https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=V1sUCbQ5mvM
Shining through my duoduo, As bright these fair shadows Shaper nothing more. See, Lord, how thy serene glow Lights near a heart Lost, all lost in wonder At the God-gloved. See, touching day, see Our images see How sest trust be weary That shall be weary. What God’s sword has so beaded O truth I do Truth themselves speaks truly For there’s nothing true. board Fire Kneel, Christ, with blows And’dart completely Until the eve.to the light to come upon them, 2. Como en norrino ale, korkti solmini Per nisu tuJosh vi cuta presensum которую Pestamietveid tigetet hei upload teter etemi sedet Xu nuovo que amarts I et me li paane, Jesu topine, me li mundum pune, tu unsarquine, Cuius unassilansa, cum facce ale, Tutum mundum quica, omnis cele. Jesu topine, loca, te, me li mundum, I miss it, it’s there, and me, what I’ve heard so. Someday to-day, I’ll be face to face in light, and be blessed forever with Thy glory side. It’s Sunday night and the mics are hot. Welcome on everybody and we’ve already got friend of the show Andrew Kay here. How you doing Andrew? Good evening. I’m doing well. How are you? I got like two hours of sleep last night. Me too. Tonight just might be exciting. But I know you’re all wondering. The question has been burning on your mind since last week. How did the Holy Cross hoedown go? And I have to say it was absolutely exceeded expectations dramatically. So Holy Cross hoedown, we were just going to have a dance as a fundraiser for the youth group, raising money for the mission trip to Omaha. And they’re going to sell concessions. And the original plan was that I was going to be the DJ and I’m like, I don’t know how to DJ, but we’ll go for it. So I was going to have a tablet plugged into the speaker system in the gymnasium. On Thursday, we had a meeting with an employee from the diocesan central offices to help plan a meeting that we did here. A parish meeting that we did here. And he hears about this and he says, hey, our family does dances all the time. We’ve got a PA system and I’m sure my son would be happy to DJ for you. So he shows up with this much nicer PA system that I had and like a much bigger list of songs to dance to. And then word got around to a whole bunch of different people who aren’t from our parish, but really wanted to come and dance. And so instead of this thing fizzling out by about 820, as I thought it was going to go, I had to kind of start shutting things down at about 930. And I just didn’t know there was that much demand for dancing in Fargo. But yeah. How many people can? At our peak, we might have had about 100, which for the first time that we’ve ever done something like this was just delightful. And then there was a lot of people who wanted to stay the whole time and they got out and danced. And there was just something I saw. A lot of the people who wanted to dance were like high schoolers from the cathedral. I knew some of them. And they were, I guess, it’s like a home schooled group and they do a lot of dances on their own. And then there was also a lot of people from our parish, older folks who weren’t much into dancing. And they I just got the sense that watching the young people dance made their week. That’s cool. Anyway, if Mark Lefebvre were here, he would say, that’s great. It’s participation. And I say, especially the line dances were participation. Line dances. Line dances. Yeah, they’re for everybody. For everybody. Line dances. Now, Andrew, I got to ask you a question. OK. Are you familiar with the Catholic dance? No. No. OK. Yeah. Some DJ at a Catholic youth conference 20 years ago came up with the Catholic dance. And it’s set to larger than life by the Backstreet Boys. OK. And as a bearer of the Catholic tradition, I took it upon myself to teach anybody there who didn’t know it yet the Catholic dance. OK. So anyway, it’s super simple. I could teach you right now. You go. OK. Oh, OK. I think I might have seen this before. Yeah. Yeah, I think you’d been to enough Catholic young adult stuff that you would have seen it. It’s called the Catholic dance. And anyway, if you don’t have it at your wedding, it might be invalid. Just saying. Oh, dear. I might be in trouble. Yeah. So what I am really… Oh, Jacob. Jacob. Jacob. For Pete’s sake. Have a little fun. OK. Um. There wasn’t even any holding hands. Come on. Wow. Yeah, I don’t know. I’m hoping to do more of these. I’m hoping to do more of these. Yeah, that sounds good. Get away from their screens and into something wholesome. Because they were doing, you know, they were doing a lot of like two step and swing dancing. And I know St. John Vianney would like it, but he’s not here. He’s in heaven. So what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Well, he’ll know about it, but he’s experienced a very scientific vision, so nothing could possibly bother him. Yeah, that’s true. We have swing dancing down here, too. I haven’t been to one yet, but… You got to… You’ll… I think you’ll enjoy it. Once you get past the initial initial nervousness, you know, it’s just… Oh, it’s not the nervousness. It’s just, you know, getting into a city and getting to where I have to be, you know. Architecture. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I mean, that’s a great excuse to go, though. Architecture. Going to Manhattan. Ah, oh, that city. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. That’s a pain in the butt to get in that tunnel. Oh, exactly. It costs like 10. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, but it is fun. But I haven’t seen any Catholic dance dances. I’ve been to a few dances, too, and I think the only time I’ve seen that was years ago, so… At some Catholic youth conference, right? Well, I’m going to hold on to the tradition. I’m going to keep the torch burning bright. It’s from the cathedral. We’re super excited to be doing the Catholic dance. You know, I love tradition, so I guess I love the dance now. There you go. There you go. And, you know, it is most fittingly called the Catholic dance. As you may well know, Catholic means universal. And it is truly a universal dance because it’s so easy. Anybody can do it. Right. Yeah. You can pick it up after watching people do it twice. It’s like, oh, this is hard. I like some of those other line dances, which destroyed my left knee. I’ve been suffering all day. But I’ll survive. So, yeah. What kind of music did you have? It was mostly country music. It was supposed to be country-western themed, and a lot of people wanted to do a two-step. A lot of people wanted to do swing dancing. I saw a few people polka-ing, too. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, those homeschooled kids actually know how to dance properly rather than what passes for dancing at your average high school dance. Yeah. Yeah. I think the only thing they teach in high school for dancing is square dancing. So, yeah. There you go. They had both kinds of music, country and western. Mark, coming in with a Blues Brothers quote. Relevant. Very relevant. So, how was your third Sunday of Ordinary Time? Excellent. Very good. How was yours, Mark? Mine was good. I went to the parish that I used to go to. Instead of the nearby one that you just made here? Yeah. I feel bad, right? Because I do the RCIA there now as a… Lay volunteer. Lay volunteer. Yeah. Some dude who makes PowerPoints. You know, I do ushering, I do lecturing. They tried to rope me into projectionist today. And I had to say, well, I can’t guarantee I’ll be here all the time because it’s a half-hour drive down. Right? I don’t know what the equivalent would be where you live, but I’m on the opposite end of the city of Ottawa. That’d be like going from North Fargo to South Fargo, probably. Yeah. And it’s tough, right? Because you have loyalties there. That’s where I got baptized. That’s where I baptized my kid. That’s where I did RCIA. And now you got this place right down the street. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And now your old parish, that was run by the Companions of the Cross, wasn’t it? No. I think this one is run by the Companions of the Cross. Oh, is that it? Yeah. I know some of those guys were in school with me in Detroit, and they were all so stereotypically Canadian. It was delightful. They were delightful, Joe. They were just super polite. And you’re super friendly all the time. You see, here’s the thing I always think, is that Americans are friendly, Canadians are polite. Right? All right. Is that we say sorry, we say the right thing all the time, but you’re not going to get invited to dinner. Oh, OK. That’s just generally what I’ve observed, right? Are you Canadian? Oh, yeah. He’s been Canadian this entire time, Andrew. Your whole life? The whole time, man. Wow. Born? Henry food. Well, actually, I was born in Brampton. I have no idea. Is that still in Ontario? Yeah. Yeah, it’s a city outside of Toronto. OK. But I didn’t live there. Just born there, that’s all. And, you know, it’s funny. I used to think for a very long time I was really an American born too far north. But that’s kind of changed over the years. You’ve become, I mean, your dad’s from Portugal, right? Yeah, from Cidade da Fete. Yep, right outside Porto. We’re actually, I might be going there this May. Oh, fine. Yeah. You just going to stay in Portugal or you going to see anything else in Europe? Probably just Portugal. It’s only going to be for a week. I’m going to go see the… So the back story to this is that being a small country, Portugal has a very big premium on funeral services. So if you’re going to bury somebody, you have to come back every single year and pay in person. Right? Wow. The idea is if you don’t come, you don’t care. Interesting. Yeah, we don’t have that problem. You don’t have that problem in Ontario. No, not at all, right? So my dad is going back because he tried to pay. He’s like, here’s 10 years worth. It’s like, I think 79 euros a year. He’s like, I’ll pay like for 10 years. He’s like, no, I have to do it every year. He’s like, okay, can I do it online? No, you got to come in person. So what do you do if you can’t pay? You lose your spot in the cemetery. You go into a mass grave. Oh, so he’s paying to eventually go into this grave? No, his parents and his uncle now. Oh, okay. Yeah. So he’s got to go back in May because my great uncle just died in December, right before Christmas. So he flew over there, helped my great aunt out for a while, and then came back. But he has to go back again. So he asked if I would like to go so I can pay my respects to my grandparents who are buried there now. And I really want to go back anyway. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of things that I appreciate a hell of a lot more being 32 than I was at five. Yeah, that’ll make a difference. Yeah. I mean, I still remember my thought being this is me as five because I’m some weird autistic fuck. Sorry. This is what a third world country looks like. There was packs of wild dogs. There were people begging everywhere. I remember some guy was faking having no legs on a skateboard. Sounds like Rome. Yeah, I’m like, what is going on? Because I was five and I only knew like suburban Canada. Yeah, it’s not a third world country. It’s just Mediterranean. I guess Portugal is not really Mediterranean. But not much of it actually faces the Mediterranean. It’s got the culture, but it faces the Atlantic. Yeah, and I mean, you get a big difference between those in the north and those towards the Algarve, which is like right at the tip of the south. Okay. So, but yeah, I’m really looking forward to it. I was going to make a list of like a top cathedrals if I could get there. Oh, nice. We’ll see. But it should be fun. Yeah. Now. I forgot. I don’t know if you caught it. The whole I got two hours of sleep last night. No, I didn’t know. Wow. So, yeah, yeah, it was. And I was just so I should have taken a cool shower when I got back to my room. But, you know, I thought I’ll pray night prayer, I’ll pray a rosary and I’ll go right to sleep. No. Man, I haven’t been to a so I don’t count weddings as dances. Because I can avoid dancing. It’s not the same if I go out to like a club or something. But I haven’t done that. I haven’t done that like 10 years. Now, do you mean like actually dancing or do you mean like, you know, debauchery? Well, the club is debauchery. Okay. Yeah. Right. But dancing at a wedding. Yeah, I’ve actually danced at a wedding. Okay. My wife is crazy. She’ll just keep dancing for hours and hours. Absolutely not. I can’t keep up. Nobody can keep up. She’s kind enough to let me sit down and just drink wine or something at the wedding and wait for it to be over. Every slow song should come over. Mark, can you come please? Does she actually sound like Miss Piggy? My wife has a very high pitched voice. She’s more like, Marcus, please? That’s funny. That’s great. Yeah. Oh, man. I don’t know when the next wedding I’m going to go to either. Like so many of my friends that are going to get married have gotten married. And now it’s like the other ones are just random. Like, is it going to happen? Is it not? I don’t know. Are they just going to have like a quiet commitment ceremony on the beach of Maui? Just a few close friends. Yeah, exchange like nerd ropes or something. Nerd ropes. Nerd ropes. I’ve not heard of that. Have you never had a nerd rope? No. What is this nerd rope? It’s a candy you could buy at a gas station. So like you’ve got like basically like an extra sticky piece of licorice or something with those crunchy Wonka nerds on them. Oh, goodness. Yeah. And they just give them to each other and say they’re married or something? Somebody in the world thinks that’s a great idea for a wedding. Oh, goodness. Yeah. I mean, I still haven’t actually gone to a Catholic wedding or any religious wedding. The closest was my wedding, which was not Catholic, and another person’s wedding, which had another Protestant pastor there. Well, that’s a I mean, like they’re conducting the ceremony. Yeah. OK. That’s a religious wedding. Might not be that religious, but they had the thought there. Jesus was said. It occurred. I went to a Lutheran wedding for my cousin. She’s not Catholic, so it was all there was no no worries about it. And this was like an old school Missouri Synod Lutheran. And actually, I actually rather liked it. You know, I could tell, though, I was sitting there because I was a seminarian at the time. I’m listening to the language he’s using it like, yep, they are studiously avoiding calling this a sacrament. They’re absolutely not going to call it as they call it a blessed and approved estate. I thought they believed in the sacraments. Yeah, but only the two. Oh, two. Yeah. The Eucharist and baptism. Well, the only ones they see is being instituted by Christ. Not marriage. Not marriage. Not marriage. No. So is the Missouri one the conservative one? Yeah, yeah. The Missouri Synod was founded by Germans. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America was founded by Norwegians. And predictably, that one’s gone crazy. Yeah, it’s gone to the left. Everything in Norway leads to the left. I don’t know. They’re a weird country. Did you see that Sweden has a very conservative government in power now? Because of all of the immigrants? Just all the nuttiness in general. And they’ve finally had that. That worries me, right? It’s like every time we’ve got punk Antifa kids in the street getting crazy and they don’t get punished, it’s like you’re just building pressure for a backlash right there. I feel it in myself. Christian minister. And I’m just like, oh, if you just had a machine gun. I’m like, oh, oh, bad priest. You’re like, I convinced every day that we need a new Franco. Oh, no. And it’s like, I don’t want the secret police. I don’t want the curfews and the tanks rolling down the street. It’s like it’s better to not have that. Yeah. I mean, even my so one of my great uncles in Portugal, he ended up fleeing the Salazar regime because he didn’t want to get drafted and he ended up losing his legs in the mountains. Do frostbite. Like, it’s crazy. I know my dad when he talks about it, because he lived in Angola a lot of the time before he came to Canada and he left during the Civil War. And he’s like, I remember as a kid being told you can’t say that in the house. You don’t know who’s listening. Like, I mean, I feel that way sometimes now, but I know it’s not as bad as it could be. Well, you know who’s listening now. It’s Alexa. My mother-in-law has Google Nest or whatever it is, and she loves that thing. Like, oh, I can’t stand it. It’s Google Nest. It’s the same thing as Alexa, right? But it’s just Google. And, you know, she walks in and Google, what’s the news or Google Music? It’s like, oh, come on. I can’t I can’t imagine just asking a device. What’s the news? Yeah. Hey, wiretap, what’s going on? No, but it’s like, like, I’m sitting here like carefully curating my source. Like, I will I will be sitting there on like a Catholic news aggregate. And I’ll be like, no, that guy’s full of crap. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I can’t imagine just asking what’s the news? I can’t imagine that too, because I mean, it kind of sounds like talking to a person. Hey, what’s what’s the gossip of the day? You know, and you’re just asking some machine on your desk. I mean, it is the gossip of the day, really, right? For the most part. Yeah, I guess so. That’s why you’re still asking the thing on your desk and not a person. That’s why I stopped listening for a while. I was listening to the Ben Shapiro show and I’m like, you know what? None of this matters. So like every once in a while, I’ll dip my toe in there and like, you know, if there’s something I want framing on. But yeah, I found. Go ahead. I was going to say I found that with some of these things, a lot of the time I get the same information. So it’s sort of a lot of the time it’s the same view on different subjects. So I don’t really need to watch it again because I already know what it’s going to be. But sometimes you get something new, which is nice. What were you going to say, Mark? I used to buy I used to pay for 11 newspapers for a few years. Like I read that I got a bunch of free ones that I’d read on top of that. And at some point I was like, I don’t know why I’m doing this. This is completely pointless. Well, you had political science in your in your background, didn’t you? Yeah, I’ve got a master’s in international affairs. OK, so I needed to know some stuff, but I didn’t need that much info. To be frank, the only ones you’d really need are like The Economist, The Times and The New York Times just to get one on each and maybe a national review. But beyond that, I mean, you’re not going to get the Epoch Times. Oh, please, Lord in heaven. I thought about subscribing to La Croix, but I didn’t end up pulling the trigger. Just because I don’t know, I feel I should stay away from Catholic politics as much as possible. Yeah, like I remember that admonition that Rod Dreher’s wife had, which is there’s too much Peter in this house and not enough Christ. And it ended up just killing him. I understand why he fell away and went to Eastern Orthodoxy just because he couldn’t do it anymore. Just couldn’t believe. Yeah, it’s a tough place to be. Wouldn’t want to ever have to be put in that position. No, I mean, ignorance is bliss to a certain extent, and it’s not like a malicious ignorance either. It’s I’m just going to try to, like Andrew says, stay away from the gossip. Yeah, and I was, you know, when I was in seminary, I was pretty plugged into the blogs, you know, and then I got to my first parish assignment in Napoleon, North Dakota, population 800, right? I was all, you know, like all this news was just right here and nobody else cared about it. You know, I’m like, oh, they’re more worried that they’re having a drought and they’re going to, you know, they’re going to have to start selling off their cattle because they can’t feed them. That’s pretty rural. That’s really rural. Yeah, yeah. No, once you once you get about 100 miles west of me, there’s this whole there’s this whole patch, like this whole line stretching down from like North Dakota, Montana into Texas, where just hardly anybody lives. I was actually looking at Google Maps in North Dakota just to see what it was like around because you were talking about how far you have to go for church. And I just kept seeing grids and grids of farmland and grass. And I was like, wow, I wonder what it looks like, you know, if you’re just driving around there. So I took out the little man to go into Street View and there is no Street View. The Google van never went that way. Classic. This was you were you were looking around in North Dakota. Yeah. Oh, wow. Gosh, I thought architecture school was hard. Or were you running away from an assignment? I wasn’t really thinking about architecture, actually. But now that you mention it, I should do that. Yeah, you should consume your thoughts so you can make a better statue than that. God forsaken when they just unveiled in Boston and Boston. Yeah. What’s it called? It’s a Martin Luther King. Yeah, just look up the embrace Martin Luther King statue. It’s horrified. Oh, let’s let’s do a little bit of the embrace. Wow, that’s in Boston now. Pull it up for. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, look at that. That’s awful. Oh, and it’s the American conservative that’s got it. Yeah, that was a good article. Yeah. Behold. It’s so bad. Bring it up on stream. Oh, goodness. OK. So it’s just what three arms grasping each other. This is the most flattering angle, by the way. No, it’s not. There are worse angles. Oh, yeah, like this. I showed my wife with no context and I said, she said, Why is there a statue of hands holding a turd? It’s not that. Folks, this isn’t hard. Martin Luther King looks sharp in a suit. You just make a statue of him. Yeah, it’s really not that hard. Gosh. So if you’re walking around Boston and you see that, what would you think? What do you think it represents? Hands? Turd. Like maybe a liver or a pork loin. Actually, pork loin is pretty close. That article he pulled up from the American conservative, I think part of its point was that we’ve abstracted so far as to be pointless. Yeah. It’s anti-beautiful. It’s like the opposite of beautiful. It’s anti-beautiful. It’s ugly. The ugly is the point. You have to sit there and talk about how wonderful it is. Oh, yeah. It’s like some Orwellian nightmare. It was ten million dollars. Ten million. Oh, my gosh. That’s like over half the cost of our new church, which is going to be lovely. The entire screening program for explosive detection dogs in Canada is less than a million dollars a year. Imagine how many explosive detection dogs you could have with that statue. Imagine how many doggies sniffing out bombs we could have. That’s a government program I can get behind. Right? They have little uniforms too. Little uniforms that go around. Like you see a dog in the airport and it’s just like, that’s nice. This isn’t an angry person. It’s just a dog. Oh, God. It’s coming up to me. Oh, God. I’m going to get searched. You know what I think the problem could be here? I don’t know if it’s the fact that ugliness is the point. Maybe that’s more subconscious. But I think all of the focus on abstraction makes it so that people have a hard time seeing what they’re actually making. So they’re so focused on the abstract idea of what the forms represent that they’re not actually seeing what they’ve made. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, that’s true. I think that’s not part of the main zeitgeist in art. You have to have a reaction to it. And that’s the point. The reaction is the point. It doesn’t matter what the reaction is, which seems absolutely absurd to me. In architecture, one of the things we’re taught is that when you design something, it should get either a reaction or people should pause and reflect on it. It should stop people where they’re going. They should stop where they are and reflect on it or something like that. Right. And there’s ways to do that that are magnificent. Look at the background of the stream. Yeah. There’s a way to do it. There’s a way to do it. I know how this works. Oh, for Pete’s sake. Yeah. Basically, if somebody’s walking by your design and they don’t ever look twice or anything, then it’s a failure. That’s what I was told. Not because I made something like that, but you know. Yeah, no. I mean, as long as that’s not the only thing you’re being taught and that’s one value among many, then that’s a good thing. But as it pertains to art in getting a reaction, that’s the sort of thing we were told in architecture. I don’t know what it’s like in the fine arts. I guess it’s something similar to that. I think it’s even worse. At least buildings have to stand up to the force of gravity. Yeah, well, buildings have to do that and facilitate people and function in a way. But art can just be its own thing and nobody has to interact with it. So it doesn’t have to do anything. Yeah, I agree with Mark down there. I mean, it’s definitely got to point towards the highest good, ultimately. It’s got to be an experience of the sublime, if possible. I mean, even if it’s not the sublime, even a really nice, well-made, like colonial style house is beautiful. And it elicits a sense of hearth and home and comfort. Yeah, I don’t know if I’d want my house to be sublime. That’s a great look for a church. But it’s like, oh, I’ve got to live here. I shouldn’t be constantly terrified by the overwhelming majesty of being. So we can take Father Eric out of the running for Pontiff. The papal apartments aren’t like that. They don’t have 200-foot ceilings. I don’t know. I think I could live with some overwhelming majesty. Oh, my goodness. OK, all righty. Good. I’m out of the running for the Roman Pontiff. I don’t even speak Italian, so I don’t think I’d be in the running. I don’t think that’s a requirement. So I’ve been partly doing a project to try to do a history of every single pope. And I’m going through sources right now. The amount of Pontiffs that were not priests before they were elected is actually astonishing. That is kind of like an early Middle Ages phenomenon. Like even into the Renaissance, where it’s like, just this guy. I know this guy’s good, so we’ll put him through all the orders before we crown him. I had to break it a few times. Like, wait, he wasn’t a priest. He’s just some dude. That’s interesting. I mean, not some dude, right? He’s working in the Curia, usually, is what it is. But in the amount of different ways that the cardinals decided at one point, they just elected three cardinals out of the congregation to choose, which was a really weird way to do it. I mean, if you’re just doing nothing but bickering, and those three guys like the bickering the most, you just… Exactly. You get one guy from one party, one guy from another party, and the split vote, and whoever he decides, essentially, is who becomes the pope. And then the rest of y’all can go get wine. It’s not a bad move. I can dig it. I mean, it’s crazy. I’m almost done just this basic overview, just finishing Benedict XVI. I don’t know if this goes into Francis or not. I don’t know when the book was published. But, man, it’s a long history. Like, people don’t even agree sometimes. Was this guy pope? I don’t know. Do we count this guy? I mean, there’s an official number, but people dispute it. I think 265? Or is it 266? I don’t know. I don’t have to keep track of it, you know? I just know who the current one is, and that’s what matters. That’s what matters. Yes, it’s still… Oh, oh. I’ve looked at those arguments. I don’t think they hold water. Anyway. No, I don’t think they do. Oh, it’s a little funny, and it’s a little sad, watching the change in traditionalist blogs from 2012 till now. You go back to 2012, Rarate Chaley had a blog post that was just, just, obey the pope. And it was all the most ultramontanist sayings of Pius X, you know, God rest his soul, a blessed memory. And it’s like, yeah, they ain’t like that now, you know? And then you also see it on the other side, too. Some of these folks who would have been a little more dissident, better than John Paul II, better than the 16th years, being like, you have to obey the pope, you know? I’m wondering if the only way we’re going to learn to live together is by investing less in the papacy. So you want more collegiality? Yeah, well, it’s like, if the papacy ends up being a nuclear weapon that only one party can have, with no other deterrent, that’s just like not an… It’s just not a good solution, you know? It’s kind of like how the American president kind of seems in our country now. Everybody’s like, oh, we’ve got to get our guy in, and if not, it’s a… You know, everything’s going to go to… You know. Just imagine the president had the power that the pontiff has. Well, exactly. Yeah, because the Roman pontiff is the judicial, executive, and legislative branch, all in one person. Vicar on earth. And think about how much influence people think the president has with these elections. I guess it’s kind of translating into the pontiff as well. I wonder if it’s the same way in other countries. It depends on the country, right? England’s got this figured out. I know they’ve got to spend millions of pounds on the royal family, but it’s like, God save the king. If the king is doing at least an okay job, everybody should be able to manage that. God save the king, right? Ah, the prime minister, what a moron. Perfect. Yeah, I mean, that’s more or less the point of government. And we can’t do that in the United States. We’ve got the whole, you know, no monarchs thing. Well, yeah, you have no one who just represents the government, right? That’s all the prime minister is. He’s a civil servant. I mean, not in that technical meaning, but he’s just a servant. That’s all he does. And he can be treated as such. We have like a prime ministerial plane. It’s not very good. It just sucks. It’s functional. So does Britain and Canada have, I expect they would have the same kind of division in politics that America has, right? What do you mean? So like how each party is just kind of at each other’s throats and they got to get their guy in and that sort of thing. We have like five parties. Oh, okay. Right? I mean, two big ones and then three smaller ones. I’m just wondering… Or four smaller ones, actually. So it’s six. Okay. Yeah, because I’m wondering if the way people are related to their government in each country, I wonder if that affects what they think about the pope and how much they’re worried about which pope is in Italy right now. I think the Americans are probably the most concerned. Right. This is a statistic that blew my mind. Only 20% of French dioceses have implemented Traditio Des Custodes and the restrictions it puts on the traditional Latin Mass. The other 80% of the dioceses are just kind of like, we’ll get around to it. But is that the legacy of Gallicanism though? Probably. Right? Like, I mean, by the way, I wouldn’t discount Catholicism in France. I do not put it past that country to have some weird fusion in the future as a backlash against immigration, where they just mixed the Republic with Catholicism and have some weird French nationalism going on. Yeah. Because I mean, you still have over 50% of the country actively identifying as Catholic. And the other part that isn’t is vaguely Catholic because you can’t escape from French history, right? You can’t do it. Yeah, it’s deeply intertwined there. Yeah, I can see that happening. It’s just… I worry, honestly, for me, because honestly, the last few times it’s happened in countries, it doesn’t end up going well. Not for the church. Usually the church is the one that ends up losing in the long run. Yeah, once that party goes down, the church goes down with it as a symbol of the oppression. That’s why it’s good. It’s one of the things I like about the American system is American priests have to ask for money. Right? Yeah, you aren’t paid. Yeah. If people… And you know, American Christians are pretty generous with their money, and especially some top income earners who end up carrying most of the water there. But it’s like, you know, that’s like a certain level of accountability and a certain level of honesty that you get when it’s not some taxes funding your salary. It’s like, if I really manage to mess this up, everybody might leave and then there’s no money. That’s true, but it could be a negative thing as well. Because you could be influenced to doing… Audience capture. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s the problem, right? There’s always trade-offs, right? And Navigating Patterns, this YouTube channel you may have heard of, has an excellent video on trade-offs. But the basic point of that video is that you’re never going to get away from trade-offs. And so the trade-off is that you might get captured by the 1% and give your time and attention to them to the exclusion of people who don’t donate as much. So yeah, that’s absolutely a possibility. And yeah, I don’t know if you knew, Andrew, but like a lot of countries in Europe pay the priesthood. Like Germany, for example, you have to tick off on your taxes. You have to tick off on your taxes. What’s your religion? Right, okay. Wow. And then they take a certain percentage and tie that to the church. Interesting. Yeah, I remember hearing about that. Yeah, it’s weird, man. I just… I remember I was talking with this…I was at a religious sister’s house and there was one of the novice…or one of the postulants was from Germany. And she was like, wait a minute, seriously? Like would you guys pass the basket? That’s all the money your priests get? Yeah, that’s where the budget comes from. We also have a much lower tax rate than Germany, so you know, you get what you get. It’s hugely different, man. I mean, I get…so immediately off my paycheck is about 45%. It’s crazy. Yeah, and right now our ego is cashing checks that…or our ego is writing checks that our GDP can’t catch, so… I don’t know. It’s a weird situation. Money is always a problem. Always has been. Always will be. Whether it has Caesar’s head on the back or Washington’s. Yeah. Yeah. Another perennial problem. Did you finish that Revelation series? I don’t reme…because I haven’t watched it in a bit. The one I did like a summer ago? Yeah. Two summers ago? Yeah, I finished that. Okay, so I don’t keep up with a lot of stuff anymore. Yeah. Yeah. I need to go through that because honestly that book is one I never read. Yeah. That was a summer of 2021 project and we completed it in the summer of 2021. Line by line. Yeah, let me see if I can get the… What made you do Revelation? What? What made you do that one? Peugeot, I think. He…where are we at? Here we are. I’m gonna just share this in the description. Yeah, basically I was reading Peugeot and I was really fascinated by… really fascinated by his videos on the number of the beast. And you know, it was 2021. I had the end of the world on my mind. And yeah, so I just…I kind of went for it. And I knew, you know, it’s like I’d been at the parish long enough to know that there’d be plenty of people who’d come and listen to me. You know, there was like 20 people there most nights. Good. And then people… Yeah, so yeah, it’s…I just…it all kind of came together. And you know, the summer is around here at Catholic churches. It’s like very little going on. So I had time to just read and research, put slides together. Did a lot of them know who Jonathan Peugeot was? None of them at all knew who Jonathan Peugeot was. And that’s fine. I was just giving them the Reader’s Digest version and helping them with the Book of Revelation. It got credited in the description of my… Oh, nice. In the description of that first video, I just said I shamelessly was ripping him off. That’s what all the best theologians do. Of course. Shamelessly ripping off Augustine, basically. That’s interesting, though, that none of them knew because I’ve been asking people around me, whenever the topic of, say, symbolism comes up, I always ask, Do you know Jonathan Peugeot? Have you ever heard of him? And they’re always like, yeah. They’re like, duh, of course I have. Well, the average age of the people who came to my talks was probably somewhere between 60 and 70. Including my mom, who drove down to Wapetown to watch my talks. Very nice. All the church ladies were just delighted to meet the mother of a priest. It was just… Wonderful. So, yeah. Yeah, it was a good time. Yeah. It’s a lot of hours. Wholesome mom. That’s right, light of the darkness. My mother is very wholesome. So, do you get to sleep in tonight, or is it always early morning rise? I should be able to sleep in until about 7.15 tomorrow. Fair, fair. It’ll be all right. I’ll take five milligrams of quick dissolve melatonin and forget about all my worries. Mark Lefebvre, friend of the show. How are you doing? Oh, I don’t… I just can’t survive, Father Eric. I can’t deal with it anymore. Literally, literally did not understand the concept of creation. Hours. Second conversation with this guy. Does not… I don’t know how to… Okay, now Mark, this is something I’ve been thinking about, right? And it’s something I just, as a friend, feel like I need to express to you. Now you are autodidactic. You have taught yourself almost everything you know about philosophy. Right? Yeah. Well, hopefully I know nothing about philosophy, but yes. Sure, sure. That comes with trade-offs, right? Yes. With your autodidactic, you could be deeply original, because… In theory. I hope not. In theory. But it also means that you’re not using the concepts that other people are accustomed to if they’re in these sorts of academic conversations. You’re not using the concepts, the types of arguments. Yeah, that’s not necessarily true, but you can fall into that trap. Yeah, if you never interface with academic… You get to remember I grew up in Boston. Yeah. So it’s not… My interface with academics is way beyond what people who go to school have. Like way beyond. There’s far more professors I’ve talked to than people that went to college. Far more. Okay. So what I’m going to ask is, what do you mean by creation? Because you mean something different than most other people mean. No, no, no, no. It’s the concept that there was something around before you. And literally the counter-argument was, no, no, no, no, no, because two people can get together and generate something. I’m like, okay, but where do the somethings come from and where’s the space in which they generate it? No, no, no, there’s no space. They just generate. And I’m like, no, what are you talking about? This is what I mean. Like it’s very hard to explain. There’s several people I’ve met online in particular, right, which is a filter. So we are dealing with something that filters out down to the dumbest of the dumb or something. But they literally, I mean, this is just like two hours. It was a six hour conversation or something insane and could not acquiesce. Like last week, it could not acquiesce to having been born of two parents and that causing their creation. They had to start their existence at birth. Like, no, no, no. Once I was born, I was, I was auto poetic and their definition of auto poetic was I don’t eat food. Like I just sort of self perpetuate and grow bigger automatically through. Where do you find these people? Discord, discord, man. No, no, but we just, I was like, do you understand the concept of creation? And he’s like, what concept? And we concept that there are things outside of yourself that you were born into. And he’s like, well, I don’t know what you mean. And I was like, what do you mean? You’re like, how can I make it any more? Those are really simple words. There was history before you showed up on, you know, my dad used to say it this way, right? He would say, I was not born with a wife and five kids. And he would say that to us when we would see like pictures of him in high school, right? Like, that’s not you, dad. Born with a wife and five kids. It’s a real revelation you have, right? As a kid growing up is realizing your parents had a life before you existed. And how do you like compute that? And also that your parents were like you growing up. You have no experience. Right, but you have zero experience. And that’s the problem. Like you’re trying to describe something to them that is outside of their experience and they don’t know anything being outside. So this guy last week, it was, oh, well, I feel very connected to you guys. And I was like, I feel very sad. This is a very sad conversation because I don’t feel connected to you at all. And he said, well, look, I mean, I can tell I’m connected to you because I’m talking to you. And this is actually what he said. I’m communicating with the model of you I have in my head. And I’m like, dude, I’m a real person. You don’t have to do that. That’s unnecessary work. I think you’re generated by Alexa. Pretty much. He’s downloading your model to communicate. I have that mark in real life. I can tell you he’s not a hologram. We had pizza together. Thank you, Father. We did. You bought me pizza. It was excellent. That’s why I like it. It’s the only reason I like you too. When you buy me food, it’s like friends for life. So there you go. That’s the secret. Not a complicated person. Keep that in mind. No. Well, look, hey, hey, you try being starving and homeless in the winter in New England. You’ll really appreciate a meal with another person that you don’t pay for. Let me tell you, or any meal you don’t have to make. It’s like, oh, this is great. No, he didn’t identify as anything. That was the problem. He’s one of these verveky followers who’s like, well, I’m just going to dip my toe into this. He was saying the crazy stuff like, well, I’m going to take from all the traditions and put it together. And I’m like, do you understand that you’re not smart enough to do that, that there’s distributed cognition through time? And he’s like, oh, no, no, definitely distributed cognition through time. But see, now I’m leveraging that by putting different things together. And it was like, you not understand why that isn’t an option to you. And he literally and here’s the worst part. You know, he’s Irish. He’s studying in the Netherlands to be an engineer. And I bet he will be an excellent engineer. Like, I bet he will. And nobody will realize he doesn’t have a moral or ethical stand that he can take in the world, much like Sam Harris. I was in Clubhouse the other day. So I was defending Sam Harris. I’m like, guy, this is the second time he’s talked about dead children. Like after the second time with the second defense, you know, and not backing down, maybe drop the guy. Like, I’m just, you know, because it seems like it doesn’t matter how many children you sacrifice. He just has to be right. Like, he’ll sacrifice any number of children to be right. And, you know, he seems very smart. So, like, fair enough. But these people have no moral ability. They don’t have the capability to be moral. You’re talking to three Catholics here. It’s like we’re not all that likely to listen to Sam Harris to begin with. I used to. But people do. People do. That’s my, see, and that’s what I’m saying is you’re so far away from some of these poor people. And how do you communicate with them? I mean, even I can communicate with this guy. I mean, I tried all night. The best I got was you’re so certain in your determinations. I’m like, yeah, because when I’m making a statement, it’s actually something I know. Why is this difficult? I can prove it to you. I can prove it to you in math if you want. And he didn’t. He didn’t want the proof in math. He just wanted to tell me I was way too certain of my ideas. And I’m like, well, yeah, I’m certain of things that I’m right about. And I have Manuel right there. So if I’m wrong, he’s going to beat me to death with something. So it’s not it’s not hard. Like, yeah, I’m certain when I’m right. Wait, he didn’t want to he didn’t want to come to any sort of conclusion because of the Gnosticism that he was deeply embedded in. Like, no, no, I can know this. I can know that. And then I can know these things. And then I have a standard by which to judge, even though he doesn’t actually have a standard. It’s just crazy. These people, they’re completely nuts. So here’s a question for you. Have you noticed I think you’ve been on her VK server a long time. Have you noticed it changing over time? Oh, yeah. Where was it before and where is it now? And was there a transition period where you started to feel something going haywire? I mean, it’s it’s gone through several transitions. So the first the first time it became a force was when I took the community that I built on his live stream over there, right, to do the meditations. And we’re still doing daily meditations on the Verveki server, right? Group meditations, because we think that’s actually important. We think that’s the important part, not the meditation part, but different discussion. But then the the religion, they’re not a religion. People came on, right. Or they were kind of maybe already there lurking. And then they sort of, you know, populated the server and sort of started to get some momentum around their ideas. And then they were kind of trying to run things, but they’re all crazy rebellious Protestant nutbags. So they they were they were anti structuralists, right, because all Gnostics are anti anti hierarchical, anti structuralists. And they couldn’t get anything together. And Manuel and I helped them and they’ve since it was new hope at all. We took notes and you didn’t. So we helped you organize your project that you couldn’t. We didn’t lead it. And they were like they were upset. So we’re sitting there leading the project and helping manage things and, you know, just giving them support. We’re not telling them what to do or anything. And they’re like, well, we want you to pick up some of these research projects. We’re like, no, no, no, we’ll help you. But we’re not doing that work because we don’t believe in your stupid project. I think it’s a bad idea, in fact. But, you know, we’re part of the community. So willing to take our opinion out of it and at least support your effort. But that that wasn’t good enough for them. And and again, they hated it afterwards. And then they sort of faded in the distance because they couldn’t make their project happen. And then we got a bunch of trolls and then some of them got thrown off and some of them didn’t. Right. And then we got a bunch of people who wanted to do their own practices or forward for Vervikis new stuff. Right. Is he a new philosophical fellowship, which is the magic thing that does the thing and the magic and the magic magic. And they were all convinced of that. Manuela and I like, I don’t know if people should just be doing this or maybe you want to make sure they do other things first and have some experience. So they don’t sort of, you know, flow into this Gnostic cesspool. We were using that term back then. But and then they they like went off and formed all these splinter groups and got they took things off the calendar so people couldn’t find them. And then they tried to message each other. So then you’d get all these groups and we still have them. So we’ve got book clubs and stuff. We have a book club today that’s not on the calendar. And so it’s just all it’s very proud, very anti-structuralist. Right. It’s like, oh, we don’t need any structure. We’re just we’re not going to tell anybody that we’re doing book clubs and we’re doing after Socrates. We’re just going to do it in secret club and not tell anybody. And it’s really structure. It’s a wall. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they don’t see it that way. They see it as that’s what it is. And I know it might be offensive to them that I’m certain about this. But but you know, it’s that’s a wall right there. That’s what they do. It keeps things out. You’re keeping the people you don’t want involved. That’s a structure right there. Yeah. Can we get the official opinion of the architect? Is that a wall? Sorry. Sorry. Don’t worry. It’s OK. He’s not an architect yet. He’s still an apprentice. I’m an architect in training for whatever that’s worth. Oh, my. That’s interesting. I thought for some reason that Verveckis project was always this religion without without a religion. No, no, he’s got a bunch of projects, right? So he’s got so so let’s let’s take something familiar like Christianity and let’s suppose we were going to science it, which would roughly mean categorizing it right. Lower case. Oh, ontology. Right. So we’re going to put it in categories. And so we have to slice it up. So how would we slice up Christianity? I don’t know. Let’s throw rituals over here. We won’t deal with that. We’ll talk about it in a talk or two, but we won’t really deal with that. So we’re just going to take rituals over there. Right. And then we’re going to take practice whatever we need to practice. We got practices. We’re not going to confuse that with ritual because rituals bad like dog. So we’re taking that up. So we’ve got practices. That’s one project. OK. And then, of course, well, we need sort of like an underlying use of a way to understand the world. And so we’re just going to get together a bunch of philosophy. How’s that? And and we’ll refer to some non-existent philosophy like Neoplatonism doesn’t exist. Why? There’s now a third wave of every stream, every stream that comes up. Well, look, there’s the first wave of Neoplatonism. There’s a third wave of Neoplatonism. It’s like if it was a thing, it wouldn’t have a first, second and third. It would just have a thing. Right. Like it’s not it’s not a magic trick that I’m playing. It just it isn’t locatable anywhere in history or in a coherent. It’s an identification against the only thing they have in common is Plato. So you’ve got third wave Neoplatonism, whatever that is. We’re going to redefine it as as we go, because that’s part of Christianity. Right. So we need to redefine whatever is in the books. We’ve got a canon. We’ve got a bunch of books you’re supposed to read. Right. And we need we need like practices that we need things that are part of the practice that sort of help to explain some of the some of the ways you transform. OK, so there’s there’s there’s this whole idea within that within that, you know, subset of philosophy that’s actually not philosophical at all, I would argue. Right. With that melds into the Neoplatonism of things like internalizing the sage. OK, now this is obviously a corruption of what a sage is in literally any wisdom text. I don’t know where John got it. It’s just an imaginary idea out of Neoplatonism or something where you can just resurrect dead people in your head and everything’s fine. You know, the Stoics. Maybe I don’t. He says he got it from the Stoics is that they’re trying to internalize and be Socrates. Yeah, I tend to doubt no one wants to be Socrates. Socrates had to drink hemlock because he pissed everybody off. I had a great quote actually. Shoot, I’ll have to find it. It’s it’s it’s really good. I put it on one of Paul Van de Klaas videos. The difference between Socrates and Jesus. Oh, yeah. Socrates pisses everyone off by questioning everything and never entering into cooperation and conversation and then dies for it. Jesus cooperates with everyone and dies for it, however, resurrects. Which which sage do you want? Pick one. Anyway, so and then you can carve up you can carve up this other thing, which is not really part of Christianity. But, you know, we’re going to we’re going to we’re going to say it’s part of Christianity, which is still the culture, right? The Augustinian Revolution or roughly the way John talks about it anyway, right? Which is the way John describes it is, you know, all these people are off in their homes in their own little churches and they basically that overturned the entire Roman system, which is very middle out thinking, right? You’re kind of skipping the important part of the story when you cast the story that way, because I’m pretty sure even if those little church house churches weren’t communicating directly with one another, and I totally believe they were, they were still all aimed at exactly the same thing based on the same set of events. I could be wrong about that historically, but I’m feeling pretty good about it. Like I don’t want to say I’m too certain because yeah, so so he just leaves that part out. And then and then there’s well, we’re going to need some cohesive structure for all of this. And what are we going to call that? Oh, that I know. I know what it is. We’ll call it the religion that is not a religion. See, that way we can imply that it has all the good parts of religion, without all the bad parts of religion and define neither set. So that’s roughly my overview of Vicky’s projects. Maybe they sound familiar to you if you’re familiar with other religions, but just saying. Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, the line between a practice and a ritual is very thin. It’s like I can look at I can look at football drills, right? You know, it’s like we’re all going to what was something we do. We’re going to do a tackling drill, right? So one guy will have the ball and the other guy has to tackle them, you know, and it’s like, well, why are we doing this at all to win football games? Right. And that’s our highest good as a football team. Right. So it’s actually it’s kind of religious or it could be it could be if you’re not careful. As long as it’s put in a subordinate position to higher values, that it’s OK. Yeah. Well, and to some extent, that’s fine for a small game. Right. Is that if you, you know, you can you can do that. Right. It’s the common aim that allows you to cooperate. This is my and I’ve been flaming mad at it. It passed her Paul VanderKlay there. Right. He I don’t like cooperative processing, Mark. I’m going to go with opponent processing. And I’m like, you don’t understand the damage you’re doing. You have no idea how damaging that is to this. Now, now the concept of opponent processing comes from neurological studies, right? That you’ve got your sympathetic nervous system, which is constantly trying to put you into maximum alertness, maximum arousal, like panicking basically. And the parasympathetic nervous system, which is trying to make you go to sleep. And it’s but it’s in that competition for neurological resources and dominance that you actually fit yourself to the environment. Right. So you’re sitting in your office, Mark’s talking again, you know, and you just you just sit there quietly because this isn’t threatening, you know. But then the Queen of England with a gun, you know, that you got to panic, you know. So right. So it and in that system, it is opponent processing. They are actually fighting for neurological. That presumes that presumes the fight and that presumes that it’s a winner take all. I mean, it’s a very postmodern idea. And it also presumes that there’s only one system of you’re getting all of that from the word opponent. No, no, I’m getting all of that from how they how they cast everything in their framing. See that the postmodern stand no chance because I can see frames way better than I can see anything else. So I see that you’re like Neo. You could just see the frames, you know, you don’t even see you don’t even see the physical objects anymore. It’s just the frames coming down. No, that happened at the end. It was Cypher who didn’t even see the way too much data decode the matrix. Mom, father, Eric, way too much. Sorry. The decoders work for the system. Yeah. So so so yeah. So the problem is that a that very obviously isn’t anything like what happens. Like we know you can measure it. That’s it. So I I just presented an oversimplified system. I’ll accept that because I’m not a neuroscientist. No, no, no, no, no, no. That’s the system they present. You’re absolutely right. It just is it is designed to be a false dichotomy and framed as an opposition. Right. Because only one can win. And then, oh, we’re in the middle of this battle and the middle is that safe space. It’s very nasty. Sorry. The middle of that battle is the safe space where the self actually exists in his conscious. That’s basically all they’re saying. And I think that that’s not generative. It’s parasitic because it’s it’s a postmodern power from above narrative. Either the parasympathetics winning or the sympathetics winning. And there’s no other options. And I just don’t believe that’s the way the world is. And what do you want to call that for ethos? Maybe that’s the Christian ethos or something. Right. I believe and this is why I say it’s cooperative processing that by both sides sacrificing some of their control over the flat territory that they’re fighting over, they create a whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts. And now it’s not an opposition. It’s a cooperation. And that’s how that’s how Peterson talks about competitive games. Because because teleologically, your entire nervous system is ordered to keeping you alive. Got it. There we go. No, there you go. It’s not ordered towards either going to sleep or staying in full alertness mode. It’s ordered to keeping you alive. OK, thank you. Cooperative processing. Well, and and and that’s the thing when it’s opponent processing, there can’t be a telos. There’s only power and it’s which side of the switch, which side of the axis the power is on. And that’s the dangerous part. So, you know, and the other dangerous part is you think there are processes in your brain that are fighting with one another. You think you’re in a personal internal battle. Like, I know why you would think that. I get that. But don’t you think it’s better to think that demons are coming at you? Like from the outside, maybe that sounds remarkably religious, Mark. I’m just saying. I’m just I’m just saying, like, well, and the problem, like with this kid, like everything was going on in his head that he could not relate to anything outside of the game. He could not relate to anything outside of his own models in his head, which is very sad to me. It’s like that’s terrifying. You’re not relating to people when you’re talking to them. You’re relating to a copy of them you have in your head. And you know that copy can’t be complete. That sounds like schizophrenic thinking. It is. Well, and I think that’s the that’s part of the well, it is because you’re you’re you’re you’re literally no longer able to outsource your sanity because there’s nothing outside of yourself to outsource to. Yes, indeed. I’ll I’ll come to that. I don’t care. I’ll totally come to that. That’s hysterical. We’re working on it. We’re working on it. It’ll frustrate people. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. One of those deathbed conversions out of Mark. Leave the dog out of the church. Sally Jo is right. Leave leave the dog headed out of the church. I will I will get a deathbed conversion out of you. There’ll be nothing. No more trade offs at that point. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this isn’t about. We’ve got John Wayne at the end. We’ll get you. No, no, no, no, no, no. This is this is this is about something more fundamentally important. Did you see did you see the did I send you the clip of peugeot and episode eight of Exodus? No, but you’ve been talking about it nonstop. So Peugeot took one of your ideas and either he thought of it himself or no, no, no, no, no. You did take one of my ideas. He he saw what I saw. That’s all. That’s not, it’s not. It’s nice to hear somebody important and intelligent and admirable echo your thoughts. It’s always a good feel. We can go with that. I don’t know. I mean, I guess there’s a better way that you’d like it explained that. Yeah, no, no, no, that’s a fine way to explain it. Yeah, I’ll show you the clip at some point. Yeah, it’s interesting. No, it’s I mean, we’re all here because of Jordan Peterson. Exactly, exactly. And he has a way of talking to secularists. He has a way of talking to secularists. Yeah. The people you can’t reach with religious language because they can’t even acquiesce to something that existed before them that they are acting within and using to not only survive and thrive, but also to build stuff. Well, I mean, the main reason I can’t reach them is that they don’t really come to church. So right. Well, and that’s yeah, that’s my complaint against y’all. So sorry, that’s that’s where I get angry. What the hell? You got to find these people. They need your help. Why are you letting them suffer? I don’t get it. Oh, my gosh. We’re trying. We’re doing a synod. We’re doing a synod in the Diocese of Fargo. It’s a meeting process. Is this the synod of synods or a different? No, no, no, this is I’m actually somewhat invested in this one that. Oh, it’s a real one. OK. It’s a real synod. Yeah. Basically, we’re getting together. We’re trying to come up with a common name, Mark. Common name for what? I think the direction we’re going to go is evangelization. And before your eyes glaze over, that is just good news in people. We’re going to good news you and all the people who are lost. Can you do that through works and not speaking at all ever or not speaking any religious language at all? I like that’s the so the context for the clip for Pidgeot is Oz Guinness makes this statement about, no, Jordan, it’s God emanating emanating down from above. And then Pidgeot steps in and says, I have to defend Jordan here. Jordan sitting right next to Joe at the time. And he says, Jordan has a way of talking to secularists and you can’t use that language because their eyes glaze over. And it’s like, yes. And then and then later he says, you have to build it up very slowly, step by step. And I’m like, oh, he totally gets it. He knows exactly what we’re doing. Yeah. So the problem is, is am I the man to do that? You’re at least the man to tell them about participatory knowledge, which actually I think is some of Reveki’s most important work conceptually. And get them on board with not talking, right, talking as little as possible, right, exemplifying things, right, through the because we get to knowledge through mimicry, through the mimicry circuit in our brain. Right. And and also never using any religious terminology whatsoever, like just keeping it as secular as possible. It’s going to be wicked hard because some of this stuff, you know, like Bishop Baron did this in the Four Horsemen, the meeting conversation, right. He just keeps whipping out the Latin and everyone’s eyes glaze over it because even Peugeot, I don’t think like what is this Latin garbage? Speak to me in French, man. I found that more helpful, though, honestly, to throw out Latin terms and as highly enchanted words as possible in a work context. And I’ve got a lot of people interested in what’s going on. What does that mean? Where do I go with that? You can’t you certainly can for certain people. But I mean, and one of the videos I have on navigating patterns was a live stream that Manuel and I did with Teo, who sees the same thing we see, which is there’s definitely there’s two groups of people. There’s crisis of faith people, right. But they have Christian language and some degree of symbology or symbolic engagement. There’s meaning crisis people and they don’t have any of that. So you not only can you not use the language, which you can’t talk about them, talk to them about symbolism. They usually don’t read poetry like they usually can’t understand poetry, actually. I feel very sad. Sorry for these people. I don’t understand. Oh, like I can’t read to you, William Blake’s The Tiger. Like I’d rather be dead than not than not be able to understand the time if I ever get to the point where I don’t understand that poem. Kill me, please. Oh, yeah, it’s offensive to God. But maybe we can negotiate. Well, fine. I’ll talk to the guy. And the thing is, is that for centuries, the church hasn’t had to deal with anybody who was into crisis of faith person. So we’ve got all this right. This machinery that deals with it like confession, you know, like every once in a while, I’ll go over to the hospital or have somebody come into the box and they’ll say, Father, it’s been 30 years. And then they’ll lay down a really nice confession and they leave feeling better. And they are better, right? Because something that they’ve been beating themselves up over, they finally they finally got it off. So we get like we have tools for that. We don’t have tools for this. This absolute technologically mediated disconnection. Yes. Right. Right. It’s like, no, no, that’s that’s dead on. And I don’t know if you saw the talk with Teo. It might be worth your time if you’re going to do this. But you’re the right voice to make that message clear. Like you need new tools and new language and you need a new approach. And I like, you know, what you said in the conversation we did with Joey and and and Pastor Paul, right about, oh, we’re switching from a Christendom model to an apostolic model. Like, wait a minute, that sounds like it might actually be helpful. Like, what is that? Right. I still don’t know. Well, plenty of time to talk about that. But yeah, just the whole idea that there’s these different groups of people and different sets of tools needed and different levels of engagement. Right. And that you can’t just talk to these people because talking to them is not going to work. Right. It’s just not. What do you think about turning up the weird? How do you where are you on that front? Nice. Nice. I love it. Yeah, it’s a it’s it’s it’s a little book. It’s not any longer than it needs to be. I think that lays out the vision. If I had a copy of that, that I could borrow for like a week, Father, I might actually read it. A book. That’s interesting enough. See what I can do, Mark. I see what I can do. Well, look, I see. Yes. See, see if you can arrange something. Look, I think I think that’s that’s part. See, this is part of the problem that that everyone’s having. Right. Like if you look at we’ll say, you know, little. Corner of the Internet that Peterson created, roughly speaking, the House of Peterson created. Oh, are we? Oh, yeah. Sorry. Well, I didn’t I didn’t use the whole term, but yeah. What the the the the problem is, they’re fallen into the evangelical trap and the trap of the creationist movement, which is, oh, the game has switched. Right. The postmoderns determined the new game. And now the game is propositional knowledge and science. So I know we invented science as the church. We can play that game and we can play it better than they can. And so they fall into theology. And the problem is that that isn’t going to work because it’s not a winnable game. And you haven’t figured that out yet. Right. Because you’re not you’re too centered in things like creation. When these poor people don’t know creation. What what church people should be focusing on is their strong point, which is yeah. But how do you explain these weird experiences that people have when they’re when they’re doing drugs? How do you explain these weird experiences that people have even if they don’t do the drugs, but they sound like the same experience? How do you explain all the synchronicities in the world that Carl Jung talked about? How do you see? And I do have a video. My you know, my actually my most popular video, Jordan Peterson, his trick. Right. It’s a very good video, actually. I kind of talk about the way he does it, which is fundamentally different from the way everybody else is doing it because of the connections he’s making and how he’s drawing you out from secularity into the symbolic realm. We’ll call it for lack of a better term, but you need to lead with your strong suit and your strong suit really isn’t theology because nobody can get their head around it. And even those that can all they end up doing is arguing more theology. And they’re not in the practices. The real thing is to say, oh, yeah, we’re over here doing this and helping this person with this or building that or or getting together for this event. Right. And and and oh, you know, by the way, yeah, I had a weird experience or or even oh, but in one of the big problems is when I talk to people about the church experience, they’re talking about churches that I’ve never I don’t exist. Right. They’re like, oh, yeah, in my church, they force everybody to think in terms of heaven and hell. It’s like, I’m not believing you. I’m just not I’m not going to buy it. I think that’s worse. Anybody to do anything for Pete’s sake. We can we can barely, you know, force people to show up. Right. Well, and and and that’s the problem. They feel like they’ve been forced to show up or, you know, like you don’t allow gays in the door. You know, you find them and you put them on a stake or whatever. And it’s like, that’s not. And also that you’re all perfect. And like, well, nobody has a crisis of faith. It’s one of the one of the things actually, I think Vanduke, they should do more is talk about because he mentions it every once in a while, kind of impassive. You should talk more about how many times he’s read C.S. Lewis and why he mentions I read to it. C.S. Lewis, every time I have a crisis of faith, he doesn’t quite put it that way, but he does say like, well, when my when my faith is sort of weak, I grab C.S. Lewis. Right. And I can understand why a crisis of faith materialist would be helped by C.S. Lewis because he definitely addresses the materialism. But I think the problem with C.S. Lewis is that again, he addresses it within the framework and there are lots of people who are outside of the Christian framework and there are lots of people who went to church but were traumatized out at like age nine or ten or something before they were. They understood the symbology. And so they’re in as bad shape as the meaning crisis people, like they because they don’t have a handle back in the way the crisis of faith people, the people who got punted out in their 20s and 30s. They have plenty of room to grab on to. That’s the way Teo put it. And yeah, I think that’s actually a really significant factor. I mean, that’s why I really like that talk that we did. I thought it was a brilliant talk and Teo was able to help Manuel and I really communicate the difference between these two states. I got to go. I’ll talk to you guys another time. Take care, Mark. God bless. Yeah, yeah. I’ve got to develop these tools here. I don’t know. We’ve got most of them, Father Eric. You can help. Yeah, I know. I know it’s got a whole document. We can we can adapt it for the crazy Catholics to use. But yeah, I’ve got I’ve got the materials here. Yeah. The thing that we deal with in the church world is that all of our most faithful people are usually over the age of 50. And they’re not all that interested in all of this. You know, tip of the iceberg or tip of the wave, new stuff, right? So I know I know that, you know, just watching stuff that I see on Vanderkla’s channel and all over the Internet about the psychedelic wave that’s coming at us. And we’re not ready to face it. But it’s like like the odds of me being able to communicate that that’s something we’re going to be dealing with. I think I don’t know. It’s a difficult problem actually trying to get people to all see the same thing. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, look, I have faith in. Oh, well, put it a little higher. That’s why I have faith in you. I can barely manage a classroom full of seventh graders. I mean, although maybe they’re the toughest crowd, I don’t know. Might be. Well, that’s yeah, that’s hard because they’re all in different places and those places are pretty far apart, even though they’re close in age. Yeah, gosh, like the difference between a sixth grader and an eighth grader. Just massive, absolutely massive. Oh, my gosh. I don’t know how I survived it. Little school should have been impossible by all right. I guess I just had a structure around me that made things easier, you know, and football and football. There you go. Just take out some of that pent up male aggression. Yeah. Look through a directive. Andrew, do you have any thoughts you’d like to share? Very contemplative over there in the bottom question. And it’s OK if you say no, that’s all right. Yeah, nothing stands out to me at the moment. Thoughts. Who even does that anymore? Well, I mean, I don’t know if I’ve ever asked you this before, Andrew, but I know you weren’t like in your teenage years. You weren’t practicing Catholicism all that much. And it’s something that you came back into when you were a little older. What did that look like? Well, I never went atheist or agnostic, but I just wasn’t going to church. And also, I didn’t know who God was. So one of the reasons I never called myself agnostic was I would hear people say things like, oh, I’m agnostic because I don’t know anything. I don’t know if God exists or not. And I’d think to myself, well, I don’t really know who God is, sort of what the definition of God is. So I don’t know if I can say I’m not sure about that if I don’t know who God is to put him in that statement. So for a long time, that’s where I was. I just I wasn’t aware of I knew I wasn’t aware of who he was or what Catholicism was really about. But it took a while to eventually find out. It would take time getting involved in conservative politics where I’d meet a bunch of Protestants, some who were ex-Catholic. And I would talk with them about their protests against the church. And eventually, when I was going through Peterson and Peugeot and all that, and eventually decided that it would be good to go to a church and get involved in Christianity again, I was thinking, well, where do I go? Do I go back to Catholicism or do I go somewhere else? And I started looking up the protests that these people were making on the church and found Father Mike Schmitz and Bishop Barron’s answers and eventually talked to Carlos M. a little bit. And after all that, I finally decided to come back in because I was thoroughly impressed with the answers I was met with. And Carlos. Carlos is a good guy. Yeah, but he’s got like four kids. So right. The time he spends with them, probably more worthwhile to the world as a whole than with us. And that was back in, I think, 2019, maybe near the end when I spoke with him. Yeah, that was even before I was on the BOM server. All right. Yes, I can acknowledge creation, Mark, that there were things that happened before I got there. It’s so absurd. Like, I feel bad. Like, I can’t explain it to people. And it definitely happens. I had to. Ethan, I was. Ethan was in. I’m like, Ethan, this is what I mean. Like, this is nothing. You can’t acknowledge it. You just can’t. You know, it’s all this half acknowledgement. I’m like, no, no, no, no. There was something there before you were born into. Yeah. But but here in your story, Andrew, it seems like you were able to ask a really good question. I don’t know who God is. Like, that is the exact like that’s a that’s a much more helpful way of framing things than most people come up with on the road. So thank you. Thank God for that. Oh, yes, for sure. Well, there’s the humility. I mean, that’s one of the one of the patterns we’re noticing. In fact, we’re coming up. I think we may have had some. We’re coming up with test questions to figure out if people are able to engage in in legitimate conversation because some people aren’t like one guy actually said, no, no, no, I’m skeptical of everybody else’s ideas, but I never question my own. He actually said that. And I was like, then you can’t you can’t have a conversation with a person because you can’t enter in good faith. And he’s like, no, no, no, I definitely enter in good faith. And I’m like, no, you do literally enter in good faith. If you’re skeptical towards every statement made, except your own, that doesn’t work. Yeah, that’s amazing. It was. Yeah, so you’re finally catching up with Augustine then who said that the root of all evil is pride. Well, yeah, well, it is that lack of humility. And I mean, that’s Andrew shows like this humility like, well, who am I to write that these people have no problem rejecting the idea of creation, the concept of something existent before they were conscious and and just running with that and creating an entire worldview out of it. That is obviously contradictory and doesn’t work and can’t be defended like you kept trying to type six hour conversation could not defend any of his points zero of his points like actually zero in six hours. Could you defend and and he just kept, you know, sidestepping nostrically over to some other point. And it was crazy. So it’s what I’m looking at here is the fact that Andrew I’m speaking about you in the third person but but do know I know you’re listening. The fact that Andrew I’m trying to get a really good solid grasp on the difference between meaning crisis and faith crisis right and Andrew story sounds like a faith crisis thing where he had some level of participation. And it seems like I think actually it’s that humility before the divine that might be a good dividing line right there. Because you hear is like humility. Humility is like a form of participation where you acknowledge that there’s something above you, and you don’t pull it and understand it. Quiet for participation and where’s the space of humility if there’s no space outside of you. Yeah, that’s what we’re dealing with. That’s what we’re dealing with right there. Yeah. If there’s nothing outside of you, how can you be humble, there’s nothing to be humble to say everything’s in my head, you’re not you’re not here you’re just you’re a projection in my head. I don’t like what why do I have to listen to you. I don’t even have to listen to listen to the projection in my head like what. So you don’t need humility for that. I can just know what you’re going to say. And then when you don’t go for my expectations. I can say oh well that wasn’t for my expectations but you know I just have to update my model. What I’m going to blow people’s mind mark once you become an apostle of humility. Well that’s that’s their argument to that was that was this kid went into an hour of why can make the same argument against you and we know you can’t because I’m actually talking about things I participated in and can prove and that you can participate in if you just do this, and he’s like what, and you know they were what I what I did was I went to my old goal, the novelty because this is this is true. You can run an evolution simulator on your computer. It’s not hard code to write. I mean especially not trying to be, you know, precisely active about all the pieces, but you can see just like Dawkins does in the blind watchmaker he writes about this. I wrote a little evolution simulator and I learned so much watching the evolution simulator simulate. He came to very stupid conclusions about what was going on is, you know, and he’s got his limitations in life will say. But, but I did the same thing like hello, it’s not that any anybody can do it really doesn’t. So what is. Do you start with it your program, and what does it change into. Well, what more importantly what patterns do you see so the patterns the thing that you realize when you watch an evolutionary process unfolding in real time is that 99.9% of everything that gets produced in that program dies immediately. It’s junk. So, so it’s, are we like seeing little avatars move around a virtual world are we seeing numbers. No, you, it grows up from pixels usually. So this is kind of like the game of life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s one for that’s a very elementary form of an evolutionary program. But it’s okay that gives people the game of life, not the one with the cars and not the board game it’s it’s an internet it’s a computer, not even game it’s a simulator. Yeah, it’s called Conway’s game of life it’s it’s in a certain class of games, because you can’t predict the ending position position from the starting conditions. And there are a bunch of things like the even that fact, and you tell any evolutionist or science guy or whatever amateur science person or even real scientists that, and they don’t believe you but it’s actually mathematically provable that the starting conditions can’t determine the end conditions in Conway’s game of life, for example. But there’s more sophisticated versions like Dawkins talks about, right, that most people use where you have some standard of like movement or something. So you have to have legs or you have right and there’s usually a gravity component in there. There’s a couple of basic components. And then you watch that unfold, you get an appreciation for how much stuff immediately dies like it just goes away. And we don’t see that because we haven’t lasted as persons as individual persons, right, through any evolutionary cycles right we’re always in the, in the very small part of evolutionary cycle, we never even see a partial cycle basically. We’ve never seen all the failures just drop off the map. But when you do it on a computer you do and then you realize the magnitude but the other thing you see is recurring patterns that fail. So you’ll see the same pattern crop up no matter how sophisticated the population gets the same sorts of mutations recur over and over and over again, and they die immediately. And people don’t appreciate that they think everything in evolution is perfect because evolution already took out all the bad stuff but that’s not true. Some bad stuff keeps happening, no matter how many iterations you go through. Right, and they don’t like it’s very complicated in some sense. Because you’re actually putting a dice roll into some of it right with the random mutations. Well and and also the results of the non random mutations. So like this should be obvious right because Mendel knew this, things like red hair. Right, it’s like, oh, well there’s certain combinations where the red hair can emerge, and then there’s certain combinations where you’re not going to get a redheaded kid no matter what. And so that cycles by generation necessarily and it doesn’t cycle like on off on off, it cycles randomly because that’s how evolution works. And so you can’t appreciate things like that without understanding the three states. There’s stable mutations, there’s unstable mutations, and then there’s things that don’t last that are recurring mutations that basically never should have been, but they’re inevitable. Wow. And you don’t know that unless you’ve, unless you’ve seen it, like you have to actually go see it in action on a computer. I guess if you were actually, if you had access to enough fossils. And like, no, but that’s, that’s, that’s, we would never, we would never actually get that much data from the ancient world because the world universe is too destructive. So, right. But you don’t know what survived from a fossil. Like you don’t, you don’t have any idea if that survived or died. Right. You just have a record that it existed once, but you don’t know for how long or if it reproduced, so you don’t know if it’s stable, unstable, or recurrent. Yeah. I don’t know man sharks are looking pretty good though. Evolutionarily they haven’t changed in like 300, 400 million years. Yeah, crocodiles. Yeah, it’s just like that we’ve, we’ve, we got something good here we’re gonna hold on to it. Oh my. Yeah, simple. Yeah, it’s a stable environment and it’s a stabilizable environment like water is very hard to change compared to air. So, yeah, yeah, it’s a huge advantage. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. Interesting. Alrighty, well that’s going to be something to talk about more. I was initially thinking about tools to address meeting crisis folks and quick triages to telling the difference between a meeting crisis and a faith crisis. That’s a topic I think for further consideration. So, meaning crisis and faith crisis, what would you say the differences. So, so I’ll try it Mark and you let me know how close I’m matching the ideas. Somebody with a faith crisis would be still having some participation in, we’ll say divinity in religion in the participating with something I don’t know quite what it is, but they can acknowledge realities higher than themselves and they’re just uncertain or ambiguous as to how they should relate to it. Whereas a meeting crisis person person in a meeting crisis. They would be kind of stuck in a flat universe with themselves. Right, so they don’t even have a concept of, of there being values above them that they are beholden to, but they think that they’re in a position where they have to make up everything themselves. Okay. And I’m getting Mark Mark nodding at me a lot so it seems like I’ve explained his ideas at least adequately. That’s that’s yeah that’s pretty good. I mean there’s there and the reason why people think they’re, they’re the same basically so the Paul Vander Flay doesn’t differentiate it seems at least more maybe the last live stream we got them but we’re still trying right is because there’s still the materialism. Right, so it’s just that the materialism is more devastating, if you aren’t in the framework with the symbolism. So one deciding factor is not just humility. Right, and the ability to understand the concept of faith. Right, or the concept of creation, for example, there’s different concepts, those are two of them. Right, but also the inability to engage with symbolism as such, so every connection they see in the world is causal and discrete. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. Right, so they think that they can’t do anything about it. that allows for the proper participation in the world. So if you participate in the world using propositions and procedures, you’re basically autistic. That’s what that would look like. I’m not talking about the source of autism. I’m saying you can’t differentiate autism, no matter how it’s caused, from that model where you’re trying to participate in the world using mere propositions and procedures. Now, the reason why symbolism is important is because a symbol meets you where you’re at, and it can meet multiple people where they’re at, even if they’re at different places. And then once you’re in the symbol, you can kind of travel around and get out the way you need to. But this is also what narrative does. Narrative gives you a way to place yourself within the larger structure through the poetic information. And if you don’t have access to that, A, you’re domiciled. And that’s one of the things we just identified the last week or two. When you’re trying to be an individual, you’re actually literally creating your own domicile. You’re disconnecting yourself from the world. Domicile means death of your home. So you’re literally homeless in the universe when you do that. Yes. Right. And now you don’t need the poetic information, or at least you think you don’t. And so you lose it. It’s a skill that you have to like everything else in your life. You have to cultivate that, and you stop cultivating it, and you get more and more autistic, basically. And then the other side is the mysticism. I think that’s why the mysticism, when you get this opponent process, the mysticism comes flooding back, because it’s undeniable that people have mystical experiences, whether they take drugs or not. It’s just you can’t deny it. It happens all the time to people. I mean, it’s not always. So I’ve had things that I think are probably mystical experiences, but it doesn’t come with any visions or voices. We’ll see. God just knows I would get conceited with those things. So he treats me well. Angel, flaming sword, living room of this house. That was a day. Yeah, I mean, but even just the synchronicities, like where a bunch of people talk about the same thing, who don’t know each other, coming from different places, even clubhouse versus discord. Or accidentally throwing the best dance ever without really doing the work to have planned it. Exactly. Right. Synchronicities happen all the time, and they’re not explainable within a flat world system. So the mysticism comes flooding back. But if you focus on the poetic, and some people are just focused on the poetic and they actually don’t understand procedures at all, and you try to navigate. Marianne Williamson. Marianne Williamson. Right. Well, you try to navigate propositionally through the poetic space instead of the procedural space. Well, now you can’t talk to people. You’re psychotic, basically. You’re seeing connections that aren’t there or that aren’t useful. You sound conspiratorial, probably. You’re making these, but you don’t sound conspiratorial in the normal way, like, oh, you know, President Biden is definitely in collusion with corporations. It’s lizard people for those folks. It’s lizard people. It’s got to come from the universe somewhere. See, they’re just all poetics and no procedure. But now the propositions don’t work because you can’t define anything, and that’s where they get into the Gnostic self-definition loop. So you see the Gnosticism manifests two different ways. But most people are stuck material. The materialists are usually struck propositionally and procedurally. That’s how we kind of define materialism, is you’re stuck on that side with the particular knowledge, and you’re not acknowledging the intuitive knowledge that comes from the participation with poetics. That’s what we need more of. That’s why liturgy is good. Oh, yeah. Yes. Well, we just focus on liturgy. Right. It melds heaven and earth, right? It leaves you with space to go through a regular participation, right? And then there’s a mystical. There’s a that’s a framework for a mystical experience. The mystical experience doesn’t have to happen during the ritual. That’s not required, although it could in theory, I guess. I don’t know. Right. But the fact that you have that framework to reference when it happens gives you a way to integrate it. And because it’s always integration, all these Western Buddhists will talk about integration, but they don’t have a way to do it because they’re all anti-structuralists. They’re postmoderns. So they won’t talk about the framing that would allow for the integration or the transformation. They just say you can do it with just on your own by yourself as an individual, which is obviously can’t possibly be true. But describing the fact that you can’t be bigger than you are doesn’t work somehow to these people. They they just don’t. No, no, no, no, no. It’s bigger on the inside. Oh, yeah. No, no, it’s all Dr. Who TARDIS. It’s like I don’t I don’t understand. I’m actually good television, but but it’s not how things actually work. Right. Well, and these guys last week, they were arguing and there were two of them. One of them I actually have a lot more hope for than this other kid. He was like, I said, look, guy, I understand that you can simulate Conway’s Game of Life and Conway’s Game of Life. Like I’ve done that personally, physically. I’ve done it. I’ve written the code. I’ve seen it. Like I can simulate the Game of Life. Oh, that’s like the computer in Minecraft, right? Exactly. It’s the same. It’s exactly what that was. Their argument was, oh, you can build a computer. Minecraft. I said, yes, but every time you do that, it gets smaller. And it’s slower. Right. But it gets smaller and slower. And they were like, well, no, because computers are so fast. I’m like, no, you’re not understanding. If you start out with a computer with eight gigs of memory and CPU at one point two gigahertz and you build a simulator, the thing that it’s simulating can’t build a simulator that size because the big simulator’s using some of those resources. And then the little, the simulator’s using some of those. And if you build another simulator, right. And then, and then one of them went, oh yeah, that’s right. I was like, what do you mean? Oh, yeah, that’s right. How did you not know this? No, no, no, no, no. Mark, take the W. Take the W. You communicated with somebody. I know. No, no, that one, that one was fine. I have hope for Rodney. He’ll be fine. The other kid, I don’t know. I don’t know about him. Oh, man. Yeah. It’s like, it’s like trying to build a model train set that has your house with the model train set in it. Right. Yes. And then you build a little tiny model of it. And then like after like five iterations of that, it’s underneath plank length, which is like a theoretical measurement. Right. That same, that same guy asked me about plank length and I actually gave him the wrong definition. And then I had to correct myself. I said, no, no, no, it’s the theoretical limit of measurement. And he said, oh, that makes a lot of sense. It’s very helpful. Thanks. No, it’s like, okay. Like really? That’s all you needed to know about. Because somebody must have made an argument about plank length and how the Gnostic universe makes sense that you can self emerge from nothing and transform into God or whatever nonsense they believe. I can’t. Plank length just proves that. We’ll all take it then. Yeah, yeah, whatever. Whatever just proves that. Well, we’re in. Can’t be any worse than carving yourself out of marble. Yeah, right. Yeah. I don’t know. It’s just it’s weird that people don’t understand these things. And they’re not they’re not uneducated. A lot of these people went to college and I’m like, what did they teach you in school? Hey, look, not everybody can go to seminary where they get Thomas Aquinas and logic, you know. I can look up Thomas Aquinas right here on Google. Yeah, right. And that is the problem. They really don’t understand the basic logic. Like it takes me a long time to explain to them. No, no, no. You’ve just spent an hour and a half and you’ve never referenced anything except in relation to yourself. Like you’ve never made an appeal outside of your own experience at all. You know where the universities went wrong when they stopped having mandatory Sunday chapel. That is true. Well, I have a video on education versus training on navigating patterns. I’m just saying it’s worse than an attack on religion. It’s an attack on participatory knowing. Frankly, getting to morning prayer at mass at seven, ten, five days a week was probably and then and then the weekends were a little more. You didn’t have to get up quite so early. You could do morning prayer on your own. That was probably more educating even than the classes. And that’s the way they actually talked about our classes at the seminary. It was, you know, it’s like, yeah, you know, if you get something really good in your theology textbooks, you should take that to prayer. It was like. And the prayer should be the more important thing. But if you like, if you’re if your theology gets into that, great. That means you’re integrating it into the whole thing. But it’s just the participation, even standing, sitting, singing, receiving communion, all of that. Well, that’s where you learn constraint is in participation because there’s no constraints in your head. And I think that’s the problem is we’re keeping people in their head where there’s no constraints. And then they they try to do things in the world. And there’s all these constraints. You try to talk to them about doing things in the world and they don’t recognize any of the constraints. And I’m kind of like, you do know you can’t learn everything, right? You know, like you do know that you can’t just adopt every religion and sort of like set them up side by side and pick one from here and one from like. And they don’t know that. Like they they actually think they can do these things. And I’m like, nobody can do that. Nobody can do that. It’s not possible. That’s the the perennial list by the perennial lists thinking, oh, I can I can stand outside the religious traditions and see which one is the correct things. Right. But it’s like, no, no, that you’re not standing outside of the religious traditions. You’ve made up another religious tradition and it’s called perennialism. And right. And it’s just a smorgasbord of things that you like because you’re at the center of it and not somebody else. Right. And you can’t talk to them about perennialism as such because they don’t they don’t know that word. They don’t understand the consequences. They don’t see it as bad when they do know the word. Like they yeah, they just dodge the whole thing. But yeah, that came up that came up today, too. I think perennialism is ultimately parasitic, right? Yes. Well, it’s self-referred. Right. Yeah. Well, even I’ll go parasitic, right, because they would say they would look at me. Right. And I’m you know, I’m a Roman Catholic priest. I’m I’m I’m just fully committed to the tradition that I’m in. Right. To the point where I I’ll I’ll even critique it from the inside. You know, and and I’m absolutely committed to it. And they would look at me and say, you know, we need people like that to actually maintain these traditions. But I’m not going to go on the inside of this tradition because I’m outside of it and I could just like, you know, reap what you have sown. It’s like it’s it’s I guess in that sense, I look at the perennialist types and see them as parasitic if they’re not going to commit to a tradition. Yeah, no, that’s that’s fair. I’ve been anything that references itself is parasitic upon itself, which is worse than mere parasitism. Right. And I think that’s the problem. That was the argument that kept making the guy today. Like, you keep referencing yourself for everything, no authority. You keep saying you have a foundation and we asked you where you where it is. You just say it’s you, which is fine. But then it’s an opinion. It’s not a foundation anymore. Right. And and yeah, he couldn’t understand that a standard had to be agreed on. It was like he was I have a standard. Where is it? And he’s like, well, it’s in my head. And I’m like, then it’s not a standard. It’s just your opinion. Like, and he didn’t understand the difference. And it’s just shocking to me. But I think that being in reality and having to get up on time and having consequences in the real physical world for when you don’t get up on time is part of the training you need to understand proper participation and poetic information in the world. And then that’s what re-enchants the world, because that’s the only way you’re going to get off the flat plane of you know, it’s a power game. That’s the only way you have to understand that there’s a way in which you can give up a little. The other person can give up a little and now the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts. And that’s why we need to teach the children to dance. Among other things, the Catholic dance is a good father. I’m going to wrap this up right where we started with the Catholic dancing. I knew you’d be a fan of it, Mark. You were a fan of it last week. And it ended up far exceeding my expectations due to things that I couldn’t have possibly planned and didn’t expect. People showing up that I didn’t know were going to come. And it’s just being delightful. And we might be able to build something good here. And speaking of building good things, I’m really tired. I had a long day and I barely slept. And so I think we’ve done good for tonight. So Mark, Andrew, friends of the show, as always, thanks for being here. And God bless you and good night. God bless. Good night. Have a good night.