https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=n5RgMrHWHWU
Hello, is that better? Am I coming through now? I sure hope I’m not muted anymore. Here I am. Okay, let’s start that again. One of the things that I inherited from my predecessors was something called the Parish Musicians Workshop. The idea is that we gather together local musicians to study the music of the church, to study the sacred treasury of the church’s music and practice that a little bit. This was my first one. I’d never been to one before, and I got to learn a little bit about it. I really, really greatly appreciate the work of my predecessors and all of the area musicians who are on the board, basically, that help set it up. They frankly do most of the heavy lifting. I just kind of show up and do a few little things, supervise it, make sure it happens, and I gave a breakout session. Let me show you some of the secrets of the church here. This is Sacrosanctum Concilium. It’s one of the documents of the Second Vatican Council. We’ll get it a little bigger there for those on a phone. This is a rather common story. Somebody will be studying the church’s documents on music, and they’ll get to this. This is Second Vatican Council, 1962. The church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy. Therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place liturgical services. Other kinds of sacred music, especially polyphily, are by no means excluded from liturgical celebrations so long as they accord with the spirit of the liturgical action as laid down in Article 30. When I first read this, it was in my first year of seminary. And I grew up in pretty average churches, especially with the music. Usually on a Sunday, you got the old four hymn sandwich, entrance hymn, offertory hymn, communion hymn, closing hymn. That’s going to be your most common musical arrangement during a Catholic liturgy. I got into seminary, and all of a sudden we were chanting antiphons a whole lot more than I ever had in my life. I was like, okay, this is different. Most of the mass looked about the same. I really enjoyed it. But here we are doing all this chant. I decided I was going to write a… I had to take a research paper writing class, which is a great thing for a freshman to be doing, learning that skill. So I decided I would write it on the church’s music. And I got to this point, and it was a bit of a mind blower. And the thought that I had was, why haven’t we been doing this? I mean, it’s not like this is unclear, right? It’s specially suited to the Roman liturgy, therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services. Now, the answer as to why we’re not doing that is much more complicated than I care to get into tonight. But I would like to offer a little bit of commentary as to why Gregorian chant is… at least my thoughts, why Gregorian chant is specially suited to the Roman liturgy. This is basically a summary of the breakout talk that I got, which I intend to put up here on this channel here soon. So if you really, really enjoy it, you can go get the full thing. There are three basic modes of music. Any piece of music will fall into one or more of these three modes of music. The modes are the Apollonian, the Romantic, or the Dionysian. Apollonian music, Romantic music, or Dionysian music. Now, it’s important to remember that it can hit two, maybe it can hit all three. I don’t know. I’m not quite sure that’s possible. And what makes these three different modes of music different? Well, it’s what faculties of the human person that they affect most directly. These three different modes of music affect the different faculties of the human person differently depending on what sort of music it is. And so the Apollonian speaks primarily to the intellect. It goes kind of into your head. It shows you the patterns. And it’s really, it’s music that tends to speak to the intellect more. The example, I gave two examples. One of them was sacred music and the other one was secular music. So the example of sacred music I had was the Curie from the Misa Papa Marcelli by Palestrina. And the example of secular music I gave, just about a minute of Desolation Row by Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan’s music really is designed to speak to the intellect primarily. And so that’s why I thought that would be a good example of Apollonian music. For romantic music, I took the Misa Re Re Me by Allegri. And if you don’t know that one, it’s the one where the soprano goes… Oh, it’s not coming through my microphone. Hold on one second. Way up there. And the example of romantic music I gave was I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston. Things that play on your passions, things that play on your emotions. That’s an example of romantic music. It goes straight to the heart, you could say. And the example for Dionysian music was Sandstorm, everybody’s favorite middle school dance song. Kind of that insistent techno beat there gets your body moving without you really having to think about it. So we got those three different major modes of music. The Apollonian, which goes to the intellect first, the romantic, which goes to the passions, the emotions first, and the Dionysian, which goes to the body first. Now, what I argue is that Sacrosanctum Cagillian, the Gregorian chant, hits the Apollonian mode of music perfectly. That it is very focused on the text, it’s very focused on this orderly rising and falling of the melodies. It can be kind of predictable sometimes, and I actually think that that makes it very well suited for the Roman liturgy because liturgy comes down to us out of heaven, it comes to us from God. And in the same way, when the music begins by working on our intellect primarily, it has a down-flowing effect. It starts with the intellect, oftentimes the truth that your intellect connects to causes a movement of the passions, and then that settles your body down. It brings everything kind of aligned, heaven and earth connects those well. Whereas I think especially with the Dionysian, that gets your body moving immediately, that’s more of an eruption of movement, of excitement, of energy, but who knows what it’s going to produce in the rest of you. And the romantic mode of music playing with the passions, if that’s not closely joined with the appropriate thing in the Apollonian, it can create all sorts of movements in your mind, in your intellect there. And so because the Gregorian chant specifically moves the mind first, and then through the mind moves the rest of the human person, I think that is part of the reason why the church holds that up as the music most suitable to the liturgy. Now it’s not like the other forms of music are bad, that you shouldn’t dance to something with a good beat, that you shouldn’t listen to things that make you speak to your passions, but liturgy is a little different. Liturgy is something set aside, it’s sacred, it’s special, and it should not necessarily be of this world. So with that let’s take a look at some of these comments here. Yeah, started off the stream muted, what an absolutely brilliant way to start off. Corey Cobel is already a Vatican II fan just like me. Yeah, Darude Sandstorm, exactly that. Yeah, and yeah. Trey, that’s a big old question. Basically by making it simpler and a little flatter, you know, greatly expanded the use of vernacular in the liturgy, took out a lot of the symbolism and made it rather talkier. There’s a lot more talking going on, a lot less whispering prayers in Latin. It’s really hard to talk about it without going into either a whole lot of detail that would be irritating to talk about or actually just going into a church. So there you have it. And Chad says, I love music that weaves all three seemingly seamless. If you can come up with an example one that hits all three. I feel like it’s hard to get all three together. I’m not going to say that it’s impossible, but I am thinking that it is going to be very difficult. How could I know which liturgy a Catholic church is going to use ahead of time? Basically 98% of Catholic churches are going to use the Roman liturgy because they’re Roman Catholic churches. So as long as it doesn’t say like Byzantine or Chaldean Catholic, it’ll be a Roman liturgy. If you want to know more specifics, you should just take a visit. I don’t know. Right relation to the highest is important. Thanks. Who’s that guy? I have no idea. S, let’s go deep on the issues of implementation in Vatican too. Well, I don’t want to just talk that one into a microphone. Or the him, how great thou art fit in the music categories. I think that’s a good combination of the Apollonian and the romantic. And it brings the two together well. And I don’t think the romantic is bad or unsuited to the liturgy per se, but you don’t just want to go and stir up people’s emotions without being able to target that at something. So you can think of something rather simple like were you there when they crucified my lord? That can really, especially in a Good Friday service during the veneration of the cross, you can, you could really, it was very simple, kind of moves the passions a little bit, but you have a target for all of that emotion. And so it doesn’t tend to cause as much trouble. Multi-hour video on issues with Vatican too. Well, I would like to have, I would like to have some counterbalance there, so it’s not all just my ideas. Stairway to Heaven kind of pulls it off. Yeah, but what exactly is he singing about? What exactly is he singing about? I’m not, I’m not entirely sure there. Well, just because it’s so complicated and like it’s the sort of thing, it’s the sort of thing where people get one idea and go kind of crazy on it. And so getting other people’s perspectives to broaden the categories here, that’s, that’s, I think, I think would be very helpful. And just to add to that, I think it’s important to think about the, the, the, the, the, the, the, just so yeah, people are still arguing about it. And I wouldn’t want to give the impression of, of there being a unity that does not yet exist. That’s what I’m thinking. Sure. And the church, they’ll go after the highest. The rest is for the rest of life. Just remember that all of this is on the record, you know, and got to be careful with it. How would the Russian chant style like they use in some Eastern divine liturgies prepare with Gregorian chant using those categories? That’s the most moving to me. I’m not terribly familiar with kind of the more Russian chant styles. I think it would still fall into that Apollonian category because of just kind of the state of mind it gets you. It’s, it’s, it’s rather simple still, and it’s designed to draw your mind towards the text and to contemplate about it rather than, you know, specifically some dramatic romantic line to lift your heart up. And, and I don’t know if you would really rave out to it. So, I think that’s the most important thing. Yeah, that’s what I got. Is it what they sing about or what you make of it? I don’t know what they’re singing about. That’s the problem. It’s certainly some evocative, poetic imagery. Speaking of things that are evocative and poetic. There’s Ted. Yeah, I don’t know. Stairway to Heaven. Did you, have you been listening to this, Ted? Yeah, I just thought that you guys were talking about, um, liturgical music. Sure, sure. So, I gave three categories, three modes of music that people can, you could judge all music by. You’ve got the Apollonian, which speaks to the intellect first, romantic, which speaks to the passions first, and the Dionysian, which speaks to the body first. Ooh. And so, and the context was Gregorian chant is very Apollonian, and, you know, it comes down into your intellect and then washes into the rest of your person. Therefore, it mirrors the image of liturgy, the highest coming down and touching the earth. So. I love that. Yeah, yeah, that’s, um, which is interesting because I think people tend to hear that and they think, well then it’s not so much as how does it enter your person, but where does it live? And I think that people who think that haven’t spent enough time with music, you know, and so, oh, dang it. Am I frozen? Are you frozen? You’re doing just fine, Ted. You froze for a while, but your voice was coming through. So I was going to say that notion that it’s where things like just enter into your being rather than where they live can cause all kinds of trouble. Like, for instance, you might look at Gregorian chant and think that it’s like. Oh, no. Uh-oh. Now he’s frozen. Now he’s gone. He’s vanished. He’s gone entirely. Yeah. Oh, no. Yikes. I was hoping you would speak to the, uh, you know, the poetic nature of music, right? Which to me is like, that’s where that’s where the rubber really meets the road is how, how poetic is it? Right. How, how many things is it drawing in? Cause music has that resonance, right? But also that rhythm, right? And then that harmony, like these are all the different and there’s more, I’m not a music expert, right? There’s all these different components that you’re latching onto, right? And it’s much like the difference between say a church without icons and a church with icons, church without tradition and church with tradition. Like these, these differences matter. And it’s sort of like a lot of music for me, especially something like Stairway to Heaven. Look, they would have a great song. They wrote it in 20 minutes though, the saying, right? And it’s a fantastic, it’s not the best song on that album, but it is the second best song on that album. It’s a fantastic song, but it’s, it’s totally incomplete picture. Like it’s just an incomplete picture and incomplete pictures great cause you can insert your own thing into it. But I don’t think you want as much inserting my own into it in a liturgical setting as you do outside of a liturgical setting. And I think the same goes for poetry. So if you look at the poetry of some random poet out of a hat like William Blake, cause it’s a poet I know best anyway, right? You can see the difference in his poems, right? In terms of the ones that are pointing towards, you know, a religious affect, if you will, and the ones that are more pointing towards earthly aspect. And I think what you’re pointing to with your, with your music exemplification is really three, all three are necessary. People hate that, right? They just have a problem with three things being necessary, three necessary aspects to music, right? And, you know, one of them is kind of above the other two and, you know, probably one of them is in the middle and one of them is sort of down below, right? But they’re all necessary. The fact that they’re in a hierarchy doesn’t matter. Like it’s, it’s necessary. It matters because hierarchy exists and you can’t get around it, but it doesn’t matter that it’s like, it’s not a bad thing that it’s there and it’s not like, let’s try and combine it and unify it and all that. Like, and also poetry is separate from music, right? Even though you often hear poetry within music, unless it’s strictly instrumental. But then I would argue that the poetic aspect of it just changes. Right, right. Yes. Am I coming through? Yeah, yeah. I had some trouble with my cord. Uh oh. Yeah, you freaked me out because I thought my machine was broken and it was like, never occurred to me that you were muted, even though we’ve had this problem. It’s extremely common, actually. Right. My first thing was my computer’s broken because my computer’s been acting up quite a bit lately. Let’s see if we can get Ted back. Come on, Ted. That’s Ted’s computer. Ted, Ted, Ted, Ted, Ted, Ted, Ted, Ted. We’re so bad, baby. Isn’t that what the young kids are saying? I think it’s your snack. Anyway. No, okay. So I don’t know what, I missed you guys in there for a little bit. Something went haywire with the internet. But so the thing, one of the things that you’re saying, Father, you know, that with the intellect, the passions and the appetite is that music doesn’t just live in one place. Right? Like it ends up, I mean, this is the thing about music and poetry is that it works all through you. And so if you’re, but your intellect has like the greatest facility to discern between what’s good and bad for you. And so if your engagement with music is on the basis of the repetitive, which is probably the worst and or the, the, the, the passions, which is a little bit better if your passions are well formed. But those, those, it’s not just like when you engage with something like in terms of what your body is attracted to that just stays in your body, right? Because we’re these, we’re these integrated beings. And so what you end up doing is as you, as you go down to that level, especially if you’re not very careful, then you start to let all kinds of stuff into yourself that you maybe don’t want to, which is one thing. And then the other thing that I was thinking about when I was digging through what I was trying to get the internet back on is that, that you’re talking about that liturgical model, but that also is, what are they, you’d be able to remind me of the term for this, which is it’s essentially what Adam and Eve had before the fall. It’s like original integrity. It’s like original integrity, original justice, the preternatural gifts, if you want to be real fancy. Yes. Yeah. So, so that’s right. So that’s where the intellect regulates the body through the emotions, essentially. Right. Right. So the idea between integrity is that the soul had perfect command of the body. Yes. And so whatever, whatever the mind would recognize as being true, the body would just immediately be obedient to it. So you might say, you know, right now, for my sustenance, a kale salad would be the most logical and rational and really thing, good thing for me to eat. And that you would eat the kale and your passions would be like, yes, hell, this is perfectly rational. And like the full sense of the word rational, that you are properly integrated into the universe. And then it would taste good. How is that not me? I don’t understand. I, I live in the age of gnosis. I’ve never seen you eat a vegetable, Mark. I know. So true. You’ve also talked about you and M&M’s. It’s peanut butter and peanut M&M’s, right? Where you’re like, keep it out of the house. Jordan Ammons, peanut butter cups. I just had some peanut butter cups. My peanut butter cups have been upgraded since I’m not doing the shopping right now. So they’re now dark chocolate and all natural peanut butter. But yeah, not, not getting right. But that’s the age of gnosis, where we think we’re rational creatures. And it’s like, have you, have you looked at your behavior lately? You’re not a rash. You can’t do that. You can’t just go like, oh, I should eat kale and go to the gym. Oh, yeah. No, no, no, no, no. We’re definitely not like that. Yeah. We’ve got disorderly passions that get in the way of that. And you know what? Sometimes we just want to do what’s wrong. Yeah. Yeah, that’s, that’s the weird one. That’s the one that you really have to come to terms with. And a lot of people spend a lot of time excusing that. But I mean, it’s pretty easy for me to look at myself and like find time to like, no, I just, I just did that because I knew it was wrong. And I wanted to do this and it was wrong. Like there wasn’t some like, oh, it’s just mistaken. No. So this is, but this is okay. Corey’s point here, why is it the intellect? Is it not equally the beautiful and the good is the true? When I like when I’m talking about the intellect, and I’m pulling from, and I’m pulling more from like St. Thomas’s notion of the intellect. This isn’t the reason part of the reason that we get so hung up on this notion of, of the intellect is that we think of it in terms of the sort of like computational, like, like logic gate kind of thinking. And what the, at least what the Western church presented as the intellect for a long time was not was so much fuller than that. The intellect is the is the means by which you apprehend the forms of things, right? Like, the word informed in English comes exactly from the tradition where it’s like, it is how you were united to things. It’s how you came into relationship with things without destroying them, because you can come into relationship with like, food by eating it, and then it’s destroyed. But the intellect is the thing that gives you the capacity to unite yourself to something in a non-destructive manner, which as you, as you know, especially Western Christians spent a lot of time thinking about union, they saw that there are these different kinds of ways of being united to things, in which it becomes less and less about me eating you, and more and more about us like becoming something together you in other like the process of in other things. Well, Ted, I would, I would, I would add a little bit to that. I would say, it’s how we order things, and then order ourselves in relation to those things. And that’s this is, this I think is actually important. There’s a reciprocal relationship and adjustment there that happens. And that, of course, is in the knowledge engine model on my channel, Navigating Patterns, just saying. And that’s actually important, right? Because the way you order things can be suboptimal. And then you can refine that. And the thing that does that is the intellect. So the intellect is not only about relationship, but it’s about ordering and relationship, right? Ordering, ordering the thing you see, then ordering yourself, creating the relationship, and going through that over and refining that process. And that’s where we get confused, because we want like an answer. And you’re not going to get an answer. Right? So you need the process, right? But the intellect, to your point, that’s how it was viewed. The intellect is the thing that does the informing, right? The forming of the signals that come into your brain. And that’s what’s really important. And that’s all in my model, by the way, just saying, just in that video. It’s all there. Corey, we got you on. Yeah, you know, I said he wasn’t being spoken up for enough. No, no, no, I just feel like if I typing is slower, I’m mostly going to be listening because I’m honestly I don’t know much about the technical terminology and framing of these things. Even though I love music, I’m not super familiar with the no one does with Aquinas. Yeah, but no, no one knows these things, because we stop teaching these these basic things, you know, some of them were assumed and we you know, we really like a lot of my work is around I keep trying to explain this to people. We have a limited cognitive ability cognitive load. And I don’t know what it is. And I don’t know if it’s greater for me or lesser for Ted or probably not the other way around. All right, I don’t know. But I know it’s limited. And I think it’s important where you put it. And I think one of the big problems we’ve had is we’ve put people’s cognitive load towards things like memorization, right? And which is so the things we memorize, but also the process of memorization. Well, what if part of cognitive load is you can either be good, you know, let’s say you could be 80% good at memorization, but then you only have 20% good at critical thinking, or what we would call critical thinking, which I have critiques of, right? And what if in the old days, it was the other way around? And, you know, like, I don’t really like I’m not pretending I understand the answer to any of these things. I’m just saying, if that’s true, and it’s almost certainly true experimentally, by the way, saying, then what does that mean about what what we’re paying attention to? Well, I think I mean, I think in more ancient and medieval pedagogical techniques, and even up until very recently, memorization was something that was considered to be like, children really need to do this. It is extremely important for children to memorize the multiplication tables, to memorize poetry, to memorize the ending of Latin verbs, to memorize all of the Greek articles, the Bible, you know, that there’s everybody memorized. So this is the important thing, right? Like, there’s different reasons to memorize things. And the reason that I’m really interested in this is because I am an instructor. It like I but most of my instruction is in how to teach people how to do things like with their body, like anti coordination type stuff. So I’m always on the edge of or even going back and forth between first, you learn it in a rote memorized, like from a book style, and you memorize lists, and you practice even saying checklists out loud. And then you go over to the thing where you’re going to do it. And it’s like bridging a gap from one type of learning, like you have to establish the framework consciously first, and then you actually have to do it, which is completely different style of learning. But they’re both necessary. And they’re both mutually supporting. And I’m not convinced that we have a solid understanding, certainly in modern pedagogical methods of how that works, at least, you know, in most of the instructions I’ve received in most of my schooling. And so what I’m saying, the thing that I don’t understand is, yet what I’d need to learn more about is the categories and the specific technical terminology that’s used from, you know, the scholastic and the medieval, you know, philosophical from because I want to bridge all these gaps, because I think we’ve got pretty much most of what we need to fill these gaps and to come to a better understanding of how these things work, especially once we start integrating the Eastern theology ways of understanding this stuff, because that, you know, this is what gets me excited. Again, I’m mostly listening because I don’t know the technical terms, but I have a, you know, I’ve done this stuff a lot. And I think it’s really, really, really important, especially because it’s not just, you know, schools and teaching kids how to do certain things or even instruction and whatever. This is like teaching how to learn the Christian life. This is teaching how to be a human being. Like this is at the root, the core of the stuff. Or anything, right? But part of that is like, yeah, you need rote memorization as a baseline. There’s no, like, I don’t, if anybody argued against that, I’d be like, you’re not worth talking about. It depends on what you’re trying to do, right? A child doesn’t need rote memorization to learn how to be a daddy. Like Jordan Peterson gives the example of a child who’s really good at just acting and imitating. You know, we have these these mirror neurons. But you fundamentally need it, Corey. Like, that’s what liturgy is, right? That’s what sets the baseline for these other things to kind of live within. But then the question is how much do you rely on it? And then the problem with that is some people need to rely on it a lot and some people can’t. Well, and there’s, I mean, part of that has to do with uptake. The thing is, I think it’s about the less about like having done the action of rote memorization, but it’s like having material for the intellect. I mean, I’m thinking about this in terms of something very analogous to like, hylomorphic being where you’ve got matter and form. And if you don’t have one or the other, then you don’t have being, right? Just matter doesn’t have being and just form doesn’t have being. You have to have a substantial form. And memorization is what gives you the material for thinking. And then you also have to learn the patterns of thinking, which the the the trivium, I mean, that’s exactly what it was about. It was about you memorize things so you know stuff, and then you learn how to work with it. And then you learn how to express it. And so when and then I, you know, I started going back again, the notion of genius is the shift from knowing what everyone else had said before you to coming up with original things. It’s like when you read someone like St. Thomas Aquinas, who’s a genius into the old definition, I don’t read that they think, wow, he was like such a dullard, who just like copied everything, like, obviously not. He’s just like, there’s just like all this brilliant insight. And then as you go in, you’re going to get all together into a big, coherent full. And he knew where things went. He knew what was more important and what was less important. And he knew what didn’t fit. And so what do you want? So then on the other side, I think one of the things that we’ve done this weird thing where we’ve on the other side, we’ve taken the arts, particularly as this notion is that it’s all just like you express the pattern that’s in your head, and people don’t have any material to it. And so most of what the generators trash. And I compare that to like, you read Moby Dick, right, which is a story about whalers. But like, the thing is so full of like, literary and biblical references, and just like, bizarre, like historical and scientific and that like natural history knowledge that I’m not blanking on his name, the author’s name, Herman Melville, my wife is yelling at me, she’s Herman Melville had it’s like, that’s part of what makes it so amazing. The fact that he’s weaving these crazy biblical illusions into it. It’s like not only does not detract from it or make it like less original or something like that. It’s like, that’s where you’re like, it goes from like a story about a crazy guy chasing a whale to having like the bottom drop out of it. And you just like feel the depth of human existence in the cosmos. It’s exactly the fact that he like memorized forces of the Bible. So right, yeah, I think I think that there’s like you have you have to have both. But Mark, your point about like, what you give your attention to that there’s some certain cognitive load that you have. And I mean, that is going all the way back to music, right? That there’s if you’re drawn to music for the wrong reasons, then you end up wasting your attention on things that shouldn’t get it. Right. And so Gregorian chant, let’s say one of the things that it does is it is it brings all of that that whole bird because one of the things that’s so powerful about music and poetry is that it does really integrate with your whole person. But if you’re basing it on what is my body drawn to, or even what am I, you know, my emotions drawn to, you might be ordering your time to take your you know, your like time attention and what’s the other one energy and energy and attention, directing it and patterning yourself after something you really shouldn’t be. Let’s say you can see this in the case of something like rap, where it’s something like obviously pathological and destructive. But like, but like, it doesn’t matter that I understand that intellectually, when the guy pulls up next to me and his bass is totally pumping the stoplight and it’s like, you know, it just like it starts to get you. So then it’s been if you just like fill your life with that, it’s like, what am I being ordered towards by listening to dirty rap all the time? It’s like, right, not good stuff. I’m talking about the liturgy, right? Like, you know, there’s a time and a place to listen to the the sappy love songs, and there’s a time and a place to just kind of boogie, you know, but liturgy ain’t that. Right. Well, and you know, it’s, it’s, let’s suppose something crazy happened, like this priest came to your house and like wanted to play yes for you, because it was really important to him that you hear some early yes, which you hadn’t heard in quite a while, right? That’s like an important connection to make with your host in this case. And like, it’s not liturgical, obviously, right? But it was important at the level that we were at, you know, sort of, you know, not meeting for the first time, right, but spending really, you know, quite a bit of time together for the first time, like a whole week, really, at least six and a half days. It sounds very interesting. Tell me more about it. Yeah, I was gonna say, it sounds oddly specific. It does, doesn’t it? It was a wonderful, let’s say that it was close to the edge, you know, 1975, first track on the same titled album. Right. Well, and, and, and, and hearing that, like, like, I’m, I like music, but I’m not musically inclined, I can’t play an instrument, tried many times, tiny hands, tiny, tiny girl hands, you know, tried many times to play guitar and piano and those things. And I don’t study music, right? I have a sort of rudimentary understanding of these things. But it’s kind of important to, like, meet that way, like, what kind of music do you like? That’s actually important. But, no one’s gonna answer. Well, my primary music is Gregorian chant. That’s not, that’s the kind of music you listen to when you’re on your way to church. Like that’s, or when you’re in church, right? Or you’re a monk, right? But that’s the tone. Well, it’s not, it’s not nobody, right? This is where people get tripped up. It’s like, when nobody would say, it’s not really nobody, right? Because there’s always outliers and there’s always monks and there’s always, right, people who listen to nothing. But that’s always the, you know, a lot of people listen to nothing but EDM. Fair enough. I like a little EDM every once in a while, right? But, you know, is that healthy? Do you need, like, a balance? Do you need some classical in there? Anything you can say about 90% of people is still really useful. Right. 90% of people are not going to be listening primarily to Gregorian chant. Right. Well, and the thing is, though, you know, Ted, I wanted to share it because you gave me a huge insight when you’re talking about Moby Dick, which is one I like to use when I talk about postmodernism. It could be that a lot of the idea of postmodernism, the whole of postmodernism, only works with people who don’t have a familiarity with the Bible or who have a familiarity but not a poetic understanding of the Bible. And so they’re not understanding those references that you talked about, which means, of course, Moby Dick is not about the feminist struggle to break free from the patriarchy. Right. Because, of course, it’s not because it’s grounded in this other thing that you hopefully have some rote memorization of, although I didn’t. A little angry about that now. You know, so you would never fall into the trap of arbitrary, you know, arbitrary assignment, which is effectively what postmodernism does. It allows you to make an arbitrary assignment of things. Yeah. Well, and I was going to bring up, Corey, right. So we’re talking about this, you know, let’s say one of the diagrams that you could use for this is like, let’s say sacred and profane, profane not in the negative sense, just, you know, some things are more sacred and some things are more profane. And so then we went on a pilgrimage and you got all these young guys from Catholic high schools on the first night of the pilgrimage. And what do they get around and do? I’m asking you, Corey, you’re allowed to say. Oh, I’m you’re asking. It’s not rhetorical. Just keep going. No, I’m literally asking you to tell people because I know they broke out the guitar and they were singing in a circle, like mostly Irish folk music, which was awesome. And rebellion songs, Irish rebellion songs, you know, like sticking it to the black and tan. So the happy songs, the happy songs. Yeah, because all of their love songs are sad and all of their war songs are happy. Yes. That was the disturbing thing about the art conference that I heard from their vendor cliques. I listened to his Arc Day three, which is a ridiculous video. It’s just everything wrong with Protestants right there. And one video don’t understand the divine feminine. Yeah, I put an excruciating comment on that one. But the one thing he said was he said, well, they played a couple of different songs during the conference. And one of them was from Hamilton, which is, you know, you know, you can kind of justify that. But at the end, they played something from Les Miserables, which I’ve never heard. It was one about the French Revolution. And I’m kind of like, well, yeah, what do you expect liberals to come up with? Like, they don’t have an anchoring in the highest. So the music that’s going to emerge, especially if they’re not curating it correctly, which I guarantee you they were not, is going to be revolutionary. Because what option is there? Like either you’re pointing up or you’re a revolutionary. I don’t know. They could have written a song about Don Juan of Austria. Don Juan of Austria is going off to war. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I want to write that song now. The Holy Alliance. Speaking of the whole, it’s called the Holy Alliance, isn’t it? I think it is. Yeah. Holy League or Holy Alliance. Holy League. It’s the Holy League. Thank you. Yes. There were several battle flags of the Holy League at the Kogrebich. Totally awesome flag. The original was like, I think, like seven feet by 14 feet or something enormous. And it’s all just this like gorgeous, intricately embroidered, huge blue flag with the crucifix and all the, you know, the various kings who were involved. Totally awesome flag. Like if you’re ever going to go out to war in a battleship, highly recommend it. No, the new war is all about hiding. Yes, this is true. Yeah. Not getting in the giant line and all seeing who can shoot as quickly as possible the other person, the ship of the lines. Yeah. No, I mean, it is, it is interesting. I mean, one of the weird things about the pilgrimage is that you, I mean, is that you could see the way that you could, you’re kind of moving through these different modes all the time. Right. And so like you’re sometimes you’re just like singing, like hiking songs while you’re going. And then other times, like people are chanting rosaries. And it’s like, if I don’t know, it all feels like very natural. And there’s this sort of like, I mean, there’s a reason that like, you know, like Catholics, particularly traditional Catholics tend to have like a deep love for folk music, which is really interesting. And like traditional folk music in particular. And so like, like I was it over at a family’s house a couple of weeks ago, and they’re just like a couple of the grown up siblings that broke out the guitar and they’re playing like a bunch of old American folk songs, but I only knew like half of them. I mean, they were schooling me. So it was a, it’s interesting, the way those things actually do seem like in practice, they actually seem to feed into each other very much. And there’s this sort of like a space, something about having the sacred actually makes a space for the profane. And this actually reminds me of the hillbilly Thomas, who are, it’s a bunch of Dominican Friars who are bluegrass band, because that actually exists. And it’s fantastic. But like they did an interesting podcast with Dr. Jennifer Frey on her podcast, Sacred and Profane Love. And they’re talking about that interaction between the fact that right there, they’re Friars. And so they sing, they chant the hours together in their study house. But then they also then they go out and they’re singing all these bluegrass ballads and stuff. It’s cool. It’s a cool thing. So I’m curious to bring it back to the modes then. How would you respond to, if we’re talking about the Apollonian mode as being like maybe the highest or the most appropriate for liturgy, why then, obviously, you know, setting aside the Vatican II discussion and the arguments for, but why is there value in the beauty of the Latin mass, where you can’t understand anything that’s being spoken or sung, assuming you don’t speak Latin and have not learned the mass yet, yet you would find it a very edifying experience, would you not? Well, the answer is obvious, just to learn Latin. No, no, no, not at all. No, no, I totally disagree. You can understand it. That’s the problem. This is where people get mixed up. They think like propositional knowledge is required for understanding. But the way Ted knows how to be a dad has nothing to do with propositions at all. Right? He has an understanding of how to parent his children. It has nothing to do with reading a book about how to parent children. And so you get an understanding of things without the language. Although I think that’s a that’s a mismap. I don’t think we should equate the propositional to. Sorry, I’ve got a better I’ve got a better answer for you that I think or sorry, Mark. But yeah, I do think this is a better answer. So I’m gonna give it to you. So when we started going to Latin mass, I was working at a butcher shop. I was working on the cutting floor of a small butcher shop. And the music that the guys I mean, the cutting floor is just like all guys. There’s you know, it’s like, I can’t imagine why there’s no women back there, swinging sharp knives around and hauling, you know, 150 pound chunks of beef around in a room just can’t imagine why it’s all guys back there. Who knows? Anyway, but the music that they play there was just, I mean, like, absolutely like the most like gutter trash music possible. Actually, at one point, it got so bad that I would just start singing hymns. And one of the guys one of the like two bosses in there, he’s like, you guys see what you’re done like, heads trying to sing the demons out of the room. Now, you know, they’re all the kind of like, sort of grew up in country, shorter grew up in church, but none of them did. But like their grandparents did. He’s like, you guys let something in the room with his music and now that’s trying to sing the demons out with him, aren’t you like, yeah, that’s actually exactly what I’m trying to do here. But then we saw I’d have five days of that. And then we’d go to we’d go to high mass on Sunday. And you want to talk about a strange experience. It was it was that one. And like, we’d only been going to mass for like a month or two at that point. And so right. So I didn’t know all of these Latin hymns and the antiphons. I didn’t really understand what was going on with the proper and I couldn’t find them in the missile or any of that. But like, Corey, when I tell you that when you hear a men’s school singing the proper and I have no idea what they’re saying, it’s still so obviously ordering me towards God in charity to be there hearing that. And so in some sense, it’s actually less potent now that I’ve been around it a lot and that I sing in choir and that like, I have a knowledge of the technique and the language a lot more than I did, say, a year and a half ago. There was some the contrast was so intense that it was like, oh, this is this is like, this is being being ordered towards the highest like I can see it and I can and I can I can hear I can hear it. I know it and I can feel it. And I can feel it in my body, like all of them, like it’s going on and on every level all at once. So so that that that that’s what like zero experience of Gregorian chant. And what’s funny is it’s like years ago before, you know, even before we’re, we’re on this process to can to becoming cat and before we became Catholic, I had like wanted to like Gregorian chant. And I tried to like Gregorian chant and I didn’t like Gregorian chant. Like I listened to some Gregorian chant. I was like, oh, man, it’d be really cool to like this. And I just like I did. And so it’s weird. It’s not an repetitive thing. And like, there is music that on those levels, I say like I engage with more readily than than Gregorian chant. But it was exactly what Father said that it just it gets to you through a different series. It gets to you through a different process. And it works on you in a different way. And what it does when it’s in you is also something different. So, yeah, does that answer your question at all? So yeah, that’s kind of getting at what I’m what I’m asking. And maybe Father Eric can can clarify for me, is that still like, in the Apollonian mode? Or is that more approaching assuming so assume that like, you know, Latin, you know, it’s being said, and you have that experience, which you know, that there is a certain kind of experience when you’re experienced something beautiful with novelty that you’ve never experienced before. And there’s a certain kind of overwhelming, like a sense of awe that comes with that. But once you get into it, and you know, you experience this when you encounter a truly beautiful piece of music, and then study it and spend time with it. It’s the same with the scriptures, right? Like you can come back to a scripture hundreds and hundreds of times. And but like, once it gets into you, then it resonates with you on a different level. And suddenly you’re reaping on the hundred and one time that you read it, you know, not necessarily because, you know, it’s not just your, and I don’t want to hear the words intellect and rational, I don’t know exactly the way that you all would use that, obviously, that’s included. But it also includes the embodiment, and it includes the Dionysian sense as well, it seems to me. So ideally, would it not be like an equivalent mix of all three oriented towards the highest? So you are not hermetically sealed off from yourself. Right? You’re an integrated whole, you have these distinct faculties, and it’s useful to talk about these distinct faculties, but they all come together. And so that’s why I was kind of focusing on where it enters. And Ted brought in the insight of, and it’s also where it lives. But that’s not the only thing that happens. And so, you know, this was something I maybe emphasized a little better in my talk, but, you know, the truths expressed by the Gregorian chant, which are not merely propositional. And that’s, that was a good reminder for me. Because the truths can just be embodied in music in a non propositional way. It’s sort of, and this is, this is something they talk about grace, to and the soul, it kind of overflows from the intellect into the passions, right? And then begin, or it flows down or it orders them, places them in the right spot. And so, and I think there is some worthy church music that hits both at the same time, because like I said, these different modes of music are not hermetically sealed. So the Misere Reme by Allegri, with the, you know, you can, you could look at the words and see, you know, have mercy on me, oh Lord. You could look at that, and you could have an understanding, but that’s what that’s about. And then you could just listen to it. And it also moves the passion together with a higher truth, right? So it’s not just, you know, saccharine and playing around with the passions, it can move them all together. The Gregorian chant being a little more purely Apollonian still has its effect on the passions, but now it’s flowing down, right? It’s emanation. Yes. Rather than just like moving with something, and that’s kind of emergence, right? And who knows what’s going to emerge from that? You might just hit somebody. I’m sure it’s happened in a mosh pit before, like I did nothing to you, but you’re moshing it out at a Metallica conference. You know, it’s the Bay Area, it’s 1984, people are crazy, you just hit somebody. Yeah. Do they call them conferences? And it’s interesting. I mean, do they call it a conference? I mean, the concert. Even in, even in like the high masses that we do, you actually do see like an arc to that, right? Because the, when we, the entrance and recessional, like those tend to be, you know, unless it’s like a very penitential mass, they tend to be like very, there’s some like raw raw to it. Like we think Christus Vincit on the way out today. And it’s like, you know, you get that bass line going. It’s just like, yeah, that, yes. Oh, and just like, and so that gets you in a way where it’s like, it is like, there’s something about, you know, that like deep, you know, I mean, even just like in the analysis of like, as a man singing, there’s like in deep bass lines, and there’s that particular like, rhythm to it that grips you sort of like a marching, you know, it’s got that. I mean, it’s interesting, right? Because Corey and I have talked about this quite a bit, like how moving the bagpipes are, right? It’s like, there’s something about that, that just like, stirs you in a way. What’s weird about the bagpipes, though, is something like that, or like the drums is that they could like, man, like you could be going off to, to fight for, you know, for God and country and defending, you know, defending the helpless, or you could be going off to like, go take over someone and burn their village down. And like, the drums kind of work the same way either way, right? And so that’s, that’s that ambiguity when you’re at that, at that mode, where it’s like, you want to make sure that you were ordered properly. It’s not then bad, right? This is the thing that this is probably one of the fundamental misunderstandings that the whole West had moving into the romantic era about what the, what Christianity had to say about the passion, was that they’re like, oh, the passions are evil. Like, no, no, no, no, the passions are vital. Like, you can’t do anything without your emotions. You have to have emotion. It’s just, can you get them headed in the right direction? And this is C.S. Lewis, and the abolition of man is his point is like, when education ceases to be about directing people’s emotional lives towards the good, then they will no longer like, have any motivation to do what’s good. And then, and then you just see trash, like, there’s no way around that. And so that it’s not so much that we say there’s a higher and think that, oh, well, then you can just you just have that thing, and you don’t need anything else. And anything less than the higher thing is just like, you’re wasting your time for something. And like, yeah, the fact that like, my own life is ordered that way, I don’t like stop eating, because like, the intellectual life is somehow higher than the bodily life, which it is the intellectual life is higher than the bodily life. But that doesn’t mean that the bodily life isn’t good and necessary, and to be cared for, and to be appropriately ordered. It’s it’s an argument about the hierarchy, not about that, the value or the goodness. And what I really, that was all brilliant, I really noticed that the appropriate time for the Christus fiend sheet is the recessional. When you’re marching back into the world, right? Yeah, it’d be really weird to do that one at the offertory, right? Like, all right, we’re all pumped up now. And the priest is going to whisper in Latin for seven minutes. Yeah, there’s a pattern, there’s a pattern for how and when you engage in it. What’s a pattern? Pattern is an expression of a hierarchy, right? Yeah. And worse, but McCoy, I want to, I want to see if I want to play with an idea, because I don’t. You think people have this worked out, and I don’t think they do, right? What’s the, if rationality is the ordering, then intellect is your ability to see, eyes to see that ordering. Exactly right. Mark did it again. Hasn’t read a single book from the medieval era, and he understands intellect, deuce, and ratseal. There you go. Not a single one either. Yeah. Well, and that, and that’s the thing, like, we want to push that down in the age of gnosis here, we want to, we want to know it. And it’s like, what that means is that, you know, we were talking about this earlier. You can know a song without understanding the lyrics, and then learn the lyrics later, and then you know the song better, right? Then you can know something about them. Like, I got educated on early yes, which I had had familiarity with and enjoyed. But then I got educated by Father Eric here on early yes. And, you know, he revivified some knowledge for me, which is that the lead singer used the voice as an instrument and didn’t, like, lyrics aren’t, propositionally meaningful in yes songs. And I was like, oh yeah, I heard that before. But I totally forgot, right? And yeah, I was actually a big yes fan when I was younger, because man, they get, they get some good albums. They got some real bangers, yeah. Right, right. And, and a lot of that was prompted by the art that I have, because I have some Roger Dean original art signed, signed by him, in fact. And he was the artist for a lot of their albums. Yes. So, you know, and that was a nice, nice art connection that we could make around our highly intellectual discussions. And fortunately, we had many non-intellectual discussions too. And we had some pretty good old ones too. We had the whole, happily. Yeah, we had the whole darkness falling on us in the middle of the woods and not knowing if we were going to survive. That was great too. I don’t think we would have frozen to death, but it would have been really unpleasant. It would have been a nasty night, dude. It would have been a really nasty night. Yeah. We would have been trying to figure out how to get a fire going without matches. Corey, do you remember that book we were talking about on, on the pilgrimage, Deep Survival? Yep. Do you remember this? Yes. There’s, there’s numerous stories about people like Father Eric and Mark going off when it’s only like 50 out and getting lost in some state parks that they’ve been in 15 times and then die. There it is. Yes. So I’m glad you guys made that. St. Joseph kept my battery alive. Dude. Yeah. You want miracles? I was like, no way. This is great. I highly, I highly recommend petitioning St. Joseph. He is quite the help. That’s amazing. Yeah. That’s a fast, by the way, that is a fascinating book. And Deep Survival is just in terms of kind of all of this discussion that’s been going on. I read that one probably 15 years ago and like this in terms of, yeah. Oh yeah. I’m glad to hear that Corey. It is just, it is absolutely remarkable. Basically his, his thesis can be summed up as in survival situations, the number one most important quality is your capacity to see the situation as it actually is and not as you want it to be. Yes. That’s like, that’s 100% of our market. I did. We got to a certain point like, yeah, we’re not getting out of here on our own. We’re just going to call somebody. No, there was, there was all this pre discussion, right? There was this, because, because by the way, it’s like, there’s going to come a time and it’s going to be too dark. We need to know what that time is before it arrives. And I was like, that’s a good point. We’re going to keep track of that. And then, and then it was, we’re going to stop when that happens. It doesn’t matter where we are. We’re just going to stop when we can’t see the trail. And that’s exactly what we did. We stopped and we didn’t move again. And we waited until they came with ATVs and saved us. Yeah. No, I mean, that’s like, I’m, I’m, I’m impressed. Like that’s pretty, that’s pretty dead on. Like it, it, it, well, one of the things that’s interesting that another point he makes that stuck with me until now is that he said that there’s actually a, a certain age of children younger than which they, they tend to survive very well because they don’t like rationalize the situation. They don’t think I’m bigger than this. I can just make it. So they’re like, I’m cold. I’m going to go find somewhere warm and dry, you know, I’m lost. I’m going to sit here until someone finds me. And like, oftentimes the biggest problem for children in that situation is that they’re so good at hiding. The rest of us can’t find them, but it’s the, it’s the grownups who are like, Oh, no, no, no, no. I totally know what’s going on. And he’s got this, my favorite part of it. He calls it, he calls it bending the map where you start rationalizing the discrepancy between the map either in your head or on the pages on you that you have, whatever, and what you’re actually seeing. And you’re like, I know that mountain should be like, you know, Eric, I don’t, I don’t like this talk. Can you mute him? This is too close to all three of us are admins, Mark. It won’t do anything. That’s true. I was thinking about it. I’m like, I don’t want to hear this right now. This sounds hauntingly familiar. I don’t like any of it. Yeah, it’s just, it’s really, I mean, there’s so many things in there that are correspond as well. Like, so I have this notion that I’ve been playing around with some, that is probably not a popular one. But my notion is that life is a lot more simple and a lot more difficult than most people think that it is. And so most of the complexity in the world comes not out of actual complexity, but other people’s attempts to work their way out of real difficulties. And you can go into that in the moral sense. But like in the actual sense, you know, one of the weird things about getting lost is if you just walk downhill, you will eventually find symbols that you’ll find people. If you walk downhill, you will always end up where people are, because I am I’m so tempted to mute you. Yeah, no, there was there were two, there were three. Yeah, there were three points where I was like, looking back, I’m like, you complete retard. And I’m a I was a Boy Scout, like, I know better and the over rationalization. Well, then that’s, and that’s why we’re in trouble. A lot of the problems we have to your point, like, life is very, very simple. And what we do is we rationalize it incorrectly, right? We find the wrong ordering. And then, you know, we’re worried about what’s going on halfway around the world to people, we can’t physically cannot help. Right. And then our attention is there instead of on the fact that we’re lost in the woods. And then we’re like, well, you know, and, you know, I mean, that’s only a slight exaggeration. I mean, really, a lot of people just get wrapped up. And so my friend was driving up to Massachusetts, and her car started to do something funny. And it only does it at idle, for whatever reason. So it drives fine. And she was absolutely panicking. And I was like, All right, look, you just need to get to a hotel and go to sleep. And literally all you need to do, you don’t need to worry about the car, or figure out how you broke it. I told her at one point, I said, You’re not smart enough to break a car. Like, so that didn’t happen. So put that out of your mind. And well, it works. In this case, I know the person very well, right? It’s like, put that out of your mind. You need to go 3.6 miles to this hotel, and get a good night’s sleep. And then I was like, and call me in the morning. And then somehow I forgot to put my phone back on. But when she get up in the morning, she just drove to where she was going. And everything was fine. But in the moment, she was so panicked. She was rationalizing how the car broke as if knowing how the car broke would help you fix it, which by the way, it won’t just to hint when a car breaks like that. Knowing how it happened is not going to fix the car. You don’t reverse the operation, and then the car. It doesn’t actually matter how it happened. In that case. So what we do, we create these problems. And then it turned out the simple fix was drive 3.6 miles to the hotel, and go to sleep and wake up and the morning continue your journey. That was the whole solution to the whole problem. Yeah. Well, you know, it’s interesting. So I do a little bit of I do a little bit of treatment. I’m going to very quickly just say the words informational diabetes. Yes. Yep. The flood of information causes information. I was just going to say Sally Jetson really well. I was just going to say existing in the modern world in our modern culture is the same as being lost in the woods. There is no difference. Like, the only way to learn how to see properly is to break a whole bunch of stuff in an organized, you know, way. So you break the things that are fake, I guess, to learn how to see the things that are real. But we like the fake things. Or you could have the or you could be lost in the dark woods halfway through your life and be met by the ghost of virginal and led through hell up to the top of Mount Purgatory. I would see those nice park rangers and their ATVs. That would make a good story. Ted, you should write like a long story, like maybe a poem about that. Maybe a poem. Yeah, maybe someone should do that. No, I it is interesting because I do probably like one or two like arborist jobs a month. I’ve got a friend of mine. He’s a climber. And so we like get jobs and help each other out with it. It’s like a fun variation for what I do. But it’s not infrequent where if you have a multi-day job or doing some high risk tree removal, where at the end of the day, we’ll be like, totally exhausted. And like, we’ve got this crazy plan for how we’re going to like, rig this stuff up and get all this stuff down. And we’re like, we go home, and we show up the next day. And all right, I’m going to try to just ignore that. We’ll go home and go to sleep. And we’ll wake up the next day. And we’ll look at the tune realize we could cut one branch off and then fill the whole thing and be done. And it’s like just the fact that we have like worked ourselves into the state of exhaustion and inability to see what’s going on because we’ve got like we’re on this granular level of we have to get like all the branches off the tree so that we can take it down in pieces. And then there’s something about sometimes about just acknowledging that limitation, showing up the next day and being like, oh, you know, we were completely overthinking this. And now, sometimes that simplicity is just like, you just have to suffer. Like, that’s the reason that the whole notion of like, life is not simple, but it’s hard is, you know, I mean, this is I think I see this a lot with parenting, too. Right. We have these crazy like, systems of doing things with children. When like the answer for most people is just that like, you kind of have to learn how to deal with being around your kids. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, individualism kind of causes that this idea that we’re individuals means we have to know more about the world than we actually do. Like, I don’t I don’t have to know about CS Lewis’s space trilogy, because I can just ask Ted, like, why do I feel like I don’t need to do that? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, and that’s my friend, my friend Brandon, who’s a father of many children, his oldest is like 16. He’s he joked about how he’s like, you know, how his brain’s going. I was like, Yeah, but if you notice what you do, you’re just like, you call one of your kids over and you ask them the question, and they didn’t give you the answer. I was like, you may not literally you may not know as much as you did when you were, you know, in some of these areas, when you were like 25 years old, because you haven’t like worked really hard and done this stuff, like, you now have access to knowledge and skills that are way beyond you, because you’re willing to trust your family to know how to do this stuff. Exactly. And then, you know, that’s, that’s a cool thing. I mean, it’s just really interesting the way and the way the way that that can happen and not I’ve been blessed with siblings to where I can do that, where I can, like, I have, I have siblings where I can call them up and be like, I don’t know how to do this, or how to think about this. And I’m like, Oh, yeah, the answers just whatever. They already know. Well, that’s one of the good things about verveckis work is that he stresses this distributed cognition now, because he doesn’t take it far enough, right. But, but the idea that we can rely and should rely on distributed cognition is anti individualist. Fundamentally, it’s like, yeah, there’s a cognition out there that’s greater than you, it’s called everybody else, or any group of people that isn’t you is greater than you cognitively, just has to be right, whether you’re materialistic or not, you’re already you’re done in at that point. And then once you understand that, if you can find it, if you can find the humility in yourself to trust that, even though it’s going to betray you once in a while, right, but you betray yourself once in a while, too. So really, isn’t that big a deal, right? That’s better for you, because it takes all that cognitive load off of you. And now you can focus on the things you’re really good at, and let other people focus on the things that they’re really good at. And if you can trade that back and forth, it’s better for everybody. Like that’s generative, because now you’re not just parasitic on that stuff, right? You’re not just using AI to try and program when you can’t, right? Like, it’s way better. Yeah, yeah. I’m gonna call it a night. I got an early morning. I was just gonna say, I gotta get going too. Good to see all you guys. It’s gonna be me and Mark. Here we go. It’s gonna be me alone in the arena with this lion. Dragon. Can’t wait to hear how it goes. Wait, what is it, the left handed monster of the Peterson sphere or something like that? The Peterson sphere, yes. Okay. Who is this? That’s Mark. I’m still waiting on a cool nickname like that. I don’t know if I want a cool nickname like that. It’ll come. You can’t force a nickname. I shouldn’t even voice my desire. It’s against the code. All right. All right, guys. Oh, goodness, goodness. Yeah, man, my little opening monologues proved quite fruitful so far. Yeah, I like that. I like that outline. I thought it was very useful. I have almost no idea where that tripartite structure came from. It just came up in the art of liturgical music with I took when I was in seminary, Dr. Prowse. And my classmates are such Philistines. They were like, oh, that class is so boring. And I’m like, this is the best freaking class I’ve ever taken in my life. I knew it. We’re just going through all the history of church music and talking about it. What more do you want? It’s amazing. Right. No, I like that you brought it up. And I was just, you know, of course, I already knew, well, this is near and dear to his heart. So he’ll be all kind of happy talking about this. And then I like how it kind of branched out into this larger discussion about rationality and intellect. It’s actually like, you know, poor Corey is like, I’ve often wondered about these things. I’m like, yeah, that’s because absolutely no one’s talking about it. And in fact, I think there’s I think there’s a ton of stuff that nobody actually knows. I think one of the things like if you haven’t heard Jonathan Peugeot’s arc talk, like, well, I mean, and I’m not, I’m actually not being hyperbolic. That’s the best talk ever on anything. I mean, that is just the best talk. Like, first of all, we learned that stuff in seminary. Well, see that. But that’s the thing. The number of times he said basically Plato had this all worked out, guys, you know, like I was like, yes. And you people just aren’t paying attention to the fact that this stuff is already known. And, you know, apparently there’s a medieval model of intellect versus rationality that most people don’t know. And I honestly, it might just be right versus left brain. Our McGill-Chris model. It can be thought about that way. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, we flat out stole a bunch of stuff from that. None of us read the silly book. It’s like 50 billion pages, but dense pages of research. But yeah, we flat out stole that. We’re like, oh, and I already knew a bunch of right, right, left brain stuff because it’s actually well published. Most of that work was done in the 80s and 90s. But yeah, we flat out were like, yeah, absolutely. We’ll just divide it in the left and right because that’s not wrong. And it’s close enough. And it’s not 100 percent, but like nothing is. Even if in a left handed person, their right brain is actually on the left. Right, right. It doesn’t. Yeah, it doesn’t make any difference. The accuracy of the mapping at the material levels irrelevant. The materialists don’t like that. So if you don’t like that, you’re a materialist, by the way. It’s a good tell. Right. And then that whole idea of accuracy also wraps you up in the materialism. But really, that subtle difference, and it’s not so subtle between rationality and intellect, right, the ability to understand the rationality is disordering. That’s really important because placing the constraints and I know we had a lot of talk about this. I know I’ve got the I’ve got the. The this little painting here, which is available on on my shop, by the way, shop market wisdom dot org. Buy one where the two different. Let’s get a good look at that. Let’s get a good look at that. There’s two different types of pointing, right? You can point in one way. You can point in one way with the woman pointing at the star, right? And then you can point in the other way. The man points down at the thing he built and the thing he built is the thing the woman standing on to be the same height. And and there are different types of constraint. Right. So men often constrained by building structures and keeping things inside like a cage. Women constrained by pointing and that keeps your attention closer to that direction than any other. Those are two different types of constraint. I don’t think people understand that. And then there’s the third condition, which is unconstrained. There’s chaos. And and and also this idea of three things. People have a really hard time with that. I have a video on that too, just put out recently, right? You have a really hard time with the dip that we’re not stuck in this binary where it’s like religious or secular, right? That’s a ridiculous frame, right? We’re not stuck in this atheist or believer. We’re not we’re not stuck in this left or right, right? Everything’s got three aspects to it. And when you don’t have that appreciation, it’s really hard to understand things like intellect and rationality. And what does it mean to be logical, right? And what does it mean to be emotional? Why is nihilism present? Like you can’t you can’t balance nihilism, right? If you do like religion and nothingness, it doesn’t you can’t think about the world that way. It doesn’t work. It’s too it’s too flat. It’s too reduced. That’s why I like your three types of music. It’s like, no, there’s three types of use, three aspects that music is appealing to. And yeah, you can tie that in. One’s more emanation, right? And the emanation moves the other two, right? But it’s more emanations. It’s not that the others are bad, right? And they all have their place. That’s the other thing. You want one answer. So that I like it when you re-enchant like that. That was a good a good enchantment from my perspective. Well, we just got to thank Dr. Proussum wherever he got that from. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, that. Yeah, it’s you know, you. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I just feel like it’s my show and I should talk more. Yeah, yeah. No church isn’t supposed to be like the rest of the world. That’s that’s really important. I mean, I think with the identity crisis, right, this identity politics is like everybody wants a single identity and it’s like, I think that’s why orthodoxy is so important. Orthodox and on various levels, rather more traditional Catholics are the ones that are kind of they’re holding on to people right now, right? And I don’t even necessarily mean traditional Latin mass, but like young people, people my age, it’s like they want to have a liturgy with gravity. Right. If they can go to a novus order with some with some gravity to it, that’s that’s plenty for a lot of people, you know, because we don’t like taking things in the world with that kind of gravity, you know, and you shouldn’t baseball. Right. It’s like it’s like when you see these kids at like a like a kids, no, the parents, the parents at like a seven year old soccer game and they’re like screaming at the refs because they blew a call. They blew a call. It’s like. My friend, seven year olds playing soccer. This is just supposed to be fun. It’s good for them. Glad you’re doing it. Glad you brought your kids there. But but like what do you. This guy’s getting paid like 10 bucks to run around after a bunch of seven year olds kicking a soccer ball like be a piece, my friend. And why should he be perfect when you’re not? And that’s one of the things we miss, right? Because we just assume that things are perfect because because they’re rational. Psychologists figured that out. Even psychology has figured that out. It’s called the fundamental attribution error. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Like when you’re rude to somebody, it’s because you were having a bad day. It’s because your kid was up throwing up all night because you have to work. Right. It was a good read. OK. Yeah. And then you were rude to somebody because you were low on energy and your body was full of cortisol and you were interpreting everything as a threat. You know. Right. But when the person, you know, who cut you off and trap, well, they’re just a bad person. Well, clearly, clearly. Yeah. They’re just I mean, what other reason do I have access to other than good and bad at that point? Right. And it’s like, you know, that’s why there’s some guy was it said, judge not lest you be judged yourself for the measure with which you measure be measured out to you. Mark, you remember who said that? No idea. OK. Not well enough read, I’m afraid. OK. Oh, Sally Jo coming in with a little more important stuff here. When nothing has gravity, then politics will. And that’s been ugly. Exactly. That’s the political frame taking over. Yeah. Being the primary frame or the economic frame. Right. And that was that came out in Van der Kley’s talk on Arc Day three. Right. But the interesting thing with the Peugeot talk was he’s basically coming to the conclusion that 80 percent of the people there are Christians. And it’s like, what possible other way do you think that would go down? Like, do you think an atheist can care that much about culture and society? I mean, ultimately, they can’t on average. Right. Not all of them, but they can’t. They don’t have the mechanism because they don’t have the religious framework that would enable them to even interact at that level. And then so 80 percent of the people there in a very secular place. Right. They’re in England or in London. Right. But it’s not just that they were there, but the ones that were speaking were largely Christian or religious of some kind. Of course, they’re the ones that are going to do the work. Atheists don’t do that kind of work. You know what I mean? Like, Sam Harris is not getting people together because he doesn’t like church. What’s a gathering of people? Like, you know, like I get some point. That’s why they all need to have an app. Right. Right. They have an app because that’s for individuals. An app that separates them because the meditation is very much like you, you know, exploring yourself or something stupid. Like, it’s just more of Western Buddhist garbage. It’s nothing to do with how Easterners do it. And yeah, it’s very, it’s very much individualistic separating you from other people. Right. So they don’t they don’t really have the tools, even if they care, to do anything on the cultural level. And then when they try, it’s either political or economic or it’s through rational persuasion. Right. And that’s very what I’m calling age of gnosis. Right. It’s well, I have the knowledge and therefore. Right. And that’s how we get ourselves into trouble. People are listening to experts. Don’t listen to experts. Listen to leaders. Leaders are the ones we’re going to be listening to, not experts. Experts are almost never leaders and leaders are almost never experts. The leaders are willing to take the hit. They’re the ones that should listen to the experts and then decide whether or not the experts are a little nuts because often and I would say always any expertise you have, you go nuts. Like, you know, when I look at computer stuff, I’m always like, well, why are they doing this this way? These people are incompetent. Right. And that may technically be correct, but it’s not useful because I’m not doing the work. Right. And maybe I could go in and do that work, but then I got other things to do. You know what I mean? Like all the way down. Right. So it’s not helpful to listen to the expert about it because it’s not necessarily going to resolve anything. Yeah. They need to cooperate well. We had a big flood here in 2009 and we had a good mayor in 2009. He was just real solid salt of the earth, North Dakota. And he gets a lot of the credit for navigating the flood. The Army Corps of Engineers sent in a bunch of experts and they said, you need to evacuate the town. And he said, no, we’re going to stay here and fight it. And he was 100% right about what Fargo is like because when we grasped the severity of the situation, we had all of the volunteer help that you needed that you could possibly want in order to throw sandbags. So we spent like three solid days throwing sandbags. And the town didn’t flood. Now he had his own expert on staff, somebody who had been studying the Red River Valley watershed for like 35 years. And so I always thought that like Danny Wallacher knew the Red River Wallached. But no, he had a really good expert working with him and he trusted this expert over the expertise of the Army Corps of Engineers who just kind of flew in and like, hey, you know, you need to have some extra voices. But he was the one who’s like, no, because the Army Corps of Engineers at one point said, yeah, this is going to peak at 44 feet. And this guy’s like, there’s not 44 feet of water there. We’re going to get about 41 and a half, maybe 42. And it peaked right between 41 and a half and 42. That’s where the crest of the river was. Right. Well, and that’s the thing. The leader decides which experts to listen to because expertise is not one thing. And if Fargo had flooded and caught on fire and people died, guess who was going to take the hit? It was the mayor. He had skin in the game. Yeah, yeah, that’s a good book by Taleb. Yeah, it’s important. And that’s the thing. They think expertise is just going to converge. And that’s where they’re like, you know, the scientific consensus. And it’s like, science is anti-consensus by design. Like, science isn’t supposed to have consensus. Science has consensus. It’s not science, technically. Right. And you’re not supposed to do that, which means that different experts are going to come up with different answers, which is why you don’t listen to experts. Because how do you know which one to listen to? There’s no way to know. You listen to leaders with skin in the game because they’re the ones that are going to ultimately be sacrificed on the altar. The experts are going to walk away free no matter what happens, whether they’re right or wrong. And that’s why you don’t listen to experts. And then we have our time with this because as individuals, we need to listen to somebody. And then we’re just using expertise and pretending we’re not owned by the experts at that point. But in fact, we are. I think that to me is one of the problems with art. But that’s also what made Joe’s art talk so important. The contrast. Well, it sounded. The other thing, too, is I sound a lot like using the words I would have used if I were making that speech, man. And the fact that he went after their primary goal of human flourishing. I’m like, yes, I’m glad he did. That had to take a lot of guts. There’s his buddy, Jordan Peterson, who’s told by other experts, the right goal is human flourishing. And like my first, when I found that out, I’m like, that project’s doomed. Absolutely. I mean, I don’t know. I listened to the talk and you could just feel like even over overstinking YouTube, not being in the room, you could feel how much everybody in that room loved what he was saying. And the way you could tell was wasn’t just by all the applause, although there was frequent applause that came at relevant points. So it’s not like, you know, Communist Party, you know, clap or die business. But it was also like, oh, excited he got when he got that nonverbal feedback from people. You could just see him getting charged up once he realized, oh, this is landing. I get like that when I’m preaching sometimes, you know, it’s harder over the internet, but it does happen. Yeah. And yeah, yeah. Ooh, millionaire Gnosticism. Interesting. Interesting. Well, yeah, because it was it was a pretty pretty upper crust kind of event there. So you know, millionaires need Gnosticism, too. You know, it’s not just for the poor people. We’re in the age of Gnosticism. Yeah, they have to have their own special, you know, boutique Gnosticism. Well, and that’s just being your everyday Gnosticism. Yeah, yeah, that’s that’s really what it is. It was all it was all, you know, it really is the fight of the people who are going to fight the fight of the 1% versus the fight of 1% just different 1% in different categories. And people don’t realize that. And somebody was making the I think it was I think it was Vanderklaai actually, but somebody is making the comment that a lot of the people that were there were from aristocratic families. It’s like, oh, that’s so interesting. That’s right. They have an explicit aristocracy in England still. Right. Well, and like, you know, like, who should be King of Scotland is known to the Scots. And who should be in charge of Ireland is known to the Irish. And there are some arguments about which line to follow, because which line is which rules you were following for succession. Right. But like, they actually know that like, this is not something that is, and it’s not known to everybody, but it’s known to a lot of people. And that’s just like, we don’t have that in the US. We don’t have anything like that. Right. So it’s like, oh, that’s that’s so to us, it’s weird. But to them, it’s like, we know who the who the aristocracy is still or should be. Right. And they still have sway over there in a way that like, we can’t understand that in this country at all. And that was, I mean, that was, you know, during the whole coronation thing of King Charles, I was like, not my monarch. Wish the best of luck. I think the monarchy of England has some certain benefits that the English people are certainly, I hope they enjoy, but it’s just not going to happen to the United States. Probably not. Probably not. I mean, we do have our own mini aristocracy around. Right. But it has to, like, you can’t say it. You can’t say it. Right. The second somebody said it, like, oh, yeah, I’m I’m actually the lord of Apple Computer Company. Right. It would just it would just be like, no, you’re not. Right. We treat people that way. That’s part of the issue. We do treat people that way. And, you know, that that’s it’s a problem because it’s not explicit enough. Right. And the missing stuff in that was, you know, Van der Kley is bringing out the, you know, invoking the feminine nature of it. And I’m just like, it’s all guys. Like, what do you even what are you talking about? At some point, it’s like, I don’t I don’t think you understand. Right. And that’s that’s how we got here. It’s combining the masculine and the feminine together. And, you know, I excoriated Protestantism because I’m like, yeah, you guys have no feminine. That’s like 99.9% of your main problem is you just don’t have any way to engage. It’s amazing that they could have female pastors, but not the feminine. Well, because the feminine shouldn’t be pastoring. So it totally makes sense. It’s like, yeah, you mean there’s a reason why. And I mean, I like that. I like my Jewish friends explanation. Like, yeah, I did. Of course, we separate men and women in the synagogue because if women were visible by the men, they wouldn’t listen. For the right. They would pay attention to the right thing. Fair enough. Fair enough. Yeah, that is correct. I can absolutely true. You could argue it’s a small effect, but actually it’s probably not. And it’s not a small effect aggregated over time with lots of people. That’s for sure. And like, you know, OK, maybe if you’ve got a very mature congregation with a bunch of disciplined men in there, you know, OK, OK. But like, you know, I think at high school, they should be because I remember me in high school. Well, and how do you get disciplined? You don’t get disciplined by being exposed to everything all the time. And this is the problem we’re running into. When do you teach children and what do you teach them about certain things? Like, these are not easy. This is one of the driving forces in the Republic by Plato. Nobody tells you that. No one mentioned that to me. I’m like, wait a minute. So you’re saying Plato already dealt with the problem of children. And it’s not like he goes goes in depth with it, right? It’s like, well, of course, there are children and you have to be careful about these things. Doh. And therefore. But that’s one of the driving motivations behind the Republic. That’s actually core to the text. You can’t take that out because if you did, the rest of the text doesn’t make any sense. But the fact that it’s in there and nobody bothers to mention that is a little weird to me because it’s one of the driving. There’s other absurdities like one of the other absurdities in the text is. And they mentioned this like many, many times. And I’m not even done yet. So who does they mention again? Men and women are supposed to be practicing naked together. It’s obviously absurd. There’s a lot of stuff in the Republic that’s designed to be obviously absurd as a measure, as a way of contrast. But I think we’re not accounting for that. We’re not like Plato. Now, when this is it’s been a while since I’ve read the Republic and maybe that’s on me. Are they putting this into the mouth of Socrates, though? Or one of his one of his wacky friends? No, no. Socrates says this. So you can remember Socrates is deliberately the character of Socrates in the Republic. Sure, sure, sure. He’s the gadfly. Yeah, yeah. But the whole book is set up like Socrates. They say it explicitly like we don’t want to have an argument with Socrates because he’ll always end up being right. They don’t say that, but that’s what they say that. Like they definitely say that. So they don’t even want to start the argument with him because they know they’re not going to win. But then all of the arguments are binary. Every single one of them on purpose, like deliberately. So he’ll say something like, well, you have to agree that a man blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then, yes, I agree. And it’s the whole thing’s absurd. It’s just silly. It’s silly on purpose. And that’s by way of this super contrast. So they go back to this thing about men and women practicing together naked, like three or four times at least in different sections. They just keep bringing it up, right? Because again, they’re trying to be absurd. They’re trying to show you that equality doesn’t work, that you couldn’t. This is dumb, right? But they’re saying because the ultimate surprise of the book is if you had a perfectly logical, rational, reasonable world, like you just did away with all the things that don’t allow for that, it still doesn’t work. That’s the point. The point is logical reason and rationality fail. Even if you give them every single thing they need to survive, they don’t survive. That’s actually the point of the book. It doesn’t have another point at some point. The point is you can give logical reason and rationality all the things it needs, even though they’re silly and it often appeals to the gods all over the book. No one mentions that. All over the book, right? When logic fails. This is, well, hopefully Zeus will make this okay or whatever, goddess or god, right? Hopefully they’ll make it okay. Again, it’s meant to be silly. And then it still doesn’t work because the philosopher king’s solution ultimately fails. And so even logic and reason rationality in a world with all the affordances you can give them can’t solve the problem of justice. You can’t solve justice, logic, reason, and rationality no matter what you do. No one wants to hear that. It looks like we’re barreling towards a world of AI judges. In a court, it’d be like, hey guys, listen, those real human beings that you’ve had as justices, they have biases. They might even be participating in systemic prejudices. So we can’t trust them anymore. But what you can trust is the machine. The machine doesn’t have any of the things that we can trust. It doesn’t have any of that biases. So what we need to do is we just need to have all of our… And that’s why every… Not every dystopian novel, but the second that you have a robot cop, it’s like that’s a sign that things are bad. RoboCop is not a sign that things going well. I remember the rather silly movie Elysium still managed to get that one right when Matt Damon’s arm got broken by a RoboCop, right? It’s like they got that bit right. Hold that up as they got that bit right. Judge Dredd, he’s more of a robot than he is a human being. He’s just like, you’re going to do justice that quickly. And that completely. And it’s that final. And then Isaac Asimov, his robots were actually human. So there. Yeah. Just rather autistic. Yeah. Well, he really was. Yeah. The father of autism. Yeah. And it’s weird that people don’t see that. And of course, where is the bias in AI? It’s in the people training it. Who are the people training it? There’s the aristocracy. There’s the American aristocracy right there. It’s Elon Musk versus… What is it? Satya Nadella versus Sam Altman right now. I mean, who knows who else? And that’s what it is. Like, oh no, we trust these guys. And yeah, well said, William Hayhy means automated non-accountability. Right. Because it’s not biased. So we’re good. That’s why I was so interested in the… I sent you the link a couple of weeks ago about the artistic nightshade. Like you just run your piece of digital art through some kind of process that just makes minor little alterations to the pixels, invisible to the human eye, because hey, we’ve got intellectus up here. We could just put the whole together. But it would really, you know, just break the machines, man. Yeah, we’ve got a filter for order. Yeah, somebody asked me about that. So it was useful that you sent me that link because I already knew what they were talking about. That was helpful. Thank you. Yeah. And it’s like, yeah. And the thing was they didn’t quite understand. So you change something like two pixels. We would filter that out because we’re looking for order. I mean, that’s just like a little bit of dust on the screen to us. Right. But what that does is it corrupts every other picture somehow. And like, I’ve been doing AI for a long time, so I understand exactly how this works. I can describe it in great detail. But you know, and one won’t do it, right? One will have an impact. But if you feed it enough of those things, it actually corrupts the entire data set. And it only takes a tiny number of those to corrupt a very large data set. And once the data sets corrupt, you’re all done. Like, you’re finished. Your AI doesn’t work anymore. And we don’t suffer from that problem because we look for order first. Because it’s emanation-based, whereas AI is emergence-based, oddly enough. That was the way the Medievalists talked about the word, is intellectus, right? The intuitive grasp of an object, a form. And they called it an angelic mode of knowledge. Oh, well, that’s interesting. Yeah. Because it all… I said that angels don’t have to do discursive reasoning to get somewhere, right? Yep. That totally makes sense. They just go straight there. They have this intuitive knowledge there. And when you have an insight into something, it all happens at once. Yes, yes. That’s why we’re the middle point between material reality and heavenly reality, is we can do that, but we’re still materially embodied. We’re not just floating off in heaven, whatever heaven is. I started ranting about heaven a little bit during my breakout. No, no, no, no. During the RCIA class I taught on Thursday night. And that got a little far for people coming into that. But it was only about 30 seconds of ranting. So I didn’t stay gone too long. We brought the Starship Aquinas back down to Earth. Oh, the Starship Aquinas. I love it. We need one of those now. We need a Starship Aquinas graphic. That’s great. I don’t know about heavenly versus material reality. I might go with heavenly existence versus material existence. That sounds good. Sure, because the reality actually happens in between the two. And it’s fungible, which nobody likes. Nobody likes. And this is all in contrast to how we think of intellect today. Because in the age of individualism, intellect is something you build up for yourself using the same kind of knowledge that you have. And you’re building up for yourself using whatever. Education, whatever it is you’re using. And sort of the theme that I’ve been noticing, because I went to a conference on Thursday that was local around entrepreneurship. And their big theme was the why. It’s just like, this is fascinating. Here comes final causality. Make final cause great again. Yeah. And then the interesting part to me was I realized at some point that the federal level is they’re using that instead of education. So the key to getting everybody out of where they’re at and making them flourish. The key to human flourishing is very much what they’re about. Is entrepreneurship instead of college. And I was just like, oh, that’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re reinventing distributism. Well, they’re trying to. The principle of distributism. But it’s not going to work. Like it was a means of production. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Most people can’t be entrepreneurs. Like, I’m sorry. Like, it’s really hard. Like, it’s really hard. So the principle of distributism, which is different than the actual political program, which was a little heavy handed. So I just want to get that out there right away. The principle of distributism was trying to get the means of production into as many hands as possible. Now, the way that we’re going to go about that was like, we’re going to give everybody an acre of land and a cow, you know, and it’s like, I don’t know if that’s going to work. And the British public voted that down. I think the British public was correct in their assessment of that particular plan. And I don’t know how you do that nowadays. Yeah. Because like farming is one thing, you know, it’s very traditional and you could just get and you could just get like, like in an old agrarian society, it’s like, this was just a part of the way of life. It was sort of embedded in everything. So even though it’s super complicated, if everybody around you is doing it, you’ll be able to figure it out. Well, or you’ll have the problem is that knowledge can’t be book learned. It can’t be educated into you, right? It has to be exemplified for you. When you have less and less exemplification or you’re further away from that exemplification, then it’s a problem. And then that’s the same argument I make for the recession of the church. When the church’s exemplification is further away from you, you enacting the good becomes harder because you don’t, you don’t see it every day. You don’t see it all. You don’t see things pointed up. You don’t hear Gregorian chant on the street, right? You hear DeRuud Sandstorm. It’s absolutely one of my favorite pieces of music. By the way, it’s absolutely. Yeah. When I was younger in particular, I was long before the meme. I didn’t learn about the meme until like a few years back. In fact, it’s like, really? People were just telling everybody who asked what song it was that it was DeRuud Sandstorm, regardless of what song it was. That’s hysterical. Oh yeah. There was a whole movement on Reddit and stuff for years doing that. And I just had no idea because I wasn’t in those spaces. But it was a good song for getting work done for me, man. I would just put that on and I’d put it on loop. And I would just bang out code and fix all kinds of computer problems. And I was a beast. I would just, yeah, I’d listen to that for hours. No problem. And similar things. Like I listen to EDM occasionally still, right? But on Sunday. When I’m working, I do Prog rock songs. Yep. Remixed with the Final Fantasy VII sound font. Nice. It’s amazing. I get so much work done. It’s just unbelievable. Dream Theater, what are you doing for Prog rock? So this guy, I follow a particular channel. He does a fair bit of Yes. He also does some Genesis. He’s done some Everson Lake and Palmer. A lot of King Crimson. He’s a big King Crimson fan. Oh, there you go. That’s good stuff. And I know some King Crimson. I’m not, there’s whole albums I just don’t know anything about. So yeah, but it’s just like, yeah, that video game, because the video game music is designed to accompany something else, and kind of set the mood, but it doesn’t grab your attention. And so the sound fonts work well, plus they’re nostalgic. And then it’s like music that I’m familiar with, but without the words to distract me. Just perfect. Perfect. That’s interesting. I wouldn’t have thought of that. That sounds fascinating. You’ll have to share that with me. It’s actually in the description below. See Bass Fiction. That’s the channel. Oh, okay. Give them a like and a sub. I will definitely check that out. Yeah. That’s good for your theme, right? Because you need, like you need, it’s not optional. It’s not like, oh, you only listen to Gregorian chant. Now you only do that if you’re a crazy monk, which is fine if you want to be a crazy monk. The world needs the crazy monks, but that’s going to be 1% of the population. Right. Right. And people get mixed up. Like we want everything to be so equal and flat. If something’s true about 90% of people, that’s really useful to know. Then when you encounter that other 10%, it’s like, oh, okay, exception. Found an exception. Happens all the time. Well, the exception that proves the rule was an important thing I grew up with that I don’t think we have anymore because people keep pointing at exceptions. And I’m like, I understand that there’s an exception. You use exceptions. I understand that there’s an exception. You idiot. Like I get exceptions exist. I realize the world isn’t flat and perfect. I get that part. You’re not, you’re, you’re doing the opposite of what you think you’re doing by, by calling out an exception. I’ve never understood that phrase. What? Like the exception that proves the rule. I’ve never understood what anybody, but I never say that because I don’t know what it means. Well, if it’s not, if it, if there wasn’t an exception to it, it wouldn’t be a rule. It would be a law. Like an unbreakable law. Yeah. Okay. A rule is something you follow. So it’s like, when you see the exception, it’s like, oh, that’s why that rule exists. Well, well, and rules aren’t laws. They’re not things that are every time. They’re not every time. Laws aren’t even laws in the Catholic church. You get a dispensation. Well, yeah, well, true. But I mean, but I mean, you know, the more classical version of law is the law is something that cannot be broken. It is the thing with no exception. But natural law is something there’s no exceptions to natural law. It’s not like natural law gets suspended every once in a while or, or you can get off the natural law path and pick a different one. That’s not the original conception. Whereas rules where, you know, somebody sets a leader might set a rule, right? An authority might set up a rule and then you’re supposed to follow that. But you can’t maybe you can’t even do it exactly. And that’s okay. Right. But it’s the exception that gives you contrast to see the rule. Whereas you don’t have contrast for a law like you don’t see the exception to gravity. And let’s say Joseph of Cupertino’s around. He just started praying and would levitate, you know, and then there would be a crowd and a spectacle at the monastery and the abbot would have to come out and order him under holy obedience to come down. And then he would. No, no, no, but dude, this is amazing because the church like the word, the phrase canon law doesn’t really make much sense. Because the word canon comes from the word for a ruler. Oh, I see. And so it was literally it was a rule, right? And and the church was like specific about it. It’s like, well, we’ve got rules, but we don’t, you know, that’s canon, but we don’t have laws. That’s no most, you know. They got that backwards. That’s unfortunate. Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Canons are only for ecclesial discipline. Right. So it’s like, what do we do in this situation? Well, 95% of the time, you should probably do this, but there might be that 5% of the time where, you know, the local authority can give a dispensation from the canon. Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah. That’s that’s how most of it. So it’s used in reverse. It’s gotten it doesn’t match the language, the vocabulary you’re using because we call them laws now and legislation. But if it’s if it’s merely ecclesial legislation, it always admits of dispensation. But divine law does not admit of dispensation, right? There’s no there’s no flexibility. And so the language isn’t quite as precise anymore. Yeah. And that’s where all the problems come from. It’s all a language problem. Thanks, postmodern father, Eric. Yes, very good. Postmodern father, Eric. Yes, that’s your new nickname from now on. Yeah, and that is the that is the issue. We fall into this blaming the language, blaming the culture, blaming this, blaming that. Right. And we just we get into we get into that rebellion mode where it’s not it’s not me. I’m not the my inability to conform is not the problem. The problem is the language. The problem is the culture. The problem is these religious people. Richard Mike, preach it, preach it. These are all the problems. It’s all the body else’s fault that the politics, that’s the if it weren’t for the power, it would run for the economy if it weren’t for my neighbors. If it weren’t for the very idea of constraint itself. Yeah, I would be God. Pretty much. Well, and it is that different types of constraint that people don’t. Appreciate constraint by walls and constraint by pointing. And it’s a huge, just a huge issue. People just don’t. And then we and we’ve got people pointing all over the place at things that nobody understands. And and it’s weird. Actually, I actually have this incident where somebody was very she’s very concerned about slides. I was like, you know that he fell and now he’s bleeding and you’re worried about slides. Took her a while, but she’s like, you’re bleeding. He was like, no, no, it’s fine. He was bleeding and did need to go and like clean up. But it was weird, right? It’s like you’re so focused on tomorrow. Are we talking are we talking about like slides that you go down or slides that you show on a slide you show on a on a on a screen? Yeah, it’s like, why are you why are you worried about tomorrow’s slide presentation? He’s bleeding like, you know, like just pay a little bit of attention to the person in front of you instead of the event that’s happening tomorrow. You know, like sometimes you need a little help. Like I’ve missed things before. Oh, yeah, people miss things all the time. Yeah, you always need a little. Well, that’s the thing. Like, you know, you got to get to accept a little help. You got to you got to be able to to accept the help. A lot of times the help is right there. And you’re just not accepting it. And yeah, I mean, there’s there’s things you can do, right? Like I’m very big on I can beat this person at their game, right? And sometimes even though I know better, right? I’m like, I don’t play. I don’t play your game. I play my game. You can lose at your game by not by playing your game well when I’m playing a different game. That’s fine. But sometimes I get caught. I’m like, oh, I want to play this game and win at this game with these rules. It’s totally unnecessary. Happened to me. It happened to me on Friday. Luckily, Friday didn’t go down that way. I went down the right way, which is no, no, no, you play this game because they can’t win this game at all. Ever. I was like, oh, yeah, you’re right. Why am I why am I trying to win this game where I don’t have 100% chance when I could have 100% chance if I just switch my game? It’s like, hmm, good idea. Right. And I had some I had some help on that. It went it went rather well. So that was that was lucky. Yeah, I miss that one. We had the parish musicians workshop all Friday night. It’s productively engaging with my local community. 100% you would be on board with that. Oh, that was great. That was great. No, I had a I had a legal deposition that took all freaking day. And I hope I hope your your lawyer isn’t a complete hoser. No, no, he’s the one that said you’re trying to do the wrong thing. And yeah, and then I was like, you’re right. I’m trying to do the wrong thing. And then he said, you need to do this. And I was like, yes, I need to do that. And I did. And he was like, that went great. No, good. That was really important that that go great. This is like that distributed cognition thing, right? Yeah. You could be pretty smart. But like, if this guy’s done this kind of legal case before, it is a halfway decent lawyer. He’s going to know something you don’t. Yeah. I mean, I would have I would have won any. In fact, most of the shots I wanted to get in, I got in. But I didn’t go in that way. Right. But that was really important. Right. Because the way I went in is like unassailable. And the fact that I got my shots in is just bonus. It’s just like an extra thing. Like, yeah, here’s your here’s your legal grounding gone for you, by the way. But that’s not the game I’m playing. Just happened to happen to work out that way. You know, so because it’s all about it’s all about painting a picture. And if you paint the right picture, right, legal stuff is legal stuff. That’s great. And it’s good to win on legal stuff if you can. But legal stuff doesn’t win the day. Right. What wins the day is painting the right picture so that people understand what they’re seeing. Because if you don’t see that the painting of the house, you don’t see the painting of the house. And then all the fact that the canvas is wrong is not going to convince people there’s a house there. Yeah. And it’s you need to give in a legal system, you need to give the why should we care to disrupt things. Right. Because like, let’s say I remember hearing this case. It was a couple hunters who were out hunting and the landowner had an unmarked boundary. So they were on legal land. And then there was just like a section that didn’t have any fence or any marking whatsoever that they had gone into this guy’s property. And he finds them out there, something like 50 feet into his property, field dressing and antelope they shot and said, this is illegal, you can’t be here. And it’s just like, there wasn’t even a fence, dude. Like, you’re just being a jerk right now. And if the judge has any sense, it’s like, yeah, technically, yeah, you were on this guy’s land without permission. But buzz off, dude. Come on. Why should I enforce this law when you can’t even be bothered to put up a hundred dollars worth of fence or a post? A sign or something. A sign of some cell that says no trespassing. Like one sign every quarter of a mile or something. Right, right. You got to have something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, because you got to look at the whole picture. It’s a picture. It’s not I won because you broke this rule. And no, sometimes that works. Like the New England Patriots were famous for this for years. They were just the team with the fewest errors. And man, did they win. There was one season where I think they won all but two of their games that way. And he came right down to the end every game. And it always came down to almost always at the end of the game, the other team made an error when they didn’t. And just if you counted the number of errors in the game, the number of actual penalties, they had one less. And that one was always critical to a score or a lack thereof. And so they just won that way. And so sometimes that happens, but it’s super rare. There’s no other team in the NFL that’s done that as many times as the Patriots have, for example. You can win on technicals sometimes. It’s super rare. And it’s hard. It’s really hard to win on technicals because being technically accurate is hard. And it’s often unnecessary because what matters is the narrative, the whole story. It doesn’t matter that there’s three types of music and that one of them is really important in church. What matters is that there’s three types of music and you need to engage with all of them to be a complete person, the proper relationships in the world, the proper rationality in the world. And you need to be intelligent about it by understanding those three types of music, which is why I really appreciated the opening theme. I thought it was great. I’ve been looking forward to doing that for a while. And I wanted to wait until after the Parish Musicians Workshop. So that the… I don’t know why that was important, but I did it anyway, and it didn’t hurt anybody. So… Well, it might have been important. It might have been important for your expression of it, right? Sure, sure. After having given the breakout yet twice yesterday, it’s now ready for the real world, YouTube. Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of people will express things without experiencing them. And like, I see that all the time. Like, I listen to somebody talk about how to code something, and I’m like, you’ve never coded anything like that. I can tell by listening to you. You have zero experience in a project like that. And it’s weird that you can tell that. And not everybody can do that. I can. I happen to be an expert in the field, too, right? But I also have other detail skills. Well, I’m also missing another number of detail skills. But that one I have. So I can tell when someone’s speaking purely propositionally. And so it was probably important for you to have that experience and then talk about it, especially so close together. That was probably really good. So since you’re so perceptive, what can you tell about me right now? What sort of state am I in? That you’re tired, and it’s time to close it down. My body thinks it’s 1030 right now, way past my bedtime. So I’m delighted to have you on, Mark. Wish we could have kept Cory and Ted longer, but that’s how life goes. They’ve got these little humans running around their houses. That requires extra attention. It’s their own fault, though. It’s their own fault. They knew what they were getting into. They didn’t think about us first. That’s what I’m upset about. Yes. I’m going to think about me first and shut this down. Good night, and God bless you all.