https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=chYiv4QPuko
God have here in hiding whom I do adore, As by these bare shadows shay but nothing more. See, Lord, at thy service, lo, thy spirit of God, Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art. See, how gently they sing our elit’ry scene, How sestrously we weep, and shall be weary. What God so loved, so we take, O, truth I do, To themselves speaks truly, for there’s nothing true. The Son of God, the Son of the Father, The Son of the Holy Spirit, the Son of the Father, And of man it does, the mortal man credence, Of man it does, and of man it will, And of man it does. Ador, o, te, ne, o, te, Ador, o, te, ne, o, te, And always be in you, and always be in you, And always be in you, and always be in you. O, memoria, ale, O, memoria, ale, O, memoria, ale, O, memoria, ale, O, memoria, ale, portis omini, O, memoria, ale, portis omini, Anis milus vitram, presens omini, Anis milus vitram, presens omini, E te, e, ele, E te, ele, sempre, dulce sapere, I, e, ele, come, ane, Jesu, domine, E li, bundum, bunda, Tu, un, sarvi, e, Cuius un, assi, La, sal, un, facce, ale, Tutum, mundum, quita, La, mundi, quita, ele, Jesu, domine, E li, mundi, quita, Tu, un, sarvi, E te, ele, E te, ele, E te, ele, E te, ele, Someday to gaze upon thee, Face to face in light, And be blessed forever With thy glory side. Happy Palm Sunday, anybody who might be listening. You may notice that I’m once again in a different location. The workmen who are doing our office expansion informed us on Wednesday that they were going to be piercing the wall in my office, which means that I needed to vacate that office in order to actually let them do that. For some reason, they didn’t want me working in there while they were building the office extension. And so while this may seem like a great calamity, the good news is that they will be working on a permanent office for me and Father Carmel. We have been sharing an office previously, and I just kind of like having my own office. So I have to behave myself now. I can’t be watching quite so much YouTube during the workday because people could just see right over me and what’s going on. Today is Palm Sunday, where we celebrate the Lord’s entrance into Jerusalem. We also read the Passion Narrative. And, you know, this is not my first Palm Sunday. I’ve done the part before. When we do the Passion Narrative, we break up the narrative into different parts, four parts. The narrator, the part of Jesus, voice, and the crowds. And at various points, I’ve been all of them. But now that I’m the priest, the part of Jesus falls to be consistently. And this year we are doing Matthew’s Passion Narrative. And what I was struck by is the silence of Jesus in Matthew’s Passion Narrative. In some of the other Passion Narratives, he has a little bit more lines from the cross. He has a little bit more lines with Pontius Pilate, lines with the chief priests. But in Matthew’s Gospel, he is primarily portrayed as silent and silently accepting his sufferings. And this was magnified by the practice of having the entire congregation reading the parts of the crowd. And the crowd does not have a flattering portrayal in Matthew’s or any of the Gospels when we do this Passion Narrative. They get to be the ones saying, he deserves to die. They get to be the ones saying, take him away, crucify him, crucify him. And all of those sorts of things. And so just actually being up there, standing at the altar, hands folded, reading the Passion Narrative, and feeling the crowd yelling that at me while I have to take that on silently, just gave me obviously not exactly the same sort of experience that Jesus would have had. But a little taste of it, being shouted at and not having anything to say in response. So it’s Holy Week. I’m tired, but we’ll get through this. Other fun things that happened is that we had our confirmation and First Holy Communion retreat yesterday. That lasted from about 9 until 2 20, 2 30 ish. And I actually had a lot of fun with that. We had over 120 kids here preparing for confirmation and First Holy Communion. And I ran two of the stations. One of the stations was talking about Pentecost, talking about Chrism oil and practicing the actual confirmation right where the bishop places his hand on the head and says be sealed with the gifts of the Holy Spirit. And the second station I did was a little reenactment at the Last Supper with the kids. I had a lot of fun with that too. And the parents got a good laugh out of it. Because part of what we did is we gave all of the kids baby wipes and we told them they had to go wash their parents’ feet with the baby wipes. And these are like third graders that were preparing for confirmation and First Holy Communion. And they absolutely just lost their minds at the possibility of washing somebody else’s feet with a baby wipe. And I just know the parents were sitting there thinking, oh, you have no idea what I’ve been through. And if you’re lucky, you’ll be going through. So that’s a little snippet. I am planning on streaming next week. Even though it is Easter, I think I’ll have the time and hopefully the energy. So any of you who are lonely or thinking that you might be lonely on Easter, you’ll have me to talk to. I’ll be your friend for two hours. And so I hope that’s nice. I am going to keep this going till at least 740 because that’s when I had originally scheduled it to start. I had the 6 p.m. mass here and I wasn’t sure if it was going to take me extra time to to tidy up from that and finish up with everything. But after 740, if I don’t have any indication that there’s another human being paying attention to this, I might close up shop and go do something else because I don’t have the stamina of, let’s say, Mark Lefebvre who can do this for, you know, I’ve seen him do hour long rants before and I just don’t do that. So looking ahead, what do we got coming up? We’ve got some fun things coming up. One of the fun things that we have coming up is the chrism mass. The chrism mass is when the bishop blesses all of the holy oils used in the diocese. Now, traditionally, chrism mass is done on the morning of Holy Thursday. And you try and get as many of the priests of the diocese there as you can possibly manage. And the priests will do a renewal of their priestly promises, which is always a good thing to do, to rededicate yourself to what you consider to be important. However, for good reasons, the chrism mass can be moved to another time. And so traditionally, our diocese has done it on the Tuesday of Holy Week. So it is supposed to be coming up on this next Tuesday. I’m thinking, however, that attendance will be a little bit depressed because this is the Tuesday into Wednesday foot plus of snow probability. As you can see over here where I live, the diocese of Fargo, we are pretty much dead center on this massive snowstorm that is barreling towards us. It’s absolutely going to dump buckets of snow. And I have no idea where we’re going to put it because our parking lot is full up enough as it is. So what I’m thinking is, is that there’s going to be a lot of priests who are going to be sitting at home and watching the live stream of the chrism mass rather than participating in it in person. Because that’s what happens sometimes in April as we get over a foot of snow. Got Holy Thursday mass coming up. Holy Thursday is that celebration of the institution of the Eucharist. So we always have mass in the evening there. Our mass will be at 7 p.m. And a few extra rituals and a part of that evening mass is after the homily, we will have the priests washing the feet of 12 people, just as Jesus was washing the feet of his disciples. So the priests are not supposed to just be sitting there collecting, but we need to be giving back and showing ourselves to be a servant just as we imitate Christ’s servant. So that’s something that we do. And then at the end of mass, instead of the ordinary ending of mass, we have a Eucharistic procession where we take all of the consecrated hosts and we go in procession out of the church into another prepared space that we would call the altar of repose. And so that commemorates Jesus leaving the upper room and going to Gethsemane. And then we settle down in the altar of repose and then strip the altar of all of its adornments, furnishings until Good Friday. On Good Friday, we have the Good Friday Liturgy. It is not a mass. We do not consecrate any hosts at that time, but we do celebrate with the hosts left over. It’s a four-part liturgy. We’ve got the Liturgy of the Word, which includes always John’s Passion narrative. We’ve got general intercessions for the whole world. We’ve got the veneration of the cross where people come up one by one and do homage to the cross. And finally, we end with giving Holy Communion and dispersing the people. That’s another beautiful liturgy, but it’s very somber and very solemn because it’s the day that Jesus was crucified. So there’s not a whole lot of pomp and circumstance. And basically liturgically, the church is dying along with Jesus. In some place, they continue to practice the covering of the images so that any of the statues or any of the images have a violet cloth thrown over them. That would be practiced starting the fifth Sunday of Lent. And then slowly, the music all dies down as much as we can manage. In a lot of places, they’ll be all acapella on Good Friday. So that liturgically, we rise again with Jesus on Easter Vigil. And that is Holy Saturday night. Ours will be starting at 830. I expect it to last at least two and a half hours. I absolutely look forward to it. What I’m not looking forward to is the prospect of talking to myself for two hours. So if somebody wants a little bit of action, I will give you an opportunity to hop in. But otherwise, I might be calling this stream soon. I will find something else entertaining to do with my time. Hey, people, be on in a moment. We can hear more about Roman adventures. All righty then. Well, Andrew Kelly is saving the bacon of Sunday Night Stream lovers. So be grateful to him, I guess. And on Easter Sunday, I allowed myself to be talked into doing a solid mass in the extraordinary form and serving as a deacon for that. So I’m going to be pretty tired when that’s all done, because I’ll have my Easter Sunday Mass at 9 a.m. that I’m doing and then an hour and a half very intense liturgy. So by the time I get over to my parents’ house for Easter dinner, I’m going to be wiped out. How are you doing, Mark? I am frantic. Nothing works. Every piece of technology is now broken officially. So I’ve been fighting technology all day. Are you communicating with me by sheer force of willpower right now? Yes, yes. Well, this laptop, which is new, doesn’t work at all to make USB sticks. And I was like, oh, that’s new. You would think that the laptop itself shouldn’t cause any problems. It should just be able to send data in there, right? It’s worse. Somebody said, oh, you should try an older laptop. And I said, well, I have one on the old machine. And that worked. And I was like, oh, no. And that other machine used to burn USB sticks. I have burned at least 100 times today. And I have burned five different USB sticks. And I finally got one that works. And that’s only the beginning of the problem. So it’s been a long time since I’ve had a laptop that works. What the Sam Hill is going on in the world of USB. Sorry, I don’t have anything where it needs to be, this new desk. Yeah, I know. You’re moved. I like the new Priest cubicle look there. Priestly cubicle, yeah. I know it all looks glamorous when I’m up there on the altar. But sometimes this is what you get. You get a little bit of cubicle. Do you have an idea what the problem is? I think that the software doesn’t account for any of the problems with the hardware anymore. And because they keep updating stuff. And one of the problems is I updated stuff. I’m like, oh, I’m going to have to update the software. And I’m like, oh, I’m going to have to update the software. And I’m like, oh, I’m going to have to update the software. And one of the problems is I updated stuff. I’m like, oh, I had a working system. I shouldn’t have updated these. Yeah, I’ve been through a couple of different programs that do the writing. And one of them is broken. And it’s the recommended one. I’m like, yeah, this doesn’t work. I can see that it doesn’t validate. I’m like, so you’re writing data and never checking what you wrote. And it’s a disaster. It’s all the things you’re not supposed to do and all the software. That’s all broken. And I’m like, OK, so I’m not a programmer. But not checking sounds like a really bad idea. They don’t check anything at all anymore. Did you hear the story about Google Assistant? No, I did not. They updated it last week. So I’m in my car. And that’s what it’s for. So the Android Assistant’s sole purpose in life is to be a voice communicator to you. Yep, yep. That’s what it’s supposed to do. It doesn’t have another function. So I said, OK, Google, play Led Zeppelin, a fairly straightforward operation that the phone has been able to handle for literally years. And nothing happened. It said nothing. And it just vanished. And I was like, but it did the little click that I heard you. And I’m like, so I get to a stoplight and I do it again. And it comes up with a button on the screen you have to press. And I was like, what? And then I hit that. And then it needed me to do some agreements. And so I hit those buttons. It’s still at the red light. I’m like, oh, thank God I’m at the red light. This is good. And then the light changes. And then I start over again. OK, Google, play Led Zeppelin. Then it does something it’s never done before, which I use this all the time when I’m driving. And it said, playing the album Led Zeppelin. And I was like, wait, what? How are you doing this? Because normally when I ask you to play Led Zeppelin… That could be Led Zeppelin 1. Maybe they’re playing Led Zeppelin 1, which would be what you asked for. Well, no, no, no. When there’s an ambiguity, it has always asked, album or artist. It’s always come back with a second prompt. It’s never not done that before until this update. Now I’m like, what did you break? And why didn’t you test it to know that it was broken? And I was just utterly stunned. And then, yeah, I mean, it’s been a busy week. So my not this last of this last live stream, but the one before that, we’ve got just shy of a thousand views. And I’ve got my first one K view video, Jordan Peterson, his trick on navigating patterns. And in this last Friday here, Gangbusters on boundaries. It’s been going great. So I don’t have hours though. Have you been putting up boundaries or taking them down? I’m the boundaries. You know that. That’s a troll question coming from you. You’ve been here. It’s all about boundaries. Oh, Andrew, how are you doing? I’m doing well. How are you? Ah, it’s I’m looking forward to Easter and I’m also going to be looking forward to Easter Monday. I heard about it. It’s just nice. You just put your feet up and it’s just nobody wants me anymore. I could do whatever I want. I am also looking forward to Easter Monday. Yeah, I suppose you’d be busy, too. All your church music. Yeah, well, I have all the church music. And this week is like we have the most work I’ve ever had in a week of architecture. So I have like three papers, a model and an entire design project due to this next week. So after that will be very nice. OK, so you’re you’re tuning into the Sunday Night Livestream because it’s a day of rest. Yeah, sure. OK, so it is you’re you’re establishing appropriate boundaries with your time, telling old mammon that he can’t have any of your Sunday. I like it. I like it. Yeah, it’s definitely not because the work is just a little daunting. No, it’s all right. It’s actually not that bad. The papers are pretty short. Oh, but it’s good to take a rest. I remember in seminary, they just give me like these three page reflection papers. I was just like there to kill time and like squeeze out one of these papers. It was just those were the hardest papers to write when I didn’t care. And I knew that the professor didn’t really care, but like needed grades on the books or whatever to meet some arbitrary standard. Right. And whereas it’d be like, oh, do a 10 page research paper. And I pick a topic that I was interested in and I would spend hours researching that and have fun writing the paper. Right. Yeah. And, you know, I I’m not sure how interested the professors were in it, but at least one party was mildly satisfied by the process. That’s good. I learned about a new heresy or learned about the way that the relationship between the Jews and the papacy during the Middle Ages, all sorts of interesting stuff. Oh, cool. You know, so. Yeah, luckily we haven’t had any work that I felt was arbitrary. And the stuff we’re doing now is actually pretty interesting. One of our papers that we’re doing right now, we all have to select a small space with a lot of pedestrian traffic and we have to analyze the space and then think about how we could change it to make it better. So me and my partner chose a sort of park area that’s kind of like a garden as well. And took a look at it and figured out all sorts of ways we could have changed the paths and stuff. So we just have to write a paper on why we should do that, which is actually pretty fun. Yeah, yeah, that’s I think something like theology or philosophy or literature would be much more susceptible to not being improved by the way that we’re doing it. I think it’s more susceptible to not being improved by having rigorous standards. I remember one of my professors was very frustrated at the university’s attitude towards oral exams. And it wanted everything to be like standardized and procedure eyes and like that can’t be the only grade of the semester. It’s an extremely personal way to give an exam. Right, you can figure out what the person might actually know and what they know even when they might be a little bit nervous and stressed out, which is, you know, it’s stress testing, just like you were you were saying that. And the university was just given them all sorts of grief for it. And so I think he ended up giving up on the oral exams, but I like the oral exams too, because they only took 15 minutes, like 15 or 20 minutes. You know, right, sitting there writing things down and it’s like, I’ve got to pad this out a little bit, otherwise it won’t look good. But it’s just that, you know, whereas in Rome, all exams are oral exams. Like that is the standard because, you know, I would complain about the Italians sometimes and I still will, but they get it. Personal things first. Relationship first. Everything else. You know, if the system works, great, but relationships first, you know. So do you mean like oral exam as in like you give a presentation instead of doing multiple choice or something like that? No, I mean, you sit down with the professor and answer questions. Oh, I don’t think I’ve ever done that. It’s so much better because the professor can also give you a lifeline, right? So I remember being in an oral exam for Christology and the professor asked me, What’s your favorite analogy for the hypostatic union? And I said, oh, it’s got to be the union between body and soul, you know. And he’s like, well, why do you think that’s a good analogy? And that was my answer. I was like, oh, well, I think it’s a good analogy because the relationship is between body and soul is itself a mystery. And, you know, that should humble us in the face of the mystery of Christ’s two natures or something like that. And I could tell he didn’t like that answer. And then what he says is, oh, yeah, and I suppose you also probably like the fact that, you know, it gives you two separate things to work with. I’m like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It’s how the two things come into one. And then so he like he fished a little bit and then he got the answer out of me that he wanted. It was just a very personal because the answer was in there. I just I didn’t know what he was looking for. And so he could lead me into, you know, what he was looking for there. Right. Yeah. It’s a personal way to conduct an exam. I’m not here to, you know, make you regurgitate information. I want you to practice. Right. Relevance realization. I think we have actually done that. Yeah. Can you pick out the relevant information from the course that we just studied? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, we have done that because even though we do presentations in front of the class, after we give the presentation, the professors will start like asking questions about the design and stuff to try to get us to say things that we might have thought of for the purposes of what we did but haven’t mentioned. Or they get us to use some of the vocabulary that we’re supposed to know. So he’s like, you know, what would you call that? You know, all those sticks over there. Oh, vertical linear elements. Yeah, that’s what I meant to say. You know, so they do that actually, which is really nice. And I don’t think we could not do that in architecture because we have to present in front of everybody. So there’s no, it’s not really a way to do like a written exam on one of our design projects. I guess they could give you like a photograph of a building and just say, tell me what you see. Yeah. That’s, I don’t know, I’m spitballing here. I, almost nothing about architecture. I guess what’s what else what’s possible is they could do what’s called a silent jury where you don’t say anything and they just look at your presentation boards and your model and see if they can understand what you were doing. But then that’s more of a practice in being able to organize your information on the boards and in the model. And that would be more of a practice in you understanding what’s important to present visually. So sounds like relevance realization again. Yes. Yeah. Which is very difficult, apparently, for a lot of people. Yeah, well, I mean, it’s a habit you have to build in whatever you’re doing. Yeah, it’s very different too from what most people go through in school, public school, because they’re used to like, you know, multiple choice and open ended questions in regards to information that they were given to kind of repeat and maybe reuse in a certain way like math. But this is like the powerhouse of the cell. Exactly. But in our program, I mean, in construction, you have to know all the terms and you have to know how all the details are laid out and everything. But in design, it’s much more difficult for a lot of people because they’re basically saying, OK, here’s the prompt. Now you make the building and you make the facade and then tell us why you did it and give us all your reasons. And you’re you’re basically like you’re telling them why. Why what you did make sense. And a lot of people aren’t used to that. They’re like trying to figure out like, what do the professors want me to do when the professors are like, no, what do you want to do? Institutionalized. Exactly. The nation has been robbed of them by these horrible public school system in the country. Yeah. Yeah, it’s just, you know, what can we measure? How do we measure it? What do they exactly do I have to live up to? Yeah, yeah. Which is which is another way, you know, so going back to my professor and the grief he was getting on oral exams, that’s another way that they’re taking a class that used to be respected professional and turning them into skilled technicians. Because you see that happening with doctors right now, right? It used to be the doctor would show up with the bag and it’s like he would just figure things out and do things his way. But now that it’s all about money and we’ve had this conversation before, Mark, about why hospitals shouldn’t be about money. The doctor is treated like this highly skilled diagnostic and procedural technician that has to like stick to these, you know, strict whatever. Yeah. Yeah. We haven’t gotten there in architecture yet, but just wait until the AI designed architecture comes in. Yeah, maybe. I mean, we’re having that conversation to like, what is AI for and all this? And most people seem to think it should be pretty good just to generate ideas, but wouldn’t really make its own designs very well. Both Mark and I are about to say it literally cannot generate an idea. Yeah, I’m not a big fan. Other people’s ideas. That’s all an AI can do. Am I right, Mr. Computer Programmer? That is correct. That is correct. Yeah. And they don’t, people don’t understand the difference between generation and taking something and adding to it or subtracting from it to create something close. They don’t, they don’t, they don’t. And it only goes so far too, because it turns out that if you give the AI, quote, more freedom, what ends up happening is the AI art just goes crazy fast. And I do mean crazy. And so it doesn’t. What it can do though is certain aspects. It goes fast. If you can train it enough, it’ll come up with amazing things, but it has to work within very tight constraints or they call them domains, roughly speaking. I mean, it seems to do landscapes and faces really well. I don’t know. I’ve seen it muck up faces pretty badly. Yeah, it has a lot of them. And when it mucks them up, it’s being given too much freedom. And when you give an AI too much, and it’s not a lot either, like just give it a little bit of freedom and it goes crazy. But anything it has a lot of data for, it can do a much better job at because it has to stick within that framework. So if you give it a lot of stuff, it has a larger framework, but it’s well constrained because there’s a lot of stuff. And you have a little bit of stuff that has to use this randomness to kind of go outside. And that’s when it does worse. And that’s not entirely true for all AIs, but I think for all the art AIs, it will necessarily be true. I could be proven wrong on that, but I haven’t seen the generative stuff work very well for those sorts of applications. They work for some applications, but very limited. It’d be good for telling if your building’s going to fall down. It’d be good for that. AI? Yeah, it wouldn’t be good for much else. All right. That’s useful. Keep that in mind. I have a robot. Let me know if the building’s going to stay up. I don’t know how people would feel about that. If you’re going to do something wild, you can kind of sketch it out in a 3D model and say, can this work with any known materials that we could use for building? You could do something like that. Yeah, I guess that’s true. Can I do a 70-foot aluminum spacecraft on the top of this building? Apparently, it was Toy Story, and they had a bunch of architects look at Pizza Planet and the architecture for Pizza Planet. I’m going to pull that up now because I’m feeling just a little bit nostalgic, but they said, yeah, there’s no way in heck you could have done that. Oh, okay. I think I remember what you’re talking about. I don’t know. Yeah. Yeah. Do you need the pillars to go all the way up to hold up this ceiling, or can you get away without? What was it called? Pizza Palace? Pizza Planet. Yeah, they were looking, I think, at this right here and saying, no way in heck this thing is going to stand up. Oh, I see. With all that lettering on top of it. Yeah, that looks a little precarious. But golly, it’s a cool design. Like, I’d go there. It probably looks cool because it is impossible. Oh, man. Oh, man. Yeah, in our school, we did have an art show in the gallery with a bunch of designs people did using AI, where they used AI to generate an image or a few images and then would mix them up or would put other materials on them or repaint them or something. And then that sparked the whole conversation of should we be using AI and art? Yeah, it’s, I mean, AI is just a mirror and it’s a parasite. Like, it can only use what’s happening. It can’t actually create new out of the whole block. And so there’s the point of diminishing returns. And when you make a copy and then another copy and then another copy, it just degrades. It’s reciprocally narrowing. All of AI is reciprocally narrowing by design. And anybody who doesn’t think so doesn’t understand the design. It’s definitely how it works. The narrowing I could see, but where’s the reciprocal relationship? Because that reciprocal narrowing that comes from addiction. No, all AI literally feeds data back into itself. The data, it’s already processed. That’s actually how you train AIs. It’s key to AIs, is feeding the data back. And it’s called back propagation. And there’s also forward propagation. But effectively, all the data that you, so for example, if you go on something like Mid Journey, you can, and I’ve played with it, right? You can type in something and if you get a result and you say, it usually gives you four panels and then you can pick one and you can say, no, no, I like this one. Well, what it’s doing with that is it’s throwing in four new pieces of data and saying three are of lower value and one is of higher value and retraining itself. OK, OK. But it still, it always needs the human to practice the actual relevance realization. Right. Right, right. Always. I mean, this is what Peugeot talks about with, you know, where, how is it making these preferences? It was like, well, the preferences come from the people that train it. Period. End of statement. And they don’t come from the engineers that wrote it either, which is even more interesting because people get confused. They’re like, oh, the engineers that wrote the AI. No, no, no, no, no. Those guys, you know, are the high end guys. And there’s, you know, a few of them, a handful of them worldwide. People that can even do that. The guys that train it, that’s actually a much easier thing to do. But they’re more like engineers, first off. And then their their preferences have to be in the system because they’re the ones judging whether or not the training works and how well. So, yeah, it’s all that’s what Peugeot points out. It’s all us. None of it is generated from the computer. None of it. Yeah, that seems to be the principle of it is like it to use the example of art. It’s like, yeah, you’re generating the art from the computer. You’re generating the art from other people. So you pretty much just have the mind of all the people that are in there. And there’s not actually anything new. Right. And they simulate the newness with with randomness or semi random or pattern changes. That’s why you do cool things like you can say, take, take a night sky and swirl it right. And then you can do even cooler things. Although I haven’t tried this. You can say, take a landscape of not real Mars. Right. Or give me a planet with four moons at Sunset. You know, you can do all those things and it will generate all that stuff. But it’s it’s really easy if you’re if you’re into computer science or computer engineering to see why and how. And you don’t need a eye to do any of that, by the way. You can do it all with math. So it’s it’s not clear to me how much AI is not just math or or isn’t just boiling down to standard mathematical functions. So if you meet somebody who knows some data science like I do, then you soon realize most of machine learning, most of the good stuff is actually in the math and not in AI generative stuff at all. I mean, how could you get a computer to do anything but math? Well, yes, that’s right. And the way they add in uncertainty and randomness, because the way neural nets work, it’s actually just a network of random weights or numbers that are usually less than one is the usual way you do it. It’s probably the only way that it actually works well for ninety nine point nine percent of applications. And then they constantly adjust those. But the problem with that is that then you end up with unintended consequences in the situation where if you put a sticker on a stop sign that a human wouldn’t even notice, the car will blow the stop sign, even though the sticker is completely inside the stop sign and not visible by humans, because it’s picking up things that you don’t know about. You think it’s trained itself on red and white letters and the shape of the sign, but it didn’t train itself on any of those things. What they found out. Oh, that’s a problem. Yes, yes. Because you think it’s got the relevant information. But you can’t actually. Right. Because what I can do is I can take a red marker, right. And without saying anything to a group of adults, I could poorly draw an octagon on a whiteboard and it’s not very straight, but it’s very clearly got eight sides that it’s intended. And they’ll know, oh yeah, that means stop. You don’t even need to put the white stop in the middle. No, no, no, just the octagon, the red octagon. You don’t even need to fill it in. And technically, technically, the AI could see could not only miss that, but also see any other thing on the board as a stop sign that you would not recognize as a stop sign. There’s no reason why that hasn’t already happened. And I suspect that it has, although I don’t, I don’t, there’s no white paper out about that. The sticker thing is a white paper out about it very clearly says, by the way, the mathematical technical mathematical number of of combinations of stop sign and things that are not visible, but from six feet away by a human is close to infinite. And so you can’t just code around it. It’s actually a flaw in the AI that is technically black box. I know they’re allegedly white box AIs, but I have yet to see them do anything useful. And therefore this isn’t a resolvable problem. And that’s why I keep telling people you’re not going to see self driving cars and they still can’t take a left hand turn. It’s been 10 years. You would think in 10 years left and it’s still can’t do that. So, yeah, no worries. It won’t be replacing you anytime soon. Like most things. Yes. Andrews irreplaceable. So you don’t think you don’t think they can, they can get around that by putting enough real world problem. So like the way that the recapture works is, you know, click all of the crosswalks. And you think there’s just too many too many variables for for even that approach to handle. They have in their database every stop sign in the United States at least four times. Easily. And that didn’t do it. So adding more data is not going to is not going to solve the relevance realization problem because relevance realization is a problem around what data, not how much. In other words, what is what data? What data is not a question of quantity. It’s a question of quality. And guess what computers cannot do? Quality. And this is what’s so funny to me is that this answer has been staring them in the face for literally 20 years and nobody has figured it out. And I’m just sitting there like, really, guys, I saw it immediately. And you guys still haven’t figured it out, which is another reason why I like the work, because at least he’s pointing at relevance realization, even if he doesn’t actually understand that problem in any in any way that that makes it sort of something that you could start to do it. But I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think it’s a good point. I think that would make a great meme. I agree. Oh, my goodness. So computers do quantity instead of quality. Is that because they work with binary and adding numbers together? And do you know what a, do you know what, what would it look like for something to be qualitatively oriented? Analog computers do quality things, kind of. But they’re not, they’re not really doing quality things. But analog computers are cool. And they’ve actually had a resurgence for this very reason, because it turns out the things that take a lot of computing power in AI to do, analog computers can do with almost no power at a very low cost, because it requires so many. Nice. Analog computers, analog computers. This is new. I’ve never heard of an analog computer. Does it run on electricity? They’re actually old, I think. Well, okay. Yeah, they’re very old. They, they, they, some of them run on electricity. Yeah, but you can actually build it, at least in theory. They might have one. My brain is a little fuzzy because I’ve been working with digital computers all day. But they, I, they don’t, I don’t think they need to run on electricity. I mean, they need some kind of power, you know, like springs are technically could be built into analog computers. There are analog computers like that. That doesn’t sound very efficient to not have it run. So that wouldn’t be, but it depends what you’re doing. And that’s the problem is that when you get into these complicated or super complex, it’s probably the better way to say it, complex problems, analog computers do way better. Way faster, way cheaper, way smaller. It’s, it’s actually weird, but they can’t do facial recognition. Like that’s, you know. So, so is it like the function has to hit a certain intensity before it’ll trigger something? There are, well, the inputs have to, the collective inputs have to reach an intensity. It’s not function. It’s not it. There are no functions in an analog computer the way you would have them in a digital. That’s the problem. When we keep reducing everything down to digital computers and then making statements about how our brain works, that’s why we’re rational because our brain is just a digital computer. And it’s like, well, we know our brains, not a digital computer. Where did you get that from? And by the way, we are not the thing we created. The thing we created is a reflection of us, not the other way around. We’re not a reflection of it. That’s not, you’ve got it exactly backwards. Causality matters, which came first actually matters. Right. And that’s where people get confused. Wow. Okay. Analog computers. That’s going to be something I’ve got to figure out. Speaking of another fine analog computer. Hello, Ted. I’m an analog computer. I like this. I think we’re all. You are? By some definition, an analog computer, among other things. All analog computers. I shouldn’t feel insulted or anything. Except, can I make it the other way where the prime analog is the human mind rather than the computer? Because I feel really uncomfortable with this thing. Like, yeah, you know, we’re just, we’re definitely our tool because Freud was like, yeah, we’re definitely steam engines. You know? Isn’t that the rant I just went on? Yes. Oh, I don’t know. I just hopped on it. So great. Because he loves to poke at me. And he was definitely doing that there after I got done saying we’re not digital computers. He goes, well, you’re all just analog computers. He knows these parable ways I can get there quickly enough to strangle him. Yeah. That’s the beauty of this communication form. When I was there in real life, though, so I’m feeling I feel like some of your threats are empty. Only, only. Yeah, I said some. I said some intellectually. I strangled you intellectually. Oh, Ted, how was your Palm Sunday? It was beautiful. It was slightly penitential, actually, because it being a traditional mass, it was like, three hours long, and we have four under four. So, you know, four, four and under. Yeah, I don’t know what I said, but yeah, four, four kids, four and under. So lots of lots of hoisting children while singing while singing long antiphons. But it was really beautiful. It still takes three hours. So this is. It still takes three hours, even though you don’t do the passion narrative. Oh, we do the passion narrative, but it’s all chanted in Latin. I thought you did the passion narrative the week before. Goodness. We well, it’s from the gospel according to St. Matthew this week. OK, already. Have you guys managed to do all this with the new TC stuff? We are so this is our parishes with the fraternity of St. Peter. OK, as he has just they’ve just got carte blanche right now in terms of doing what they do. I don’t know if they’re going to be like set up new parishes, but all the established ones are Bishop. He was usually not. He was usually not. He doesn’t he’s not really just there with what’s going on, but he called our priest the next day. Father, our priest didn’t even know, hadn’t even heard about it. He called our priest up and said, I just want you to know this doesn’t change anything. So we’re very grateful for the care that our bishop has given us. Oh, OK. Yeah. Yeah, it’s really great. The FSSP actually has a really good relationship with the Vatican and attribute that a lot to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. So, yeah, but what’s been what’s been really fun is that this is our sorry, I got something from my wife really quick. What’s been really fun is this is our first by second past of the liturgical year with the traditional with the traditional the whole traditional liturgy. And so the first really strong member I have was Palm Sunday last year. And so there’s we’re doing all the new things and now we’re adding recollection to all the things that are going on there, which is really lovely. And so then you get new stuff. Father, I think you were saying a couple of months ago how you still have stuff clicking all the time when you’re re going through this. And so, you know, with the with the blessing of the palms and all that, when the when our priest came in and he’s in red, it just never clicked to me that we’re celebrating the martyrdom of Christ. We celebrate the other martyrs and now we’re celebrating Christ’s martyrdom. And so he comes in as this triumphant king, but he’s dressed in red. And so it’s, you know, you see both of them right there already together. So that was really that was something that was something that you want. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, but it was lovely. And the there’s just so much beautiful music and it’s just unbelievable. There’s just such a such a rich treasury of beautiful, beautiful music. Yeah. Well, the whole year. But but right now that’s what I’m appreciating is what’s in front of us. So, yeah. Yeah. So how about you, Father? Yeah. So I I ranted about this at the beginning of the stream. But, you know, Matthew’s passion, that was the one we do this year. Jesus is very silent in that. And I was up there reading the part of Jesus, not chanting, just reading. And it’s like I’ve got the people shouting back to me, crucify him, crucifying. And I’m just standing there silently and they’re they’re shouting. And then I say, my God, my God, why have you abandoned me? And then I die. What did you do in the part of Christ? Like I was. So so Matthew’s gospel is a little different. And I think it most well, Mark’s gospel is about the same. But Luke and John, he’s a little more talkative. Hmm. Oh, yeah. We’ve got two Andrews now. What are we going to do? It’s OK. Andrew Kay’s got a K after his name. So, yeah, that works. You go. Well, yeah, Father, I had one one one other funny experience is I was holding our our young son for pretty much the whole service. And he was all he when I wasn’t holding him because my arms were falling off. He was like taking his shoes off and then trying to put them on the wrong feet and then getting mad that they wouldn’t fit. And that’s like what he was doing. And so he was really great. But I mean, first of all, I just can’t believe what kids can actually put up with. We just assume they like go throw them in another room. They can actually really engage with things when they’re, you know, silent and reverent, not like all the time, but mass on Sunday. They can actually it’s pretty amazing. And, you know, there’s a pretty large sample size from all the parents just like from. But the one time he chose to start freaking out is when it got to the part of the narrative when Christ dies and everyone kneels in silence. And then I have to pick my kid up and get his shoes off the floor and take him out of there. It’s like this is life. This is you want to talk about embodiment. This is part of embodiment. Part of embodiment is here is, you know, what should be one of the most solemn moments in the entire liturgical year. I’m trying to shove my kid’s shoes on his feet and run him out the door. Yeah, I love it. It’s great. That’s just what you have to do, you know. There’s all kinds of wonderful things about being married and a father. There’s also wonderful things about being a monastic or a priest. Yes, yes, indeed. We have a very young parish here. So I see plenty of it. I try not to stare. I try not to look at it. I don’t want to because I have my my resting serious face and it gets even more severe when I’m celebrating liturgies. So I don’t want to be like. I can stare all I want because I’m in the choir loft. Nobody will see it. Yeah, that’s why we put musicians up in the choir loft because they’re fundamentally untrustworthy. Oh, you said that out loud. I’m not going to say anything. Yeah, you’re not going to dispute that. You’ve known enough musicians. Always late. Always. Getting you copies of things that very clearly say do not copy. Yeah, that’s happened actually. I’ve seen it. Yeah, it’s nothing I would do, of course. All righty. Other Andrew in college. What are you up to? I just got back. So nothing much. No. All righty. All righty. I don’t have anything to add here. That’s just fine. Do you know anything about analog computers? No, not really. Okay, me neither. But I’m very interested now. Very interested in analog computers. We talked about how you can make them out of crabs. All right. Tell me how to make a crab based computer. I want to know what the name of the operating system is as well. That I don’t know. But you can, you can, you can. There’s a paper that I read one time where they built. They built the circuitry, the logic gates and everything out of these little hallways for crabs. And then turns out something about the social behavior of crabs is if you dump the crabs in one end, they will run through it like current through an analog computer and end up providing you with analog output based on where the crabs come out on the other end of it. So I guess that means that crabs are Turing complete. I’m not sure. As long as they’re standardized crabs, right? You don’t want that one rebel crab throwing things out. Yes. Yeah. Well, I hear electrons do that too, if you make your circuitry small enough, but which is interesting. Yeah. All sorts of it gets squirrely. I was so father, I was just listening to the Thomistic Institute lectures at all. Any of you guys by any chance? It’s a bunch of Dominicans talking about St. Thomas. I’m a big fan of the Thomistic Institute, so I’m probably going to like whatever you’re about to tell me. Well, so I was listening to, well, I just think you’re talking about quantum tunneling. And I was thinking about, I was listening to one professor presenting that the Aristotelian Thomistic, hylomorphic view of reality. And as, as it’s sort of like gaining serious traction and philosophy right now as a way to deal with all the issues that you end up with with materialism, yada, yada, yada. One of the things that I thought was really interesting is the comparison between that and atomism being that the fundamental issue with atomism as such as that there has to be an irreducible, you have to reach some point where something is utterly simple. Whereas with the sort of the hylomorphic view of reality, you have, I wish I could remember exactly what this is. You’re basically you’re engaging with things that are that are knowable, but still complex. And so you’re engaging with the substance of a thing. And it’s that’s doable even if there are, let’s say, conceivable subdivisions of that, which I just thought was really interesting in relation to the sort of the philosophical substrate that I realized that I grew up in was was atomism, which is you have to go there has to be something at the bottom that can’t be divided anymore. And sort of science grew up on that. And then we got into quantum physics in the early 20th century and started getting into it. And so all this stuff is going mad. I’m like, oh, this is why everyone was so excited about string theory, because you end up with all of these subatomic particles that are supposed to be combining into the sub. Actually, I can’t remember what the hold on to. You’ve got atoms that you’ve got subatomic particles, which are electrons, neutrons, protons and some other stuff. And then those are made up of like the quarks and gluons and all that. And I don’t know what level that is. But apparently even those aren’t the base. And I think I’d always thought, oh, yeah, science just does that. You try to just go to the edge of things. I didn’t realize that it’s like, no, the whole basis was atomism. And so the fact that there continued to be divisibility was always a problem. Anyway, that was that was kind of a light bulb moment for me. I thought that was really interesting. Yeah, it seems like and I’ve got a lot of physicists. So listen to my theology degree rant here. But it seems like every time that they’ve experimentally tried to go below the quark layer, the quarks like instantly reconstitute themselves at another arrangement or something like that. That’s something I thought I remembered hearing. And I remember thinking like like once you get down to a certain level, things just become indeterminate. Yeah. If you start breaking things out, it actually just becomes indeterminate. Yeah, everything in quantum is technically indeterminate. That’s why it’s a statistical likelihood and not a certainty. But the other assumption of atomism is linear and discrete connections. It’s a relationship between A and B that’s bounded in space and time. And the problem with quantum is none of it is that none of its linear, none of its discrete, none of its bounded in space or time. And so they don’t know what to do with it. But they keep selling it as a solution to solve some kind of problem of whatever higher up. Right. And because they’re not, you know, they’re running under the assumption that it’s not a two worlds mythology. And it’s like, well, there’s definitely there’s definitely two. Plato was clear about it. It’s weird. I’m a Neoplatonist and I don’t believe in the two worlds mythology. I’m like, then you don’t believe in Plato. I don’t. You’re not a Neoplatonist. And I don’t know how you’re sparing that circle, but you’re wrong. Like you’re just wrong at some point. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. And so it’s like it’s like that inverted Platonism of everything just comes out of that base layer and can be explained from that base layer is just like even science is telling us that that’s not how it works. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s actually that balance between the emanation and the emergence coming together. And so some I’m sorry. Someone’s going to talk. Go for it. Oh, okay. So I had a really interesting and now experience with biology. So I went through I went through undergrad and then a year and a half of grad school in biological sciences sort of looking at like organismal biology and ecology. So I ornithology was my particular interest. And but you know you go into a university you kind of get the general bio stuff your genetics classes to biology some molecular bio some cell bio all that. And I’ve gone through all my schooling and and then I read this paper from this this guy even published in the New Atlantis. I think it was I think it’s the only article I’ve ever read from the New Atlantis. But it was a great article and he was presenting which should be no surprise to anyone here. The teleological view of life which he said biology is nonsense if you assume that everything is means driven. And I felt like I had been swindled my entire college education when I read it because he starts. All right. We say it’s all means driven but you go down to these chemical interactions at the genetic level and you say that you’re proofreading your right here there’s error correction. What is that. What could that possibly mean if there’s not intentionality there. And then and then you start moving up and you’re looking at animal behavior and it’s like well for whatever truth there is that the behavior is it’s like you have a bird and it wants to build a nest and it kind of doesn’t really matter what you give it. It’s going to build basically the same nest. So it’s trying to build a nest and it’ll use various means to do that. To me the part that’s the most interesting is we start looking at genetics and when you start looking at you know there’s the whole idea we start sequencing genomes of entire organisms. We think we’ve got biology nailed down. This is it. Here it is. Here’s the computer program. Here’s the OS for life. Turns out not really at all basically. And all this stuff was there in the classes. I just couldn’t see it. And so particularly the sort of the clearest memory is of developmental biology which I took two courses on loved it. Absolutely fascinating. If you ever want to be astonished that any baby ever comes out of any organism with like the limbs in the right places just take one of those classes you’re like I have no idea how anything comes out. OK. It’s just because here’s what happens. So you’ve got your little egg and it gets fertilized and then it sets up some sort of north south axis. All right. It sets up a pole and then it starts dividing and you get this protein gradient and it varies across organisms but it’s like up and down basically. And then you establish one more axis and it’s like OK I’m tracking with this. We basically got two or three different proteins that are diffusing across it that give identity to the cells. Great. It’s dividing. You get into like you know a couple thousand cell range and it’s like and then we start developing body segments. We’re like we’re still good because that’s pretty straightforward. It’s like let me have the signaling factor and this signaling factor goes and in certain cells it up regulates these seven genes down regulates these 18 genes. All of those all have 15 other interactions that they have. He’s like we don’t know. We don’t. I’m not going to ask you for any of this because here’s one slide and there’s just this like spider web of up regulation down regulation coverage all of this stuff. He’s like this is what this one signaling factor of like 15 that we’re running up is doing. And you think well OK. How is that bottom up. And it’s obviously not because then you realize what what are organisms doing. They’re actually reorganizing the way that they’re sort of the epigenetic stuff that you’ll hear about occasionally right. It’s the way the DNA is packaged. That’s that’s the organism operating top down and saying well we don’t need this part of the DNA. We need this part that needs to be accessed. And what you end up with is actually something much more like say an immaterial pattern that’s making use of the information embedded in the material of the DNA. As it’s needed to maintain a certain form. Right. And to me that just I mean I thought wow this is this makes more sense than however many thousands of hours I’ve sat through all this stuff. So the same kind of thing going on with physics. It’s all needs to emerge from the bottom up. Absolutely not. I mean in bio it just doesn’t it just doesn’t work. And so then you know and then I read go to finally get a hold of some domestic loss to mystic natural sciences and it’s like organisms are causal locuses and what they do is they bring forth them their itness. They keep doing the thing. It’s like a yellow throated warbler perpetuates yellow throated warbler ness and it takes stuff into the environment and it’s all stuff in order that it continues to instantiate this pattern over and over and over. And then it makes these little eggs that are yellow throated warblers in potential and so on and so forth. Wow. Yeah. So I think you turned Mark’s day around right there. He looks very happy right now that he didn’t have to explain all that to somebody. I didn’t have to argue you into that. That’s Michael Levin’s work. Right. He talks about oh look at all the things you can do by changing the electrical charges in the in the development process. And it’s like yeah isn’t that. But he still doesn’t get it. And you read these guys like Kastrup and Levin and Josh Abak and you read their Twitter feeds and you realize that things that they don’t know would stun you. I read them and I’m like you can’t be this dumb. I mean I’m literally like how can you do all this other stuff and like not know how this works. You’re just perplexed by the simple. Highly trained technician. Highly trained technician. Not a professional. Right. Well and that’s the thing. And I think the kind of load is an issue. I think you know they don’t actually they appear smarter than they all are. I think that’s what happens when you over train somebody. And then really what you’re doing is you’re trading off general knowledge for specific knowledge. But now you’re missing the general knowledge. And when things collapse and we can’t hold up the academia I retire anymore they’re not going to make it. They’re literally actually not going to make it because like Einstein they can’t find their way home. They can’t put their shoes on or you know whatever it is. Which is charming in a four year old but in a 40 year old. Well I was around a 30 year old a 30 something year old. We had a temper tantrum like a four year old once. And I was just and I was you know I was a kid like I was like 17 or something. I’m sitting there watching this grown ass man have a literal temper tantrum the way I had never seen any kind of creature but a four year old have one. And I was just I didn’t know what to I I still have problems processing. And I’ve run into him since. He’s a famous person. It’s just like wow that’s that’s amazing. Like you’re in your 30s. You were supposed to be done with that in kindergarten. Right. Over dinner over dinner which is the funny. Like over what to eat in a in a time in a place with with facilities to eat whatever we could drive wherever we wanted to go. And we have any kind of food we wanted. Literally I mean we were in Boston and like you can get Ethiopian food in Boston. Like you get literally any kind of food you want. And the meltdown was over that kind of a decision. Like a four year old is not getting fed. Like wow. It’s amazing. Mark. Yesterday I had a real interesting discussion with the guy that I met fairly recently. He works in interstellar spacecraft. That’s what he does. I think he does. Speaking of computers like firmware or something for interstellar spacecraft. Yeah. And he’s a really wonderful guy. He he goes to our parish and we were having this conversation about people around him. And I was saying you know I see these things like say Sam Altman. Right. So GPT four is getting flack because the phone saying it is. And yes I get that. And then there’s this open letter and his response is I’m personally hurt that Elon Musk doesn’t think that we did a good enough job on this. And like dude how is this. And so I so I’m asking this friend of mine I said like and there’s just these other little things too. Like I really love the space engineering world. So so what was it. It was a relativity one rocket that they launched a couple of weeks ago. And there’s this video of the workers there and they’re celebrating. And I was like these look like six year olds. And I thought maybe they’re just caught up in the moment. So I’m asking him like getting all these little pieces. And he said oh no no no. This is exactly what’s going on. You have these people who are hyper competent at say designing rocket engines and you know doing fluid dynamics modeling on the turbo pump machinery of you know of a closed cycle you know methaloxins and whatever or large language model design. He’s like it doesn’t matter. They are emotionally six year olds. And in fact most of them are proud of the fact that they’re emotionally six year olds because they’re so competent to what they do in that field that they don’t have to pick up the slack anywhere else. He was saying it’s interesting because like he’s like you know attack I’m like pretty much technically as good as anyone else but I’m also actually a mature human. And so like I am like really in demand of this because I could be the only adult in the room. But that but like the deep I mean and that’s funny and I appreciate that for him and all that. But what exactly that point was so weird to me is that you can there is such a non correspondence between high technical capacity and development as a human. And this comes back to that distinction of your religion and science on the one side and magic and technology on the other. And this sort of work where are we going with this. Am I trying to be receptive to reality or am I trying to manipulate reality. And you know there has to be some degree of manipulation so that we don’t die because the environment is to some degree. And so it’ll kill us if we’re not careful. But if your fundamental orientation is towards manipulating things and you assume hey my desire structure my value hierarchy whatever you want to call it is where it should be. You’ve got the technical skills that allow you to live with that. It’s like wow turns out that submitting to what’s true is actually a necessary component to growing up and not being a baby. Well and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve catered to these specialties. And if you want to be terrified for the rest of your life and then understand why suddenly I can’t use Streamyard on Firefox anymore which is just a weird bug to have happen out of the blue because I didn’t change anything on my machine. Firefox didn’t update they changed something with Streamyard and now it doesn’t recognize that I’m running on Firefox. It actually tells me I’m not. So I have to use Chrome and then my camera is funny. Actually my camera is correct because it doesn’t work under Firefox. All these different bugs. If you want to be terrified and understand the phenomena go to YouTube and type in the coding train. OK. And now watch what he’s doing. It’s in every video and realize some of the things he’s teaching people are AI. And some of that is very advanced computer science. And I mean very advanced because I watched some of those like and he’s and he’s a professor at NYU. And I’m looking at his presentation and he’s literally blowing a train whistle and he’s all goofy like a like a kids TV show literally. And he’s using soft children’s colors and he’s teaching advanced programming in some of it. Not all of it. Some of it’s very simple programming. But he’s teaching advanced programming in some of these same format. And it’s just it was terrified. I found this I was a fascinated and be horrified at the same time. I’m like why are you treating software engineers as though they’re six year olds. And he is. And it’s amazing. And some of this stuff is really got like some of the first digits. Excellent. I’m like oh yeah that’s actually a really good way to explain AI in this situation or machine learning or whatever. And he’s got like five part series and stuff like this is not for six year olds. And yet it is for six year olds. It’s like what you know and we don’t appreciate how knowledgeable people can be about certain things and how much other stuff they don’t know that you would think was foundational. And we have no appreciation for that. And I still get caught up in it all the time. And I’m used to it because I used to hang out at MIT and Harvard and see people who were solving the human genome problem and literally couldn’t keep their shoes tied. You know or like one time I was at MIT. This is great. I’m at MIT and two of them come into this dorm room and they’re arguing with one another. And he says I you know and one of them goes he spilled his drink. And he goes I did not spill my drink. And he started in on this physics explanation for why the cup that was on the tray that he was had only fell. But that had nothing to do with him. And I was just like I’m sitting right there. He’s three feet from me and I’m like what is going on. And the other guy’s like chuckling up a storm. And you know it’s and it was very like they’re at MIT and none of them were admitted early. It’s not like they’re eight year old prodigies at MIT. They were you know in their 20s or whatever right like or at least 19. And and I was amazing to me that you couldn’t just take responsibility for having tipped his tray over. You know it was it was because the glass was top heavy which you know the glasses there at the time were top heavy. I know that for a fact I was there. But like that’s not why it fell. So yeah you get into these things. It’s strange. Oh my goodness. Yes that’s how you’re going to raise your kids right Ted? To never grow up? Just be in Neverland? Oh my goodness it is it is. Well I wonder how much of that too is just. Oh Mike and Evan’s at MIT. Is a failure to have grown ups that they see that are like worth emulating. I mean that just sounds really basic. One of the things that I really appreciate about my parents growing up is my mother was extremely unapologetic about how much she liked being a grown up. She’s like being a grown up is great. It’s just better. Being a kid is great. Being a grown up is better. And so I just I grew up with this attitude of not like I’m going to like miss out on something. It was no like that is the realm of at least on the earthly level capacity and fulfillment. You know and and you’re moving into something that’s actual not just potential. And so. This isn’t one of you know that’s one of old Peterson’s old sticks to write the you know you have to choose something because you’re always moving out of potentiality into actuality and a 20 year old that doesn’t know how to do anything. It’s very different from a 40 year old who doesn’t know how to do anything because they haven’t chosen their major or what career or whatever. And that’s sort of. Yeah you wrote sort of you just you start doing things and then if you have the proper engagement with those things and all of a sudden you stop being the kind of guy that goes into our physics argument over why the kids are so good. And then you start doing things and then you stop being the kind of guy that goes into our physics argument over why the cup fell itself off of his tray. It’s like. But that’s the thing is is it’s you know these space cadets scientists these adult children have a competency that they’re super developed in. And nothing else. Right. That’s called overfitting this and they’re over fit. And I think part of it too. I noted this on the band. It’s like a wonderful video with Mary Harrington. Absolutely great to must watch. It’s a must at Harrington’s. She’s awesome. It was way too short. It’s surprising. It calls us an hour long video. I’m like who’s short. But but he you know one of the things she said and this is very British. So like you know whatever. This is a UK thing for sure. But she said like I don’t like talking about my family. And I think part of the problem is when we’re shielding people from negativity we’re they’re losing a bunch of information about the world but they’re also losing how to deal with negativity. And the other thing is we don’t realize that means they can’t deal with positivity either. Like you remove one extreme the other extreme vanishes. And now you’re not dealing with that correctly either. And so this is why they’re six years old when something complicated goes right instead of the old days. And you can watch old NASA reels when they launched the Saturn rockets and stuff. Yeah. By the way we were able to surpass the Saturn rocket within the last three years. That’s how we advanced the set and we still can’t make a moon lander module. Cannot. We cannot. We can’t duplicate. The technology was actually lost. The technology to manufacture things that would make a Saturn rocket was lost. We had to we had to construct new types of rockets using new technology because we don’t know how the ones we had worked or we can’t reproduce them anymore in material science. And yet people don’t appreciate any of that. But you know when you watch these films these guys are very reserved and it’s not like they don’t ever go. Yeah but it’s yeah. And then right back to work right. They’re very well contained within their excitement and they’re very circumspect about the whole thing. And there’s a reverence and they treat their job as sacred. And we’ve lost all that and part of losing all that might be I don’t know right. Just a thesis right. We’re not going to church. We’re not learning those skills the skills around liturgical engagement which give you the potential like biology. It gives you the potential the scaffolding of the structure for the miracle to happen. Yeah. That’s why it’s just a really funny kids to church. Yes. Mark a really weird anecdote about building Saturn rockets and how much of that knowledge was lost is last fall. I had this old bent over guy come by like three ricks of firewood from me. And so he’s over there you know all this wood around and we get to talking because I love talking to old men who live in the woods. This is one of my favorite things. And he starts telling me about all these different jobs he’s had. He’s like yeah you know I was out in California. This was back in oh mid 60s and man I had this job building up these plexiglass models that they’d used to cast something. He was like in it you know it’s about this big and shaped like this and yada yada yada yada. And they I think it was part of that rocket engine they sent to the moon. I was like you’re building these you’re building the expansion throat to the F1 rocket engine for the Saturn rockets. I was like no. And I looked it up and like that’s where they were being manufactured at the time. I mean there’s no way he was messing with me and there’s definitely there’s enough detail in it. And so I’m like right. It’s that it’s like if you want if you want to know how to manufacture the you know right when you go from that throat right there out and where it starts expanding like there was a guy who lives somewhere in rural Arkansas now who’s bent over with age and hard work who knew how to build fiberglass models that they would use to cast that portion of the engine. And it’s like that’s where all that knowledge was. It was in all those guys who knew that and that and that and that and that and that and that and that and that. And that’s one of those weird really weird things about the technological civilizations. Then on one hand it’s this sort of operating above us and you know you’ve got this one little hyper specialized piece of it. But on the other hand it’s also just embedded in people. And if you lose those people you actually lose that knowledge. It’s really interesting. So you know if they build the F1 rocket again I’ll try to track him down and have him teach someone else how to build up that part. That’s the Peterson thing about you know you can take a bunch of six year olds or whatever whatever age and none of them has the full set of rules. But together they can play the game and play within the rules. And that’s the case for distributed cognition that the Vickie talks about right. And if you listen real close to the Vickie he’ll tell you relevance realization is also something that that Peterson is on. Although I would argue Peterson was on it first and Vickie found it that way. But and I think John actually says that at one point but I might be misremembering. So yeah they’re they’re they’re tracking all the same things. They’re just using different terminology right which is which is really interesting. But yeah that distributed cognition that ability for any one person not to actually know how the thing works. But together somehow they can coordinate cooperate such that there’s a manifestation that’s larger than themselves. The whole appreciation for that is lost in the individualism and the only place you really find it nowadays is is in is in is in the church experience. And you know I watched this there’s a special I think it’s on Amazon Prime but it’s called ITER. It’s a documentary on the on the fusion technology right. Maybe a fusion technology and it’s fascinating because they talk about in the 1940s when they first started the nuclear fusion idea. And I was like wait it’s how old how they were saying it was five years away in 1945 or something. And I was like wait what they’ve been they’ve been selling this snake oil since the 40s and no one caught it. And then there’s one guy in I think he’s American but he was over there working on the on the European ITER project. And all he kept saying was well this is like a cathedral. I mean literally keep saying the word cathedral over and over again because I will never I won’t be alive when it’s done. And that was all his reverence. And in fact the workers were there on that day so they got the camera falling around and he’s going into the working area and he’s an engineer like whatever. He doesn’t really understand the technology. These guys are all foreign to none of them were French you know or you know they obviously weren’t born in France in the in the past two generations. Let me put it that way. So they they what he told them was you are making something that your children and your children’s children will benefit from that you will never. And they were like oh really. Well that’s kind of cool you know and it kind of motivated and you can see it in the moment in the documentary which I found fascinating. And the rest of the documentary is about how much of a complete catastrophe the project management was which being a project manager or having done a project manager I’m like yeah no surprise there. Yeah hurting cats is always hard. Hurting engineering cats who are part is the worst thing you could ever possibly hope to do. There’s whole specialty books written on how to deal with genius teams. It’s like yeah that’s a whole different different set of skills. So we don’t appreciate how much of that there is and how much parallel there is between a project like that. It’s you know 50, 60, 70 year project or more maybe who knows. And and and what we’ve already had in the past was building of a great cathedral. Multi generational you know projects and how how impactful that is even in the scientific individualistic age. And we just don’t we’re not exposed to it anymore. That’s because the church has receded Father Eric it needs to get out there. Okay I’ll get out there right now. Right now. Here we go. Mark I have an idea about how we could make the church bigger. I found at least one person that could. All right. Mark come on. You can make it one bigger. Oh yeah. I’ve already made it bigger than one already doing doing other things. So this is this has been something that I’ve been pondering and it’s a little bit of a turn but it’s been it connects really closely. I was I was out walking yesterday before early early in the morning at a state park and there’s this beautiful overlook over some beautiful falls. And then they’ve got all these stonework that keep people from casting themselves off the cliff to their doom. And it was reminding me of like the picture of the pictures that I’ve seen a lot of the like the Greek Orthodox monasteries on the eastern side of the peninsula. And it hit me. Oh you know I grew up viewing state parks and national parks as sacred spaces. How interesting is that there are these places that are set apart you go people make pilgrimages to them. Right. So it’s like oh we’re going to go to Rocky Mountain National Park. Why you don’t have to explain why you’re going to Rocky Mountain National Park. You’re going there you’re going there you’re not even really going there to have fun. You don’t go to national parks to have fun. They’re not adventure parks or anything like that. You go there to be odd and then they’re sacred. They’re the special place like there’s all sorts of behavior that you don’t do there. You don’t throw garbage away. You don’t act crazy. You know and on and on and on. And I just thought how interesting that was that. I mean I feel like I just soaked that one out totally from the world growing up. It was like these are sick. And so now you know that I’m actually having out of Protestantism that I have a conception for sacredness a little bit more like oh that’s what that was like the state parks the national parks. Those are sacred. I just thought those are really interesting thing that I had never seen before. The part Rangers are the priests there who are looking after it. And when people cross the stray of the of the gods of the park they’ll right out there and their ATVs and pick them up. Yes. Well hypothetically we don’t know anything about that personally. Well and that’s the thing too. I was listening today to Jonathan Pigot had a discussion with Stephen. Sarah from Hamilton on symbolism scripture and universal history. It’s a really good all too short unfortunately talk but it’s a really good talk. And that was one of the things they were talking about was he was talking about sort of the limits like well when I talk about this stuff you know I have a feeling I don’t know this for sure but I have a feeling that when you hit a certain point the Protestant doesn’t break down because this stuff doesn’t doesn’t work like there’s stuff that you listen to them. They avoid talking about Mary the mother of God right because they know you know some I know I will say unconsciously that if they go there they are not going to be able to stay where they are anymore. They’re going to have to move and yeah it was very interesting he said it a couple of times and I was like oh that’s that’s you know and you can tell kind of from the flow of the conversation listed some of the some of the boundaries like there are definitely boundaries here. Cross this boundary your process is in trouble you know or at least you’re in trouble within it and so you’ve got to make a decision real quick run away or run towards right and I found that fascinating but what you’re really pointing out is it doesn’t matter what you do or how hard you try to get away from it. There are the patterns of religion as I call them on my wonderful channel navigating patterns and and you know that that’s why I keep I keep trying to explain to people if you believe you don’t have a religion one will be provided to you without your knowledge or consent. You’re going to act out the pattern of sacredness you’re going to act out things like dogma right you’re going to act out. Literature these things you are going to do those things and it’s the religions that sort of gave you the distributed cognition through time to explain to you the best way to handle those things and one of those ways is to practice it and what is the practice to practice is going to church every Sunday so that you’re so that you’re fresh on. Oh no no this is the right thing to do and like one of the senses I lost recently myself was I totally zoned on the fact that the idea of you know your life is that most of your life is boring and banal and then there’s these little blips right and part of the problem is that’s not as true for me as it is for. Because I have a huge I have a huge awareness of detail that other people don’t have and so I can just track a tremendous number of things and so I’ll be sitting at the computer and I’ve got a window right in front of me and a butterfly will go by and I’ll notice it and I’ll be like oh butterfly beautiful you know and things like that or that I’ve got rabbits I’ve got occasional deer comes outside the window for some reason which is weird because it’s near the road and I’ve got a little bit of a you know all this stuff is going hummingbirds buzz by I’ve got regular birds but I noticed all that stuff when it happens and so to me it’s like what do you mean you don’t live in an enchanted world this world so enchanted sometimes I’ve got to shut down like what are you talking about but then you forget no no you get to do the dishes every day you get to sweep the floors you forget all that. Well Mark what’s interesting about that too is that even if you are when you’re one of those people right and I remember a guy that I lived with in college where I realized sort of the gap that you can have there where this guy’s at one point a semester and basically explained I kind of just like don’t know where I was I’ve been this whole day I’ve just been places doing things and I thought what does that even mean I can’t understand that but okay where did I go? So the point I think I get this from is the Dark is Rising series it’s a children’s fantasy series over sea under stone the first one was great the rest of them were kind of garbage but there’s this really interesting point it’s the sort of Arthurian good versus evil thing that’s totally run at the end because Merlin just cast a spell on the kids and they never remember anything it’s like what did we even do this for but the point that probably the most original point was in their first showdown with the forces of evil they’re like they have to do this thing and they he can’t see this leaf spinning on a branch in the wind as being anything other than the most significant thing in the world and it’s like the force what the forces of evil do is they direct his attention at this leaf and instill it with so much meaning he can’t look away from it which I thought was like at the time I thought wow that’s really weird and now I think about that I think no that’s really really wise and so even when you live in this world of enchantment you’ve got all these things going on you still have to do something to I mean I’m not telling you anything that you don’t haven’t heard a thousand times from for Vicky and Peugeot and Peterson but it’s like okay we’ve got all these great wonderful things which one should I pay attention to you know how am I how do I know which one of those are the most meaningful how do I not just spend my whole life wandering around looking at butterflies because obviously you’re driven to do something other than looking at butterflies and rabbits right so where does that come from? But that’s also the problem right is that you need regular reminders they’re not optional the things that you learn that were like wow moments need to be revivified for you on a regular basis that’s why I like Peterson talks about revivification that has to happen and if that doesn’t happen then things start to break down. Well and so I’m suggesting that one of the things that church does is it in the liturgy in the action of liturgy consciously or unconsciously it says okay you’ve got all these things we’re going to take some of them and we’re going to do this here it is look at it and especially you know Catholic architecture I mean I love this it’s like here you go you walk in the building and it’s like there are lots of things here that are beautiful but you’re doing this and then there’s the you know there’s the tabernacle and the altar and then during the service it’s like there’s the Eucharist and you’re like that’s it everything’s pointing at that one thing that’s the most important thing and everything kind of the meaning radiates out from it and so you you’re given this way of starting to like work through how you pay attention to these things but then also yeah I mean Chesterton talks about this a lot this sort of reenchantment of things and one of the things that’s been running through my head a lot from just from various things is especially now that we’re in the Lenten season is just how remarkable trees are trees are very central obviously to the Christian story and they’re also very central to the Lenten to the Lenten narrative and so now we’re in the we’re starting on Passion Sunday the preface which is again I don’t know how familiar you are with the structure of the mass it’s the thing that’s prayed pretty much right before the consecration and it changes regularly and this is like it says father you might be able to help me get this more exact but it’s you know as as as death came through a tree like it’s fitting that life should also come from a tree right so the first tree being the tree of knowledge of good and evil the second tree being the tree the cross and so then again when I’m walking yesterday and I have I guess I have like a I feel like I really could have been sort of like a transcendentalist it’s very easy for me to engage with nature in a very very meaningful way to have like deep emotional experiences in relation to that and I was looking at the trees and I was thinking should I you know I sort of made this distinction right when we came in should I right when I got on this talk should I look at the trees and think I find the cross meaningful because I love trees and it’s very easy to engage with them or should I find all trees meaningful because they echo the cross and I think it’s got to be the second one the first one’s helpful but it’s got to be the second one and it works backwards and then and that’s that’s the way that that meaning works out and at least in my life and and and then there’s that reenchantment and I’m realizing that I’m you know walking with my eyes open in a world full of meaning and not you know preference say well yeah that’s why narrative is so important like that’s why narrative is the key right because even if there is a nomological order however you define it it’s not useful without narrative and and even if there is a you know another kind of order it doesn’t it doesn’t matter right normative order doesn’t matter because it’s the participation that matters and the only thing you can participate in technically is a story and so the tree is it is only a tree unless it is embedded in a story and that story is a story that you can also participate in so you don’t have to participate with the tree in the story but you have to be able to participate in the same story as the tree in this otherwise it doesn’t work right and and that’s the real that to me is the real thing that everybody’s missing that’s the real key is that it’s that participation and the only thing that can hold participation and this is in our four piece model is a four piece of information not knowledge is certain John Verveckis whatever you believe he doesn’t describe knowledge he describes information if you think carefully that that’s why poetics is the navigation of participation and the thing that we’ll that we’ve lost and if you think about it in our model if you lose poetics you just look autistic and have you noticed that everybody is starting to look autistic well yeah everyone’s starting to lose poetic engagement and that and you and and like anything else it’s a skill so you can have it one day like critical thinking is a skill to you can have it one day and when you haven’t used it for six months or six years or whatever it is suddenly you’re you know doing doing something crazy like taking untested fake news slu shots because you think that’s the right thing to do even though you know three years ago you would never have done such a thing it’s like you lose the kids the skill of being properly critical right or having relevance realization around what you’re critical of so you’ve lost some form of relevance realization in the in the process of not exercising it on a regular basis and the idea of exercising on a regular basis we want to use the Verveckis language exacting that out how do you exact out doing something on a regular basis I don’t know maybe if you went somewhere every Sunday on a regular basis it might exact out everything else like so so in that sense if that’s true maybe it’s not true like you can say no mark you’re absolutely wrong but if that’s true maybe the church is the way that you have to be to live in the world over generations and there’s no other option so there’s no better option that kids is why the church has a Sunday mass obligation you don’t go to mass on Sunday you’re going to hell when a relevance realization hell so what do you mean by poetic engagement do you mean like reciting poetry or just talking a certain way that’s my question Andrew thank you the way the model works and check out the model and navigating pattern the knowledge engine model the way that the model works is on one side of the brain you’ve got the propositional and the procedural and propositions are the things this is going to get tricky but I’ll just use things because it’s the best we’ve been able to come up with and we’ve been working on for three years so you know as close as you’re going to get the way they help setting right then procedures are the navigations relationships and connections between things and necessary stuff right and now that’s when you go to when you go to participation on the right side then those are the things the participation right what you connect them with because propositions are discrete and linear connections it’s a one to one relationship with every every piece of the one to one relationship with every other piece or maybe maybe two pieces but it’s still one one for one on the other side with participation that doesn’t work like the way to shake hands with somebody is not an actual procedure because when you start breaking it down it doesn’t work anymore you can learn this if you read the novel flowers for algenon which goes into it quite well I have read that the boys artistic well you know with the way they’re making the doughnuts is actually different so the two guys are telling him no no this is how you do it but they’re not telling him the same thing they think they are because they don’t see that poetically they’re interacting differently they don’t see it they have no idea that they look at each other and they say oh I understand how this works and therefore we’re doing the same thing but you’re not doing the same thing if you have to break it down using procedures and so the way you shake hands with somebody is not procedural it’s a participation and it can have many connections there’s many ways to walk up and shake somebody’s hand there’s many different tactics you can use when you’re shaking somebody’s hand and and they’re so nuanced I’m not going to go into that and there’s so many variations it’s so common for explosive explosive that the only way to connect it is through poetics so poetics are nonlinear non-discreet connections there are multiple connections and and that’s also linked to symbolism how symbols are things you can enter at any point and then once you go they can move you up and down or however through them and exit at any other point and there may be a limited number of points but it’s not one for one it’s not enter here and exit there right that the symbol of of will say Mary since we’re all in Catholic land here can lead you many places it doesn’t just lead to the mother of God right it is the mother of a representative of the mother of God symbol of that’s a litany that’s the litany of Mary right there yeah I was just thinking that we already have that built in we have the litany of Mary mark I remember thinking like what comes out of that could be any number of things right it could be our reviver yeah I remember I remember thinking like who’s who’s our lady of sorrows like I’ve never I don’t know which saint that is like who’s our lady of lords and I was I remember being a little confused at first when I was learning that it was still mother Mary I was like oh okay interesting I’m going to add you Sally Joe I have one father Eric if you get the chance I’ve got a new one to add to that litany I don’t know if you listen to the Richard Rowland pageo conversation on Beowulf but Roland mentions an early Anglo-Saxon book of homilies in which the Blessed Virgin Mary is referred to as the true Arkenstone of God yes yes like all like all of my circles they have come together I would like to say I drink a beer with Richard Rowland I think that would be an enjoyable time and we just I just be like tell me about the things I will listen I want all the things out of your brain into mine now yeah yeah he’s a fascinating crazy person and he is crazy though he is really over connected but but his relevance relation is excellent like you know yeah you know how he deals with being crazy is that he participates in the liturgy and that cuts everything down for a bit cut all that cut it all out cut it all out we’re just doing this right now that’s that’s what people don’t appreciate right I mean I talk a lot about Zen sweeping I’m like yeah that’s how I that’s how I dealt with my anxiety when I was young I invented which is not true right but I invented Zen sweeping literally get a broom but it can be it can be doing dishes whatever when you do that and I give you all the scientific biological reasons right your body’s doing something regular and then it sends a signal up to your brain and then your brain it’s going whoa it goes oh wait there’s a regular metronomic signal here from the muscle memory maybe I can clock to that instead of trying to clock to everything else in the universe and then it calms you down and it works pretty well I mean no one’s ever not said wow this is a miracle to me after trying it so like I’m assuming it’s fairly fairly consistent and reliable and it’s always worked for me and people don’t like they don’t appreciate that but that’s something that the liturgy gives you is a box right not just the exactation of the skill of doing something regular right but also the box that allows you to constrain yourself so you’re not off being an artist 24-7 like Sally Jo or something which is you know it’s not a big deal but it’s something that you can do you can get lost in that stuff pretty easily Mark Mark Mark have you ever been to a traditional Benedictine monastery by any chance no no I have you would you would you would love it so there’s one over in eastern Oklahoma or Lady of Clear Creek and I’ve been out there a couple of times and you start sitting through there yeah there it’s oh Father I don’t know if you’ve ever been there but it is I mean well first of all you drive up and the only thing that tells you what millennia you’re in is the cars and when you’re sitting there it’s like yeah this could be the 500s but you when you start sitting through the daily office and that you know so they’re chanting through the entire book of Psalms every week in Latin and you start first of all you sit there and you’re just hearing them go through this and they’re doing it what seven times a day they’re coming together seven times a day for it I think then they’re just chanting and chanting and chanting in Latin and you start thinking about these guys that have been doing that for 30 years and you realize that’s doing stuff to them like all kinds of stuff and it does stuff to you even when you’re there for you know for four hours I mean it’s just really it’d be it’d be I think I think you would I think you would find it interesting I’ll put it that way yeah no there was this scientific this this disaster in the 70s you know where the monks were going to update everything right yeah and so they decided we’re not doing all this chanting anymore right we don’t do that anymore it’s 1970 everything has to change you know and all of a sudden these guys have been running on like four hours of sleep a night no problem right four hours of sleep and I’ve been like you know what we’re gonna get eight hours of sleep a night and and they were finding that their health was just going to heck going to heck in a handbasket they needed more and more sleep they needed more and more food they weren’t able to cooperate with each other and then finally they got a new abbot thank the Lord it’s like we’re gonna go back to the chanting right that was the only thing they changed we’re just going to add the hours back in everything started evening itself out you know that that regular chanting it’s like Saint Benedict figured this out that’s why people still follow his rule of life and he didn’t figure it out all on his own he was just codifying what everybody before him had done yeah it’s amazing that’s why you’re always so happy when you’re chanting at mass I know you’re happy there I’m not as happy anymore anymore you don’t get to do it as much very sad yeah there’s a couple monasteries around there’s Memkin Abbey which is a Roman Catholic monastery apparently they’re not all created equal yeah no no I gotta check them out Google is not good at telling you where the clothes this Benedictine monasteries are first of all it still thinks I’m in England I don’t know why I live in England but I haven’t ever lived in it on so no no there’s no VPN here no no I don’t know what’s going on it’s been doing that on and off for ages I just haven’t figured out what what bug is in the Google software there but yeah I’ve got a look for one I’m gonna I’m gonna be in New England on Tuesday anyways it’s gotta be one near New England so let’s one up there somewhere yeah you gotta find one that actually has young monks in it yeah it’s amazing yeah if you make it really growing and not dying yeah but if you if you make them just father was saying sleep four hours a night and chant for six hours a day and eat a tiny bit of food turns out all the young men want to go there well that was I mean that’s funny turning that was my thing but my my you know and I still I have the document up my four hours how to get down to four hours a night of sleep because that’s what I was doing I mean I was four hours a night of sleep and then I’d literally jump out of bed every morning after my sleep and just run at the world at 100% or maybe by by human standards 10 million percent y’all are kind of kind of slow and and just for 20 straight hours I just I guess so even now like when I have a good I don’t even need a good four hours I could do if I get two hours when I’m back in that state I get so much work done it’s insane it’s like people like what and I’m like yeah I just you know format of this did that and ran through this and cleaned up all this and they’re like what and I’m like yeah I just I had it for a couple hours and when I’m back in that state I just get stuff done real quick start chanting some more then start chanting that’s all it’s like chanting is not a bad idea well chanting is yeah chanting is very imaginable I remember being scared skeptical of her vacay chanting and then I was like what and then I know I know all the science behind this and then I did it I was like whoa I was affecting that have that effect at all so yeah chanting is an interesting thing especially when you can do it on a regular on a regular basis but even just the first time it can be quite the transformative experience I remember the first time I chanted in a in an ashram and that was I was looking around like you put something in the air or because I didn’t need to drink anything I’m like I don’t trust these people you know like they’re doing right but but I was like and the windows were wide open and I was like why am what is going on this is not a chemical induced experience oh wow that’s pretty impressive and and the funny part was I already I could already get to weird states by myself I didn’t you know but I was like how is everybody chanting you know they did these long unknown well all begins with all sorts of chance right and it was just amazing that everybody there and the and the energy that that imparted into the room yeah for sure I imagine doing that with the Bible yes yeah I should probably do that yeah I mean nice bye father Eric like two two months ago we had it we had enough men in our choir at church and we we were doing I can’t remember what the chant even was this for part of the proper though then there’s a seminary at one of the seminarians of someone with us and so he and I did I think it’s called the Epson where you’re just holding the root note of the chant the whole time and so you know we’re we’re cycling breaths with each other which is also interesting because you really have to be tuned into the other person to make sure you’re not hitting the same breath gap and it’s a pretty thing we both got like deep bass voices and it’s a pretty rich note we’re both belting it for like four minutes straight and I mean mark to your point just on the physiological level right leaving everything else aside physiological level just hitting that one note with another person for four minutes straight and I’ve sung my whole life and I was like that was weird that was weird like it was like my lips are numb there’s all sorts of others it was like this is fascinating it I mean what did there is oh there’s some line from is that oh yeah that’s who it was Spencer Claven talking with Jonathan Peugeot when he referred to art as weapons grade emotion which I thought was fascinating and I think that that just like hits this general idea that we just totally underestimate these certain things say for instance singing we’re just like yeah singing is singing is singing it’s like absolutely not you can you can start doing weird stuff and I yeah I don’t know it’s it’s interesting because I’m working back there I spent quite a bit of time in South America when I was a college student a little bit after and met all kinds of people there and had a lot of stuff that just did not jive with kind of the models I have for things so it’s been really interesting to start to revisit all this because when I was down there it was like I’m meeting people going on the I was got trips this is 15 years ago almost and you know those were already the people doing I was go there’s like all this new age meditation stuff going on there as well as you know entrenched Catholicism and then you know Pentecostal light down there and so it’s really weird that I saw that stuff and here I am like nine years later all the stuff is like reemerging in my life I’m like no here’s the Catholicism here’s the here’s the hallucinogens it’s like I remember all of this and so it’s interesting to hear you talking about that because you know I’m hearing people talk about having these profound spiritual experiences that absolutely know nothing to do with the Judeo-Christian framework and where I was at that point I was like I don’t really know how to deal with any of this right I didn’t have any way to think about that yeah yeah yeah without the framework what happens is you have a bad trip right you have a you have a bad trip instead of a good you need a framework to help integrate well yeah there were people I also heard plenty of stories about bad trips when I was down there I was like oh you got abducted by aliens while you were on a on a I was go trip and then the witch doctor told you that means you’ve got a demon living in you I was like I don’t know you know just a kid from Arkansas I didn’t know any of the tools at that point right there right there take care of them fantastic also you have to stop doing ayahuasca that’s a part of yeah you know and I mean this is one of the one of my one of my very one of one one criticism I’ll make publicly of her Vicky M Peterson is like they’re not telling me the truth about drugs man you do drugs and the odds that you’re gonna have a good trip are almost zero and and the problem is not that the person doing drugs could have the bad trip problem is most of these people are smart enough and responsible enough to have somebody watch them and when trips go bad two people get hurt not one or maybe three or four like and I’ve seen that many many times sometimes the damage is reversible but a lot of times like the most common reason for psychosis is drug use that’s the most common thing for psychosis is the use of and it can only be marijuana because marijuana is hallucinogenic too right in large enough quantities and so like people like you shouldn’t be telling people that without without giving the warning is that most people who do drugs go nuts just factually in the numbers take your science and measure it it’s already got the works already done but we the literature it’s all there it’s not new it’s been there since like the 50s and 60s I’ve read that’s a lot of the great topic for a video mark where you actually pointed some of the literature and get people connected to it all of that research I don’t yeah right because you could say I could say oh yeah it’s right there in the code of canon law you know but if you can’t deliver the goods well see make stuff up I like this I like this idea of being great emotions because that because I’ve always I’ve always thought Sally Jo was very dangerous and now I know why yeah you have to be careful yeah I mean you got to be really careful I mean I really so I most of my engagement with the thing that we don’t talk about is is just your podcast because I’m on the road a lot and I’m in equipment a lot and I can listen and so I don’t really watch a lot of videos I do a lot of listening and so I end up listening to Paul Vanderkley a lot because he’ll also take a whole bunch of stuff and run it through and he did like he did a 20 or 30 minute thing which apparently is that like mark because of you because you told him that he’s started doing short videos and but it was about how these narratives are moving he was talking about he was he was referencing someone who’s like we didn’t watch television or movies and but I knew who John Wayne was John Wayne was in her house and the way these things move through and yeah I mean for us a large part of our conversion to Catholicism was our realization of the universality of liturgy which is something you guys were talking about quite a bit previously and realizing how much all of that comes in and it’s just been it’s been really weird we haven’t I mean we haven’t you know slammed the animal down on anything in our lives but we had just walked out of so much media and we were not very media saturated people before anyway we would just walk way way way way way back because you start paying any attention to how that stuff moves through you that is art bad art or good art it’s art and it’s just it’s just crazy I want I want the images in my mind yeah I want the images in my mind to be the thing that brings me towards God and what’s interesting is now we have more art in our house actually you know so we’ve got got a lot of art in our house and we didn’t before and you know there’s actually have the cosmic mountain by pageo a big one about this big it’s great we’ve got a beautiful icon of Saint Joseph I’ve been writing some icons there’s a family out that does wait are you gonna yeah there you go excellent you got art you got one of the votes up yeah yeah but it’s just it’s I’m just realizing how conscious I have to be about that stuff yeah that is the line of the century right there pretty girls selling virtues they will sell cars that is correct but Sally Joe’s fixing that problem so there you go and there will be all the there will be all the prettier if they sell virtue realize with science they cut things off but then they don’t realize the additive power of things because they literally cut things apart that’s what science has to do no choice if you’re not cutting things apart it’s actually not science anymore and that’s the thing that scientists are struggling with well how do we get these things back together oh neopletism it’s magic and it gets things no right but you you have to be able to synthesize things back together that’s why the hegelian dialectic is so popular even though it’s got nothing to do with the socratic or the platonic dialectic there are different concepts but that’s why Thomas Aquinas is the best theologian because he knew actually how to put things back together after distinguishing them yeah that’s what the later scholastics lost and so every time you hear the orthodox dogpiling on western Christianity it’s like they didn’t get Thomas though they got a lot of much much weaker hosers that followed after him but they don’t they don’t get the big guy if they can’t take the big guy down you know you’re not gonna get anywhere you know what’s interesting father is when we were walking out of Protestantism I had a very strong emotional attachment to orthodoxy and and one of the things there’s a number of things but one of the things I really I can’t give up on Aquinas I can’t give up on Aquinas I realize that was a real consideration it was like if I go to if we go over to the orthodox church like that’s kind of it for me and St. Thomas and I couldn’t do it so for what that’s worth I thought that was pretty funny yeah yeah that’s he who is I heard someone say he has a mind like a cathedral which I just thought is a great a great description of him because he didn’t build it himself you know he was inheriting the whole tradition there yes if you’ve read the discarded image CS Lewis has a very interesting aside on the different not the discarded image the allegory of love where he talks about how the idea of genius and how by the time you get to the romantic genius was an indication of original creativity previous to that genius was your memory the degree to which you were could memorize things which I thought was fascinating so genius especially in the time of st. Thomas Aquinas what a genius was someone who remembered everything that they had read not someone who’s coming up with a bunch of crazy new stuff so that it’s another one of those little those shifts where you start to see those those sort of long-term historical patterns taking place speaking of patterns we are coming up to another pattern here the pattern of the end pattern of weakness on on your part father eight and a half hours on friday my friend yeah you know what um I I have boundaries on the end of my uh on my live streams perfect that was perfect that that meld them both together because it was on boundaries eight and a half hours well done sir well that’s so so it’s been this is built man this was a great conversation Ted always great to have you here and I’m glad you asked that question about poetics um yeah I’d like to ask more eventually yeah well uh you just discuss it more anyway feel free to drop into the discord or set up a call with me and I’ll be and I mean we can do a video on it whatever you want to do I love I I’m always worried about engage I’d love to do a video and have you interview me about it or whatever and share it with everybody so that they can get a better sense for it I do better when people are interviewing me and asking questions because I don’t need other people frames to do the magic that’s right okay what I do so yeah feel free to reach out and uh and we’ll do something if and we don’t have to record it like but I’ve got a zoom account so we can talk for hours if you want okay cool all righty well God bless you gentlemen take care see you after Jesus rises from the dead see you