https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=YCsCz2DzVBs
Good evening and happy Sunday to everybody. Yeah, the ticker was not clickbait. I don’t end up paying much attention to somebody like Ibram X. Kandi, not somebody that’s all that salient to me, but he did come across PVK’s radar recently and I wanted to know what was going on. I looked up this little story about dustup over at, I think it was Harvard and some of the trouble that that guy’s having at managing some big think tank. Then I found out how he got big in the first place. His book stamped. Kandi’s work has always courted a claim in controversy and equal measure, stamped a more than 500 page doorstop that charts a conceptual history of American racism published during the halcyon final years of the Obama presidency has a provocative and even ingenious thesis. Racist ideas don’t generate racist policies. Instead, racist policies defined as policies that produce disparities give birth to racist ideas that serve to explain those inequalities after the fact. When I read that, I thought, oh my goodness, that’s almost certainly correct that people would behave badly and then come up with a theory to cover their bad behavior is definitely how people behave and that people behave well and then tell you later how they did it, even if it’s not actually true, is also how people behave. I drew a connection between that and what I’ve been learning in school. I’m taking online classes right now through the Catholic University of America for canon law classes and the class this semester is the history of canon law and talks about how before there was legislation, before there was law written down, what there was was a common custom, the tradition of the apostles, as it’s commonly called, this common custom, people behaving, people doing these things first, which is where we actually get the term canon, C-A-N-O-N from. That’s not a legal term originally, it just means a measure or rule of something. And so when the church finally got to writing things down, it started writing down what people were already doing and explaining it kind of after the fact. And it depends on what you’re doing. If you’re doing something good, then maybe you’ll come up with a good explanation for that, but if you’re doing evil, you’re always going to come up with a bad explanation for that because that’s happening. So the development of racism in Western society probably began with just bringing over African slaves to work on sugar and tobacco plantations because that was a convenient policy. And some of the racist ideas that followed American chattel slavery would have come afterwards to explain that. And so anyway, just an interesting thing to note there. That’s all I’ve got on that. Hello, Chad. Hey there. How you doing? Good. That was a really well explained little thing you did there. Well, thank you. I’m used to preaching, so I know how to get ideas across quickly. Yeah, that’s good. It kind of reminded me of how I like that you use the distinction between customs and then what would later become traditions. I guess that’s kind of what I heard. Yeah, yeah. What did I hear? Yeah, it’s like a tradition is a custom that’s been around long enough to really have proven its worth. But yeah, it’s an interesting thing to notice that all of this church law just was the way that people were doing things initially rather than, you know, St. Peter sitting down with a grand plan on how all of this is going to go. Yeah, that would be a nightmare. You can’t plan that much. Right, exactly. Yeah. I remember I did ask you once long ago, like, so like, where did the tradition of confession stop? And you said it was complicated. And I imagine it kind of comes from some of that too. Just some of the different traditional practices in general come from a lot of that stuff. Yeah, yeah, it’s kind of changed its form over time, something like confession has. We didn’t have the boxes until the 16th century, for instance, the confessionals. Before that, they had kind of public places where people know that this was going on, it would keep their distance. And I think that’s still the Orthodox practice. But I’m not sure because I’m not an Orthodox priest. So sure, that’s kind of a practice we have in a, or like a fifth step, which is a type of confession, I suppose. But with just a drunk, not an authority figure, like, such as yourself. I’m coming up on a weird spot where I probably robot, but. Yeah, yeah, I remember. Go ahead, sorry. I was just gonna say, I know a place on Highway 5 in North Dakota where you go down into a valley and you drop a call every time. So yeah, every day on my harvest Sunday on this drive home, this is why I try not to call in because it does this thing here. Hey, have you read Benson at all? Yeah, yeah, Lord of the World. Mark, not Lefebvre, Mark F. He’s been reading that recently. I read it a couple of years ago, maybe even four years ago at this point. That was a really interesting book. I mean, I just did the prologue in like an hour into the audio version. I’m like, good, read. Yeah, yeah, it’s written in like 1908. Yeah, yeah, 1908 and talking about communism and one world order and all that stuff. Yeah, you’ll see. You’ll see how much you got right and how much you got wrong the farther you get into it. Yeah. The whole university thing and the. Just. I think he’s going. I think we’re losing him. Yeah, somebody else. Well, I’m sure we’ll get Chad back here soon enough. But yeah, he’s talking about Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson. That’s a dystopian novel from 1908, which, yeah, it’s just really, really interesting how he was able to see that he was an Anglican convert to Catholicism and was pretty bullish on the whole Catholicism thing. So, you know, if you’re if you’re not in the mood for a little bit of a Roman triumphalist reading, you might not like it. But if that sounds like fun. Yeah. So that’s a very interesting book. Let’s see if we got Mark coming in to Mark in a hooded sweatshirt instead of a freeze. What’s freezing? Is it actually freezing? Reasing. That’s a good question for me. Yeah, if I didn’t, if I weren’t ill, I’d probably be fine. But what do you think? I get cold. That’s yeah, my hands are getting cold. It’s not good. It’s not good. Actually the heat isn’t it working in my room right now. So it means it gets down to 65 at night, which is basically perfect. I was going to say that’s well, that’s about sleeping weather. If you’re not sick like me, I can’t sleep at 65, but some people can. And most people should. Yeah. So I’ll highlight this. It’s a bad definition of racism. Fair enough. I didn’t say I agree with him on everything. I said I thought he had one good insight. Maybe that would have been a better way to add one good insight. Policies come from ideas, but I think practice comes first, doesn’t it? Yeah, I was just fighting the rest of his bad ideas. Like policy creates ideas. No, policy is created by ideas and then it propagates those ideas. Fair, but that’s not creation. That’s propagation. Big difference. So yeah, yeah, I think that the right thing. And yeah, if you’re going to give bad people because I mean, he’s a bad person. Like there’s no way around that. You can try to defend him if you want to redeem him or whatever, but he’s really any redeemable character. It seems like from that article, he took a lot of money. Like he started getting paid a lot of money. Oh, he stole it too. Oh, he stole it too. OK. On lies, right? He’s not a good person. Like there’s… But I think when you’re talking about people who aren’t good people, it’s fair to not give them too much credit and say, well, maybe they only got this one thing right. And like I think that’s actually really important because people get confused. They say, oh, you said he got one thing right. Maybe you got two things right. No, no, there’s a lot of people in the world who actually only ever got one thing right. I’m sorry, but it is. And it’s important that we that we point that out because otherwise people will try to redeem, redeem, redeem. And it’s like, you know, and that that’s actually been the topic this week is, you know, and maybe maybe you’ll maybe you’ll feel inclined to pipe in on this. What’s the difference between forgiveness and redemption? Because I have a big problem with these two terms and and and not only the terms, but I, you know, I see a lot of people trying to redeem what I would call irredeemable characters who aren’t even interested in redemption. I don’t think that’s an appropriate thing to do. Yeah. Well, so you’ll like this, I think, Mark. You cannot receive absolution from a Catholic priest unless you have a purpose of amendment. Yes. It’s just. And it doesn’t even have to be a realistic prospect of amendment, right? Like, if you know you’re pretty badly addicted to something and you think it’s highly probable you’re going to fall in the next month, but you would prefer that not be the case. That’s enough. I can offer you absolution. And and does that what’s the difference between absolution, redemption and then let’s deal with it? Because for me, from my conception, forgiveness is something that I do for myself, towards somebody else. And so for for somebody to ask me for forgiveness is totally inappropriate. Like, first of all, no. Second of all, it’s not forgiveness you’re seeking. It’s probably redemption. But I can’t give you redemption. That’s not that’s way above my pay grade. Sorry. Well, forgiveness is forgiving. Yeah, yeah, I’m just thinking about that, Mark. Yeah, for me, it’s something you do for yourself. Like you go, OK, I’m going to forgive that person. And we were talking about this with Adam earlier, too. And that allows me to not pay attention to my anger, resentment towards that person, but to have more time to focus on, we’ll say, higher matters or something. Right. Or at least not be locked up in in in, you know, too much negative attention paid in that direction. Right. But but that would mean if I’m correct about this, that would mean that somebody else asking for your forgiveness is totally inappropriate and doesn’t help them one little bit. Sure. So I remember I remember watching a video. This was some kind of documentary and it was post apartheid South Africa. And there was a guy who was involved with the government and he did bad things to this family. I can’t remember the full story. He goes to that family and he asks for forgiveness and they like throw a plate at him. And I remember, like, watching this, right, because I had the stinking camera pointed there. How did you think this was going to end? And I was thinking, you know, that’s actually not like he didn’t he could have used a little bit of coaching on that. That scenario could have gone badly, could have gone better if he had said what I did to you and your family was wrong. I shouldn’t have done that. And I have a lot of sorrow and regret and I wish I could go and take it back. Is there anything I could do? Right. Yeah. Even if there anything I could do. And you put that at the end. And if he had said it that way, I think that whole scenario would have gone better. So I think there’s a little bit of something that you don’t. And this is actually the form of Catholic confession is what you do is you just go in there and accuse yourself of sins and say that I’m sorry for them. And I actually have to stand in the place of the judge to see if I’m going to give you absolution or not. I am basically right. You would have to somehow get into the box and confess your sins and then convince me that you’re not sorry for them in order for me to actually deny absolution. There’s guys that go their entire priesthood. They never deny absolution to anybody. And they’re doing just fine because by the time they actually get to confessing, they’re usually ready for it. Right. Right. Yeah. So that barrier to entry is sufficient notice that they’re serious enough about it. They at least deserve a chance. I heard a story once of a teenager going in there because his parents made him and he refused to cooperate. Okay. You obviously don’t want to have solutions. I’m not going to give it to you. Yeah. So I think there’s your you’re you’re kind of on to something is that. What I’ll say this is that you don’t owe forgiveness to them. That’s the entire point. Right. That it’s a mercy that it’s goes beyond justice. But I don’t think like if you do if you transgress against me. Okay. And then let’s say some let’s say a totally appropriate thing happens. Somebody else comes to me and because this is actually the scenario that Adam was in. Somebody else says, boy, you’re still pretty upset about that. You need to forgive him. And I forgive you. That doesn’t that doesn’t help you at all. It still only helps me. So again, it’s not external to me. And I think because we flatten the world or compressed reduced everything, we’re not understanding there’s absolution, redemption, salvation, forgiveness. Right. Like all these things, they are related in some way. Right. But they’re not the same. Right. And the differentiations are important because what I see and what we’ve been talking about actually a couple of weeks now, but especially this week is a lot of people are trying to redeem other people. And now the big problem is now you’re seeing that all over the place with the most recent incident in Israel. Right. With Hamas and all that. And it’s already started. But there’s already people trying to redeem. And let me be clear. It’s irredeemable behavior. Okay. And you, if it could be redeemed, are not the one that’s going to be able to do it. Right. Stop making excuses for people who are not sorry for what they’re doing. There’s somebody else who could manage, but not you. Yeah. Right. Well, and so you can see there’s a plethora of errors wrapped up in people’s behavior. One is they think they can redeem. Two is they’re trying. Like, wait, the arrogance. The arrogance, I tell you. Right. And three is why are you involving yourself in a procedure that somebody has to actually recognize a wrong was done, have the intent at least to acknowledge that to the person or people they’ve wronged and have an intent to do something about what they had done. That’s three big ones. None of those are even on the table right now for, say, Hamas or a number of other things. Right. There’s a bunch of people out there who have done a bunch of things. And, you know, they have no intention of apologizing or even thinking they’ve done anything wrong. And they have their defenders. And I’m like, why are you defending this? They don’t want your defense. Like, there’s a bunch of people out there who say, well, so and so didn’t lie. And I’m like, I don’t know. They said they lied. I don’t know why you’re defending them against something they’ve admitted to. That seems weird. Stop. Like, why is, why are you doing this? Oh, I can’t hear you, Father Eric. Did you mute? I forgot to unmute. Yeah, I’m good. I’m good. I’m back. Definitely wasn’t user error on a stupid computer. Something that, you know, we’ve told in seminary and I think makes a lot of sense to me is that you’re always able to forgive somebody. That that’s always possible. But you’re not, it’s not always possible to be reconciled with them if they’ve hurt you. Right. Right. Well, and that’s, right. Well, that’s right. And that’s different. That’s important. But a difference from what I’m talking about. Like, my big thing for forgiveness is, yeah, I can forgive you all day long, but that’s not going to change my attitude towards you. If you’re not repentant, for example, like if you lie to me and then you want forgiveness for lying to me, you know, for, you know, maybe you’ve lied to me every time you’ve talked to me. Right. Like, I don’t know. Or every time in the past five years or, you know, whatever, or every time about this particular subject. And I can forgive you for that all day long, but I’m not going to believe you the next time you talk. It doesn’t help you at all. Like, it does nothing for the other person. It just helps me not to stay bitter and angry at you. That’s it’s for me. It doesn’t it’s not external to me. And what you’re actually wanting, wanting is either absolution or some form of redemption or, you know, some some forbearance on future behavior. And it’s like, no, you did. That’s inappropriate to ask for. If you’re going to ask for it, I’m not the person to ask because that ain’t it’s well above my pay grade. And I don’t I think that we just don’t have a sense of that anymore. Like, we’ve just lost the idea that because because no one’s dealing, as I appropriately with the spiritual, like some people are dealing with the spiritual by getting crystals, but that’s not right. They’ve still flatten the hierarchy and they’re just switching sides on the two worlds mythology or whatever. Like, that doesn’t help. Right. You really have to have that sense of what all these things are, that they’re different, why it’s important, why you don’t run around just apologizing for people who, A, aren’t sorry and B, did a bad thing. Like, I know this term redemption. This term redemption is really interesting, right? Because it’s like a it’s like a business term. Yeah, it’s like it’s like a business contractual term. So the idea is, I think, I don’t know, I’m going to put this into a biblical framework because that’s all I know is that we sold ourselves to the evil one, to the Lord of this world, and by his blood, Jesus ransomed us from their power so that we wouldn’t have to be enslaved to the evil principality of this world, but instead could now become slaves or even sons of God. And it’s like that’s a pretty steep price to pay, you know, who can pay a ransom on their own life, much less somebody else’s. So the idea that you could go back and redeem somebody else on your own capacity, right? It’s just that’s a work of the Holy Spirit. You know, that’s not something that you’re actually going to be able to manage. Right. And I don’t think people should be running around and I’m just not talking about, we’ll say, the world issues like it scales all the way down, running around apologizing for other people. Like, that’s why I don’t like the term Christian apologetics. I’m like, really? Like, why would I apologize? The Greek for apologia is like a legal defense. Right. I wouldn’t mount a defense either. Just be like, here’s me. Here’s what I do. Deal with it. I don’t why are you defa you can let people attack the unassailable castle all day long. And I’m sad to see them die at the foot of the unassailable castle, but also like it’s your choice. You wanted your free will. Here you go. You’re going to die at the foot of the unassailable castle. Good luck to you, buddy. Have fun. I don’t know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then I like Laura’s comment. Yeah. That is what Mark is like. Dying at the foot of the unassailable castle or just not feeling sad when somebody dies at the it’s not feeling sad when somebody’s. Yeah. Well, I do feel sad, but I’m not like I’m not going to I’m not going to cry that much over it. Like you made a choice. You were warned. Unassailable castle here. I don’t know what to tell you. And Willie Brand says, God’s mercy doesn’t mean much if anything, if you are innocent or if you’re convinced that you’re innocent already. Yeah. I always wonder, I wonder too, like how does this how does this relate, you know, in terms of our loss of the ability to deal with symbols and symbolism as such like that loss of what I would call the poetic, right? Like because I think I think the poetic is the thing that gives you the ability to differentiate a bunch of things that look the same on the surface, like redemption and forgiveness and, you know, reconciliation, salvation, salvation. Right. Thank you. Those are the other two words I was missing, of course. Great minds think alike. I don’t know why we think alike, but, you know, just in general, great minds think alike. Yeah. Because I think, you know, one of the things that Sally Jo’s been wondering about is, I don’t know why she’s not here, but she threatened to be, was wondering about this whole loss of, you know, the appreciation for, like what’s the difference, say, between straight up voodoo, worshiping, you know, going to the cathedral, to the Basilica in Washington, D.C. and seeing all these statues of Mary, right, or worshiping these little painted pictures in the Orthodox church, right? What is the difference? Because, I mean, we’ve got crystals and astrology and… Are you asking me? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What, right, because that is part of the issue, is the iconoclasm causes us to be in this situation where we’re not able to engage with the differentiation between the things that we just mentioned. Like we’re not, differentiation as we’re not able to engage with the differentiation between the things that we just mentioned. Differentiation as such is really hard for people, right? They keep flattening things. You flatten things when you only have, we’ll say, simple tools. And thinking about the world as linear and discrete is a very simple way to think about this. Very useful. Science is useful, absolutely. We’re on computers, guys. Like no one’s throwing the wooden shoes into the machine here, you know? But also, what did we lose with that? Like what is that all about? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I’m gonna give you just kind of the Christian Catholic apologetics answer, which is, Blessed Virgin Mary’s the mother of God. She’s gonna bring you to Jesus. If you’re relating to her properly, it’ll never be idolatry because she wouldn’t want that. And now being the queen of heaven, she’s just gonna make sure that these things taper. So basically, it’s like, look, that’s just false worship right there. The crystals and the tarot cards and the magic, that’s just all false. And the true worship is worship in spirit and truth. Through Jesus, to the Father, in the Holy Spirit, forever and ever, amen. I don’t know if I’ve got a better answer than that right now. Maybe I will next week. No, that’s fair. That’s fair. Yeah, and I think that if you don’t understand the need for the way to engage with things, we’ll say, indirectly, right? Because something like Sola Scriptura is very like, oh, it’s pretty direct, man. It’s A, B to C. It’s not, and there’s no mediating factors, right? You’re not mediating mediation at all. You’ve got the book mediation. That’s all you need, which is crazy, by the way. But whatever. It’s not actually how it works. Well, and I think that when you compress the world that way, you compress everything that way. Right now, you don’t have an appreciation for other people’s perspectives. Because you’re not used to it in the spiritual realm. You kind of lose that flavor. And it’s a very tyrannical way to think of the world. It’s like, well, it’s me through the Bible, right up the ladder, all the way to the top. And so who needs angels? Who needs icons? Who needs any of that stuff? And just like, forego it. But there’s a significance in approaching things through worship of their physical representation. Yeah, yeah, it’s. So at least for certain Protestant denominations, they’ll still do things like baptism and communion. But those things don’t have any significance of themselves. They’re pointing at something that God has already done. So certainly the Baptist notion of baptism is that you’ve had this experience of encountering God and regeneration and getting the dunk and being baptized in the name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit is just the outward manifestation of that in the community. So obviously, you couldn’t do that unless you were an adult and you were capable of having an experience of, you know, misery, redemption, gratitude, and articulating to other people that you’ve gone through that. So obviously, they don’t baptize infants. It doesn’t make any sense. A more traditional notion, and I mean, Catholic and Orthodox Lutherans chime in the chat if you think that the sacraments are efficacious. Yeah, we think that the symbols and the sacraments that we encounter actually cause what they signify, which is how we get the Eucharist, right? Jesus says, this is my body, give it up for you. And then we symbolically sacramentally reenact that. And then Jesus’s body is there. In the sign of bread, its blood is there in the sign of wine. So the sacraments actually, and this is what Aquinas says, actually contains the grace that it gives you. So, you know, we can put that in with the big seven, the big seven, big seven sacraments. But the sacramentals of the church, the little sacraments, they are the sacraments. They also contain the grace that they send you. The icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Health that I’m looking at right now contains like the whole story of Our Lady comforting the infant Jesus when he notices the cross for the first time. And like that image contains that whole story for me. That allows me to interface with it. So, right. Well, I like William Branch’s second comment, his last comment there. Yeah. And I think that’s tied up in the poetic way of thinking, which is how I’m using poetics, by the way, is a way of thinking, right? There’s two ways of thinking. One is linear and discrete, basically, right? Very concrete. And the other is more along the lines of what we would associate with poetry, which is indirect and multifaceted in terms of there’s multiple ways in and multiple ways out, multiple connections in the middle, right? Instead of just one connection on each end. And when the world is flat, when the world is reduced, compressed down to like, say, you, book creator, right? Then the problem you run into is that everything should be universal. Like if that were the structure of the world, universalism is correct. I got news for you that universalism is not correct. It’s not. It’s weird because it’s like even the evolutionists are universalists. I’m like evolution states. Universalism is incorrect. I don’t like where are you getting this from? What do you mean by universalism? Well, universalism, universalism for me, universalism only applies to the ethereal. It doesn’t apply to the material at all. That’s how Plato conceived of it. So I don’t know how you’re using the word universalism. Well, look, if my child is sick and God intervenes and a miracle occurs and somebody else’s child is sick and God doesn’t intervene for them, they think it wasn’t God. Okay, whatever. Like, right? And, you know, they’ll come up with alternate explanations. I still don’t know what you’re talking about. Well, because that would be universal. Like, oh, I’m as pious as they are and therefore I should get the same gifts that they get. Okay. Right. So it’s treating God like a vending machine. Right. Well, all universalism is, yeah, is treating God like a vending machine. Ultimately, because God is creator would be the rider of all things. Are you aware of how universalism gets used to being that all people end up redeemed in the end? That’s ethereal. Reconciled and forgiven. Yes. Yes. When you’re a materialist, you don’t actually use it that way because you can’t, because you’re a materialist. And that’s where the problem, right? They try to universalize the material, which is where it doesn’t exist at all, obviously. Like Einstein, evolution, like all scientific frames, it doesn’t work. And yet they persist in their, oh, well, this happened to you, so it should happen to me. Or this person did X, Y, and Z. And so when I do X, Y, and Z, I should have what that person has. It’s not like I’m a materialist. I’m not. I don’t know what that person has. It’s like what and you see this every, there’s a horrible, well, it was an interesting video from a guy who did a Mac computer repair for 15 years. And he basically said, oh, my old 15 years is worthless because my goal in doing my YouTube channel and all the stuff that I do with forums and everything else, was to make sure that somebody in high school, could build the business that I built. And nowadays you couldn’t get into this industry no matter what you did. And so he felt like his entire 15 years was a failure. He’s like, what? Right. He did an old video and it’s a horrible video. I mean, it’s an interesting video because meaning crisis, but wow. Wow. I think you’re gonna need to put a little more work into explaining what you mean by universalism because I’m having a hard time tracking you here, but as far as- Yeah, it’s universal material cause and effect. Yeah. So just all causes are one to one and can be reproduced anywhere. So it’s basically like seeing the entire universe as a series of interchangeable parts. Yes. So it’s like, I could go get an air filter for 2019 Equinox and it’s gonna be exactly the same as every other air filter. And then you try and map that onto, I can start a business from my garage and it’s gonna go just like Apple did. Right, or HP or right. Cause I’ve got the formula that they used. And even if you do, and this is the problem. This is what, there’s one guy, I think his name is Rossman, the last name. This is what he was talking about was like, I’m trying to reproduce the things that made me successful and maybe he is doing it perfectly, but the conditions, we live in the age of decay somehow. What is that? A bonus surprise. You don’t mean to shock, right? Entropy is real. Like I don’t, where did you not step that from? You never step in the same river twice. Yeah, exactly. I don’t, and yet he thought that, well, he had based his whole like worth in the world of 15 years of work helping people on that. And yet, he thought that this was gonna be something he could manifest again. Lightning strikes rarely, right? Like, and sometimes that happens. Oh yeah, Michelle has a good statement there too. Repeatability of observation and experiment is the basis of science and that works for the least interesting parts of reality. Exactly. The stuff that we can manipulate, the stuff that’s beneath us. Right. Like if I heat water to 212 degrees Fahrenheit, then it’ll boil. Woo! That’s interesting, because maybe that’s part of the problem with iconoclasm that they think icons are only beneath you. But icon is the raising up of that which should be beneath you, ordering it such that it points above you. Yeah, yeah. I think that’s how they get confused. All right, let’s see what Mitchell Crazyman’s into. Or the right combination of words will lead to a proper outcome in the words that can be either nihilistic or narcissistic or none. None is my favorite. You know, I’m having a hard time following what he’s getting at there, but you’re nodding. Explain it to me. Yeah, well, I mean, it’s magical words. And words can carry some weight when combined with proper practice, we’ll say, which is not to say witchcraft is real, but it is to say that liturgy is, like liturgy works, prayer works, right, when done correctly, right? So believing that it’s, say, just the right combination of words and that will manifest something repeatable and reliable, but then it becomes nihilistic or narcissistic or leads to nothingness, right? Which leads, I would say leads to nihilism. But I think what he’s really talking about there on the none is apathy, where people are just like, doesn’t matter what I do or what I say, even though I think words are powerful, what I say doesn’t, it doesn’t have an effect, right? Yeah, yeah. And nope, it’s gone. Whatever I was gonna say went away. But Vasani was coming at the same place, right at the same time, and he’s a jinx mark. He got it in text, you got it in, yeah, yeah. So- Yeah, through proper technique, through proper technique. It is a technique issue. It’s like, okay, technique can do whatever in the world. And it’s like, well, there’s still a mediation that has to happen. And even if it’s say proper technique, like everybody puts everything in the right place and does all the prayers appropriately. And Catholics are very good at understanding this for some reason. They’re like, sometimes there’s a higher plan. That’s usually what they say. They’re like, we tried to intervene and sometimes it’s just a higher plan and it’s God’s will. And they just kind of give up. They don’t dwell on the fact that the Catholic thing that’s supposed to work didn’t work because they never believed, they never believed it definitely would to begin with. Yeah, Catholics seem really good at that actually, surprisingly. Going in and blessing the person with the relics of St. John Vianney will only heal them 30% of the time. Or 0% of the time, I don’t know. Yeah, yeah. So it seems like even with words, like let’s take something like apologizing, apologizing for bad behavior. It’s not actually about the words that you say. Right. It’s about you actually being sorry and you’re gonna communicate that whether you like it or not, regardless of the words that you say. Right. And so it’s almost like all of these techniques, all of these propositions and procedures, if they don’t have the spirit breathed into them, are only gonna last for a time, maybe spasm around and then fall apart. But it’s gotta be like 100% oriented top to bottom in order to really work. Something like that. Yeah. Something like that. Well, there’s an interesting quote from the best science fiction show of all time, which is called Blake Seven, where the main character, or one of the main characters, it’s complicated, it’s British. I have never understood why it should be necessary to become irrational in order to prove that you care, or indeed why it should be necessary to prove it at all. In other words, if you don’t know someone cares, then it’s likely they aren’t doing things in the world that are, we’ll say, observable by someone other than themselves. And therefore, which is not to say that if you are doing things to care for somebody that they’ll notice, but it is to say that maybe telling somebody that you care should never be necessary, ever. Yeah. Yeah, it’s sort of like if you have to tell somebody that you’re popular. Right. It’s the same sort of, that pattern’s kind of everywhere. Yeah. Like, once you say it, it’s certainly not true. By the time the words have left your mouth. That’s a thing. I did see something from Emma up here. No, no, here it is. So, Mark, you’re coming to the poetry as Perception Convivium, right? I have no idea what any of those words mean. It’s the conference in Arkansas. Yes, I know about the conference, but I’m trying to get to Arkansas. I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to go there or not. Okay, so it’s up in the air right now, but I will be there, and the link down below, it’s, oh, goodness, calendar, where are you at? It is November 17th and 18th in Arkansas. Tickets are available. You’ll have me, Ted, and Dr. Jim. And yeah, if you saw the conversation we had, PVK released that on Monday. I had a blast just in the middle of that conversation. Just talking to those guys. I felt like a little like, man, these guys are pretty daggone smart, and I’m just keeping up. But yeah, it should be a good time. And I think Arkansas is probably nice in November. Not too hot. Not too hot. It won’t be hot, not in November, that’s for sure. I don’t know if it’s nice. It sounds cold to me. It looks awfully northward from where I’m at, and I’m already a little chilly, so. Okay, well, last year. I’m gonna try to go. But yeah, that was a good talk. I liked that talk, by the way. I thought that was a good chat. I’m glad that PVK released it finally. Well, we only recorded that on Friday, and it was released on the Monday. So he let that out of the gate pretty quickly. Apparently Laura’s conversation is gonna be behind the paint wall, because she doesn’t wanna deal with a whole lot of attention, which is fair. That’s too bad. I’m just gonna have to pirate it or something. You’re gonna have to find a friend. You have any friends? I have two, actually, and both of them were in that conversation. So. Ha ha ha, fair. That’s funny. Difference between Jewish and Christian religion on this side and paganism is that we serve the deity versus the deities serving us. I sure hope so. Yeah, I don’t know if that conception of paganism is correct. I mean, there’s still, I think the way the pagans related to direct appeals I think the primary, I really liked when Andrew Clay a while back, was probably at least a year ago, did the video on the economics of paganism, just collapsing the Roman Empire, because no one could buy the redemption. It’s like, yeah, it’s not a bad thesis. I don’t know whose thesis that was, but he did a video on it. I was like, oh, that’s pretty clever. I like that idea. Also not wrong. Yeah, the bread, the wine and the priest’s salary is a lot cheaper. Well, and only having one set, right? Cause it’s really all about how many sets of that. How many sets of that extra layer of management do you have? It’s like, oh, wow, that’s kind of tough. Yeah, yeah, interesting. Laura can’t see her own video, apparently. My goodness. I don’t have $3. What kind of a ridiculous capitalistic world do we live in? Consumeristic world do we live in when this is the case? Don’t you think it’s weird that we can just watch things on YouTube for free? Yeah, I know. Nobody finds the freedom of free streaming from people. Not only that, but I could just put the, YouTube is in charge of me a dime to put this out there. I’ve got to pay for StreamYard, and I’m happy to do it because it’s a solid tool here. But being able to just bring people on, that’s nice, but yeah, yeah. Well, I did a Zoom call on Saturday. I couldn’t do the whole thing cause things going on, but did a Zoom call. I listened to a very high level, very academic, sort of like reminiscing there. Cause it’s been a while since I’ve been out of Boston and able to listen to really super academic stuff from DC Schindler. And I was like, wow, and it was free. It was totally free. Just pop in when you want, pop out when you want. I’m like, yeah, we don’t even understand how privileged and ridiculous this is that something like this is free. It’s just like a medieval peasant being able to listen to the lectures of Peter of Abelard, or Thomas Aquinas, or Albert the Great, and just, yeah. Yeah, no, it’s just, it’s so insane. And I think they were like 20 people there. Well, and then, right. And then, right. And then you can spread it out to everybody. And then the problem that people don’t realize with that is that, yeah, but that goes double for the bad ideas of which there are many more. And so they just drown out the good ideas. And so maybe having a hierarchical system and a broadcast system that was elitist was actually a good thing cause then you weren’t flooded with information and then had to sort through it yourself because you kinda do, or rely on algorithms to sort it for you because you kinda do, you’re not gonna sort it. There’s another option. You can sort through in the community. That’s how I get all my news. I get all my news from Bridges of Meaning. I pirate all of my sense making from other people who listen to garbage, and then occasionally throw me the good stuff. Thank you very much, everybody. I used to do that for people too. And occasionally I spit things out for other people, but usually it’s other people listening to the garbage. I’m at the end of the filter, thank you. I have just enough bandwidth to follow a certain percentage of Catholic news. And it’s like, I’ve put the time in to figure out the players and the issues. I can’t do that with geopolitics for Pete’s sake. Tell me, are there any good guys or are any of them good guys? Should I be putting? That’s what I wanna know. Are any of them good guys? That’s the problem now. Yeah, and I think we really get lost when we try to focus on the wrong thing. Set of badness is very large compared to set of goodness. And so the discernment you need is for the good, and then the other discernment is irrelevant. So yeah, you don’t need to worry about the rest of it. Yeah, and I think the focus on things like beauty is gonna save the world or conversation, which is basically a subset of gnosis by the way. See my tweets on Twitter about age of gnosis. Or truth is gonna save the world, which is a subset of gnosis. I think that’s all misguided, right? It’s goodness that’s gonna save the world. The discernment you need is for the good because there’s goodness in ugly things, right? And there’s goodness in falsity. And people don’t like that. Well, not one little bit, but. I don’t like that. Goodness and falsity, give me an example. Well, in one way, we’ll say the dog-headed are false because they’re not in the church, right? Saint Christopher may be a saint, but did he go to church? Was he taking this out? No, he was carrying people across the river. Right, but in that way, he wasn’t true to following Christ. But he was pivotal in the Christ story. Getting people across the river. And then we can argue about what true means at that point, but you can see what I mean about, well, there’s a falsity about him being a saint at all because he’s still dog-headed and he still didn’t really follow. It was like, how did he get in the club? What’s going on there? But he did, and it’s important that he did, and it’s important why. It’s like, oh, there’s a there there. It’s super important. It’s not about living the true life even, right? But it’s about being true to the higher principle, we’ll say it’s about doing the right thing, or it’s about doing good in the world, is the way I’d cast it, right? And so, yeah, if you stick with the good, you’re all set. You can throw the true and the beautiful out at some point. Not that I recommend that, but if you needed to pick one of the three, there’s Ted. Ted can straighten this all out and tell me where I’m wrong, excellent. Yeah, the transcendentals are all interesting. Mark hasn’t studied the transcendentals according to St. Thomas Aquinas, so he gets confused. He doesn’t know that they’re all just different aspects of being. Yeah. So being is good, being is true. Beautiful, I’m kinda, depends on the day of the week. You can get me to say that beauty’s a transcendental and other times I’m just like, ah, I still don’t see it. No, I think it might just be a property of material beings, but I could be persuaded. I made a radical claim, Ted. I made the claim that effectively, and I used St. Christopher to do it, but effectively goodness is sufficient and you don’t even have to be true. You can be false and good and that is a way to be, and it’s okay. Oh, well, I mean, Mark, what you’re saying with the idea of St. Christopher is what level of falsehood, right? Right. Because you can be messing up on the lower, obviously you can be messing up on lower levels of say truth, but doing something that’s true on a higher level, right? And so, I mean, this happens all the time. This is how mercy works basically, is that God looks at us and he’s like, in my mercy, I’m going to take the fact that you don’t want me, but you might want to want me, or you might want to want to want me, or something like that, and then he starts pulling us in. And so in that sense, yeah, I mean, obviously if you use falsehood in the broadest sense, like most, it would seem that many civilizations have had certain factual falsehoods in societies that they’ve operated under about say mechanics of the natural world, totally fine. It doesn’t make them, those people morally evil. Actually, Mark, what’s interesting is that notion that you can only be good if there’s no falsehood is part of the, like the science is a nonsense, right? And yeah, I’m sure this is just what you’re, you’re just wanting someone to bring this up. And so here, I’m your man, I’m your patsy. I’ll bring it in for you, Mark. Don’t worry, I’m there for you. I know. So, so the thing, I mean, cause, well, I’m gonna just put it this way. If what you’re saying isn’t true, we’re all screwed. But there are, there are, if you can, if you’re aiming at something high enough, you can be, let’s say you can get some of the details wrong. And what Father’s saying I completely agree with is this notion that the transcendentals are like different things, right? Because what’s weird is like people get this weird platonic idea of, it’s actually not even a real platonic, it’s like popularized Platonism, where there’s like a room, where there’s like a goodness, that’s like a statue or an animal or something. And then there’s like a room, there’s another like statue or animal, like that one’s truth. And then over here, there’s being, and then over here, there’s unicity and no one actually knows what unicity is, but that’s fine. But it’s like, and what the point is, is that the reason they’re called transcendentals is not because they transcend everything. They’re not like things that transcend other things, but they’re aspects that are found at every level of reality. And I think, Mark, I think I’m starting to get what you’re saying. And it’s like, truth has multiple levels of participation. And if you stumble up on some of the lower levels, you’re gonna be fine, right? If you think the water is 40 degrees and it’s actually 58, but you’re like, ah, that’s too cold to swim in right now. Yeah, well, and I think it’s more, to some extent, fundamental than that. I think the first problem is truth. There’s no such thing. I think what you mean is the true, and then that changes everything, right? Now it’s not static anymore. Right, now we’re back into the poetic way of understanding something rather than the discrete linear way. And then it’s because it is the true, it’s the true, the beauty and the good, right? But they’re not discrete things in the world, right? They are unfolding aspects through time, which, you know, and that’s what you have to relate to. And you have to constantly re-relate to. So- Yeah, yeah. And that’s sort of understanding, like I’ve heard truth defined as the conformity of the mind to reality. And as long as you’re clear about what kind of mind is doing that, we’re not getting, you know, right? There we go. Yeah. Like it’s this mind right here, you know? We can conform to a little bit here and there with about 80% accuracy if we’re lucky. Yeah. But I wanna, Mark, I wanna shoot back because this is just something that I’ve been trying, like I’ve been trying to get into this thick skull of mine. And there’s a Dominican scholar who is saying this. When we say like being, that good is an aspect of being, we don’t mean like that some, that like some being has a quality of goodness. Like being is good. So in as much as a thing exists, it is good. And in as much as a thing is good, it exists. You can spend five years on that one, right? Yeah, yeah. So you’re like, how do you exist? Well, by being good, by goodness. Like that’s how you participate in being is goodness. It also means that for a thing to be as fundamentally good, which is man, that’s freeing, right? Because we have, it actually gets you into a different place and a totally different place in the way that you relate to existence. And you don’t think, what it says is something like, well, it says all sorts of crazy things that are really helpful. Like for instance, you’ve never met someone that’s just bad. In fact, you actually can’t encounter some thing that’s just bad because in order for it to be a thing, it must in some way be participating in the good, have goodness, right? That’s pretty radical, but it’s also true. And I like, Lewis makes this point. I mean, he’s, again, he’s with the conduit for so much of this stuff. It’s like, he actually makes the point that the more evil a thing is in terms of our experience of it, it actually requires a greater capacity for participant. It has to have more, let’s say, ontological goodness, right? His example is a bad dog can do so much harm. A bad man can do much worse harm than a bad dog. A bad angel, like all bets are off. And you start thinking about that, and you’re like, yeah, that is so true. And then you think like someone who has all the worst people in history, in terms of what they’ve been given, they’re extraordinary people, right? And this is, I mean, it’s both wonderful and a total warning just because like, hey, just because someone has these great capacities does not mean that they’re like doing what’s right, but it also means that, well, what it means is that in the end, like, goodness or evil will just kill itself because evil is an anti-pattern. Well, that’s what it is. Right, that’s good. Evil is that which kills itself. It’s an anti-pattern, it’s not existence, right? And that’s when we think being is good. We don’t mean it’s just like, oh, it’s good that those things exist. No, being is good. Right, well, or maybe a better way to say it is that there’s always the possibility of goodness within something that is being. And therefore, there’s the possibility for redemption and all that. It’s not even, well, it’s not even, because look, when we talk about redemption, we’re generally talking about like moral goodness. And I think in the Transcendental, that term goodness is a much broader term there. True, right. Goodness is the capacity to bestow perfection on another being, to complete it, to elevate it, which is why goodness is diffusive, it calls out. And because beings naturally want to tend towards their perfection if they’re not twisted like these beings here. And so the perfection of the rock is to be heavy and solid. And so it tends towards that place where it could be heaviest and most solidest, that being on the ground. And if you think that sounds fanciful, then well, what is gravity exactly? I check my phone. Do you actually have, you have an equation, which is cool, which is useful, but it doesn’t actually tell me why that happens. So yeah, separating ontological goodness, goodness as the capacity to bestow perfection versus moral goodness, which is being aligned with God and justice and all of those things, behaving virtuously. Those are two different things. You gotta keep them separate. But you do, what is interesting is that you do see, and this is, no one’s gonna make a consequentialist of me, but I would say that you can actually see that as moral creatures, when we step out of moral goodness, we actually become less of a thing. And this is Verbeckis’ reciprocal narrowing. That’s what he’s saying. He’s saying that when you cease to be morally, the less morally good you are, the less ontology you have. You become something less. How do you get out of that? You get out of that by freedom, not freedom of, not freedom for, what is it? Freedom of choice and freedom from consequence. That’s not freedom. Freedom is the ability to be good, which is to say, for humans morally and ontologically to be perfected, which is to be completed, to be whole. Or to be better. Or to be better. Well, yeah, I mean, we set this bar of wholeness. It’s like, just be better, okay? Well, it’s one of the brilliant things that Peterson does is he says, yeah, just compare yourself to who you were yesterday, man. Don’t even, don’t shoot for perfection. Just try to be better. Do one thing, one small thing better today than you did yesterday. Good enough. Well, and there’s, I mean, I think Aristotle was probably onto something with his four causes. And if you’re thinking in those terms, right, the efficient cause and the final cause of your goodness, very different, right, if you’re like, I’m going to try to operate in my final cause, it doesn’t allow you to do anything. So your efficient cause would be how my, is basically Peterson talking about that. How do I move towards my final cause? It’s that, it’s like compare myself to yesterday, do something a little bit better than I did before. The problem where Peterson falls apart is that there’s no final cause to goodness in Peterson’s universe. I mean, this has been so, this has been turned over. This is not something new. He’s still a, yeah, he’s still a sciency guy that still is, he’s still a materialist. Well, and it’s sort of the classical liberalism thing, which I watched the trailer for ARC or something. And it was basically like, we’re proposing human flourishing. I’m like, great, until you, until we can actually, until we can like come down and get some granularity on what human flourishing means, like, we’re just going to, we’re going to do the same thing because- Romanticism, that’s romanticism. Well, it’s interesting that you have classic class. I mean, historically, classical liberalism moved into the romantic era pretty much immediately. And it’s like, that’s the process. You just do one to the other. Hey, Jacob, I’ve been talking about you. You’ve been on here and I haven’t seen you on the screen in a while, so. You were talking about me, what’d you say about me? No, no, no, I was talking and you were here. I mean, here, here in air quotes, but you were there. I don’t know if you had anything you wanted to say. Good is good. I’m a fan of good. I like good. Hey, God is good. All the time. All the time. God is good. All the time. Or to quote Father Jerome Bailey Hopkins, we must always be on the side of good because good is good. That’s a blessing. It’s a blessing. Yeah, that’s right. That’s okay. That’s how it works, actually. That’s too bad to hear that they went with human flourishing. And it’s wrong, too. That’s the worst. That’s the worst thing you can possibly say. It’s like, your purpose is to be happy. No, it most certainly is not. Where are you getting this from? It’s just wrong. It’s so interesting, Mark, because when you use the word happy, I know exactly where you’re coming from, and I was on that train for years. But then becoming Catholic, there’s this other use of the word happy amongst Catholics. It means a completely different thing. Yeah, eudaemonia. Yeah, it means- Yeah, but eudaemonia is contentedness. That’s the problem. Eudaemonia is contentedness. It’s not contentedness. That’s the problem. Eudaemonia is contentedness. Well, the problem is that you just have English slipping around under us. I mean, that’s honestly like the word, when most people on the street say happy, they don’t mean anything like when a Catholic priest says that we should hope for the happiness of heaven. Those things are not the same word in English. And that happiness in English is- And happy used to mean lucky, right? Right. Call no man happy until he is dead. Happy until he is dead, right. Right, but the colloquial use is of something, like when we’ll say normies, he says, right? When non-religious people use the term happy, what they’re talking about would be either luck or joy. And either way, those are things that are rare and you should have gratitude for. And it’s the same with human flourishing. It’s just a different formulation of that. It’s not flourishing. Like flourishing is a gift that is given to you. Like this is why people are confused about Job. It’s like, no, you’re not guaranteed to flourish, dude. You’re guaranteed that you can become content in your worship. That’s it. Like you ain’t got nothing else. You might be starving to death. The only thing you’re guaranteed is you’re gonna, that you can do things to make yourself content in worship. That’s it. Everything else is extra. Well, that’s interesting. I was just blasting through the chat really quick before I got out. Were you guys talking about magic earlier? Yes. Usually. Yeah, because like, usually. Yeah, that happens a lot. Well, because we’re all using magic. So yeah. Oh, good guess, Ted. We always talk about that. That’s not a guess. That’s a certainty. But I mean, Mark, what you’re saying essentially is, the, that’s the opposite of magic. The opposite of magic is to seek into the goodness and worship of God. That’s the opposite of magic. Like pretty precisely. Because if you’re Job, then stuff happens to you. And what you’re doing is you’re trying to get up all the way to God. Instead of saying, I’m gonna try to regulate this other stuff. And what’s interesting is like, when I think about, I mean, God is merciful to us and he also like does stuff for us and lets us do things. Because it’s really hard. Like being Job is extraordinarily hard. But like the two models, you know, I see in, you know, like in the accounts of, in the gospel accounts that you have at the beginning and the end, at the beginning you have the annunciation. And the Blessed Virgin Mary says, be it done unto me according to thy will. Right? Be it done, right? And then at the end, at almost the end, you have the passion and Christ in the garden. And he says, not my will, but yours. And so, I mean, that, it’s that, that is where all prayer should lead. And what’s interesting is that the person who can actually pray that is completely free. Because what circumstances, what circumstances could possibly present themselves to you in which that’s not open to you? That orientation, it’s always available because there’s no, there is no circumstance. Right, and this is like, this is my thing when, in Chino when John Verbecky was like, Dr. Verbecky was saying, you know, what’s the orientation that you can take to sort of meta-optimal orientation. When you have, when you have a, what do you, basically like a horizon, an event horizon, I’m sorry, I’m having, one of my children’s having, children’s having a late night snack of bananas and she’s pulling raspberries. So I don’t know if that’s coming through, but it’s very loud for me. It’s not. But this unknown horizon, it’s like, okay, you can’t anticipate what’s on the other side of that. And yet you still have to like orient yourself somehow. And my response was, well, it’s the crucifixion, right? You’re oriented and also radically open at the same time. And it’s the prayer in the garden. It’s like, there’s nothing that could come after that that that prayer doesn’t work for because what’s presented there is the worst thing happens. I mean, this is right. Just on a narrative level, like Job in the Old Testament and then Christ’s Passion in the New Testament, they’re both presented as limit stories. Like that’s what they’re doing. They’re saying like, look, we’re gonna put some brackets on possible human experience. Like I defy you to get outside of them. And so then if the things that work in these here, those things work here, if those are actually like ways to be connected to God in those circumstances, you can be assured that everything inside that, like you’ll be good. If you can get there, if you can get where he was in the garden, then it just doesn’t matter. And then you’re in the place of total freedom. And there you go. And I think Job, you can see the same thing. Job’s more complicated. Like I don’t think that’s what the focus of Job is about. But I think you see the same thing going on there. Yeah, absolutely. And I think this actually ties in pretty well. I’m using Wikipedia, because that’s what’s available. Talking about eudaemonia in Aristotle. It’s the aim of practical philosophy prudence, along with the terms virtue and fronasis, commonly translated prudence. Talking about how these things are essential core components to having this good spirit, which we’re not able to translate into English well, because I don’t like either happiness or welfare. I think we might have to use two words to translate this one Greek word here, good spirit. Having a spirit that’s oriented towards the good and is capable of actually achieving the good. Right. Right there is eudaemonia. Right, but Aristotle’s coming from the stoic and Epicurean. He founded those schools, he’s not coming from them. Right, but what do they have in common, interestingly? Contentedness, right? That’s their baseline. Like it’s explicit, and I know in recent times, we mistake Epicureanism for this love of great food or something, but actually the Epicureans were basically like, no man, you’re supposed to give up one ration of beans to feed your friend, if it means you both starve a little. Like that, Epicureans are very, we would consider them stoics, but actually it’s sort of like the foundation of stoicism in some sense, this privation, right? And they talk about privation leads to when you get good food, you can really enjoy it. They talk about that, right? But ultimately, and the stoics have the same attitude, this baseline of contentedness, and that’s where they’re coming from. That’s the thing that leads you to, would say be able to be a good person. Interesting point of trivia. The Aramaic word for heretic is epicurus. So would that be like from the time of the Maccabeans and the Greeks setting up the gymnasium in Jerusalem and all of that? I mean, yeah, it’s the Aramaic loan word that’s used in the Mishnah, which is at the latest like second century for heretic. So it must have been at least 100 years old. To do with starting to eat pork, go to the gymnasium and covering over the mark of your circumcision, right? Those are three things which were included, yes. So I left the most important, I varied the lead there, I’m sorry. So I grabbed a quick Britannica. The conventional English translation of the Greek term happiness is unfortunate because eudaimonia, as Aristotle and most other ancient philosophers understood it, does not consist of a state of mind or a feeling of pleasure or contentment as happiness as often implies, right? And it is the implication. So. Interesting. So that’s where Bishop Barrett and Dr. Peterson just started not communicating, if you remember that. Like, oh, come on, Your Excellency, please remember that he didn’t get the first books of the Nicomachean ethics drilled into him when he was 19. Well, and the problem with science is that they’re trying to have and contain a bunch of things without acknowledging that you can’t have or contain the more even pieces of them, right? Because again, we don’t have that poetic sense of the world where representations are representations of something higher when they’re properly ordered. And it’s the properly ordered part that’s tricky, given granted, but that’s the difference between an idol and an icon. You know, Mark, you should, Mark, you should cover this thing that we’re having in November in Arkansas about poetry. I will do my best. Awesome. Okay, no, I wanna, look, Mark, cause your notion of contentedness is really interesting cause it actually hits on something that bounces around in the Peterson sphere slash the thing that won’t be named here, which is, there’s like, there’s like, guys like Father Eric or Jacob, and then there’s like the process theology guys, like Dr. Ian McGillicrest and the other guys who like Whitehead. And I think actually the English word contentedness is like really close to the heart of what’s going on here because I think the process theology guys have this notion that contentedness slash is like, something like stasis and death and like not living and not dynamic. And which is very weird. And this is why they kick up this about, you know, they’re healed about all this notion about like God being perfect or the beatific vision being full fulfillment. Contentedness, I think what you’re talking about when you’re talking about contentedness is not, it’s not the, like say, like the, you’re not like taking the volume down on who you are as a being or what you are until it matches circumstances. It is, it’s actually the opposite. It’s total full, it’s like, it is that state whereby everything that like calls out in you as being that, right? Like that should be contentedness. Because Mark, you don’t like, you, I mean, you don’t think, well, you need to just like not, try to not appreciate food so that you’re just content with whatever garbage you eat. Like that’s not contentedness, right? The point is you need to have some orientation, some relationship to your food that actually transforms it by say, for instance, seeing it be the division of your divine father, the provision of your divine father who cares for you. Then all of a sudden you’re like, whatever food it can be, it could be an amazing gourmet feast or it could be dry beans that whoever shares, some homeless guy shares with you. And so maybe, yeah, yeah, but that’s where contentedness comes from because it comes from, well, to go back, it’s good on a higher level. That’s what it is basically, is you’re moving up levels in terms of how something is good for you. Maybe. I would say, how about this? How about contentedness is contingent upon the things around you, right? Your conditions in the moment. But what you’re doing are two things and you only have to do two things. One is fill that condition with all of your being, right? However little that may be, right? So maybe, and also orient your being towards upwards, towards the highest, right? And then if you do those two things, you are content irrespective of your circumstances, right? But what that looks like has to change with circumstances. Yes, yeah, yeah. I mean, well, because we exist in relation and so we’re contextual. I don’t know how to put it, we’re just contextual. Everything about us is contextual. And so, I mean, this is the whole thing about wisdom to go back to wisdom, right? And about eudaimonia being the instantiation of practical wisdom in life. Is that, I was like, Mark, what’s the wisest thing for me to do? And you can answer me at an extraordinarily high level, which would be to pursue wisdom and the good. And it’s like, okay, great, okay, so now what do I do that’s the most wise thing? It’s like, what’s going on? Like, what is your, you know, it’s like, and on and on and on. And it’s like, this is why you can’t make rules for wisdom. You just can’t. Like, you have to become a wise person. And wise people, how do you know a wise person? Because they’re people who know what’s wise, not because they might. Because it’s. You see the wisdom. Like, you see the wisdom in their actions or you see the wisdom in their advice or whatever. Right, you sense the wisdom at a different level. Isn’t it wild that you can recognize someone as being more wise than you? Like, that’s marvelous. It’s pretty necessary though. It’s totally necessary. But it’s like, you know, when someone like does math, that’s just like totally, someone starts talking about linear algebra, I’m out. Like, I have no idea what it is. There’s like this inaccessibility. When someone does something really wise, you’re like, oh, I have no idea how you got there. But like, I, as a fool, recognize that that was wise. And it’s just so interesting. I think about this all the time, like the notion of like, you know, how do you, how do you like, how does a broken mind be healed? Like, how does it participate in its own healing? But we can. I don’t know, it’s just wonderful. Like, it’s really wonderful that we as. You don’t wanna universalize that. Here’s an example, right? Cause some people can’t see wisdom. Like they don’t see wise people at all. So that would be a universalization, brother Eric, to our earlier, what is universalization? Right, a lot of people get into this habit of, well, I can recognize wise people, therefore everybody else can. And it’s like, oh, I don’t know about that. I can recognize truth, therefore everybody else can. Oh, that’s certainly not, that’s not the case. No, I can recognize beauty, right? I mean, those are universalizations because we don’t recognize them equally, we’ll say. We don’t have equal capacity or equal ability or equal implementation, something. Something’s not equal. And it’s that equalization that I was using or referring to when I was saying universality. At that level, that’s too low a level to be universal. Right, right, yeah. And you know, sometimes there’s just no teaching people. Right, well, you can’t. That’s why saving any of us is a work of the Holy Spirit. It’s not anything that we can accomplish on our own merit or even the merits of somebody else, unless it’s the perfect man come down from heaven. But we won’t talk about that in front of Jacob. Do you think that you could even go further and say that you can’t teach anyone unless they wanna be taught? Oh no, I don’t think teaching’s a real thing anyway. I think you can guide somebody and if they get revealed knowledge, that’s fantastic. You can set up the conditions for that to happen, but really, I’m not even a, like you can learn. I’m like, I don’t know about that. I don’t know if you can learn, because it’s not up to merely your will, which is not to say that your will is not involved, but it’s not up to merely your will. Yeah, yeah. Now it’s gone too. Sorry, I don’t know if I bumped that one out of your head. Sorry. Oh yeah, it’s about humility, for Pete’s sake. Of course it is. If you don’t have humility to start off with, then you’re contented entirely with what’s between your ears. You don’t need anything to do that. But that’s not sufficient either. I mean, I’ve met people who are ready and willing to learn as much as they can be, and not just me, but they cannot be taught a certain thing. And it’s like, I don’t know what that is. I don’t understand it. I don’t wanna understand it. Like I have no desire to understand it, but it is what it is. That’s the thing. And, whoa, he’s in question from Benjamin Franklin. How rare. How soon do you give up teaching if the children rebels do stop teaching? Well, look, when I say that, when I made that comment about can you teach anyone, or no, sorry, I didn’t say that. I said, I don’t think you can make anyone learn. That’s what I meant. Yeah, because at the end of the day, I mean, good old aphorisms, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make a drink. It’s actually impossible to make someone care about what you’re doing or about what you’re saying. Like it’s actually impossible to make them care. And so if they do, or if they have another set of things that are driving them, sometimes you can say, hey, look, here’s how the thing that I’m saying is important relates to the thing that you think is important. Generally, when we talk about convincing someone or something, that’s actually what we mean, I think probably, I haven’t really put a ton of thought into this, but it’s something like drawing the line from here are the things that you find valuable and here is why I think you should find this valuable or important or whatever. But Mark, to your point, I mean, there’s all sorts of levels to this too, right? It’s not just, well, I just wanna learn. It’s like, great, I’m glad that you wanna learn. Do you know what you should be learning? Right, because that’s the whole, I mean, this is where it gets weird. It’s like, it’s not just do you wanna learn. Do you know what you should learn? Because what could you learn? I mean, this is the Peugeot, Vervecchi and Peterson brilliant thing about combinatorial explosion and attention. Like they’re all making the same point with slightly different language and you could pay attention to an infinite number of things. What are you gonna pay attention to? And it’s like, I’m ready to learn. It’s like, great. I mean, so I went to like a math and science boarding school and people like, the people going there went there like they have like nerd is what was their identity. Now, if you really wanna parse the notion of nerd apart, I think it’s essentially it’s people who are unable to provide proportion to factual knowledge. That’s what a nerd is. A nerd is someone who has a hard time saying there’s a difference between, let’s say, how important this piece of information about like a mayfly life cycle is and the way the wisdom that I use to relate to my wife. Those are, there’s different values there. Now, there’s another set of people like say Jordan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, who could do this thing where they take something that seems really unimportant and actually make you see why it is. That’s a whole nother thing. But the notion of nerd as such is something like, here’s my enormous litany of whatever obscure, it’s all true, right? It’s all always true. But it’s like, is it important? And I did wanna address what Laura’s talking about too, which is there’s different ways of introducing learning. I think this is where the humility and also the caring comes in that you were mentioning, Ted. You don’t have the humility to learn the thing you need to learn in the way you need to learn it. And the thing you need to learn about the subject you care about might not be the thing that you think you want to learn. And you run into this a lot when you, so I’ve done a lot of training. A lot of people have wanted me to mentor them in programming for various reasons or systems engineering or sometimes both. My success rate is extremely low with a certain class of people. And lots of people have learned from me, like I’m very good at training, corporate training. I’m very good at corporate training. I’m very good at teaching people one on one. It’s not a problem for me. But there’ve been many people who’ve come to me super eager and we would say, although this is slightly incorrect, it’s correct enough, they don’t wanna put in the work, right? So yeah, there’s an aspect to learning piano where if you’re not gonna sit down for 20 minutes a day at least and play piano, you’re gonna be limited in what you can learn about piano no matter how much you care about piano. Because I’ve met people actually like that with piano. I’m like that with all musical instruments. I’m just never, well, I know I’m never gonna put in the time. I already know, I’ve been trying my whole life. It just never happened that I will put in the time. I just, I cannot get in the regimented. Now martial arts, no problem at all. Put in the time. You did the 10 point blocking system every day for years. Like no problem. Music, drawing, nah, I don’t know why. I have a super, I really actually wanna do both those things and I’ve just never been able to do it, right? Sitting down, writing poetry, that was something I was highly successful at. I could probably jump right back into that. I’ve got poetry that I’ve written somewhere in the shed. And so that’s not a problem. But some of these other things are a big problem. And some of that is probably just what you’re willing to sacrifice for what you wanna learn or learning the thing in the way you have to personally. And like, cause a lot of people like, oh, I wanna learn how to program a video game in assembly language. And I’m like, no, you really don’t. You know, some people I can tell, no, they really do. And they will be able to put in the work because programming anything in assembly language is, A, a nightmare. That’s one step above ones and zeros, right? Yes, assembly language, that is exactly correct. One step above. The kinds of people who wanna program a video game in assembly language are the kinds of people that create analog calculators in Minecraft. Yes, right. No, no, there’s a class of people. Well, that’s the thing, like I can recognize those people. Like I recognize color in the daytime. Like I can just see, you know, not really, but I can tell by talking to somebody whether or not they fit into the camp of the type of person. But the number of people that think they wanna do that, and I know absolutely will never be able to, is way larger than the number of people that are interested and can do it. And there’s a bunch of people who could do it, but aren’t interested. Like that happens too. And we don’t appreciate all that nuance in learning and education. And this is what leads to the, oh, the education is bad, just try to fit everybody into one box. What we really should do is have a four pronged education part or a six pronged or whatever it is. It’s like, that’s impractical. Like that’s just a dumb idea. The fact of the matter is we have to try to fit them in boxes, not because we wanna train them for the factory because of the Prussians. Like the stupid explanation is totally historically wrong, completely inaccurate and utter garbage. It’s because there’s a practical limitation to what you can do with the number of students versus the number of teachers versus the amount of infrastructure. It’s just a simple freaking trade off. And you can make the very good argument that we never should have federalized education in the United States, but I’m not gonna get on that soapbox. Yeah, somebody else is starting to soapbox. I’m not gonna get on that soapbox. Jacob, did you have a soapbox you wanted to get on? No, he’s got his own channel. He can soapbox there. Yeah, we just want to hang out with this cat. Learning is hard, man. Learning is multifactor and really difficult and involves humility and being willing to accept what you can and give up on your conception of what it is you think you can learn or want to learn all kinds of things. It’s hard. Well, I do want to go back to this thing that Benjamin Franklin said, which it’s just shocking to me that Benjamin Franklin cares about Father Erich’s live stream. You would think that Benjamin Franklin would have all sorts of other things to be paying attention to. Famous guy, help start a country, all that, but he’s hanging out here with us, which is pretty cool. But how soon do you give up teaching? If the child rebels, do you stop teaching? When I say that wisdom, you can’t turn wisdom into rules, this is exactly what I mean. There isn’t an answer to this question. It’s like, how soon do you give up teaching? Well, you give up teaching if it’s right to give up teaching. That’s the thing. What are you teaching? Change what you’re doing. I mean, that was Laura’s excellent point. Yeah, sometimes you just got to force the kid to practice 20 minutes every day on the piano. That’s a different way of teaching. There’s other ways to teach piano. You cannot teach someone something they don’t want to learn, that includes kids. But kids are stupid. And as any good parent knows, it’s really easy to fool the kid, right? Like there are parents who say to their kids, you must wear this. And then there are parents who say, which one of these two would you like to wear? And the parents who say the second one are a lot more successful as opposed to the ones who are like, you must wear this. And so I’m sorry, you’re not a good teacher if your kid wants to run away from teaching. Now, practice is a whole other thing. And whether or not a kid will practice, will spend time doing things that they actually, there are ways of incentivizing kids. But if your teaching isn’t geared towards the kid that you are teaching, you’re going to fail. And there are good ways and bad ways of teaching. And a bad way of teaching is like, you must learn this. There’s something interesting there in terms of, well, because I mean, Jake, what you’re saying is there’s this connection between knowing someone and being able to teach them, which is really interesting. I mean, look, like, because teaching and mutual learning are actually really similar. Like first off, right? I mean, anyone who’s been in a teaching situation, you’ll immediately realize that the first thing that happens when you start teaching people is you find out how ignorant you are about it and you learn a whole bunch of new stuff, right? So, okay, so teaching and mutual learning, very, very similar. And so then I’m thinking about a couple of things. One, I’m thinking about like me and Mark’s relationship over these online discussions, which like when I first started talking to Mark, I had no idea what he was saying. And I got nothing. I still have no idea what he’s saying. That’s why I don’t listen. But because like I know Mark a lot better now, to some degree, at least I know how he talks about things now he thinks about things, some things. I’m actually able to teach in the sense of communicate what it is that I think is true in that situation to Mark. Okay, because I know him, because I’m like, these are the things that Mark will connect with, right? Because like that’s what I was trying to get at when I say I can’t make like my child value this thing, but if I know that they value something else and I can make them see all those two things are, those two things are connected in value, then I can start to get them on board. And so if I know, hey, Mark thinks these things are important, these are really like core concepts, and I’m trying to sell Mark on something. If I can show him how it’s connected to like some particular thing he’s trying to unravel or how it enlightens something that he finds important, then all of a sudden it’s relevant to him and he wants to hear what I have to say. And I think that that’s true with teaching period, like you’re saying, Jacob. I mean, the notion of saying, your notion of you have to do this versus like, here’s a choice. I think the broader thing is you have to do this. Although I do think there’s a place for helping your children simply does develop personal discipline. I don’t think that in any way, this is just what I think. It shouldn’t all just be like, you just always get to choose about everything. It’s like, sometimes like, you’re going to give up your personal idiosyncrasies to come and be part of the dinner table, as Jonathan Bejo would put it, right? And like, they just have to do that. They don’t get to choose if they wanna eat later. But there’s all sorts of things that you can do to show them like, hey, learning how to eat at the table with everyone else is a really good thing to do. And so there’s something in there about like, the more that I know my child, the more incapable of doing it. Like, it’s so much easier to get my children to do what they’re supposed to do than someone else, me to get someone else to do what they’re supposed to do. Because I know them. And I think, I mean, when you start realizing that, I think that has a ton of stuff per that earlier point about like, what Mark was getting at about truth and goodness and what God does for us. Because with the notion of God knowing us, all of a sudden this becomes really transformative and you realize, oh, if I as a parent of my children am able to use my knowledge of them to draw them towards what’s good in ways that they don’t understand what’s going on, what is God doing to me in all the circumstances of my life? And there’s something, I don’t know, there’s something really great and beautiful about how you have to be transformed at least a little bit to actually get to know somebody well. Right, you’ve got to kind of cultivate the space inside of you to be able to say, oh, this is what this person’s like. This is what they’re into. To come forward with that spirit of finesse towards them. And then that actually being what you can use to draw something good out of them or to share something good that you found, that very personal relationship versus even what’s available from a book. I have lots of books and I don’t think books are bad, but yeah, that’s very different than actually being able to talk to somebody. You have to make a space in yourself, right? Yeah. For them. For your, or at least your model of them. And that changes you because you’re changing the space within your head, we’ll say. And then that allows you to connect to them, hopefully using the poetic way of knowing. And then that allows you to draw them into your world as well. And that’s actually, Wynus says that one of the effects of love, even on the human level, is mutual indwelling. Or the lover, the beloved are in each other. That is what the entire Divine Comedy is about too, if you’re wondering. It is the- Check that off the bingo card, the Divine Comedy came up. It always does, it always does. But yeah, that’s what the Divine Comedy is about. Because look, John, his notion is, what Father Eric said there, that it’s the indwelling of the other, that that can happen between God and man. That’s essential thesis. And that the approach to that, the approach to that is through loving people. So Beatrice, what goes on in his relationship with Beatrice is what teaches Dante that that could happen with God himself and him. And yeah, and so the closer you get to God, as you move out of hell into paradise, the more- Look, the anti-picture of that, the anti-picture of the beloved dwelling in the other is what you get at the very pit of hell, when everything is frozen over, and you have a soul who is eternally chewing the head of another soul, of a man that he hated in life. Like, he’s eating his head forever. It’s like, that’s the opposite, that’s the opposite of love. It’s just like, I’m gonna try to like, I’m going to try to destroy you by consuming you, instead of this thing in which like, versus the other image, which is the souls in paradise, where they’re all mirrors of divine charity and goodness. And so that every new soul that’s in heaven, there’s that much more of the glory and the love reflected around. And they’re singing. And they’re singing, yes. I still have zero clue how Dante became like a prophetic text. It’s like, a lot of people use it as like, oh, the mystical explanation of what heaven and heaven, hell are like by some random guy. Wow, I’ve never heard anybody use it that way. Wait, Jacob, are you saying- No, no, they don’t call it. What? Sorry, sorry, are you saying that you don’t understand how the text, the divine comedy became used that way? Or are you saying, I don’t get how Dante, the historical man managed to produce a text like the one that he did. I don’t understand how people view a text by the historical man, Dante Alighieri, as a prophetic text the way they do. Oh, well, he was a genius. Like, why he was a genius is a completely unanswerable question. I understand that there are, like, okay, let’s talk about The Matrix, right? So the Coen brothers are geniuses, right? And it was a pretty influential movie that lots of people talk about. But I separate their conceptions from, I’m like, this was made by the Coen brothers. These are not great fonts of wisdom. Therefore, I will not treat the details of their compositions the same way as I would, for example, scripture. Oh, sorry, Wachowskis, whatever. Oh, I mean, I think the Coen brothers, look, oh, Brother Rarito, that’s a good movie. No, look, okay, so here’s what’s interesting, Jacob, that is that the Wachowskis, from what I can tell, are, they did The Matrix movies, right? Yeah. Yeah. And, they’re just, Oh my goodness, that’s so true. Speaking out of themselves, right? Like, they got some ideas from somewhere. Dante, what Dante did was not, he didn’t create some view of the universe that’s like great and prophetic and amazing. What he did was, he was, as far as I can tell, he was the art, oh, that was exciting. He was the artistic, he was the artistic means by which the view of the universe in the Christian West was presented in a poem. Right, so it’s not like he came up with this stuff. His genius is not in like creating it, his genius is in arranging stuff that he’d already been given, which to me is a very different kind of genius. And that’s why I think I could look, because what he does is he says, hey, you need to look at things, do things this way, right? He doesn’t, he’s not coming up with heaven or purgatory or hell or the beatitude of the saints or any of these things. He didn’t even make up any of his characters. All of his characters are either mythological, historical or contemporary or biblical. And sure, whatever, blur those categories around as much as you want. He didn’t make up anyone in the Divine Comedy, right? He didn’t generate something ex nihilo. Whatever genius it was is the fact that he came up with this beautifully symmetric structure, that he could take basically the entire Christian West view of the universe, cosmology at that point, and put it all together in a way where it just lights up like a literary stained glass window. And you look at it and you’re like, oh my goodness, wow, that’s something I’d never seen before. So there’s my, I don’t know, there’s my apology for- Okay, well, here you are complaining about books you haven’t read. Yep. First of all, I find poetry in translation just inherently offensive. Oh, boy, that explains a lot actually. It does, yep. Yeah, poetry, like reading poetry in translation is just something I generally try to avoid ever, ever doing. Wow, Jacob, that’s so interesting. Poetry works on a lot of different levels. I don’t know how to say it. I mean, frankly, I would be more likely to pick it up and try to read the Italian because I do know Spanish than I would be to pick an English copy of something that’s poetic. So read it, and then you’ll understand why people are, have the, although I’ve never heard that particular attitude that you described, but understand why people have such reverence for his writing. Well, it’s interesting. I think there’s actually a really good set of examples that I could use, because I’m thinking of two different, being in a Gothic cathedral and then being in a Romanesque cathedral. And when you read Dante in the Italian, there’s all of this textural stuff that’s going on there that you lose when you translate it to English, but with a Romanesque architecture, you’re not looking at all the fine detail and the fractal surfaces. You’re looking at the proportions of it and the arches and all these things. And I think that you’re right that you lose stuff when you go from the Italian to English, but to think that you’ve lost the most important things that Dante has to say is so far off base. Because it’s not, well, look, it’s not like George Manley Hopkins. George Manley Hopkins, reading a translation of Hopkins would just be pointless because he is, he’s saying so much in the sound of it. But there’s actually a difference between lyrical poetry and epic poetry, where epic poetry is not, okay, this is a great example. See, I’m pulling this from C.S. Lewis’s Preface to Paradise Lost. He says, go to his bookstore and find a copy of the Aeneid or the Iliad of the Odyssey. And what you’ll find is, or even something in English, like Idols of the King by Alfred Lord Tennyson, these big, long narrative poems. And someone will open it up and they’ve got like underlined stuff and they put stuff in quotes and they’ve made all these notes. And you get about six pages in and there’s nothing else in the book. And his point is that the Aeneid, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Job, they’re not about producing pithy quotes. They’re like, oh man, he just, he said that so well. And like the way that he formed that Latin hexameter right there was just like, like that’s not what the poetry is doing. No, like lyrical poetry, say Shakespeare’s sonnets or something like that. Yeah, it lives by that. And so when you translate it, you’re losing a whole bunch of stuff. But with specifically the form of epic poetry, Beowulf is another great example of this. You actually, like the kind of poetry allows itself to be translated with only minimal loss. And I say that with friends who, Jacob have the same view as you, who are Catholic, and they will read Milton’s Paradise Lost before they’ll read the Divine Comedy because it’s in English. And so, but like it really, that’s really what’s going on there. You’re not supposed to like sit with some of those, some particular phrase of Dante’s and like, wow, because there’s just too much of it to do that with. You just have to keep running. Okay, but there’s enough poetry in languages I know that I haven’t read that I could be reading. Plus, like I don’t view poetry as a form of epic poetry. Like I don’t view Dante as in any way, like I’m reading right now an English translation of, which I got at a Benedictine monastery, by the way, of Rabbi Chaim de Talle’s mystical diary, right? And like, I kind of wonder to myself, okay, I could be trying to read this in Hebrew and understanding probably not as much because the Hebrew he wrote it, the Hebrew and Aramaic he wrote it in is just too hard for me, right? But like, at least I view, I think it’s like, I think it’s like, I think it’s like, I think it’s like, like at least I view his spiritual journeys, like he was Rabbi Chaim de Talle. So when he wrote something, I’m like, this is somebody that I believe like was receiving revelation. To read Dante in translation to English, it’s like everything that I would find, like the poetry, like everything is just being denuded of it. Like- Jacob, I wish I could shake your hand and thank you because my whole point about learning has just been proven perfectly. I can’t hate you. Okay, Jacob, let me see if I can do it, right? Why don’t you imagine that you’re a Marvel fan boy, right? And you’ve been watching all of the Marvel movies coming out, right? You’ve got your Captain America, you’ve got your Iron Man, you’ve got your Thor, got your Black Widow, you got your Spider-Man, and then all of a sudden they all come together into the same movie and it’s like, oh, what do they do when they all get together, right? A little bit of that energy refined, brought up to a much more interesting and satisfying palette is present in a epic poem like the Divine Comedy because as far as I can tell, Dante integrated everything that he knew into that. Like all of his crossover- He’s a synthesizer. Yes. Yeah, absolutely, yes. Yeah, that’s exactly it. Isn’t that where all the value is in ordering? I mean, there’s definitely value in ordering. Okay, look, Jacob, when I said genius, this is actually really cool. So genius and say going back to St. Thomas Aquinas this time, the notion of genius was seen as how good of a memory someone had. So how much have they read and how much had they remembered of what they read? This is totally opposed to the romantic notion of genius of someone who can come up with crazy stuff out of wherever and is really original or creative. Totally different thing from- So when I say genius, when I said Dante was a genius, I mean like Dante was a genius in the sense of he was an incredible synthesizer and integrator. I don’t think Dante was trying to be original. I think he was trying to speak what was true and he pulled, he was incredibly well-read and incredibly intelligent, obviously. And you also have to ask, what is poetry? And if for most of the answers of what poetry is, if you say Dante was a truly great poet, then you actually do just have to take them seriously. Like that’s what, if that’s what poetry means. Learn more in Arkansas at the convivium. Yeah. Links in the description. Don’t forget to hit that like button and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Oh my goodness. Yeah, there will be more Divine Comedy. I probably can’t keep it out. Yes. What did T.S. Eliot? Yes, there we go. Grail translation of Psalms. Ted, have you talked to Charlie Hancock? No, we haven’t crossed paths yet. You gotta talk to Charlie. I’d like to talk to Charlie. Yeah, yeah. Last time I talked with Sherry and Nate, she was talking about Charlie Hancock and how great he is. He’s the only reason I’ve ever been to Arkansas. Wait, is Charlie Hancock in Arkansas? Yeah. Oh my goodness, I need to meet Charlie. All right, I’m gonna- He lives near Lake Beaver or Beaver Lake or whatever you call that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s my quadrant of the state. So Beaver Lake is beautiful. That’s where we had the first annual Bridges of Meaning fishing trip. Did anybody actually fish? Nobody actually fished, no. Well- Did you set around a campfire all night and talk? We did until six a.m., until dawn. Come on, we’ll do it again. We got campfires, we’re gonna have full weather. It’s gonna be awesome. Hey, I drove all the way to Arkansas from Los Angeles. Jacob, that is remarkable. That is, that’s a drive. Heroic pilgrimage, worthy of the best of us. Arkansas is beautiful. Gentlemen, Arkansas is beautiful. No one knows about how beautiful Arkansas is. Yeah, so I posted, this is just the one funny thing. I posted in the meetings thing in the Bridges of Meeting Discord. I dropped the link for the sign up. And there’s a picture from a mountain in the Arkansas River Valley, it’s like an hour from here. And I can’t remember who it was. So he goes, that’s such a beautiful picture. Is that in Appalachia somewhere? No, it’s Arkansas, it’s where we’re having the meeting. I didn’t just pick up the grand picture of a mountain. It’s exactly where it is. I was genuinely very much surprised at the beauty of Arkansas. And I’ve driven through most of the United States now. It is definitely, I mean, I did not expect, so it was in July, it was 4th of July weekend. I did not expect it to be as luscious and green as it was in the middle of the summer. Oh yeah, we love Arkansas. It’s gotta get really dry before it dries out, before it turns brown here. Arkansas, it is a gem. I was up in the, just this last weekend, this is cool. This weekend, we were up in a little back corner of the Ozarks where my great grandfather’s great grand, no, sorry, my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather’s father ran the general store. And the little house behind this town of like 10 houses, someone renovated and turned into a short-term rental. We spent the night there, right behind this general store that whatever, however many generations back, my ancestor ran. And it’s just, I mean, it’s just painful how beautiful it is, honestly. All these rounded, it’s like, it really does look like Appalachia on like half scale, actually. Just rounded sandstone mountains, just covered in oak trees and all these old black walnuts in people’s yards that have all turned yellow and like the sumac and tuple is all red. Oh, and then it hit, we got the cold front, the first cold front of the year through, and then it hit like 41 out and just brilliant blue sky. You know, the shadows all turned blue in the fall. It’s good, it’s good stuff. Very nice, very nice. I’ll tell you what’s also good. It’s going to sleep. And so, thanks for coming on, had another great time. Great to have you on, Jacob. Hope to see many of you in Arkansas. November, let me pull up the calendar again. November 17th and 18th. The signup is in the video description. But otherwise, God bless you all. Happy Sunday.