Open Mic： Go Play, Thank You for Condescending to Me (xf2FYe3a_4Q)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=xf2FYe3a_4Q

2’ See, Lord, at thy sight, Lo, my spirit hark, Lost, all lost in wonder, At the God-gloved. See, he touched me, Tasting my religious need, O, how such trust he gave me, That shall be me reaped. What God so blessed, so great, He gave me, O, to thy doom, To themselves speaks truly, For there’s nothing true. Until He arranged it, And put vak malheur under my breast, Through quick ninja and vманita, No longer I would try, Nor my bringeth, Amen. Amen. Hello everyone. I’m the discount Father Eric, being neither actually hairless on the top of my head nor being ordained by the Roman Catholic Church, but I am here to facilitate the Sunday open So I think Father will be dropping in at various points. Mark, yes, it’s here. Only one minute late, which shows you that I’m not as German Catholic as Father Eric is because it’s one minute late. Yeah. Anyway, I think Father’s going to be here at some point. I believe he’s been on some sort of journey and asked me to start this up for him. So please feel free to believe that I cut my hair just to make look like a knockoff Father Eric. That’s a I even like, you know, it’s like kind of wore the same kind of shirt, just no collar. You know, it’s like there really is. It’s like as close to Father Eric as I’m going to get. Maybe I should have grown my beard more for this, but he didn’t give me like a lot of heads up. So there you go. But yeah, anyway, I think the stream yard link, I hope the stream yard link is working. This is a little bit of a mad dash to get this all up here. We. Yeah, it’s more than a fall out of it. Look, Mark, you and Father were just making me feel bad. And so, you know, I just had to cut it off and I’m sure I’m going to get there before long. Anyway, so, you know, I’m not that worried. Yeah, it’s been a busy week over here. I’ve been kind of running around. So it’ll be nice to. What’s the topic? I’m happy to join you. Oh, there’s a lot of topics we can talk about. Man, I don’t know. I like I mean, the funny thing about the open mic night is it’s rather. You know what anyone wants to talk about? You know, I’ve got my kind of usual things that I go to. I did. I did go to an interesting like. Is a poetry, it’s like a poetry writing exercise that my friend. Some group of his like people that he knew they were doing, so it was the dean of a little college around here in the liberal arts school, and he hopped on, he hopped over and gave this like. It was like a how to write poetry. I don’t know. I showed up in the middle of it, which is always interesting to show up in the middle of something like that, and they were doing some sort of investigation. I think the. Hello, Mark. Hello. That’s quite the illustration behind you. Is that a cell undergoing division or something or scrambled up behind you? Is it evil? It’s a spider eating a person. Oh, oh, because of your live stream on fear. Oh, you are paying attention. Yes, indeed. That was. Yeah, well, I mean, I did on dude, Mark, in the fear category, spiders like way up top for me, just so you know, snakes. Not a problem. Spiders. Dude, no, it’s too many eyes. It’s too many legs, and the things are like. Inordinately large snakes are the opposite, so everyone got a kick out of it because I was on discord and I was talking about, yeah, you know, there’s a snake in the house and then the snake had apparently escaped the back room, which I still haven’t figured out quite yet. But I was on discord and I went into the it went in the living room and like snakes scared me. I was like, ah, snake. It was like, ah, sure, they were all funny, funny, but snakes have too few legs. Spiders have too many legs. They’re they’re all right. Either way, right. They’re on the spectrum. I get it. No, that makes perfect sense. And spiders have like all the wrong kind of hair and snakes have no hair. They’re like. Yes. Well, and so the interesting thing to me, Ted, maybe you have a comment on this because we were we were noodling over this a while back. You know, when you read when when you read Genesis or if you read Genesis, I read Genesis, it’s a lovely, lovely story. It’s not a serpent that feeds Eve the apple. Whatever feeds the apple loses its legs as the result of. And it’s like, well, wait a minute. Maybe it was a spider that explains everything. Well, OK, so, Mark, it’s really interesting that you say that because I just started through my whatever I read through the Lord of the Rings. And and there’s all this. First of all, I wish I had brought the fellowship with me because there’s this quote from it where I was like, if you take one sentence out where Bilbo is talking about the ring. I was like, dude, he’s just talking about a smartphone. Like every single thing in here is a smartphone. He’s like, it’s growing on me. Like, I feel like I can’t, you know, it’s like I feel like I can’t leave it alone. Sometimes it seems like it’s an eye looking at me. It’s like all this. I was like, dude, he’s just talking about. Anyway, but in the in the Silmarillion, right, because in the Silmarillion, you’ve got Valinor and you have the two trees that give light to the world. It’s like, OK, right. Yes. Got it. It’s not a snake that drives the trees from the world because there’s, you know, it’s like. In some ways, like being driven from the trees and the trees being taken away, it’s sort of the same thing. But there it’s a spider. It’s Ungoliant. It’s the world spider that comes out and like, dude, Tolkien gets how scary spiders are. Like, if you read the full Tolkien corpus, like Ungoliant is. Well, it’s it’s it’s his spiders are his picture, I think, of that, which just seeks to bring everything inside of itself destructively. Like in his mind, like that’s what a spider is. It’s the thing that will just like. Right, because think about what a spider does. It’s in the eyes. All also, yes, they have too many eyes, but but those their eyes are their eyes. Like, right, there’s eyes and then there’s eyes, right, because there’s eyes that let you connect and then but spider eyes are not for connecting. Spider eyes are for consuming. And then they then they either paralyze you or wrap you up in something so that you can’t do anything. Right. They draw you in. They draw you in. And then and then and then they dissolve you from the inside out. Then they dissolve you from the inside out. It’s like, yeah. And then they just suck you into their abdomen. It’s like, yeah, like, praise be to God that that, you know, they have an open circulatory system and book lungs and that we don’t have to deal with any spiders bigger than this because physics are on our side with spiders. Physics are protecting us from spiders. Science wins again. Science wins again. Yeah, it’s like, yeah, the creator of the universe knew what he was doing, what he’s like, you know, all those freaky arthropods, all open circulatory systems so that, you know, you can’t get you can’t get big. You know, the the the column pressure, the column pressure across an organism like that is going to prevent them from getting very large. And and also, well, spiders are better, but insects, the other reason insects don’t get huge. I don’t know if you know this, Mark, but they’re the respiratory system is just it’s just a diffusion like they have holes in the side of them. And like they’re not using lungs. They’ve just got it. Oh, great. They do breathe, but they don’t have lungs. They don’t have like a they don’t breathe. No, no, breath is the in and out. Like that’s the spirit. They don’t have. OK, so this is this is actually really interesting thing. So they do. They do do the in and out, but they don’t have like they don’t have a special structure for it. They just have holes and they have like they have hemolymph, which is blood and they just they have to move. They have to move to take in air. Yeah, they’re not doing the in and out there. They’re moving through the world as a way of sustenance. Fundamentally parasitic. You think that’s why we think bugs are so freaky? That’s why bugs are freaky. Yeah. OK, so, Mark, I don’t even remember whether this is a song like. Oh, where was this? I know. Yes, it was a summer that I I’m going to get Chad on here really quick. Chad will like the story, too. Maybe you won’t. I don’t know how Chad feels about bugs. Hey, Chad. Hey. So this one summer I was working with my brother, worked for this inner city like youth development thing up in up in the northeast. And I took the kids this like butterfly sanctuary and they had a you know, that’s it’s really cool. You go and they’ve got all the butterflies flying around in this like rainforest thing. Um, they’ve got this other room with all these little terrariums of stuff. You know, it’s like here’s a box turtle. Here’s a snake. And then there’s this one that had one of the largest, you know, leaf insects are they’re like walking sticks, but instead of trying to look like sticks, they look like leaves. And they’re kind of thick. I don’t know how else to describe it. And so there’s this one terrarium that’s like this big, you know, maybe like a foot by two feet by three, three feet, not that big. And it’s the biggest species in the world. The biggest ones are like this big, like eight, like bigger than your hand. And the thing is just chock full of them. I mean, on the walls, on the ground, all over. And they’re all just like pulsing together, like almost rhythmically, dude. It gave me the willies so hard. There’s like just too many of them and they’re all moving just enough, but not enough. Yeah, I don’t know that you could. I feel like you could take that one and just dissect it in terms of like, why is that? Why is that horrifying to me? Mark, are you looking at are you looking at what are those called leaf bugs? No, no, I didn’t bring up leaf bugs. Well, Chad, what’s going on, man? Oh, not much. Just I saw you in here. I want to see nice haircuts. Thanks. Yeah. See how you’re doing. Yeah, the only bugs that really kind of give me give me the creeps are like centipedes and bugs that sting. And then along with bugs that sting, I haven’t seen them around here. But when I was a kid, they used to have these bugs in California. We I don’t know what they were technically called, but we would call them potato bugs. And they have like they’re crawling bugs. I don’t know if they fly, but they have a stinger on them. And they’re just nasty. I don’t know if I don’t know the technical term, but I haven’t seen them in the Midwest. Thank God. There is a you know, it’s funny, there’s something particular about stinging bugs. I’m looking at this word. I think I’m going to get it in here in a second with the with the help of Google. So how does it work? I mean, if if the bugs, I mean, some bugs do stay stationary for a time, if there’s no wind, they suffocate because because we get stationary. And no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it’s not like that. So so they do like they can like contract their their abdomen like this. So they don’t diaphragm. They’re just like contract because they’re not. I don’t know if any bugs have a completely hard exoskeleton. And so you think about it, it’s not like like it’s like a sponge, right? If you squeeze a sponge, it like pushes everything out everywhere and then you let go and it like sucks everything from it. So they’ve just got a bunch of holes in them. So one of the things. And so what that what that means is, is that it’s really hard for like oxygen to get a long way into their body because they’re really dealing with fusion. They don’t have they don’t have the kind of separation that like the mammals do or reptiles or fish or anything where it’s like, hey, this is the you’ve got this one particular oxygen exchange area. So you can take the least oxygen. They don’t have a specialized area for oxygen exchange like we do and a specialized system. And so that means they need more movement to breathe. Basically, they need well. And then what also happens is that they just max out in terms of size because you’re dealing with this diffusion. You can’t move it actively across large areas of body. Right. So because they don’t have blood vessels and so because we have blood vessels, we’re isolating our oxygen carrying fluid in areas and we can keep the fresh blood from the exhausted blood, the oxygenated from the from the less oxygenated blood separate from each other. Then you basically just max out it like how much can you get the further into the bug, you get the less oxygen there is. And so then they just eventually get big enough where the interior can oxygenate and then you have tissue necrosis, which is we used to have giant dragonflies. But we had a much higher amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. Well, that’s exactly right. I don’t know that. Yeah. Yeah. Insects were big when oxygen was high in the atmosphere. And actually, this is one of the things that really pisses me off. Like as a junior paleontologist, when I was a boy, like I wasn’t double digits. I knew that there was much more CO2 in the atmosphere. Like I think it’s I think it’s a hundred times more CO2 in the atmosphere. And the temperatures weren’t that much higher, which is why when they do the climate stuff, I’m like, do you? I know you people are punking us. Like, did you never look at the fossil record far enough back? Because you’re talking about what do they call it? The carbonaceous period when it was just like when they’re like, yeah, there’s all this carbon dioxide and all this oxygen in the atmosphere. And then, yeah, at the same time. And it wasn’t 60,000 degrees like we would predict now because I’ve run it in their models. I’m like, all right. Well, well, and this is this is one of those little things that nobody knows. All geologists, like 80% of geologists, were climate science’s bullshit from day one because geologists and paleontologists, who actually look at the fossil record, know exactly how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere for exactly how long and they know what the temperature was. So they know these guys are full of it. Like they already know and they knew that. I knew that when I was a kid. I’m like, I don’t like what knowledge did we lose exactly that these people are being alarmist about a little bit of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This makes no sense. Yeah, I think that. I don’t know if it’s real or whatever, but I was talking about a methane increase event, something like a is going to be a like an ice age coming soon or whatever due to rise in methane. I don’t know. Well, the original climate guy, one of the founders of Greenpeace, was the original scientist in the late 60s, 70s, something like that, I think it was the 70s, who basically said, oh, we’re going to have global cooling due to sulfur. And he got and he to be fair, got everybody to remove sulfur out of automotive fuel, which was ultimately a good thing, just not for the reasons he said, which just it’s like the irony, right? Like removing sulfur was great, but it had nothing to do with the climate. But also, sulfur cools the climate. So actually him doing that caused the opposite. Not really, but it’s just one of these things. It’s like you think you know about the world and you have no idea and you’re just messing it up. Yeah. Well, look, I just like. All that stuff is so difficult to predict. I mean, like it. Right. You’re talking about that. Impossible to predict. There are multivariate equations. Science is not based on multivariate equations. They’re all recursive and then they’re all recursive, which is problematic and so reciprocating. Right. Yes. Reciprocal. I want to throw. OK, so this is what Charles Webb is a great spider story. Right. So Martin, Chad, do you both know Charles Webb, the story? Yes. Chad. Yeah. OK, I shouldn’t have pushed you on that. If you’re embarrassed about not having read it, then I shouldn’t. I have. This actually brings up a really interesting point. So I had one of my friends in college. We’re talking about probably Interstellar came out. So we’re talking about black holes. And he was he was telling me that, like, in his mind, black holes are to go back to this notion of fear, Mark, black holes are like the let’s say the natural quintessence of like of evil. Right. And in his mind, they’re just like these. They just like they just destroy everything and they suck everything into them. And I was like, yeah, except that you also look at black holes and they’re what, like, apparently maintain galactic structures. They’re the reason that, you know, we have star formation because interstellar glass gas clouds are held together because of them and on and on and on and on. Wait a minute, Ted. Are you saying that they are not only the limits of physics, but also they define the limits of the structure of the universe itself? We’re just evil. What did you say, Chad? I said, no, they’re just evil. They’re just evil. OK, this brings up a hypothesis I have. So you’ve got like, right. So with the spiders, you’ve got like Angoliant, the world spider who, like, tries to eat everything good in the world and is, like, blotted out with her vast, you know, obese weight. And then you’ve got Charlotte from Charlotte’s Web. And, you know, the actual good things that spiders do. I have this notion that, like, pretty much everything on this level of things, like when we look around and we look at things, there’s this valence in which you can almost everything you can, let’s say, when you move it up to the world of an image, either could be a positive thing or a negative thing. And I’m not like I haven’t pushed that very far, but I find that to be like fascinating and you can like pick up great poets and they’ll take the same thing and it’ll be really negative and then somewhere else will be really positive. Chad, what do you got something on that? Yeah. So have you read or listened to any of Mark Twain’s post, is it post Thomas or post humorously released material? No, there’s a book that he was writing called Letters from the Earth. OK, I would I think you might get a kick out. It’s Letters from the Earth. And then there’s another one called The Diaries or Ex scripts from the Diaries of Adam and Eve. Those are both fascinating and hilarious. Letters from the Earth. Yep. Letters from the Earth. That one, I don’t I don’t think he actually finished it because it to me, the way it ended, it didn’t seem like he got to finishing it, but he talks about flies in there and like like flies are like the most evil thing. And I mean, his that’s actually some of the only stuff by him I ever read or I never read it. I listen to audio versions. They’re right. There’s like a bunch of free versions of them right on YouTube. But the Adam and Eve excerpts from Adam and Eve’s Diaries. Fascinating, hilarious. So Eve’s the length of Eve’s is about 45 minutes. And then Adam’s is only about 25 minutes, which there’s some about right. Yeah, yeah. And but it’s it’s kind of interesting because like, I don’t know, I think I think he kind of gets at things. I don’t know exactly what he’s getting at, but there’s a reason why he didn’t want those things released while he was alive. So, well, so this is I mean, this is like a pretty serious I’ll give you like a pretty serious version of this, which is just but it’s it’s worth pondering. So I think it was the Tin Boom Sisters. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that. That’s the story. Yeah. So, yes, thanks. I think. And I think that’s the end and the father. Would have been saints considered saints, I think, if they were Catholic. So so everything that I’ve heard about them lines up with that, Chad. And there’s a story about how they’re in, you know, they’re in it. They’re in a prison camp. They’re in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany under the Nazis. Before we go further, can I say something? Because this point that I’ve been trying to make time and time and time again about how kind of reductionist people talk about things like evil and things and they’re very it’s very cut and dry things only evil and or a thing is only good and no good can come out of evil. And what I think the the Corey are the Corey Timboom story, along with her family’s story is a complete shattering of that frame because some of the most beautiful things happened because of some of the most horrific things happened. Yeah. And, you know, like the fact that what was well, I know you’re going to talk about the fleas, but yeah, you know the story. Yeah. So but the fact that that happened and they were able to have whatever nights it was that they would have nights of worship. So it would be Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, Jews and atheists all worshiping under the same. Roof. Yeah, yeah. All right, look, continue. Sorry. Yeah, well, I’m glad, Chad, I’m glad you know the story for anyone who doesn’t. And you might be able to correct some of the details. So I’m going to give it a really rough outlines because this is what I have. Basically, the the barracks that they’re in, they’re just like their beds are infested with fleas. It’s just it’s bad. And one, all the Timboom sisters are, you know, they’re telling the other women they’re like. Be thankful for the fleas, like, I don’t know why, but be thankful for the fleas. And so, Chad, you’re bringing up their ability to gather together there and be left alone. But like, I’ve also heard that that the guards were really mistreating the women in other barracks and right in the ways that, let’s say, men who have women under their power would do. And but they never came in and messed with the women in the house of fleas. Right. So, right. What’s evil, what’s bad? It’s like. Man, it’s a complicated thing. And so, Chad, I mean, I like this. And like, this is a point that I that I bring up over and over and over. And like, it’s part of the reason I think Job is such a great story. Right. Yeah. Because it’s like, well, when do you know? Right. And we always rush to make this judgment of like, I’m uncomfortable, so it’s bad or hurt me, so it’s bad. Or I can’t see where the good is coming from this. So it’s bad or whatever, whatever. And so I’m well and truly into like it. I believe that you can’t. Look, I mean, I was just thinking about this, right, with, say, with my with my family, right, and so we’ve gotten this far. We’ve got these children. I’m in this marriage and there’s all sorts of things that could totally change that story, right, like I could I could die tomorrow. I could die, you know, whatever. And you might say, OK, well, now that now the story is a tragedy. Like it was this beautiful story. Now it’s a tragedy. But the thing that finally clicked with me is like the appropriate things for me to do and for my wife to do and for our children to do are the same, regardless of whether we get another 40 years of marriage or another day. Right. Right. And so it like it finally clicked with me that because the way that I kept saying it sounded like, well, you don’t know. So who knows how to act? It’s kind of all fine because like really how you have no idea what’s going to turn out. And finally, it was like, no, like when we say like it’s the right thing to do. One of the things we mean is it’s the thing that works. It’s the it’s the appropriate thing, regardless of what the future what happens in the future. And I think that might be the that is a way of defining wisdom. Like that’s not the only way to find wisdom. But a way of defining wisdom is saying it was the right thing to do, regardless of what happens afterwards. Like there’s no way to reframe that action badly is maybe a way of saying it. That’s that’s why I like principles, because if you’re able to follow principles, regardless of outcomes, I think, you know, well, it’s a matter of what principles, you know, so, you know, I know that Mark and I have talked about this print, the idea of principles as such is not sufficient. But, you know, which principles are we talking about here? But, you know, the idea that. The idea about things being good or bad, I think some of that stuff is, yes, was it bad? Yes. Was it good? Yes. It’s like it’s above our pay scale in a lot of ways, you know, and like, well, it’s like when I hear people say something like. They like, well, fear monger people into something because they’re going to die. It’s like, yeah, like everybody else. And like, so like the one the one thing from the film don’t look up that I thought was the best aspect and probably the only good aspect of the film, so the very end of the film was breathtaking, I thought, with the prayer scene. But the most poignant piece of the whole film was when they’re going around freaking out and they’re telling people, everybody, we’re going to die. It’s like, yeah, like, I don’t know. If you watch one of those scenes, it’s like, if you look at it from, say, just I don’t think that I think you that whoever made that film was trying to say something very important in those scenes, you know, it’s like, yeah, you’re going to die all the time. But they were they were struggling with a bunch of stuff they clearly didn’t understand and and the film sort of reflects that. It’s very, very postmodern. Oh, there he is. Yeah. Greetings from Wyoming. Ooh, amazing. We’re in Wyoming. Gillette. They haven’t shaved me yet, though. Well, you really go in for like a diversity of geography or like, should I be in the high plains that are sort of in the Midwest or should I be in the high plains that are sort of a little bit further west from the Midwest? I am. My dad and I are on a excursion to move our brother-in-law from Las Vegas to Fargo. So today was day one of the four day trip. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. The God’s country. Beautiful. Oh, it is. It is. I mean, like, I’m used to small towns. I’m used to rural areas and all of that. But Southwest, North Dakota, Western South Dakota and Wyoming are a different level of rural than I am accustomed to. Yeah, they are. 100 percent. There’s very little going on out here. Well, a lot of it, guys, I got to go spend time with my wife. But it’s great to see. I wish I could talk more. But great discussion. Thank you. Thanks for dropping in, Jack. Yep. Yeah. So, Father, what was it a week ago? Two weeks ago. Jimmy. Wow. That was a week ago, I think. I helped drive my sister up to her school up in like eight hours north of here and we were going through Illinois. And the thing about Illinois that shocked me was the sense of volume. Right. Like here in Arkansas, especially in the summer, it just like there’s just this like dome of blue. It’s like you just feel like there’s like a bull upside down over you. And I don’t know if it’s Illinois all the time or what, but like there’s like windmills out for forever. And then there’s these clouds. And it felt like I had been shrunk down to like this small and it was at the bottom of a huge lake, like just like the sense of like there’s just air. There’s just air and air and like more air. And like you’re looking through it. It was that. And then we got these windmills turning the right way. And then they’re matching the parallax effect of the trees. They’re like in the mid distance. And it looked like they’re like rolling along at the same speed as the car through the landscape. It was so trippy. I could not look at it. I was going to drive off the road. Yeah, we call that big sky country. Yeah, yeah. It’s real. I didn’t. Oh, yeah. I thought you were just like scraping the bottom of the barrel for something to hold up about that part of the world, but it’s real, I guess. It’s it’s really shocking when you get out there, especially if you get top down. Yeah, it’s it’s fantastic. Because there’s just there’s like it’s not even sky. It’s something else because there’s so much of it. It’s like it can’t be sky. I have sky where I’m at. Same sky, not the same sky. It’s not like I don’t know what’s going on here. It’s kind of weird. That’s amazing. Well, no, that was two weeks ago. Yeah, that was two weeks ago. I was like, what did I do last week? Oh, my goodness. No, last week we went to a homesteading expo in Missouri. That was awesome. Hitting the expo. That’s the most dead thing you’ve said all day. It look, Mark, the notion of an expo and homesteading go together like oil and water. Like, it’s really exactly. I was just like, nah, Ted’s Ted’s making stuff up again. He’s no, the guy here or something. He’s super real. And yeah, it was it was pretty wild. It was it was in Marshfield, Missouri, which I didn’t realize where everyone from the Hubble the astrophysicist is from. He’s from nowhere in Missouri. They’ve got like a model of the Hubble Space Telescope there. It was like, oh, weird. And yeah, it was it was wild. Like it is a homesteading. The like people who come to homesteading events from the online space. That is a really interesting crew. You’ve got everything from like the holiness people to like the guy who’s wearing a kilt and open carrying to the like total hippie. It’s just like the entire spectrum. But they’re all there because like they want to see someone do like, you know, like a live hog butchering demo and learn about life, dark guardian dogs and how to. Sneak around the IRS on your homestead, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was it was it was a lot of fun. It was it was a pretty cool, pretty cool thing. It’s really funny to see like the commercial products that people also are like they’re selling to the homesteading group. There were some. I’ll be honest, I was drooling over some of the hand crank grain mills. I think it’s very sanitary. I mean, I wasn’t literally drooling over them. Just next to your eyes went out like that and your tongue. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That beautiful cherry red with that cast iron flywheel on it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it was it was fun. It was it was a there was some really cool. There’s a mushroom guy there that had an awesome display of like horse collected fungi and you want to talk about something that it just totally wild pigeon to mushrooms like the bracket fungi. You look at the underside of them and the patterns going on. Oh, my goodness. Just yeah, that’s how trees communicate, man. Don’t. Yeah. It’s like, wait, what? No, it wasn’t you. I’ll talk with a friend of mine about the science behind plants, roots moving towards water, and he’s like, apparently no one understands how they make it towards like they’ll do stuff like, yeah, they’ll like play the sound of running water over here and then they’ll have still water here and it was like go to the still water or they’ll like put it in a PVC pipe and it’ll still like hit the side of the PVC pipe that’s towards the damp water. It’s like right. No, they haven’t figured that out. Yeah. The last I checked, they had no no clue. I just don’t. They don’t understand how plants seek sunlight either. Like like and they know this because when they take them up in space, weird things happen and they just have they’re like, this doesn’t fit any theories. Why? Why aren’t the plants figuring this out? Hmm. I don’t know why indeed. You know, why? What were the plants doing? In space, they just don’t behave correctly because of the lack of gravity. And if you try to simulate gravity on them and stuff, none of the theories of how plants grow were actually correct. So when they put it in space, they didn’t behave the way anybody expected. So they don’t have they don’t have theories of how this stuff works. Like everybody thinks we know how plants work, but actually we have no idea. Yeah. We only discovered about the mushrooms and the tree communication recently. Like that’s not that’s not 20 years old. Yeah. I mean, it’s super. And you and I mean, there’s that. And then just like the level of interaction going on there. I think for some plants, there’s two kinds of basically route interacting fungi and certain kinds that are actually increasing the surface area of the roots for nutrient water uptake by like tenfold. Like the ten times the surface area of the plants roots that we know of that we know of and the plants are feeding them carbohydrates to keep them alive. And they’re pulling water and minerals and stuff that they’re pulling from the soil into the plant. Yeah. This is look, this is the thing. I mean, Chesterton was making this point back in the 1920s where he was like the most the closer to the stuff is to us, the less that we like understand it in the sense of that sort of like analytical, say, mechanical explanations for things. It’s like sleep. Why do we sleep? Right. State of the art research is because we get tired. Seriously, like this actually like best, yeah, I mean, like everyone knows the practice. The reason is we need to practice dying. But anyway, no, no, science will science will get it. Sounds good. Remember, I I mentioned I mentioned this as frequently as I can just to prove the absurdity of science. They only recently discovered that, in fact, they can measure the fact that if you get if you fall out of a relationship, your heart is damaged. And if you get into a and then it took them another another while to figure out if you get into a relationship, it actually physically repairs your heart. And I’m like, you guys, literally everybody already knew. And by everybody, I mean everybody since the dawn of time. We have songs, we have books, we have poems, parables like we already knew this. Like, thanks for the update, science captain obvious. Like, really? It’s so silly. It’s like, what do you guys what are you guys doing with your science? I don’t get it. Yeah, it. Oh, my goodness. I thought it just immediately makes me think of St. Margaret of Scotland, dying of a broken heart. You know, oh, it did. Yeah, dude, I went through that. Well, not to let you know. I was like, oh, this is definitely real. And I’m right on the edge. It’s like, oh, OK, that’s fair enough. Lori, Andrew, what were you going to say? Oh, I was going to say it. It just sounds like, you know, you can hear all those songs, but the scientists were probably thinking like, oh, but that’s emotions has nothing to do with physical hearts. You know, right. Well, well, and here’s here’s interesting. I figured this out when I was young. So when I was fairly young, my uncle, my father, a few other people were making comments about when they were kids and how how often Christmas had snow. And and. Other people were saying, no, no, no, that’s just sample bias, that’s just this, that the other thing. None of those people went back and looked at the records because it turns out they were right, their memories were actually correct. It was more often to snow when they were little than it had been since they had passed some certain age. And I was just like, this is the problem with science. It makes a bunch of presumptions and says, well, we know about this bias. And we’ve heard this and science would tell us somehow because it’s a magical creature, I don’t know if you knew that, that would that would just tell us things. And therefore, since it hasn’t told us, it must not be true because people always want science to be the teller of the truth rather than the thing that tells you what’s wrong. The entire scientific method tells you things that are wrong. It doesn’t actually tell you things that are right. It just infers that the thing that hasn’t been proven wrong yet is the most correct. And that’s a theory and all the other competing ideas are just hypotheses or something, right. That’s that’s how it’s supposed to work. That is I mean, that’s like something that should not be under emphasized, is that any time you read something like theory was proven, it’s like unless you’re talking about math, like that’s that’s technically incorrect. It is technically incorrect to ever say that a scientific theory has been proven. Now, you might have like what they call like a six sigma confidence on it, right. That it’s like a one in a million chance based on the data we have that the null hypothesis is generating this data. But like the way that science is done means that you can’t prove anything positive, you can prove things negatively, but you can’t prove things positively. Exactly. And this is this is actually, you know, Daniel Thomas, Dr. Thomas, the one who brought this up to me and he connects this with the old Aristotelian and to mystic notion of the immateriality of the intellect, which is like if we’re going to know true things about the world, there has to be something going on that that’s not merely material because we’re not encountering things to know in that way. And the one of the classic examples is of a triangle. He’s like, you cannot by science prove that a triangle has a certain interior angle of 180 degrees because like and he goes into like why that is it’s like, well, you could measure it, but even if it was technically a perfect triangle, the bottom limits of physics would never let you round out all the zeros. Right. It will be, you know, one eighty point zero zero zero zero zero. That’s how far we got. And then you get down to the quantum realm and like and then we’re just toast. You actually can’t measure that. But you can know 180 degrees is the interior angle of a triangle. He’s like, so what’s weird is he then takes that and says, this is why this is how we can know that something is going on in your head. That’s not just embedded in material reality. Something else is going on based on the mere fact that you can know with real certainty that the triangle is 180 degrees of interior angle. To me, that’s fascinating. It’s like that stuff is, again, so basic. A lot of this stuff is really close to us. That’s what I was bringing up about that Chesterton quote is like a lot of this if you look way out there, hey, like we know this about, you know, these particular forms of the way reality manifests and you start to bring it in. And again, this is Thomas point, like you can’t know the wavelength of red light until you can recognize red light. Like the knowledge of red light precedes any scientific understanding about red light. Exactly. Yeah, that’s that’s the fundamental problem is that detail matters. And as you get further out in detail, you can know more because you need less precision. But science is about precision and accuracy. And so it increases the detail. And then ironically, it meets limits of what you can know because because so, for example, and this is a famous thing in physics. There is nothing preventing you from walking through a three foot steel wall and coming out on the other side in physics, nothing at all except mere statistics. In other words, according to according to all we know about physics, even at the quantum layer or especially at the quantum layer, because actually this is tilting your favor at that point, which is really weird. You can definitely walk through a wall if you try hard enough. And it doesn’t matter what the walls made up. It makes no difference at all unless it’s unless it’s an energy field of some kind that we haven’t been able to produce in in a large enough quantity to know if it’s practical to scale up. I’ve got something to level at you, Mark. I don’t think physics would allow you to walk through a neutron star, but I’m not certain about that because I think that’s a collapse atomic because I think that at that point, well, I don’t even know. I couldn’t even I couldn’t even tell you on that one. You don’t know anything about neutron stars. That’s the experience of that. We know nothing about them. Right. It’s all it’s all math theory. But like at a certain point, they get the this is the problem with black holes. Because we talked about that earlier. The problem with black holes is that actually all the math collapses for real. It fails. It’s like the Big Bang. You can get so close to the Big Bang and I forget how many picoseconds. Right. And then math fails. They admit this. This isn’t hidden. It’s not like you go look and you’ll find out. Oh, yeah. The math fails. So what that means is that the boundary between matter and energy changes. We don’t actually know what that boundary is. We kind of know again, we know roughly that it exists. We know roughly what the number is. But we have no practical experience of it. Right. We can’t. So it might be that a neutron star becomes an energy field. And yes, for energy fields, according to physics. But again, you still don’t know. Right. You can’t get through an energy field because the energy would be destroyed. That’s why a common go to for Gnostic thinkers when they reach the end of materialism is, oh, no, no, we’re pure energy. And therefore that solves all the problems of materialism. It’s like, no, it doesn’t. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, OK, so there’s there’s something really interesting there. And hold on, it’s going to take me just a half a second. Yes. OK. So one of these interesting is you get these weird things with like the way people talk about black holes, like event horizon and singularity. Right. And like by the time they get to common parlance, people take them as a thing, as though the event horizon is a thing, like a material object. And the singularity is a material object or a position. They’re not. The event horizon is is the space that we know nothing out across. Once you get to what you’re saying is you can’t see anything past that. It’s not a thing. Likewise, the singularity is not a thing. It’s what happens to the math when you put the numbers in for a black hole. Like we don’t know anything about what a singularity is. It’s just math collapses. That’s what a singularity is, the actual collapse of mathematical theory. Yeah. Math failed to work at the statement of the singularity is the statement that math fails to work. And the singularity comes up when you try to get to the essence of the Big Bang. So when you go past some number of picoseconds of the Big Bang, you also reach the singularity. It came from that first and it went to black hole second. And it’s the same problem. You just reached the limits of the math. It’s almost as if the infinite creates the finite. Exactly. Father Eric, almost as if. So so, Mark, I wanted to I wanted to take something else. You’re talking about this, right? You’re looking at something like the Big Bang and you’re trying to get in as close as you can, but you can’t ever get there, right? You can get like you can keep there’s this sort of mathematical Zeno’s paradox there. It’s Zeno’s paradox. Yeah. As you move. And so it’s interesting is and Father Eric, you probably would be able to help me refine this. It strikes me that this notion of like substances changing, right? And sort of the Aristotelian view of the world, which is it like substances do change like when I eat something, right? The substance of the salad that I had, like is taken up into Ted into my substance. But like, but you can’t you can’t figure out where that happened. There’s no it was. It doesn’t happen in one place either. It doesn’t happen in one place or at one time. But like that’s all change or or through one process. All changes like is like that in that you can keep there’s a sort of like Zeno material change, material change instantly. It doesn’t have parts. Thank you. That’s a great this. This is the kind of refinement that I’m after here. Right. So. Well, and honestly, like you get this, I’ll just I’ll just throw this grenade in there to like it’s the same thing with the whole notion of abortion, too, right? We’re trying to it’s the same thing as as trying to define the start. Like the start of life is the same problem as the start of the universe. You’re like, well, we’ve got this sort of continuous gradient of change from a moment that we were simply before. There’s definitely a time before it. And then and then it’s here. But materiality requires discrete processes and we are not discrete processes. So all things on the material register are divisible into distinct, discrete divisions. But but and this is why the knowledge engine model that we came up with that I use all the time has part of your brain processes, discrete things, part of your brain processes using continuous things. And there’s different math for this, too. Interesting. Like we actually have different math. And you can use the same. You can plug in the same values in that math and you get slightly different answers and there’s a there’s a whole art to picking whether you want to use continuous equations or discrete equations. And that’s what’s so interesting. And I did want to address Corey. But by the way, by the way, your talk with Corey was great. I left you some comments. I don’t know if you saw one. Yeah. Oh, wherever you did, I thought it was your channel that you talk much. I’ve done a couple of my channel. Yeah. Anyway, I don’t know. Aaron’s on the space on the ransom. I haven’t seen that one yet. Corey’s is real as consciousness. Consider this because because I’ve thought about this a lot for years. Consciousness is just the scientific version of soul, but they don’t want to say soul, so they can’t put the new word because they they they they have the equal ability to define it as they have to define any other sort of thing like soul. It really is a total black box for them. It was it was one of the things that came up or didn’t come up in Thunder Bay that that Catherine was a little upset about, like nobody defined it. And they didn’t because because then the problem once you do that, you open the box that psychologists went in two years ago, which is, well, there’s consciousness, which is sort of the rational side. What about unconscious? Well, they had to invent the unconscious to explain all the irrational behavior humans do. That’s why in psychology you have the the conscious and the unconscious, the conscious and the subconscious, subconscious and unconscious, the same thing. So that’s what happens when you when you run into the boundaries of these things. And I think I think that Zeno’s paradox is specifically designed to show you the limits of your material interaction in the world. Look, this is I mean, I listened to one or two of Paul Vanderkley’s podcasts on Jordan Peterson dealing like he was like pulling Jordan Peterson’s like the College of Psychologists and his Exodus seminars together, which were which were pretty fun. Yeah, because the soul is the formal cause, at least in a person like the soul, the human soul is the formal cause of the person. And science does not examine formal causes like just so he’s you know, he’s like this whole thing about how psychologists are the priests of the modern world, like of the modern Western world, which is like, yes, first of all, absolutely. That’s dead on. But I’m like, I’m over here banging my head against the wall. I’m like, psychologist. It’s like the psyche. Psyche is the Greek word for soul. Like, isn’t it? It’s like, yeah, yeah, no wonder you’re overlapping domains here. It’s like, yeah, they don’t they don’t see it. It’s just it’s just like, you know, the DEI guys. Did you you realize that the DEI people actually said D.I.E. until Peterson kept pointing it out to them? No, really, because you can’t avoid it. Like at some point, the the the the ethos of evil makes itself known in an unambiguous way, and then we just we kind of failed to we failed to notice these things. I literally had two people very close to my life who I’ve known for years and years and years in the same week, completely independently come up to me like, you know, it just occurred to me that like all these corporations in our country are being run by demons. And they I think they specifically and they’re don’t like they don’t listen to Jonathan Pesce, so they don’t have the whole like, you know, a demon being manifest in this body and all this. They’re like, yeah, I just realized that like no one’s in the no person is in the driver’s seat operations. Well, that’s where that’s where egg regards come from. Like, if you if you watch like you should see what I’ve been seeing, like on Clubhouse and stuff, if you watch, they’re all converging on the same thing. Like they really are all converging on the same thing. And they’re coming there. They’re running head first for for for Jonathan Pizzo and and and and sort of the orthodox ethos of how the world actually works. Right. Like they’re running right into it. Really, really. But we don’t we don’t notice these things. I mean, the big theme for me, actually, embarrassingly enough this week was I just sort of realized. So when I when I first saw Verveke, you know, he’s got that icon, the man above the fog or whatever it’s called there with, you know, it’s one guy. He’s on a mountain. He’s above the clouds. The romance painting, the romantic painter. Yeah. Where is like it’s a romantic painting. Right. Like, yeah. Didn’t pass right by me, right. Until like a year and a half ago when I went, oh, the answer was there all along. He’s an individualist who wants to be alone in the world and above everybody else. It’s right in the painting. But then the other thing that I missed, that I that I kind of figured out this week that I was like, man, are you stupid? I just feel so dumb all the time. It’s like he starts the whole awakening from the meaning crisis stuff with this nine dot problem and the premise of the nine dot problem. If you pay attention to it is. OK, you’ve created a box for yourself, but with a little bit of training, you can learn to break out of that box and transcend the, you know, the problem that you created for yourself. And I’m like, this is a total individualistic, you know, self transcendence. Yeah, there it is. The man above the fog. I think it’s called. Right. But his whole thesis is based on creation denial because saying that the box, the constraints that you tried to do the nine dot side to solve the nine dot problem with were yours and were in your head. And, oh, by the way, there’s a series of practices that you can engage in to get out of that box and free yourself from that constraint, like, like, wow, it was always right there. And I totally missed. I got totally sucked in. Yeah. Well, it was funny. I was bringing up that poetry. First, hey, Sandy, don’t let us do you want to say anything? You’ve been you’ve been saying I like I personally, if I said anything at all at this point is, what is Eric saying not to and how did we jump from? Thanks. Oh, the scrolling effect was perfect. I had to ask the next half of the question was, how did we jump from literature to demons just as I was signing in? Not a reflection on your timing. I’m about to bring it back to literature if you want, Sandy. No, this is fine. Keep talking. No, I will. I really was because Mark, I was I think Mark was listening when I brought this up, but then I went to this poetry thing with a friend of mine. It’s like a poetry writing workshop thing, which is funny because they didn’t write poetry, but they spent a lot of time. Like, but basically he was like trying to teach them how to like generate the kind of things that they would put in a poem. So they’re writing, I guess it was called like a prose block or something. Anyway, but all that to say is it was fun. But he cast off this definition from Wordsworth about poetry as being is like the spontaneous overflow of emotion like made like crystallized and like through tranquil reflection or something like that. I was like, that is the most romantic definition of poetry I’ve ever heard. I was like Dante and Virgil would have so much beef. I’m pretty sure with this notion that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of emotion, it’s like there’s definitely poetry that’s like that. But like, tell that to the Divine Comedy. And I bring that up, Mark, because this notion of like you’ve made this box, right? And now you need to transcend the box. And it’s like. You don’t have to live in a box, you can live in a cathedral. The cathedral’s been built. Well, and you can like see, and that’s where the problem comes. It’s like you alone by yourself can’t. And it’s like, no, you you actually can’t. And the irony is you have to watch John Verbecky to learn how. And it’s like then you can’t do it by yourself. Why are you giving people this message? You’re giving people the message. Therefore, they can’t do it by themselves because they need the message. And that involves you. And like they just it’s. Yeah, yeah. And we don’t see it. So what is with the cathedral thing? Oh, I’ve heard that come up a few times. Oh, I don’t know what other people mean. But basically, I mean, I meant two things. One is that the Divine Comedy is like a cathedral as a poem. Right. Like, like, literally, literally, the actual correspondence between the structure of the poem and an actual Gothic cathedral, but then also in the sense that it’s, let’s say, highly structured and also deeply organic and does all this stuff in terms of orienting you towards Earth and heaven and towards the saints and the church and like informing you internally. So that’s what I meant when I said with the big cathedrals, there’s always going to be something that you haven’t looked at yet. Yes. Yeah. And the church deemers to it deeply fractal. Right. So you’ve got these big structures that then have a certain level of detail in that, but that’s made up of higher levels of detail. And that’s very much like the Divine Comedy, where you’ve got the line and then the particular turts and then how that fits into the canto and how that fits into the whole thing all the way up and down and the geography of it. And what’s cool is with the Divine Comedy, you get to the point where he’s got enough basically overlapping grids of meaning that all he has to do is pick up a little conversation with so-and-so at this one place in Purgatory, and he said books. Just because it’s that person, he had that one little basic conversation with them. But because they’re right there and they’re at that particular place in the poem, oh, my goodness, it means all this stuff. So that. I do not write that kind of stuff. Me neither. It’s totally beyond me. I mean, for Dante, it was a work of decades, right? Like, in literally decades of his life, he spent most of his life preparing for it. At the last thing he wrote before he wrote the Divine Comedy, he said he’s not going to write any more Beatrice until he’s actually figured out how to say something worthwhile. And I think it was 10 or 15 years before he wrote the Divine Comedy. And then even then it was, yeah, it was a labor of decades. And he he wrote the last part of the Paradiso, like within a year of dying, something like that. And the story is, is that no one could find it. And then he showed up in a dream to one of his sons and told him which of the bricks in the basement to pull out of the wall, and there were the remaining manuscripts of the Paradiso. That’s bonkers. I wanted to I wanted to validate the comment that Corey made earlier about grabbing for power with psychology, right? That the ways in which psychology is magic are are numerous, right? Because they literally use words to manipulate people. Right. And so it’s magic words all the way down. And you see that a lot. So one of the things with the Barbie media, because it’s not a movie or a film that that whole event is all about changing the changing what’s happening in the world by making propositional statements. It’s all except for one scene, which which uses music and propositional statements, literally a song that changes the relationship between the mother and the daughter. But the rest of it, the sequences where things change, things change as the result of speech, not as the result of actions in the world, which just is just bonkers to me. It’s just like it. But it is psychology is the same thing. It’s that ethos of Wingardium Leviosa, right? Or whatever it sits. It’s the Harry Potter way of the way. And that’s a common theme throughout history. It’s not it’s not unusual. Just psychology is like the most pure scientific form of magical words as as the thing that CS Lewis predicted this. That is the screw tape letters. He was talking about coming up with a generation of materialist warlocks, basically, yes, who were just interfacing with forces in the universe, impersonal forces that they thought they were in control of. And, you know, basically using magic. That is so true. Yeah. Where does OK, you guys are talking about interesting things. It is magic. And whatever Mark talks about in terms of some of that is egregores and all the spiritual stuff, we’ve almost talked about that a few times. And egregores are just are just the the word for spirit when you don’t want to religious work. Yeah, I kind of figured that. But so you’ve got magic, you’ve got egregores, you’ve got language itself. So magic. Well, I have a reason for my question. So magic. Yeah, but I had a very weird, weird dream last night was very hard. I don’t remember the dream. And sometimes I don’t. It seems to be the distance in the distance I go because I have repetitive dreams. And then today at work, I had a very. I had an unexpected conversation, but those happened to me with somebody who basically I just kind of. Yeah, he was this guy walking around the store. He’s into gems and rocks. He was talking about this wish rock he has. And so I’m kind of going. And when and I looked him up. There’s there is something to the conversations you have, the timing of conversations you have, the people you engage with and what they’re doing. And you were talking about corporations when you started that. But you also just when you guys just said something recently about people who think they can control people and this person definitely thinks that. What is the intermeshing? I’d love to hear you guys talk about that. I mean, you’re talking about it, but I want to drop the question and go. So I know what I think some of the stuff going on is with that. What do you guys think some of the stuff going on with that is? So it makes me think of. The second chapter of Saint Paul’s letter to the Philippians, where it talks about. Where it talks and if it makes you feel any better, Saint Paul probably didn’t actually write this himself, he was just writing down a hymn that was already common in the early Christian churches. I’m pretty sure I’ve read most of all. He said, he said, Philippians, chapter two, though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not team equality with God, something to be grasped at. It is very interesting word that Paul uses there. The word is harpochmos. What that means is grabbing onto something and it’s got this sense of. Like gripping it and squeezing it and kind of tearing it a little bit. Like the harpy, is that where the harpy, the name harpy comes from? Perhaps, but I know for a fact it’s etymologically related to a harpoon. Oh, yes. Yeah, right. He’s put the harpoon into the whale and it destroys the whale. But you’ve got a hold of it now. A pogmos. Yeah, but you’ve kind of got it with the harpoon. Has the harps. You know, we talk about Christ and consider equality with God as something to be grasped. That’s the word there. Yeah. The harpoon is just designed so that you can wear the whale out. It’s actually not supposed to kill them. What kills them is they run. But OK, yeah, but it doesn’t have the integrity of the whale in mind when you’re grabbing onto it. Right. No piercing its flesh. You’re putting barbs in there. And then holding on. Right. And holding on. That’s magic. Yeah, that’s magic. That’s magic right there. It’s also technology. So this sort of relationship to the world is unavoidable. Right. If you’re going to make a pot of spaghetti, you have to hold on to it such that, you know, that the water and the noodles and the heat all goes in and that, you know, your shoe and the bugs don’t go in. Right. You have to control it. You got to be able to grasp these things. So this is the trouble, I think, is that we have to know what we can lord over and know what we have to relate with reverence towards. Yeah, it’s a magic. You start trying to control something that’s worthy of reverence. Yes. And I think so. I want to push back a little bit on just some technical stuff that Mark said earlier. I agree with what Father Eric said, because I would relate that to McGillchrist’s saying. So like the grasping is the left brain stuff and like the stuff that you’re supposed to be reverent towards is the right brain stuff. And so psychology in the nature and the way that it’s magical by nature, it’s not just propositional. It’s Margaret Knight, my wife, who is still not in labor yet, but anytime might be tomorrow. I didn’t think I was going to be here tonight. So it’s kind of like we’re everybody’s using this word liturgy, especially the ortho bros. And like I’ve been reading Fagerberg and the ethics of beauty. Wait, did I bring up Fagerberg to you or did you find him independently? Probably. I know somebody recommended it. It was probably you. He’s awesome. I need to keep track of who recommends me what. But so like, well, you said this word liturgy to describe these just ways of being in the world, right? They’re habit patterns. They’re just they’re just ways of the patterns of being. So you can describe liturgy and like there’s liturgies that lead you in a bad direction. And there’s also liturgies that lead you in the only good direction. Right. And what psychology does is it’s starting to understand that you can create liturgies that have actual power, but that lead you in a dark direction. But but we also like is liturgy isn’t supposed to be like a you know, is it a neutral word? Is it supposed to be like you have to call it a dark liturgy? If it’s not divide liturgy, I don’t know. But that’s that’s the way that I’ve started to think about. That’s how this magical stuff works in the world is you discover what liturgies lead to what kinds of outcomes. And that can be a dangerous thing if you use it to grasp that power in an improper way. Or right. Yeah. If you’re like, we’re going to power it all over. Mark, I mean, that’s that is interesting, though, right? Because there’s the notion of like of hierarchy, right? Because, you know, in our family, right. So in my in my in my when I say I’m in my nuclear family. Right. In which I’m one of the parents, there is there is a proper grasping of wielding of power. I don’t know if I’m grasping it. I don’t know if you mean that, but I’m wielding power and authority in our house. Our children actually die if I didn’t, to be honest, like they kill themselves quite quickly if I didn’t wield that power over them. So I don’t know what you mean there. I just want to like throw that out. I mean, this is sort of what Father Eric is saying. I don’t think you’re grasping at it for several reasons. One of them is you didn’t spawn these children by yourself. They’re not an act of will. You did not carve them out of marble unless you don’t actually have children. You just have statues. They’re gone. You were cooperating, cooperating first with a woman who I’m presuming is your wife. And you’re also cooperating with creation, with God in the production of these children. And then, you know, it’s like we can we can set the conditions for having children if we’re doing things properly, but we can’t actually make it happen. Right. All of that is a mystery. So so in a certain sense, the power that you have has been bestowed upon you. You have not grasped at it. So like you said, that’s the proper understanding of how we are supposed to use authority, because authority is always something that’s given to you. If you use the grasping in the negative sense, that’s like the grasping for the tree of knowledge of good and evil before God tells you it’s OK to do so. He hasn’t given that to you. Right. Right. Before you’re ready. And I want to bring this back to what Sandy asked, because we’re sort of I’m ambulating it right. Magic is what makes the world happen. Everything else brings from that where we get confused is the definitions of things like power and the video on that course, right. And the differentiation of control and influence. We don’t have power in the way that people talk about power. We have time, energy and attention. That’s the closest thing. Right. And where we put that matters because it has influence on the world. But what it doesn’t have is control. What we never have is control. Right. Which is not to say we never have any control over anything, but just, you know, and like Peterson’s so good with this, right. Like, just tell yourself to go to the gym. Go ahead. See what that right. And maybe not be the gym for you, but it may be the forbidden doughnut for Homer Simpson. Right. Or or any sweet thing ever for me and my house. Like if I buy it, I’m screwed. I’m screwed. I’m screwed. And and and in the past, I had much more self control over sweet things where I could buy a bag of M&Ms and it would be fine because it would last me two weeks. And that ain’t happening anymore. In fact, I had to tell my and my friend last time to, you know, we go on these drives occasionally, I was like, you have to buy very small bags of peanut M&Ms and you have to eat some of them because this is a problem now. I know five years ago wasn’t a big deal, but like my my self control is not what it used to be. Right. And so we don’t have those levels of control that we that we use when we’re talking about control. But what we do have and what we’re not paying attention to and the thing that’s ruining the world is influence when somebody does something bad. And there are no consequences that has an influence on you. It has a it has a negative influence on you. Oh, that bad person isn’t getting punished for doing a bad thing. But it also has a positive influence on you because you say, oh, people can do bad things and there are no consequences. Huh? Yeah, the psalmist for writing about that. OK, I want to there’s three there’s three words. I want to just throw something out there. There’s three words that we have showed up at different times in this conversation. Magic, religion and liturgy. Well, religion hasn’t, but it was it’s just a great parallel. Because there’s like religion in the sense of the Catholic definition of religion as the virtue of justice oriented towards God. Right. So it’s those acts towards God which we owe to him. So that’d be something much more like the traditional view of religion. Like I went to mass this morning in a church. Right. There’s holy water. There is a priest like that kind of religion. But then there’s sort of like the Petersonian definition of religion, which is how you act towards the thing that’s like you value most highly, regardless of if you’re aware of it. So it’s interesting that there’s two kinds of because, Corey, when you’re bringing up, sorry, of religion, when you’re bringing up liturgy, and you’re like people talk about there’s liturgy everywhere, but really there are habit patterns, right. Taking Dr. Fagerberg, I can hear Dr. Fagerberg talking about his definition of liturgy when you say that. And so there’s like I think you could do the same thing with liturgy. One is there’s a definition of liturgy like I went to a Byzantine liturgy, Byzantine Catholic liturgy yesterday, and it was wonderful. Right. And so we’re we’re participating in the divine liturgy of St. John for Sostom. So that’s that’s sort of like the way the if you will, like the habit patterns passed down through the holy tradition acted out towards God. But you can see how that word is still actually appropriate to understand is a similar category of human action as the liturgy of the family meal, the liturgy of alcoholism, whatever, whatever. It’s these patterns that are passed down over and over and over and repeat themselves and then do something to you. So they’re always oriented towards something. Right. To me, that’s the main distinguishing thing is everything you said is true. But with the also additional that liturgy is always oriented towards something. OK, I’d probably I’d have to I mean, I think all actions are oriented towards something. I mean, that’s what St. Thomas says. All actions have some. Well, they have to write it’s just judgment, action in that order. So thank you for your patience. I’m going to get to magic because there’s at least this magic is actually a really, really complicated word. And so when we’re talking about magic, Sandy here, what we’re talking about primarily is, let’s say, the use of non material causality. To affect desired change in the world. So that’s the kind of magic we’re talking about here. That means like it might be special words that do something. It might be drawing a circle and summoning a demon. Right. It might be arranging crystals in a certain pattern. Those aren’t you want to get someone out of the room. There’s material ways to do that. Punching them in the face, spraying skunk smells, lighting the room. Those are all material ways of getting someone out of the room. But you might try some magical incantation like, you know, I don’t know the list of every old name that you can find in every Holy Scripture ever. Or, you know, giving them the evil eyes that old Jonathan. Like that was like the first video I watched was his thing on the evil eye. On the evil eye. You’re working through the differences that you’re working through now through non material causality. Now, given that there are all sorts of other things that the word magic means. One way I would point you is towards Tolkien’s excellent essay on fairy stories and are considerably less excellent conversation that I had with Emma about that on our channel. Because magic, one of the things that Tolkien says is magic, talking about magic, he’s trying, he says that language, story and mind are inextricably interlinked in the human race and connects language with enchantment, right now he brings the language story in mind are interconnected. Yes. And the language enchants, but not all enchantments are bad. He makes that very clear. Not all enchantments are bad. Right. And so his understanding of, say, a fairy story is that a fairy story is good magic. It is actually something like good magic because it enchants you towards goodness. Right. Well, and that’s the struggle is everybody wants a process like liturgy to resolve good and evil, or they want a thing like, you know, oh, well, this scientific finding is going to resolve good. That’s not how it works. The pursuit of good and evil is a separate pursuit from those things. It might be wrapped up in wisdom, right. But that’s separate. Like enchantment is neither good nor evil. Right. The chair is neither good nor evil. Could go either way, though. Like it’s not it’s not exclusive. It’s not it’s it’s conditional on the usage. Yeah, so I think the important piece of that, too, is like we’re talking about these words and there’s a lot of overlap, like I’m still not even sure how I would distinguish between like the way you describe magic and religion and liturgy. Like. I don’t know. It’s difficult for me to distinguish between those things. But the key piece, I think, for us to understand, or at least for me, I’ll speak for myself, is that to avoid improper usage of these things, you spend less time reflecting on those things that are not themselves and just reflect on obedience or not reflect on obedience. You obey. You obey based on the authority that’s given to you because you end up acting these things out by the proper enacting the proper authority that you’ve been given in the world, right. And you end up acting. You don’t need to understand what’s happening in order to participate properly. You will you will act things out that you do not understand. And then the question is, are you going to act things out because an authority told you and at least relieve yourself of some of the responsibility? Are you just going to end up creating more chaos in the world? No, no, no. Acting acting on behalf of the authority does not take away your responsibility in doing so. Sorry, go ahead. No, I’m saying I’m not saying it takes away your responsibility. I’m saying it takes some responsibility away, which is a different statement. Precisely. I like Corey’s answer, but what was your contrast? Are you going to act something out just because you act it out or are you going to? Yeah, are you going to act it out due to an authority? You’re going to take actions in the world. The question is, are you trying to take them alone? Because if you’re trying to do that, you’re going to get possessed by something. And the odds that that something is good are less than less than if it’s bad. And that’s where the problem comes in. You’re just more likely to stray towards certain negative patterns like addiction, negative patterns that well, you could you could tend to think very in the tangible world in a lot of ways. When you ask the question, my mind immediately goes to I dream a lot of stuff. And sometimes I dream. I dream so heavily things that I’m engaging that I wake up exhausted. But I don’t know. Not helpful. Doesn’t work very well that way. Because like, yeah, I mean, I’ve had I’ve stayed in hotels with friends who tell me I pray in my sleep and sometimes I sign in my sleep. You know, and I had a friend actually literally got up off the bed, took every single blanket because she said I was burning up, it was so hot in the bed there. We had three people sharing a room and slept on the floor and said, I didn’t think you’d care. And I’m like, and then she got up and told me part of my dream just based off a few clues. And I was like, and and and something she had seen. So when you start talking magic, spirituality and stuff, I’m like, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. But part of magic is that synchronicity that happens. Like, for example, the weird coincidence, if you want to call it a coincidence, that after I pick a topic for the live stream, that topic just appears everywhere. And you can say, oh, that’s you know, you’re noticing it because, you know, the white. No, that’s definitely like I can tell you, we can measure these things quite accurately now. There’s there’s weird stuff going on. And then it comes from places. And like I said, there’s a bunch of places converging on, we’ll say this stuff that that we like to talk about the most. Right. Which is which is these these topics as places you wouldn’t understand or wouldn’t believe are actually converging on these issues is everybody’s trying to resolve the good and evil issue. And some are further along than others and realizing that’s what they’re talking about. So they’re just working through whatever system they’re stuck in. And but they’re working towards the same thing. And for me, who sees it quite clearly, I’m just like, oh, you guys are in for a ride. You know, and I usually know how far along they are, too. I know what that reminds me. It’s frustrating. It’s frustrating to watch, Sandy. I just want to say that I aspire to have prayer so ingrained in me that I pray in my sleep. Therefore, that’s the W word I was avoiding earlier today while holding an egg shaped stone that I was there for what you wish for. Yeah, I was looking at this thing going. I don’t want to wish on it. I want to see what’s in there, who’s wished what on it. You know, more than that, finds the stuff in there. There’s a whole look. There’s a whole. Well, first of all, there’s a tremendous difference between wishing and prayer. And I think that’s actually related to magic. And yes, there’s one of the things that’s really interesting in the Old Testament is the frequency with which you see these things where people ask for stuff from God and he gives them exactly what they asked for. And that’s their judgment. Right. I mean, and this is Dante’s notion of hell. You get exactly what you asked for. That’s hell. So if you don’t ask for God, if you ask the way Pashow would say it is if you ask for something lower than God, it’s always hell. It doesn’t matter how good the thing you ask for is. It’s always hell. And so this is, you know, I look that there’s two the two fundamental prayers that I see in the Bible. There’s there’s our lady’s response to the archangel Gabriel. Right. He said she says, be it done to me according to thy word. Right. And then Fiat, right, Fiat, volunteers to like be your will be done. And then you have our Lord in the garden where he says, not my will, but yours be done like every prayer ultimately needs to be converging towards that. Not. Because because you’ll go to hell if you don’t. I don’t know how else to put it. And that’s why there’s an entire there’s an entire class of fairy tales of people getting exactly what they wish for. Right. They’re not good fairy tales like they’re not they’re not fun stories. It’s like, right. I want everything that I touch to be gold. Great. There goes your daughter. It’s like, but gold is great. What’s better than gold? It’s like your daughter is better than gold. It’s like, but you don’t know. And right. And so then so then you think about the Lord’s prayer. Right. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And then we ask for our daily bread, what we need. And and also the blessed the blessed sacrament of the Eucharist. Then everything else is just about like getting lined up with God, like, let me forgive people, let me be forgiven and keep me out of out of evil, out of temptation. You’re asking for anything except what God knows you need. There’s I mean, like, there’s this great. So one of the fairy tales in the prayer tent. Yes, I love this prayer. It’s the prayer that we’re supposed to pray. It’s when when when when people on this earth ask God, how should we pray? He said, here’s how you should pray. So like but this fairy tale, this fairy tale that I read by my kids a while back and the Howard Pyle Wonder Clock book, which is 24 fairy tales. And most of them are wonderful. But these boys, it’s one of the like the three sons go off to find something. And the older sons, you know, basically are scumbags. And so things turn out badly for them. But they’re going along. And the first night they see two they see two taverns and one tavern. It says what you want and don’t pay anything for it. This is beautiful, like three story building with music and there’s lights and they can hear people laughing and the clinking of dishes. They look over on the other side and there’s this little rundown shack. And it says what you need and pay what you can. And so, of course, the older brothers go, well, what I want and don’t pay anything for it. Heck, yes. And so they go in there. The younger brothers like what I need and pay what I can. Of course, I’m going to do that. So he goes over there and, you know, slaves like earns his keep in this little hovel and then ends up being given some thing that looks totally worthless. And turns out, you know, of course, it’s his magical deliverance at the last moment, he has no idea. Then he ends up with a golden kingdom and the princess. It’s like, right. Yeah. Pray, don’t wish. And it sounded like you just described their brothers’ caramels out there. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of a lot of patterns. Yeah, a lot of patterns. Yeah. I don’t think how are probably what you’re doing. Oh, yeah. What did you say, Father? I was thinking about Pinocchio. Pleasure Island. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There’s no free lunch. You sign up for that vacation. You’re going to get sold a timeshare. That’s cool. Wait, what’s wrong with times? I have a time. OK, I’m so sorry, guys. Can I interrupt with this? It’s not free time. Mark, I’m saying it’s just not free. Not free. One of my favorite stories is right after right after my wife and I were married. We did this. This is the first year we married. We did this big trip up and we went and saw some people that we knew in the going up northeast and so we’re going through Virginia. And this old friend of mine from high school is living in D.C. So we’re like we saw some of the capital with them. And then we’re sitting in this pizza restaurant on the second floor where we’re going to have dinner together. It’s like 15 tables, one other one or two other tables have people at them. So we can hear everything. And there’s this dad and he’s like a 10 year old son. And as well as you can see, like they haven’t spent that much time with each other because like the dad’s sort of paying attention and kids totally not paying attention and just like. And so I’m getting these like little bits of the conversation. Mostly I’m talking with my wife, but I’m getting these little bits of the conversation. And so this and this and then all of a sudden I hear the dad go, son, I want to start this conversation by telling you that I love your uncle and I think he’s a wonderful man, but he’s gotten himself into a really bad situation. I was like, what happened? Like, did he commit treason? Did he kill someone? Like, did he embezzle a whole bunch of money? And so I’m like trying to not like scoot my chair over to him. And then I hear the son go a little while later, he’s like, Dad, what’s a timeshare? Nice. Anyway, there’s my time. Share could get you in a lot of trouble if you, you know, don’t talk with the people who have a right to know about it, spend a whole bunch of money that you don’t have and sour that relationship. And you can see where the rest of that goes. So I wanted to let you know, I want to start this conversation by letting you know I love your uncle and I think he’s a great man, but he’s gotten himself into a really bad situation. Oh, man. Anyway, I totally derailed everything, but there you go. Not at all. Not at all. It was in the spirit. That’s what that’s and that, you know, yeah, the best way to understand magic is to say the non material cause, right? And you are always. Yeah, you’re always doing something, right? You’re always doing you’re always taking an action. And that was preceded by a judgment, whether you realize it or not. You deny that you’re going to destroy your ability to discern. And then you’re going to end up being a conservative Republican who goes to church, maybe even Catholic church, and not understanding or having the ability to say drag queen story hour is bad. So that’s based on what you two just said. I love that people are starting to describe one of the central things that we need as a resacralization of our imagination, right, or redemption of our imagination. Guess what the reading today was from Romans in math. My favorite chapter from Romans 12, you know, be transformed by the renewing of your mind like that’s that that kind of accomplishes all the stuff that you’re talking about before, Ted, right, like the end of prayer is having your will match God’s will. It’s not that your will disappears. It’s that you willingly allowed to be transformed to participate in what God’s will is, you don’t lose yourself, but you obey. It’s back to like just obedience. And then beautiful stuff happens. You don’t have to understand how it happens. In effect, it’s probably better if you don’t understand how it happens. But some of us are cursed to want to know really bad. Cory, let me ask you a question. What would you call the training of that of your mind? Because there’s one word that actually describes this, that’s that’s you know, that that you’ve heard around, interestingly. Well, how do children do it? Well, I mean, there’s there’s what kind of language play. That’s what the psychologist would say. You’re using psychologist language, Mark. Well, maybe liturgy. This is true. OK, so let me this is this is a soapbox. This is a soapbox thing for me. All right. Play is right. There is the way the psychologists describe it. Yes, play is the way that you figure it out. But it is not purely emergent. This is the part that’s so not emerging at all. Right. Well, it looks like it is when people talk about play. It looks like it’s emergent. You’re bumping into things, right? So when you try things, you do it from the outside. When you view things from the outside, because you are outside of them, it looks emergent. It’s just like discernment, judgment, action. I know that I have a discernment, make a judgment and then take an action. You don’t have access to those first two pieces. You do infer them after the fact. So and I went over this in my life. So it looks backwards to everybody outside of me. But it actually happens in the opposite order from what you see. Look, yeah, but my point is just that it happens in a structure emergent versus what Mark said means. Emanation, emergent versus emanation. Which is like from from from above, bottom up. Look, I mean, the answer to this is actually Calvin Ball, because Calvin Ball, when you read a comic strip about Calvin Ball, it looks really fun. And then you go and you try to play Calvin Ball. Not only can you not is Calvin Ball not fun, but you don’t have the capacity to come up with rules quickly enough to play Calvin Ball, you can’t play like play by definition is having a shared set of rules. Right. Like, I mean, that’s the work like cheating comes from not having rules. And so I think Mark and Cory are agreeing on this. Right. And not necessarily. Why would it be a shared set of rules? Like, I mean, are you thinking play in the sense of sports or are you so the way little kids play? The reason it works is because you interact with stuff. You interact in the structure that you’re in. So it’s like it could be a cultural structure, be a family. It could be like a baseball diamond where there’s a set of rules that you’re having to abide by. You can try to break the rules and then you run into consequences. And so that’s the way in which play works. But that structure of rules, whatever you want to call it, whether the best way I think to understand it is really in the context of a family or a culture or perhaps a church or perhaps an entire created reality that was created by one individual God who has rules and reality. So we do. Cory and use the word psychologist alongside play. Two things pop into my head. One was more recent, which was my trauma counselor telling me that my homework for the year would be figure out who I am, what I love, play big, break all the stupid rules. And way further back than that was one of the guys that I really liked talking about autism at one of the symposiums. He formed he and a couple of few people that work with him. What’s his name? Dr. Stanley Greenspan, I think it is out of Washington area at the time. If you go back a few decades, he had a program for families with children with autism that he called floor time or something. Anyway, his instruction to parents was you come in and I will teach you how to be playfully obstructive so that you will create just enough like friction on sort of where the kids stuck. And he said, and the goal is get as close to a tantrum as you can without actually going there. And that is the that’s the two places play to get there and get as close to that spot as you can. So he had videos of dad’s dad sitting on the floor playing with his son with car little cars. And he accidentally on purpose get his hand in the way. But you’re but it goes back to what Mark was saying about language and language in a sense being the magic that you guys are talking about because you’re taking it and you’re going this way and this way, you’re needing the language. You know, so it would be are you you know, are you this or this or this or this? And he kept saying, change up the order of things. So the one mom, they had a runner who was about eight years old. And they’re trying to talk to the doctor and she’s standing at the door and he’s going, don’t get mad at him. What you want to do is, he said, sometimes let the door get partially open. And when it does, you say, but did you mean you wanted to go out or in? And then you’d say and you say that for a few times. And then just to kind of confuse and also check what the rule is in the kid’s brain, you go. But did you say you wanted to go stay in or go out and you flip it? When you guys start talking about that, that’s those are the two places that my head goes. Yeah, that’s that’s because when they’re when they’re talking about play and, you know, Verveke makes this because he’s a stupid science guy, serious play. It’s like, no, there’s no there’s no such designation. Play is the spirit of exploration in which you are learning. That’s what it is. And so it’s not about being within the rules. It’s about being able to transgress the rules without having set consequences. Like it’s and it’s not that there are no consequences. But when you’re an adult and you break the rules, like you drive on the wrong side of the road, those consequences are kind of like one and done. And when you’re a child, you’re supposed to be able to break rules and kind of figure out very softly what consequences are all about so that when you realize there are actual like one time consequences that you don’t get to like there’s no more consequences after this, right. You you you have a respect for them. And when you don’t do that, look around, look around at the world we’re living in. That’s exactly the hell we’re living through. In your language, Mark, it would be either forming of intent to form patterns or something of that nature, because one of the other videos he had wasn’t with autism, it was a child with severe CP about one year old had only control of mouth muscles. The only so the only thing that the child could do was grip things. And the mom was playing with one of those two toys for teething and doing the exact same thing just close enough that the daughter has to reach for it, but not so far as that she can’t reach for it. So the same principle is your and I was thinking when you guys were talking in a sense, play is about breaking the rules, but it is also about forming the rules. And so when I picture that mom and daughter, it’s that place where you’re kind of you’re kind of deciding the depth. What is it? Finding boundaries and appreciating the value of them and understanding that different rules or different boundaries have different consequences and costs. And then you can make those trade offs. Otherwise, you don’t learn how to make trade offs in life and you don’t learn how to avoid things that kill you, and so you end up doing dumb things like trying to fix the planet and just starving a bunch of people. Prince, like, don’t do that. That’s terrible. You were going to go for something easy, like fix my own car engine. No, no, no, no, no, no, because most people don’t do that. Most people go one layer up. That’s where they get into trouble. They go, oh, I know. I know how to fix the climate. We’ll just force everybody not to drive because I don’t drive anyway because I live in the city and it’s like you’re not you’re not really understanding how this works. And that’s because they didn’t have proper play when they were young. And that’s one of the things we’ve taken out of the school system, by the way. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Did you know what they’re doing here in Canada now? I was listening very, very, very carefully to CBC because it’s one of those sound the same things. They were talking about. Right, right to read program. They have they have this right to read program that they’re putting it in. And I’m going, OK, I’ve been spending way too much time on Discord listening to people. Are they spelling it R I G H T or W R I T E? What? And I’m going, please be a W, please. No. Right to read. It’s another going to instead of doing anything. Practical that your basic E.A. would ask for for kids with various reading disabilities. No, the government’s going to mandate so many that whatever dollars for one more. But this test will actually something early assessment. That’s what they’re going to do. You should have been there. Apparently, it’s going through the paperwork. Can I just ask Nick? Did we Nick? Did we meet in Chino? OK, sorry. I know you did, Nick. You’re muted. No, yeah, yeah, we yeah, we went I went to that mass, the the the rock the rock. That was my first rock concert mass. Mine, too. Stadium Stadium Rock concert. Yes. Yeah. Mark, I did the thing where I picked the closest church. We were all just going to go to the closest church and there was a drum set guitars there, but the people were very friendly and welcoming. So they were. They were. That’s bothering you. It drives me nuts. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it. Are like anywhere near the well, it was it was. It drives me. It was absolutely it bothers me. It was an oil and water experience because Father Eric was like I’m a new Catholic convert and I don’t come from a Christian background. So you must forgive my layman’s way of describing this kind of stuff. But when Father Eric is like coming, you know, the initial parade or procession into the church, you know, Father Eric, it’s like so like, you know, instant gravity. Yeah. Yeah. The power of Christ compels you sort of, you know, coming in and it’s like, you know, they like judge. Jesus Christ. It’s like a YouTube. I was so like if you were deaf, you know, you’re looking at the procession and you would like totally have one experience. And then if you were blind, you would have a completely different experience. Oh, no. And then myself being gifted with both eyes and ears. It was like, wow, I’ve never seen anything like this. And I was really I want to say that I was honestly, I was I was very moved by your you were kind of sitting a couple rows in front of me and, you know, you were very I really appreciated how like focused and, you know, devout you were and everything. No, I do. You know, I have a story I have to tell you. I’m just curious about this experience. One second on a scale, on a scale, was this kind of like your average Protestant church that uses things or was it more like this one Pentecostal one? I went where me and another guy got up because it was well, it was going to throw his pacemaker off, but I was just kind of like it was more than the first one, Sandy. It was more the first one. Now, is that from the music or from the magic? Let’s just say the entire building wasn’t constructed to deal with the level of volume of sound and intensity. Probably one of those churches that I’ve been outside of where it’s like I can hear the music better outside of the church building than inside. No. OK, so, Nick, here’s my story. So last fall, I went on this two day walking pilgrimage over in eastern Oklahoma, which was wonderful, but I was not prepared for how much walking it was going to be. And so by the end of the first day, my legs were cramping up so badly that I couldn’t I either had to walk or sit. I could not stand and I thought it’ll be great. I’ll sleep it off and be fine the next day. There’s only like 12 miles the next day. I didn’t. It was just as bad the second day. So when we get there, it’s like 1500 people and it ends up at this beautiful, like 30 year old Romanesque very traditional Byzantine monastery. It’s a beautiful place. Our Lady of Clear Creek, if you ever get the chance in Oklahoma. But like we’re way past filling up this church. And so there’s like all like hundreds and hundreds of people are out in the courtyard in front and like we can just hear the this pontifical high mass going on. Right, Father? It’s a pontifical high mass if the bishop is is there. I mean, that’s a Latin term and you’re at a Byzantine church. So I don’t know how they Benedictine Benedictine Benedictine. That’s completely different. Yeah. Pontifical high mass is correct. So so so they’re like people are leaving because like they’ve got noisy kids and stuff and that people would come out and be like, hey, we’ve got like five seats in the church. And so first couple of those went by. People weren’t really getting up. I was like, I you know, I feel dead, but I’m going to go in there. That’ll be great. And so I went in and I’m like stuck in some corner behind the monks chanting. And it’s beautiful to hear, but I can’t see anything any right. So then the portions of the mass when we’re supposed to be feeling my legs are done. So I just like got on my like on my face because like literally my legs weren’t working. It was so the no one up, you know, and receive communion and all this. And then we go out and we have this barbecue dinner on the lawn in front of the monastery and I went back to my car and this lady comes up to me and she’s like, I just want you to know that like I’ve got two teenage sons, you know, and they’re feeling pretty awkward and like and then they saw you at mass. And they’re just like when they saw your reverence in mass, it just really like affected them and they’re like, we just like we could do this. If this this guy can do it. Wow. That’s right. No, I got to say, I mean, like I literally couldn’t get off the floor like no, I really shouldn’t stroke your ego like this. And you’re probably going to have to go to confession next Sunday. But I totally know what they mean, because like, you know, I don’t know, maybe you’re maybe maybe you’re the best LARP or I’ve just ever seen in my life, but like you look like it’s inspiring. It’s inspiring. You should come to my home, Paris, when I’ve got all four kids. It’s it’s yeah, that would have been like an opportunity for you to just participate in mass without having to worry about a fight breaking out. Yeah, yeah. OK, that’s that’s something there. Yeah, yeah. It’s like we I had that we had some fidgety kids today. I’ll put it that way. It was like, oh, this child’s trying to eat paint falling off of this chair. And like, please don’t steal that child’s toy. And like we’re going in like the room behind the North X. It’s like, yeah. So, you know, when I get a weekday mass in, it’s a good day. I was Mark, Mark was talking about Vervecky earlier and, you know, play or he was ragging on Vervecky earlier and talking about play and is Catholicism, Catholicism play? And I was actually thinking about this like months ago. Good question. Father, what do you think about that? Is liturgy is liturgy like appropriately described as a form of play? What do you think? That’s what Romano Guardini, the great liturgist, said that liturgy was supposed to be was supposed to be play. Yeah, in that way. What? I would say I’ll play, but the type of play that Peterson and Vervecky and those guys are talking about is exploratory. Yeah. So it’s a different counter to the mass. Are they not exploring within themselves, within the bounds of what the mass is affording them? I don’t know what they’re doing at Mass, dude. I don’t go there. I actually I don’t mean the mass. I mean the Catholic reality itself. So, for example, like confession would be like going like touching base or what are these like tag games where you’re like safe or something like it? I think I was watching some Vervecky video probably around the time the Chino Conference or something and he was talking about play. And and I don’t know. It just seems like he was talking about Catholicism to me, but I would kind of I’ve never really understood Vervecky. So maybe I’m like wildly out of base with him and Catholicism. It’s a joke where he’s like where Vervecky is like, you know, it’d be really great if there’s this place where people could come together on a regular basis. And they had these practices of like cultivating wisdom and like maybe they could sing together or something. It’s like, yeah, it’s called church. And Paul says that every Paul van der Klooy says that every time he gets the chance, he’s like, oh, you just invented church. Good job. But no, he’s reinventing the religion that’s not a religion because he deconstructed Christianity, took all the pieces apart and then said, oh, now we need to put all these pieces back together. It’s like, or not take them apart. That would be better. So, Nick, what you’re what you’re pointing out, there’s actually a really great like thing to think about. I can’t I’ve hit this in other areas. Right. So you’re making this connection between I don’t know what kind of a connection it is. It’s sort of like a formal connection or a poetic connection between, say, playing tag and confession. Right. That’s like you’re going back to be like you go out and then like, I you’re coming back and you’re now you’re safe. Right. And there’s. And I think another good way to look at that is I was bringing up those fairy tales, right, where you have these stories of these princes who then they go and they inherit this kingdom of gold and the princess. And right. And you could you could look at those two things. And I think the world’s. There’s been a whole a whole trend of saying, oh, well, we figured out what religion is, it’s these childhood games just like taken up to an adult level. You could say that you could equally say that all these childhood games are foreshadowing this reality we’re supposed to participate in. And like. There’s this move all the time of, oh, well, we figured out what the story means, because like, you know, say it, what was it? What was it? The three little pigs. So I read this totally whack and also awesome description of it as being like learning, learning how to control your bowel movements, children learning how to control their bowel movements. It’s like I’m going to huff and I’m going to puff and I’m going to blow the house down. It’s like, yeah, you better figure out how to keep the wolf out or in or however you want to say it. It’s like, is that all that the three little pigs is? Can you lower it to this like sort of analogy of potty training? And it’s like. I think that if you move, make that move too often, it’ll kill like it’ll kill you intellectually, because the truth is that potty training is actually a fake undumbration of something higher, right? It’s that it’s that rational capacity to order your body appropriately so that you can live in harmony and beauty with people. And so so all that to say, like, yeah, I think you could definitely see these relationships between play and aspects of the liturgy or the sacraments, but that there’s nothing intrinsic about that lowering the higher things. And that’s the problem. Most of the time when people are like, hey, look, there’s this connection between religion and play. They’re trying to say religion is just play. It’s like, how how is that helpful? Honestly, right, like now you’ve taken the most meaningful thing in human life and lowered it to something that’s not that meaningful. Instead, let’s do it the other way around where we’re saying maybe I can see the beginnings of these things in childhood play. And I think that that actually puts you in a position to have a much richer view of the world. Right. Well, and if you haven’t done it, if you haven’t done the and this is this is my argument all along, right, like you don’t have the exposure to learning control, learning boundaries, learning consequences, and you grow older, but you haven’t learned what a four year old has learned. I mean, this technically I’m not being hyperbolic. Then look around. We have seemingly people in their 20s and 30s literally actually leaving the confines of where they’re at, their apartments in the city, going to a random spot with lots of people and screaming. This is not the behavior of somebody who’s had a proper introduction to play as a child, technically, like for real. Right. This is not an incident. This is not one or two people. Right. And it manifests differently in different folks. Right. Like I’m I’m having discussions with people where they’re saying, well, you’re doing the thing to me that you said I was doing to you, and therefore you’re the problem. And I’m like, well, first of all, that didn’t even happen. And second of all, that’s not how things work. Like, what are you four years old? Because you sound like you’re four years old. But they are they are they they haven’t mentally matured past that point because they’ve never had play. It’s not a coincidence that Peterson’s saying we need play. It’s not a coincidence that for baking, we need serious place, not it isn’t one to dirty himself with actual child’s play, because that would imply that you’re a child. But actually, no, you are the kingdom of heaven. Yeah. Well, look, there is, you know, there’s all sorts of interesting, interesting things there. And like, so, you know, we’ve got four children and I was I was one of five, but my wife was an only child. There’s all over horizontally and vertically where all these interesting mixes of huge, large families, sometimes huge families and single children. And so I see a lot of this contrast. And, you know, my wife has noted like we’ve noted there’s such a difference in terms of now I’ve got a bunch of siblings that are and this is assuming they’re about your age. When you grow up in that, you don’t just get to get people’s attention. Right. It’s like you better be saying something good, basically. If you want everyone’s attention at the dinner table, it better be worthwhile. Right. And you better be able to say it concisely, otherwise everyone’s just going to shut you down or talk over you. Right. And so there’s this like there’s these interesting things that come out of I’m seeing, right, like our oldest is not that old. And I’m already seeing these sorts of things where it’s like they’re learning that you don’t just get to like dominate everyone. You don’t get to dominate everyone’s attention all the time forever. And like there’s this give and take in conversations and all of these things that. Right, Mark is saying should be worked out at. You know, start getting worked out when you’re four, maybe that’d be a good time. Or it’s a good time to start should be in progress by six. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it’s weird. And then you even see that, Sandy, to go back to your point earlier about this emergence of play, I mean, I was thinking about this with my kids, like they get so mad at each other when the kids, the other their siblings not playing by the same rules, right now, they may have just made them up on the spot. That’s fine. But like they sure better abide by the rule of, you know, these are my magnetic tiles or it’s my turn to have the baby or this is my side of the pretend table or we’re having a dinner together and not like this happens all the time with my less now, but my two older girls would build these magnet towers and then their younger brother would just smash them. It’s like, that’s not the game for them. And they’d be so mad. It’s like the game is you finish the tower and then you look at it and then you smash it. That’s the game. That’s what they’re playing. But he just come in and just, you know, and it all be on the floor. And so there’s this really interesting thing of like, you do have to abide by the rules. Now, there may be crazy rules and they might change, but there’s a sort of you have to have that level of mutual agreement there. But that’s what you learn. You learn good rules from bad rules. You learn consequences and tradeoffs. That’s how you learn it. Arbitrary games, arbitrary liturgies, arbitrary engagements. And when you don’t do that, you do crazy things like, oh, what difference does it make about gender? Like, what could that go? Pronouns all the time. There was somebody who made an argument. I saw it on Twitter today. Today, they made the argument that this pronouns thing is stupid. Pronouns have been in video games for years. Like that was some kind of an argument. I was like, pronouns have been part of the language forever. What is your point exactly that pronouns exist? Because we already knew that that doesn’t talk about how you are supposed to use them, though. So like that wasn’t the argument. He thought he was making a rational, reasonable argument. And I’m like, you don’t even make any sense, dude. Like, you don’t understand what you’re saying even a little bit because you haven’t played with rules. You haven’t understood the importance that some rules should be bent. Some rules should never be broken. Right. And that’s important to that is important to learn. And you can’t learn that if you’re in a world where it’s either soft slope or hard slope. That doesn’t teach you that middle ground. Hmm. Now, Nick, I’ve been thinking about the question you asked about whether we could talk about Catholicism as play, and I’m willing to actually accept that if the idea is that when we come into the kingdom of God, we finally become grownups then. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And if that’s if that’s what that means, then then I’ll buy that because otherwise if Catholicism or Catholicism can actually tell you how to live your life, like it’s got kind of a universal extension to everything you do, it can be informed by it. Right. So then at that point, everything would be play. And that’s like saying, you know, everything is real. True, not helpful. Yeah. Well, you know, for there are some people that do need to hear that actually. Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, the probably the most important thing so far in my life that why I joined the church and everything that C.S. Lewis taught me, but I’ve heard from many other people who also C.S. Lewis probably thought is the idea that God is that God condescends and I’ve never really heard the word condescend used in that way before. And now it like it means everything to me, especially because I’m a father. I have one kid who’s 15 years old. And so I’m just intimately aware of like condescending to a child. And it is just that was my light bulb moment for me is that God doesn’t sometimes. And so it doesn’t sometimes condescending God condescends like period like that. That is what he is he is doing. And so that’s probably sort of where I have a lot of where I kind of see some or I’m sympathetic to the idea of the Catholic reality as play for Father Baron, Bishop Baron, best video I’ve ever seen by him. It’s not on YouTube. I scoured looking for it. It’s not I’m like in the Word on Fire. Group or what? You know, I pay my dues for that. So but when he was a priest, a father, he made this video about that. And I won’t sort of I won’t I won’t reenact it for you. But basically, he just was talking about I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but he’s talking about these bugs outside of his window that show up in Southern California in the winter and and the punchline of the video is he basically says, I am one of these bugs, like from not from God’s perspective. He said from an angelic perspective, which is, of course, much lower than God. He said from the perspective of an angel, I’m just one of these bugs who crawls from the right side of the window all the way to the left side during the course of a winter in Southern California, and that is their accomplishment. And I’m like a writer and I’ve Father Baron. I’ve published 12 books and counting and da da da da da. And I and I’m one of these bugs. And I get, you know, and I was like, aha, yes, because God condescends because we are children. I mean that, you know, Nick, one of the one of the things about about the Eucharist that is is just that reminder over and over and over like God would come to us in such a humble way. And there is I mean, I’ve been reflecting on this a lot, like that there’s this thing in the liturgy, right, so that like there’s this back and forth of right. We bring the bread and the wine and we offer them to God in the liturgy. And it’s like, which is like God gave him to us in the first place. Like, we’re all contingent being. This is all contingent being like the bread and the wine did not come from us. We’re buying our dad a Christmas gift with money he gave us. Right. But then like, what does he do? Right. Exactly. So that like that would be ironic enough. But then he doesn’t like receive it. He doesn’t give it back to us to eat. He. Gives himself to us under those appearances, like, OK, like, you’re like, hey, Dad, here’s you know, here’s this ten dollar Christmas present that I gave you. It’s like, you know, here’s this little piece of metal. He’s like, great. I gave you a key that unlocks the deed to the entire universe. It’s like, oh, OK. You’re like, well, thank you. I would like to give it all back to you. And he says, that’s great. Now eat me. And you’re like, OK, I can’t I can’t win except that I’m winning. It was like there’s this. Yeah. Corey, yeah, so there’s the question is, but the question is, why do we think condescension is bad? We should know it isn’t. It’s right. Pride. Literally, it’s our damnable pride that thinks condescension is bad. Right. So I had I just want to tell the story because it’s so good. I had it was a few months ago, actually. Somebody came on to the Discord server, under my Discord server, and asked me a question. And they said, I want to know about this. OK, now think about what’s wrapped up in that. Right. Why would you ask anybody a question? Because you think they have knowledge that you do not have, that they have an answer or they can provide an answer that you don’t have. OK, you’ve already placed them above you in that thing. Maybe not in all things, hopefully not in all things. Right. But in that thing, they have something that you don’t have there above you in that aspect. And I was trying to work through the nature of the actual question. Like, what is it that I tell this person? Because I never know what you people don’t see in the world that I see so clearly that would never occur to me that everybody doesn’t see this. Right. And so I eventually got to that with him and he said, listen, you’re being very condescending. And I said, dude, how can I not be condescending? You came to me believing, whether you’re right or not, that I had a piece of information or insight or whatever wisdom that you didn’t have. I’m trying to communicate it to you in order to do that. I have to come down to your level. And he went, oh, you’re right. And then he didn’t feel so bad that I was, quote, condescending to him anymore. And it solved the problem. But I was like, yeah, why is this a bad thing? But we do. I mean, even me, I think it’s bad, too. I’m like, oh, he sounds so condescending. But there’s something about that. It’s just we’re using the wrong word. And that’s why I’m always big on precision with language. Precision with everything else is garbage. Presumably language is actually really important to me. So, Mark, I mean, that just makes me think of Augustine saying that humility is the key to all the it’s the gateway to all the other virtues. Yes. Yeah. Right. And humility isn’t about my understanding is that it’s not about like it’s not. It’s not reviling yourself. It’s just seeing yourself as you are. Humility is the capacity to see things as they are. Humility is a part of temperance. Well, is it? Humility is a part of temperance, whereby you do not take inordinate pleasure in your own excellence. Yeah. OK. But you also don’t despise yourself because that would be to take the appropriate amount of pleasure in your excellence because God has given all of us, all of us, some manner of excellence, some manner of share in his own nature. And if you don’t take pleasure in that, that’s also vicious. And so you can’t. It’s so hard to learn if you can’t see. I don’t know something that person knows. Like it’s that capacity. Like that’s amazing. You can. But that’s humility. It’s humility. And then the condescend. I mean, I love that market’s like, yeah, they condescend to your level to tell you like. Every professor should be condescending to their students appropriately. Otherwise, you won’t learn from them because they’ll be talking above your head. And and and and and the key is not to trigger them and make them feel like you’re you’re you’re condescending to them or you sound condescending to them. But you also have to talk at their level, which means you have to find out what that level is. And that that’s rough on people, people. And the problem is humility is the space that you create into which you can grow. Without that space, you can’t grow and change. You’re stuck in a closed world. You’re stuck in a box of your own making. To be a little fair to a point, you made a box for yourself and there’s no space for you to grow out of it. There’s no way to self transcend. Right. There’s no way to transcend at all. I know you can’t self transcend. Right. That’s what humility is for. For making that space outside of yourself to grow into. There’s that name. What’s the name for the the political discourse window? I usually remember this and I always forget. Over to the window. Mark, so this is exactly my point. And Nick, to your earlier discussion about reverence, this is one of the things that I love about the Fraternity Parish, the priestly fraternity of St. Peter Parish that I go to, where it’s like the there’s a really strong culture of reverence and like if you don’t have that, compared to the Protestant churches that I grew up going to, where there’s this like we’re going to meet you where you are. Right. And this is what’s weird. This is the wrong kind of condescension. Actually, it’s really interesting. It’s like we’re going to provide an environment where you don’t feel any gap between your. Well, it’s not it’s condescending. So people don’t feel condescended to. That’s weird. I’ve never thought of it in that way. And so what happens when I go to this, you know, go to mass and it’s like, wow, it’s quiet enough in here that like it’s really uncomfortable when my kids start making noise and I have to leave and like. Like all the women have head coverings on and like everyone genuflects when they come into the into the nave and like and like in all this stuff. And it’s like, what does that what that does, though, these things that are like natural to me, what that does is it gives me somewhere to go up towards, right, because if I don’t have that and I don’t have the humility to recognize that like I’m not naturally as reverent as the conditions that are being created here, then I can’t grow in that. I’m just I’m maxed out. And what that actually does is it gives space for the entire rest of my life to move towards that, even when I’m not at mass. Now, all of a sudden, like our household could be more ordered and I can, you know, there’s all of this, all of this, our family life and the way that I treat people in my capacity to be serious at the right times, right? All of these things. There’s this sort of humility that like kind of like opens opens this. Yeah, it’s like it shifts the Overton window for you in terms of what you can be. What have you got, Father? It would be impossible for that to work if you were satisfied with yourself. Yes, exactly. Like, oh, yeah, this is all that there needs to be. I’m full, I’m done. I don’t need to move anymore. No, it has to create that that painful sense of, oh, this is. This is bigger than me, and now I’m small. Yeah, that’s that can hurt, but you got to that. It’s it’s it hurts in the same way as being hungry hurts. You know, it’s like, OK, now I’ve got motivation to go do something. Yeah. But is it motivation to make yourself bigger? Yeah, but not bigger than you’re supposed to be. It’s like, it’s like being hungry. Yeah, right. You know, if you do it right, if you’re hungry, correct, then you just fill your stomach up. You know, you don’t fill yourself with an entire taco truck. Now, we’ve got real physical limitations on doing that with food. Thanks be to God. But spiritually, it’s much easier to to fill yourself beyond what you should be taking in, which is why it’s always good to remember Psalm 131. Oh, Lord, my heart is not proud nor hearty. My eyes have not gone after things that are too great nor marvels beyond me. But truly, I have set my soul in silence and peace as a child has rested its mother’s arms, even so my soul and speaking of rest, I think we’ve got like 13 hours on the road tomorrow. So, wow, where are you going? Las Vegas. They are part of your 14 hour Wow. Is this part of a driving all the way back down to my sister’s cottage? My dad and I are moving my brother-in-law to Fargo. So you said that at the beginning, but I’m like that long, that much driving. Wow. Yeah. Well, my sister loves him. So it’s a pretty big country, I guess. Magic, love, magic. Thanks, everyone. Appreciate you holding the breach with me till father came. Appreciate that. Ted, I had a quick question for you, Ted. You’re going to have to ask that later because I’m ending the stream. Oh, OK. Nick, find me on Discord. You can find me on Discord, probably. OK, I just want to get the name of the poet. I’ll send you a DM. You bet. Good night and God bless you all. Good night. God bless.