https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JgVsOY1PD70
Good evening and happy Sunday everybody. I’m glad that we are actually able to do this this week. I am glad that I’m in a place where the internet is running reliably. All day long last week my internet was working just fine and then when it came time to streaming everything inside the house was functioning properly but the internet service provider decided to just not do anything and so we had to miss out on our live stream last week but now I hate to say it but Florida is proving to be more civilized than North Dakota at the moment and we are able to be going live at this time. Now I’m live here in Florida because I was at the Symbolic World Summit with me and a fair number of people that I knew, a few people that I got to meet for the first time and yeah, you know, it was a very delightful weekend. So as most of you probably know they had a special secret guest on the Symbolic World Summit prep time and everybody’s like, oh boy, I wonder who that’s going to be, you know, who is it that they can’t announce until like a week before it and as it turns out it was Dr. Peterson himself and you know, Dr. Peterson is still himself. He had a rather interesting back and forth with Father Stephen D. Young and he gave kind of a presentation and a little panel discussion and you know, we would just say that that was a classic Peterson and yet, and yet I was sitting with my good friend Mark and Sally Jo and my other good friend Adam, we were all kind of sitting for across and constantly, constantly throughout the entire presentation we were all like, oh no, he’s getting that wrong, what’s going on here? There were certain things which becoming clearer and clearer to me as time was going on, certain errors in the thoughts of Dr. Peterson became apparent to me during that panel discussion that he was having because he was up there with Father Stephen D. Young and as you may well know, Father Stephen D. Young is a Orthodox Christian priest, rather well educated and I think he’s got a pretty decent understanding of ancient world views and ancient world views were very, very capable of just saying, yeah, God created the heavens and the earth and just leaving it at that because that’s actually how simple that it is. The heavens and the earth come down out of God, comes down from us and something that I saw for the first time was just how committed the degree to which Dr. Peterson was committed to having things coming from the bottom up. Now, I think it is very true that things come from the top down primarily, they’re also met bottom up, but the bottom up movement seems to me to be much more secondary, that we should place the privacy on what God is doing first and looking only secondarily to what’s coming up out of and from creation. And so Father Stephen was rather clear on this point, he was representing Christian faith fairly well, although his insults to Latin, he said Latin was boring, that I’ve forgiven him for, but I have not forgotten. So these two errors, it actually got to the point where Dr. Peterson was blind to or refusing to look at the possibility of things coming down from heaven, it got so intense that I actually did a little exorcism on the room, nobody would have noticed it was all just kind of internal, but I rebuked two spirits in the room, the spirit of Pelagianism and the spirit of Gnosticism, because I think those are two things that Dr. Peterson has fallen in error and I think unless you’re firmly grounded in revelation, you’re going to fall into those errors, you’re not going to be able to do much about it. So Pelagianism, what is Pelagianism? It’s named after the British monk Pelagius, he was from under the fourth beginning of the fifth century and he taught that Christ, when he came, only gave us a good example, that was all that he provided to humanity, that we could look to Christ and we could see the way that we should be behaving. Now that’s not how it happened at all, no, it was the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, his incarnation, his death, his resurrection, everything that he did was necessary for our salvation and so this idea of Pelagianism has come to describe this idea that it is through our moral effort alone that human beings are saved. Then we go, we look at Peterson and I saw that very clearly, everything that Peterson sees is the result of human effort. Now human effort can accomplish some things and I think when we look at Dr. Peterson, we can see a decent amount of what it can accomplish, he can discipline himself fairly well, he can comport himself well in public, he can gain insights into good behavior, but it’s ultimately not the fullness of that. So Dr. Peterson only sees what is possible through human effort. By the way, that’s why you’ll find all sorts of Christians constantly being do you believe in Jesus, doc? Do you believe in Jesus? They’re insistent on this point, maybe not the people he’s actually talking to, but when I saw Dr. Peterson a week and a half ago in Fargo, they had this forum where you could ask questions and the most popular upvoted question, which was not asked to him, was who do you say that the Christ is? Oh boy, yeah, that’s not a leading question right there. This is kind of where some of that frustration is coming in from, that we are not seeing Dr. Peterson receiving grace from on high. The only thing he thinks he can do is to make a moral effort himself. And so I think that’s an error. I think it is the case that the Lord in his great tenderness and mercy reaches down to us, he enlightens our intellects, he straightens our wills out, he gives grace to all of our faculties and draws us up to himself. It’s not a matter of us needing to reach up there and grab it, but rather to cooperate with what God is doing in us. And the second thing I saw, which I’ve identified as Gnosticism, is the way that he sees heavenly archetypes. The way he sees heavenly archetypes is by looking inward. He looks into himself. He finds these spirits inside of himself. Rather than looking up, looking out, he looks into himself to find all of this wisdom. And as far as I’m concerned, that is not the appropriate place to look. You need to look up towards the Lord, not inwards towards your unconscious to find out the appropriate way to navigate yourself. And I think that is something that Dr. Peterson inherited from his hero, Carl Jung, and I don’t follow Carl Jung on this one. Well, we can look at archetypes and we can look at the way they’re embodied in us, and maybe we can learn some things from them. Those are realities that are beyond us. Those are realities that are above us. And we need to look up at Christ and the saints and the heavenly angels to know how to conduct ourselves. If we look inwards, that’s going to mess things up. So I’m identifying that with a Gnostic impulse. Maybe Gnosticism isn’t the right category for it. Maybe you think you can explain it better. And if that’s the case, then the link has been posted. Go ahead and come on and tell me all the ways that I’m wrong. Let’s take a look here. Yes, civilization is well, I just assume the internet’s working in Fargo now. We’ve got Prismkite. Good to see you. We’ve got Renee. Good to see you. I just want to know if Father Eric gave Tammy Peterson communion. So first off, she has not yet been received into full communion with the church. So I would be putting the cart before the horse there. And second off, I was not at the same church as them. In fact, I believe that Dr. Peterson and Tammy left the conference on Saturday afternoon or maybe even late morning in order to get somewhere. So they were not here on Sunday. Instead, Corey found a Byzantine Catholic church and I could celebrate the Divine Liturgy at that little, little, little Byzantine Catholic church. It was a delightful thing here. Yes, yes, I had to leave. I had to come all the way to Florida to find the internet. I watched Glenn Scribner go over Peterson’s arch speech and point out everything he got wrong. That was eye-opening. Okay. Yes, yes, there is a ghost in my room. He’s been haunting me all weekend, actually. So yeah, you know, and I offer these critiques of Peterson. I offer them not to try and take him down, not to try and say that he’s a bad person, that you shouldn’t listen to him. But he’s got some definite limitations in his thoughts. And I wonder the degree to which he’s going to be able to keep his interior life, his connection to the world fresh while being blind to things coming out of heaven. I don’t know how well that’s going to work for him. Is he going to be able to continue to expand his range of thought or is Dr. Peterson now stuck? I don’t know. We’ll see. We will see. I hope everybody’s having a good Lent because of the festive atmosphere here. Oh, we got a question here. Did any Catholics get to participate in that conference or was it all EO propaganda? Yeah, I felt like the EO propaganda was light with the exception of Father Stephen and his grave insult Virgil in the Latin language. Grave insult Virgil in the Latin language. I think Vesper Stamper was actually Catholic. Somebody told me that she was, but otherwise everybody else up there was Eastern Orthodox. I would say that of all of the Orthodox folk I talked to, including a few priests, everybody was very welcoming and winsome. We weren’t there to highlight the differences or to hack these things out, but rather to see where we were in common. All righty. Are we going to be echoing? I have no idea. Sounds good so far. What do you think, Mark? Yeah, I thought that, well, I didn’t understand that polygenism term, but it fits. I think that did come out in the conference for sure. So I thought it was a really good observation. It was interesting that Virgil, for example, attacked the orthobros. That was healthy. I mean, I’ll be in a position where I will get a little bit irritated with what we call rad trads, people who think traditional Latin mass and nothing else. It’s like, well, the church is bigger than that. So yeah, sometimes you got to rein in the aggressive young men. That’s something that needs to get done. Yeah, I thought the fact that Peterson ran to psychology for every answer first sort of shows that emergence problem, which we’ve kind of talked about before. What are the tells of an emergent is good thinking psychology? Because it’s very individually psychology, because it’s very individualistic. Right. And so he’s answering everything quickly with his trick, which is psychologically speaking, whatever. Right. Which is just it’s disappointing. You’re looking for progress. Yeah, yeah. And it wasn’t even there. Sometimes I listen to him a little bit and it’s not even the case that I think what he’s saying is bad. It’s just kind of like I’ve heard it before. And, you know, it’s kind of map territory. It’s not interesting. Like last week or week and a half ago when I saw him in at Fargo, he brought up it was a paper he read by Richard Dawkins 30 years ago about how every organism is actually a microcosm of its environment. And so if you were to study it appropriately, you know, like a bird, you’d be able to tell probably about how big the planet it is on, what the air density is and some of the chemical facts about the environment around it. They just kind of brought that up. And I’m like, oh, that’s interesting. Like, you apply that test to human beings. What would you find? Because human beings are not like most other organisms. We don’t like to stay in our environment. We prefer to transcend our environment. We’ve gone to space for Pete’s sake. Yes, I still believe in space. I’ve seen the Mercury capsule in person. It was amazing. They really did set a human being up in that tin can. And yeah, so it’s like that tells us something about human beings. But it didn’t go there. He talked about Noah and Cain and Abel, which is, you know, maybe what people there needed to hear. So I’m not going to not going to worry about it. Yeah, I guess the attempt for him to tie together psychology directly with the biblical verses. I didn’t like that at all. Because you are going from an individualistic frame to a communal frame. Like the Bible is a communal document? Well, and it’s about communion. Right. So that’s one of the St. Augustine’s definitions of religion and his etymologies of it, which are kind of the same thing, is that it’s relegio, which just means to read again. And something that you’ll notice about religious festivals is that the same texts come up over and over again, with the Bible certainly taking pride of place there in Christian and Jewish liturgy. So yeah, yeah, it’s the way that we approach the Bible is communal. And then also, the Bible is a story about a community of persons. Whereas psychology is, you know, I guess there’s group therapy, but the platonic form of psychology is, you know, you sitting on a couch, and the psychologist being buried, it’s just two individuals, but one of them is supposedly helping the other, which sometimes happens, I’m sure. Yeah, but the idea of psychology and the way it’s based is all individual. It’s what can I do? How does this affect me? Whereas, and I think this is a problem with the flat world materialist Bible readings that we’re kind of stuck with. The Bible is really about relationship. Right, the biblical stories are about, well, this happened as a result of this person, right, and then these other people were affected. And then it usually loops back, as any good story does. And we don’t focus on that, to be fair. But for Peterson to try to marry the biblical story, because he always says, well, you, and he means it in the singular, can imagine, and then psychology, neuroscience, whatever. And then he talks about a biblical story, and I haven’t read it, but I haven’t heard any stories that were just one person. That’d be pretty lame to read, I think. I need to correct that. One person, but not only one being, or one bigger than being, however you want to parse that. Whereas psychology is, you can imagine that you could, which is different from the idea of what you get out of psychology, in terms of it all relates into you, that the biblical stories all relate to everything around you. And I think that was one of the major themes of the conference there was, you hear Richard Roland talking about it, you heard Father Deacon Cotard talking about it, about telling better stories. They were very insistent that that was their number one goal for us, leaving this conference, was to be able to tell better stories. And I think that was to be able to tell better stories. That’s why they brought Martin Shaw in there, Dr. Martin Shaw, excuse me, to come in there and to ravish us with fairy tales. Very quickly. I feel like he should have sent out consent forms ahead of time, letting us know that he was going to do that. And it’s very interesting because I think the most effective forms of therapy, in so far as it’s effective, usually ends up being one person helping another person tell a better story about their life. So you can imagine somebody who’s got a phobia of something that they shouldn’t be afraid of. We could look at the exposure therapy that you would go to, let’s say, say if you were claustrophobic, just getting near the closet, and then maybe going into the closet and staying in the closet, exposure therapy, you could look at that as, well, that person’s becoming braver. That’s not a bad way of thinking about it, but maybe a better way of thinking about it was the person was saying, I’m incapable of doing this. And the other person was able to help them with that. And when you see, you can see this, Dr. Peterson does actually see this communal element. He sees it kind of implicitly. He looks at, you know, like if he’s got a new client in there, he says, Okay, how is your are you married? Do you have any relationships? Do you have any friends? How’s your relationship with your work? All of those things. And so he can kind of see the importance of it. But maybe maybe he doesn’t put it first. Well, I think again, psychology tends to be you. And it’s an outward connection. It’s not a relationship. They use the word relationship. But it’s all locus, you. And sometimes it’s like, look, it’s not all about you. But when you do that, you’re still talking about you. It’s like to say, you the center of things, the person I’m talking to, the world isn’t all about you. I haven’t, I haven’t brought another person in. I’m brought on an object in, I brought a relationship in. Right, I’ve hinted at relationships that, you know, the world isn’t all about you, or, or I could say like, your marriage isn’t all about you. But I didn’t say like, well, when you talk to your wife, it’s totally different. So when you, when you’re dealing with Bible stories, or fairy tales, or good stories, we’ll call them. They always have that element of the relationship. And more than one locus, right, or the or the or the locus. I think one way place that people get confused is that technically speaking, the Bible is the objective worldview. It is the most objective worldview you can get. And that is the assumption you’re supposed to make. Right, because this is the story you’re supposed to make. And that is the assumption you’re supposed to make. Right, because this is the story from the creator. Right, it’s the divine inspired word of however you conceive of the ineffable creator of the universe. And, and so to say, well, science has an objective worldview is completely backwards. The only objective worldview is that that one particular book. And then the Jews can hate on me, I guess, I whatever. Right, or we can we can amend how we’re talking about it. But that changes the game. Because, again, every time you talk about biblical story, it’s, you know, well, it’s not the story of Noah, the story of Noah and the flood. It’s not it’s not the story of Adam starts out that way. It’s the story of Adam and Eve. Right. And then and what’s the real story? It’s the story of the fall. That doesn’t make any sense. Oh, yeah, it’s the relationship of Adam, Eve, God, Eden, and a beast and a fruit. What and there’s a transformation of the beast in particular, right? I mean, there’s two other transformations to it. You could argue that. But this is all relational, all of it. But when you hear Peterson, and he does, I think I think he’s trapped in the expectation, true or false, that that’s the trick that he does. He reframes everything into an individualistic psychological justification for moving into a biblical story. Yeah, yeah, it’s really it’s it if such a thing as objective material reality were to exist, the only person who would have access to it would be God himself. This would not be something that we would have the capability of because we look at the world through time and through space. So is that what you’re calling it? What Peterson thinks his trick is, is making the Bible stories make sense through a individualistic scientific frame. That’s what you think he sees himself doing. I would say that he’s using the psychology frame, so the science frame, to justify the biblical jump. Right. And then, like he and I think now it doesn’t work as well. Well, it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t work as well for people who didn’t go through the journey of hearing maps of meaning. Pinocchio, man, he does Pinocchio because it’s such, we were talking about this earlier with with Corey, right? There’s an aspect of worldview breaking that has to happen to open you up. And when that happens, now that jump seems natural. But I don’t think that’s the way it is. I don’t think him doing that, I think that is the expectation. I could be wrong. It’s certainly the thing he thinks is the expectation because it’s his first move all the way to the end. And I think that’s the core of the issue. I think that’s the expectation. I think that’s the core of the issue. And I think that’s the expectation. I think that’s the expectation. I could be wrong. It’s certainly the thing he thinks is the expectation because it’s it’s his first move all the time. And it was an inappropriate move given the audience. We’re at the symbolic world summit. These guys are already all about the Bible. They’re already in, right? He’s talking to Father Stephen DeYoung and he’s going immediately to psychology. And it could be too that it’s not so much the expectation of the audience, but it’s his internal expectation of I need to justify this scientifically before I can go to the biblical side of the register with it. Yeah, yeah. And maybe that’s just a case of he doesn’t spend that much time with Christians, which I imagine I’m not going to say that everybody there was a Christian, but we probably were over 95 percent, like pretty easily. And, you know, it was like, OK, you know, are you Orthodox or Catholic or oh, my gosh, we actually have a Protestant here. That’s amazing. We didn’t we didn’t think it if you guys would come, you know, I figured out that I was actually the only Catholic priest there again. But, you know, I wasn’t the only guy in a cassock. There was a lot of Orthodox priests running around. I got to shake a few of their hands. It was nice. Yeah. So. So let’s just do a little thought experiment then. If you were having a cup of tea with Dr. Peterson, what would you tell him he should do next? Oh, no pressure. Lovely. I can’t believe you did that. OK, so I’ll let you think. I’ll let you think. I wanted to go up to Dr. Peterson and ask him. How do things come out of heaven? That’s begging the question, Father Sides. Yes, yes, it is. The things obviously come out of heaven. He seems to respect these texts that come out of heaven. It doesn’t seem to have any way by which things flow down from the heavens, which is why I use him of Gnosticism, but it all somehow comes out from inside of him. So I would just like ask that question and then just stop at Sarah. So that would that’s different than advice. That wasn’t the question I would ask you. I would ask him. Yeah. Yeah, I don’t know how he could go back to a classroom now just because of. Like, imagine the waiting list. Imagine the waiting list to get into Dr. Peterson’s classroom. So, OK, Mark, have you formulated an answer now? Yeah, I think what I would say to him is. If you don’t account for something coming down from above, not something that you look up to, and you don’t account for relationship between other persons, person and things higher than them, doesn’t doesn’t have to be the ineffable. Right. It can be angels. It could be saints. It could be so-called agregores, right, spirits, right. It could be cities. It could be any of these things. Psychology doesn’t have a way to deal with that. Either of those points. And so that’s how I would think I would attempt to open up Dr. Peterson if I were so bold, which I am a coward. That’s where I would go because I think those are the two key issues. Right. And I think they’re related when you live in this flat world, when you just see things as from me out, it’s very hard to tell where you end and other things begin. And it’s very hard to get out of opponent thinking because technically, if we’re in a flat plane, right, if that’s if you live on the horizontal and that’s where we exist, then giving something up means the whole thing that I give up goes somewhere else and someone takes that whole thing and I have less. It means communism is correct. It’s not correct, by the way. And it also means that when you give up, you’re just giving out and it’s preserved like thermodynamic style. But actually, and this was nice about the conference, they talked about sacrifice and I cheered. People were looking at me strange. I didn’t care. I was like, yes. When you give up, it goes up, guys. It goes up. Up to where? It doesn’t even matter. Right. It matters that your conception of up exists and that you understand that you’re not just looking up. Things are coming down upon you from up. Those are the important points that I think and this is not a Dr. Peterson criticism, really. This is an everybody criticism, Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, atheists and Dr. Peterson. Right. We’re all stuck in this materialistic flat world. And I mean, one of the unsatisfying things is that up is basically an analogy. And it’s a good analogy. It’s the best analogy that we have. But this idea that it goes up, it’s like, so I just put it up there and then something magic happened. But it’s an analogy. But it’s actually like the truest possible map of the world. And it’s the only way to navigate things properly. But it’s all an analogy. I mean, it’s our use of language describing these things has to be analogical. We don’t have a direct way to speak about it unless you do, in which case I’d be excited to hear it. Yeah, I don’t think it’s and it’s not the language. It’s not a language problem. It’s a conception problem. Yeah. So when we because like I said, the language you use is correct. Give up. But if you don’t know conceptually that it’s up, you’re a communist. I’m giving it to somebody else. No, no, you’re not giving it to somebody else. You’re giving it up. There’s no else. There’s no somebody else up. It doesn’t make any sense. Then that way we’re equal. I can’t give it up to you. I have to give it up to God. Way up. And that changes the game entirely. And also this idea that there is a directionality emanation comes down upon you. You don’t look up at it. That’s not what happens at all. Ever, ever, ever. It’s all coming down. There are things coming up from underneath, but you’re not looking up and seeing emanation. I don’t think you can see emanation. Emanation can constrain you. Sure. Emanation doesn’t constrain you infinitely. Right? Even gravity. Yeah, you get in a plane. I mean, how gravity is working out for you. Right? We can’t. Now, it’s expensive to do that. I think this is where we get confused. Oh, the laws of nature aren’t really the laws of nature because of course we can fly. We can get in a plane. That is so costly. Right? Not everybody can get in a plane. Not everybody can afford to get in a plane. Right? Not everybody needs to get in a plane. Oh, that’s messy. But it is sort of a breaking of an, if you see emanation as mere constraint, it’s a breaking of the emanation. You don’t break the emanation. The emanation says if you’re closer, everything’s cheap and easy. And if you’re further away, maybe you can make it work for a while for weird values of work. Like you don’t fly the way a bird flies when you’re in a plane. Right? And so, sure, you are flying, but you’re not really flying. And maybe one person can get in a plane, but that was enabled by a bunch of other people who built the plane. Or maybe one person can build and fly a plane because that happens. Right? Look at the cost. Right? The birds are born with everything they need to fly. And then they develop the skill. So all they’re adding is learning. Right? And then bang, they fly. We will never do that. That will never, if that becomes available to us, it won’t be us. Right? It’ll be Bird Human or something. And we’re not conceptualizing that correctly because we think, oh, we made this happen once with these constraints. And so maybe emanation doesn’t apply or maybe we can move emanation around. But you can’t actually. And that’s where we get confused, I think, in general. And I think everybody does. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a lot to take in. And I think what makes it more complicated is its invisibility to us, even though it is in itself very real. It’s not something that immediately is apparent to us just because our eyes are too weak to gaze at the sun and not have us damage our sight, which is why mystics are always just a little bit crazy because maybe they got a peek into the heavenlies there and it kind of hurt them a little bit because things are so much bigger than us. So that’s why it’s also good news that God is good, because if he wasn’t, we would be pretty toast there. All right. So we’ve fixed the problems with Dr. Peterson. Was there anything else that you saw in the Symbolic World Summit that you thought was outstanding? I found a whole bunch of things. I’ll just pull up real quick my notes. I have a note called Summit Notes. Give up the subjugation to your own will. That particular quote, just I was like, I was like, you’re furiously typing on the phone. Do you remember who said that one? No. I have access, well, we both have access to the live streams for the next few days. They’re also going to give us in a few weeks edited stuff, right? Trust makes everything out of nothing. That was just a whopper sort of a comment. We are all serving in one temple or another. So this is a lot like if you believe you do not have a religion, one will be for added to you without your knowledge or consent. So obviously I really like that. Trade tyranny for depth. That was like, that’s one of those things. You hear that and you’re like, why didn’t I say that? I feel stupid. I didn’t even see that. It’s like, yeah. So it was, I think in general, the thing that made the Symbolic World Summit really good for me was that feeling of how utterly of how utterly stupid I am for not seeing a bunch of stuff. This is right there the whole time. And it’s that to me means I’m learning. So I’m like, all right, it’s bonus. I love to learn. And that was good. And myth is the wildest, deepest way of telling the truth. Yeah. Yeah. I really like that bit about trust, making everything out of nothing. And that’s actually how things work. Was it you that was talking about Japan? And or was that was that somebody on stage that was talking about Japan, about how that’s a country without very much natural resources. But because they’ve got high trust society where people can reliably cooperate with each other without fear of fraud around every corner, they didn’t have to be constantly on edge in every exchange of business. They were able to be enormously productive despite the lack of natural use. I think that was something you said that wasn’t coming from the stage there. And the thing about trust is that it is not reducible to any kind of technique. There’s certain signs you can point that, but ultimately there needs to be a person making the judgment. Right. And if you’ve been around the block a time or two, somebody comes to your office door, introduces themselves, they got a real funny feeling about them. And then within a minute asks for your cell phone number. I don’t trust this guy, but that’s something that mostly comes from experience and intuition, not from running some kind of an algorithm. Which is why it was necessary to tell people that trust makes everything from nothing. Because since we’re so caught in propositional tyranny and trying to reduce everything to the appropriate procedure, we lose kind of touch with that intuitive navigation through the world. Yeah, it’s a problem too when it was Jonathan Pichot that talked about Japan. I’ve talked about Japan similarly, but he said it on stage, if I remember correctly. It’s a problem when we don’t understand trust. And I think that’s something that’s been happening for a long time. And I think it’s a problem when we don’t understand trust or we do something like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is proceduralized trust. Why would you proceduralize trust? Well, procedures are precise, accurate, and reliable and consistent. And so you’re trying to perfect trust. Which is perfect trust. Yeah, then you will never be betrayed. If trust were accurate, precise, reliably consistent, you would never be betrayed ever again. Ooh, sounds lovely. We’re not living in that world ever. You’re never going to live in that world. I’m sorry. Not happening. And that’s the kind of limitation that you have to be kind of introduced to. Because you can rather naively believe that you can create a 100% trusting utopia by human effort alone, the application of the appropriate knowledge and procedures in order to make that possible. You know, it also makes me think about how some of the best food in the world comes from the poorest places in the world, where they’re kind of lacking in material resources. You know, crabs are bugs and so are lobsters and so are shrimp and so are snails. And people basically figured out how to cook those well enough where they become a luxury items. And you know, as a North Dakotan, I will sit here and I’ll tell you, I’m not going to tell you how to cook those. I’m going to tell you how to cook them. And I’m going to tell you how to cook them. And I’m going to tell you how to cook them. You know what you roll out in your peel will be the best policy找meat that you have in the universe that will say I can’t go back into salt water. What to buy you, eat you, fart, find you, climate healing food. You know, I’m thinking aboutettive food in well, because they were poor, maybe they didn’t have much work to do, maybe each other was all that they had and that was enough to transform the way that they’re eating. And it gets stolen by rich people. So. Yeah, I thought I had some other sort of insights to write. One of them is getting people to reveal themselves without the use of the word I. I think that was Martin Shaw. And Dr. Martin Shaw’s, oh my, he was so good. That was just so good. I thought that was really interesting. And this idea too of awe is the ability to see something larger than yourself. And that dovetails nicely with Dr. Vervaike’s, the axis between awe and horror. Right. So if you’re seeing something bigger than yourself and that creates horror, then you’re a narcissist, roughly speaking. That’s a problem. Good tell too. Well, the thing that’s bigger than you could be evil and out to destroy you. Like that would be a good reason to experience horror, right? Yeah, there’s good horror, right? Like horror is not bad in and of itself, but it’s a good tell for, you know, like if you’re afraid of Christianity, because it’s bigger than you, you’re probably just a crazy narcissist who wants to create his own religion. And I’m not picking on Vervaike there. There’s Simone and Malcolm Collins. There’s a bunch of other people saying, oh, this is definitely the solution. We just need to make it improve on our religion or make a new one. Right. It’s very much revivalist old school, right? Way back in American history. Yeah. And I thought that was interesting. And the idea of revivifying the garment of skin and modernity, or I would call it age of gnosis, because my way is better, roughly speaking. Yeah, you know, revivifying the garment of skin, I think that’s important, because technology is the garment of skin, but it needs to be revivified, right? So like you need to take Bitcoin and actually do something with it that is towards the good, and not just towards the we’re going to create a trust procedure. Right. Because that’s another aspect of that. And yeah, I think that’s all I have other notes, but most of that is just Sally being brilliant. And unfortunately, she’s not here. Yeah. You know, I guess this is on me, but I never really encountered Martin Shaw much before. But he was just absolutely, absolutely phenomenal. And for those of you who don’t know, he’s really big into storytelling and myth. And he just embodied that for us by going up there and telling a really fabulous fairy tale, basically. And this was a heavily abbreviated version of something I think he would tell over the space of three days. Around a campfire in the woods of Ireland, or maybe upstate New York, or someplace like that. And golly, I can see why people would would pay for that privilege. And, you know, it really opens you up to kind of a bigger way of knowing to be able to encounter a story like that. Because, and he made this really good point, too, about the difference between film. I think he made this point, or did somebody else make this point? I’m going to make the point anyway, even if he didn’t make it, is you can only get one version of a film. Everybody sees the same thing. And that’s a power of the medium. And it’s also a limitation of the medium. Because when he’s telling that myth, everybody encounters it just a little bit differently. And if they’ve got eyes to see and ears to hear, they will all participate in that story in a unique way that only they really do. Because the myth is, the bones of the myth are broad enough where you put yourself into the story, just intuitively, assuming you’re not utterly flattened, just kind of put yourself in the story. And since there’s nothing else in the universe quite like you, your participation in this fairy tale and this myth is going to be kind of your unique contribution to things. Yeah, so Martin Shaw, very good. Yeah, and Martian Shaw says, let’s tell you, thinks was best. Martian Shaw was inexplicable. She must be typing on her phone. Yeah, that insight about basically myth being the wildest, deepest way of telling the truth, is just because that goes back into the poetic way of informing the world. It goes back into how do we connect, we’ll say, two stories? How do we put ourselves in the story in different ways? Or how do we find ourselves in that story? It’s those deep connections to the truth of the story being told. And when the story is deep enough, it’s a myth. And because there’s more points of connection, there’s more ways for you to see yourself in it, or for you to get something out of it, or for you to feel like you’re a participant in that story. And the way the inexplicable Martian Shaw, I love that inexplicable Martian, I love it. The way he tells things, his style of delivery is so amazing. I thought Nicholas Cotard did something very similar to when he was telling his story. It was almost a shame that Richard Rowland and Father Stephen and Peugeot, they couldn’t compete with that at some level. Because Dr. Martin Shaw and Nicholas Cotard would really up the game with those great stories. It’s almost not even a fair argument. This conversation here, it’s a decent conversation. I think things are going pretty well. But it’s like, yeah, are we really going to just do better than just fiving and telling a story? I think a really good story. We’re not going to do that. Philosophy is always going to be in basically a position where it’s explaining something much more interesting than itself, at best. Yeah. Now, I’ve got thoughts about Father Stephen’s talk. His talk was on the resurrection, eternal life, using Nietzsche as the guide for that. And basically, his explanation of eternal life is basically, you take the best moments out of your life here in the world, we strip away everything that’s not worthy of that, everything that’s the chaff, the kernel of goodness that we participated in, and then we just live in that forever. And that’s what is brought up to us. I thought that was an interesting way of talking about it. It actually lines up nicely with the doctrine of my man Thomas Aquinas, who says that, and he puts it into this very Western frame, which as we all know, Western theology, which is the al-no, Western theology is all bad, bad, bad, very bad, and no good and dirty rotten Western theology. But I’m going to do it anyway, because I’m a Westerner. Talked about how the measure of your merit in God’s kingdom is the moment of your life when you had the greatest love for God. So it’s actually, it’s the peak, the peak of your, because love of God, we tend to think of that in terms of emotions, because we’re all flatlander materialists, but your love of God is basically the degree to which you’ve conformed yourself to it, and thereby conforming yourself to reality, because that’s what love does. Ultimately, is it joins two things together. So if it’s love of God, that you’re joining and conforming yourself to him. And so obviously that repeating what your best possible moment could be, would be the degree to which with the most intensely you you joined yourself to the highest. And so I thought his talk managed to catch some of that particular tolistic doctrine. Sally Jo also was very happy with it, the best description of life and eternity I’ve ever heard in my life, and no abysmal dead same as no irrelevance of life. Yeah, so you remember that talk particularly well, Mark? That one. Yeah, I didn’t a lot of Christian language. Unfortunately, just slides off my brain. I did get that sense that he had a better interaction with eternity. And the way it sort of sounded to me was more along the lines of an engagement with the idea that it’s not a relationship. It’s the nature of your connectedness. Right? And so that’s more like the quality of the relationship. Right? In other words, you don’t get rid of the connectedness, right? You were all disconnected, which would be the standard sort of, we’ll say, materialist flat world trope. But really, he sort of re-enchanted it from my perspective with the quality of that connectedness of that relationship was the focus. And I think that and I think that was what Sally Jo really resonated with. She can tell us. But it’s that idea that sure, because Sally’s Baptist, so it’s not like she doesn’t have the sense, oh, there’s God and there’s me and there’s a connection. So what was different about what Father Stevens said really ultimately, but I think it was that, well, don’t focus on the connection, focus on the what I would call the intimacy, right? The quality of that connection and the way in which that quality manifests, not the connection, right? Because the connection’s mysterious. Like, you know, your, boy, I had it the second go in my head. You come to the conference right and you’re like, wow, I wish so and so would show up with no expectation and then they’re there. Well, that’s the quality of the connectedness that you have or we went to that chapel, that St. Michael Chapel, the Healing Chapel. And what was that experience? Well, it was all quality. I could tell you about all the stuff outside and the Greek matriarch person there and you should probably tell that ecumenism story there just to give everybody hope. And I can tell you about the annoying guy in the kilt, which is really a skirt at that point because he wasn’t Scottish. At that point, you’re just cross-dressing and him running up and getting in the way and not asking a question, right? Jonathan turning it into a good answer, despite it was a terrible question about reunifying the church or something. And you weren’t there, right? If you weren’t there, it’s kind of words. But once you see the connection, we’ll say from God down to you, where there is an action that’s happening in relation to your life. Now all of a sudden, this whole idea of life and eternity, you get a new grip. You get an optimal grip. So use some verveculing. With the optimal grip, I think that is more along the lines of what Sally Jo was hearing in that description. And also that I think, look, big prediction. And if I get this right, you can believe that I am a super prophet. Father Stephen DeYoung will be on the Jordan B. Peterson podcast for sure, more than once. That’s my prediction. It’s a really bold prediction, unless you were there, in which case you’re like, you’re an idiot. Because he was really taken by that interaction. I wonder, so at the beginning of that talk from Father Stephen, he was like, well, we’re going to be going into the underworld, and we need to have a guide. And he needs to be either a Greek or a German, because Virgil is boring. And then I shook my fist at him. And Latin is boring. And I stood up and it’s like, okay, so you’re going to use these quotes from Nietzsche. Mr. Orthodox priest, Mr. loves the Orthodox liturgy, loves the saints, loves, I don’t know who he loves the most. Is it Maximus the Confessor? Is it St. Ephraim the Syrian? Is it St. John the Persistom? I don’t know who that is. You went for Nietzsche. Who were you trying to connect with, Father? Who was it that you were trying to really reach in that audience? Because I know my flock and I don’t think the Orthodox folk are that terribly different. If I want to talk to a whole room of faithful Christians, I don’t start bringing up Nietzsche and talking about he’s going to be our guide. Because even if he has something useful to say, and perhaps he does, he’s not the first place I’m going to go look for it. So that was all, I think, a way of trying to, yeah, he knew his audience of one. He was just going to throw that bait right in front of Peterson. Peterson just went and ate it. It was good. He should eat it. This is all very fine. And I just want to thank Sally Jo for, yeah, gosh, because Father Stephen so insulted the Latin language. Now I just want to become the best Latinist in the world and then go tell them how great it is. That’s what I’m thinking. What do you think of my crazy theory? Yeah, I think that Rome conquered Greece. I don’t know what else to say. They didn’t want to. And Rome was like, oh, we love Greece. That’s why we’re not going to conquer them. And then Greece couldn’t hold it together. And Rome was like, all right, we’re done. He had to go. And then they came in military and conquered them. And I think, like, what more do you need to know? Like at some point, they absorbed all the good stuff. They did the Rome thing with it, which they did with everybody, right, to be fair. They had a great reverence. They revivified the Greek and improved upon it, right? And then the Greeks could not be conquered for whatever weird reason that Greece can’t hold itself together. And yeah, I don’t know what else to say. Like, you just, you couldn’t cut it, Greece. I read a fascinating factoid in a theater booklet from the SCA today, basically saying that Greek kind of were inventing or invented comedy theater, and it was more intellectual. Rome didn’t like it, so they went more for slap comedy. And so they liked the comedy, but they wanted more, you know, satire. And so it kind of like went more into Charlie’s Chaplain kind of stuff. So I thought that was interesting. Well, Rome also despises actors, because they’re basically like, look. Oh, that’s true. I read that, yeah. Yeah, these people, these people are paid to lie about who they are and what they’re doing. And they are not to be trusted. You know, it doesn’t mean you go kill them, but it’s like, well, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna elevate these people. It’s Emma. Emma’s here. Hello, Emma. I have to make dinner, but I heard people were talking crap about Virgil. Hey. It was Father Stephen DeYoung, not me. I know. You have to go set him straight. I will. I’m really sad I wasn’t able to make it to the conference. Yeah, no, we certainly would have, would have been delightful to have you there. But, you know, all good things, you have to make choices, right? Sometimes. All right. Sorry, I’m trying to make it go to my headphones, not my speakers. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. You hear me okay? Yeah. Can you hear me? One, two, three, four. Okay. We’re doing good. We can hear you. We’re doing good, Emma. Okay. There we go. So. I might switch my camera off and talk while I make dinner, if that’s all right with you. Okay. All right. Her video is gone, but she’s still here with us in spirit. With us in spirit. Mind? I thought this was magic. When we’re doing mind, I can hear you. Within mind. Talk to you. Only on a sensual level. Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? All right. Other than just seeing Virgil, what else interesting happened? I’ve only heard like a little bit of your video. We are not going to recap the last. No, don’t recap the whole thing. Just pick up wherever you are. What did you, Mark? I thought that Jonathan’s advice to artists was really interesting. So first he says, look, if you want to be an artist, don’t do it. It’s a bad idea. You’ll be poor your entire life long. And if you look at that cleanly and say, I still have to do it, then maybe you can. But like, just don’t do it. And he talked about how blessed he felt to have a wife that was content to be poor with him. And that really interesting bit about when they were poor, more miracles happened. I thought that was like a stinking money quote right there. That is when they were poor, miracles happened. That’s exactly the advice I was told when I wanted to go to grad school. Don’t go to grad school. Don’t go to grad school. And if you really can’t come up with anything else, maybe you can pull it off. Yeah. Yeah, I thought to be more precise, his first, I thought this artist thing was, I had tears in my eyes. Literally, I was like, wow, it’s a wonderful thing to say. His first advice was don’t. But importantly, you missed his second piece of advice was don’t. And his third piece of advice was no, really don’t. And that wasn’t the only, he said it more than three times as he went. And he said, if you feel compelled, that’s fine. That happens. Right. But there’s still that, yeah, really don’t. You know, don’t just don’t go there. Don’t do it. Not a good idea. It’s just not a good idea. Right. And I thought that was perhaps the most helpful thing in the conference, was him basically dissuading people unless they’re really possessed by the need to engage. And that for me was such a good positive aspect of the leadership. There were other areas, of course, I don’t know if you want to get into them, where there was a lack of leadership. And that kind of showed. But in that instance, just seeing anybody will say engaged in this project of expanding sort of the Peterson sphere of influence, for lack of a better term, for them to give some disparaging advice. But helpful disparaging advice with a rationale behind it. That to me was, that was great. That was a really great moment in my mind. I was very like, everything’s worth it. We’ve got people here who are looking at the artists on the stage, looking at the artists around them. Right. Two more Vs was there. Sally Jones was there. There were a ton of other artists there. Justin, who’s a documentary filmmaker, Justin Wells was there. Right. So there’s a bunch of people there. And to discourage them, don’t be like the guys on the stage. Don’t do that. Don’t try to be us. You be you. I thought that was such a positive, it’s the sort of thing we don’t hear. Helpful discouragement. And I actually think this ties into a live stream that you do. It was two and a half weeks ago. And you talked about it as mediocrity, being in the middle. And, you know, we can also think of it as a way to get people to think about it. And, you know, we can also think of it, another good way of speaking of it might also just be ordinaryness. Just being content with an ordinary life, just being content with doing kind of the conventional thing. And going to some job which hopefully is useful to somebody, at least it’s useful to you and to your family. Bringing home a little bit of bread and making opportunities for those you love. In a quiet and usually thankless way is actually so outrageously important. Because that’s how almost everything actually exists. You know, even for these artistic types, right? I bet you if you ask them, you know, the comparison between when they are, you know, in kind of that ecstatic relationship with the muse. Compared to the amount of time they spend worrying about like bills and other regular things. It’s like, I’m sure most of their life is still really ordinary. And they put themselves in a position where they don’t have a whole ton of resources. Yeah, I grew up that way. I grew up, my dad was an active editor director. And we worked in media production. And it was always hills and valleys of income, mostly valleys. So always struggling to pay the bills. Helping people. And I think that’s the most important thing. Helping people. Never getting to do my dad’s film projects. We almost got funding for his at the end before he passed away. But it’s a hard life. It’s not grammar. The usual standard days in filmmaking are 10 hours. And it’s usually more on independent filmmaking. And you work really freaking hard. And you rest when you can. And then you make money while the sun shines while you actually have a gig. And the rest of the time you’re trying to scramble for fine work. So it’s not an easy life. It was very, very good advice. Many people are drawn to the glamour and glitz of artistic endeavors. But I look at my friends who are writers and artists and stuff. And they just do it as hobbies. And they’re very happy and very content. They don’t have a lot of the business books that I read about writing. It’s very much getting the writer to just sit down and write every day. It’s like really hard for most writers to do this. It’s a job. And inspiration comes not when you want it, but you force it to come somehow. By just writing every day. And I think it takes some of the joy out of it. But I think the success story spurs the majority of us on that that could be me. But I take it as a job. And I think it’s a job that I’ve done. That could be me. But I take cues from you, Father Eric, and from Paul Van der Kley. And just being there and being ordinary and just fellowshipping with people. I think it was one gentleman who told a story of I think it was a counselor for the Small Business Development Center. And he was a former musician and a writer himself. And he knew one gentleman who was a singer-songwriter. And he knew he was never going to make it big. And so he just did the usual circuits of bars and coffee shops. He did it for the local people. He stayed humble. And he just gave his art to the most immediate people and knew he was never going to be famous like all the other stars that we know the names of. There seems to be a price for that. The funny thing is that that’s where all the marketing and stuff for people in our industry, whether you’re an actor or a writer or a director or an artist, you’re supposed to try to build your platform. And that means be famous so we can sell your stuff easier. And so it’s backwards. Most writers I know and friends from the marketing, it’s hard enough just to write and write well. So I was like, you know, that really is good advice. Just don’t. You don’t have to live with this stuff. Because once you’re famous, you have to be… Everybody tells you what to do. It’s expectations of what you should do. And then also, you know, you have to keep going. Somehow you have to create new stuff. Some creative people, like my dad, you just keep creating. It’s just never… It’s just bottomless well. But yeah, so thanks for letting me babble. I just… It’s interesting that you got to witness that kind of creative lifestyle, we’ll say, firsthand. That had to be the environment that you grew up in. It doesn’t sound like you hold any animosity towards your father for it. But you’re also just pretty realistic about what the life is like. I’m sorry. Yeah, there’s a little reason for that. I’m sorry, go ahead. I’m done. I think it was a digital delay. I didn’t realize you were talking until I heard you talking. Yeah, he was a good man. He’s very generous. He loved us. There was no emotional distance with us. He was a very tender, gentle father. Encouraging. Tried to instill us… His father was a police officer. So he had been given street smarts by his dad. Which he passed down to my brother. So it wasn’t this pie in the sky naivety thing going on with some artists. Happened to have. But we had more of a very balanced… We got to grow up in media production, which most people dream about that. We just know that it’s hard life. It’s better to have something pay the bills first. And save up money. And then get into the business. Then you’re not hungry. Then you can pick and choose your gigs as you wish. And it gives you more power and control. So if anybody really wants to get into media production and all that stuff. Just find me on my website, www.balabeefland.com Send me an email. I’m used to telling people how not to get ripped off by con artists and stuff. Trying to get into the industry. There’s a way things work. And it’s not… You don’t have to pay big money to agents and all this kind of stuff. So I don’t want you getting cheated. Oh, that’s great. If Pichot did mention the… If you don’t draw every day, don’t become an artist. That was one of the things that he mentioned. And it also sort of occurred to me. Thanks for mentioning my mediocrity life. I’m told it was quite good. I’ve got some comments on there that just blew me away. I was like, oh, wow. I really hit on something with this one. The artist curse is that the mediocrity hurts them. Doing the normal things to make money hurts them. And here we are going, oh, I hate this stuff. It’s horrible. I have to go to work 9 to 5 and I have plenty of means to do what I want. It may not be everything that I want. Maybe I’m not making right tradeoffs. I’m spending all my money on video game tokens rather than vacations. Because people do that. But it’s very much… That doesn’t hurt you. You may not like it. Sure. Fair enough. 9 to 5 can hurt you. 9 to 5 can be tough. But the artist, it actually hurts them. And you’re like, no, I want to be them. I don’t know about that. I’m not sure. No, you don’t want to be them. Well, because you don’t want to be in the position where just having a steady income is something that causes you emotional distress or physical pain or whatever it causes some of these people. Because I know many artists and it really does. It damages them to be in a mold that most of us are like, yeah, whatever, dude. I’ll just do what I have to do to eat. And they won’t do whatever they have to do to eat. They have to do this big thing or whatever. And it really wrecks their lives in a lot of cases. And I think we get confused. We see that from the outside. We don’t really understand them. Maybe we do if we listen to them carefully like I did. All right. We don’t really understand them. And we go, I’m just like them. I don’t like to work either. No, no, it’s not that they don’t like to work. That’s not what’s going on there. It actually hurts them in a way that it doesn’t hurt other types of people. Yeah. My dad never really could function in a corporate setting. He was an artist. There was just an incompatibility of trying to deal with the politics and stuff. And he’s had office jobs and sales jobs. And he did really good in sales because he earned people’s trust. But he never was like, he never tried to persuade somebody to buy something when they wanted it. He had the highest retention in sales. But he wasn’t the top salesperson. It was dealing with the politics. I mean, there’s politics in media production and filmmaking. Yeah. But there’s a hierarchy. And there’s a lot of don’t do stuff. And there’s on the set and stuff. So you don’t, you know, as a PA, a production assistant, you don’t go to the director and tell him he’s got the wrong shot. I mean, that’s, you know. But yeah, it does hurt artists. I think it’s mostly like they’re so intuitive. And it’s kind of the fringe and the center kind of thing. So artists tend to be more on the fringe. They like totally look normal. Inside they’re very eclectic. And sometimes it just can’t function. But we were able to do classes for like Hunter Douglas and stuff, a voice over class for Hunter Douglas. And that was kind of weird. Dad had to prove himself that he actually was a voice talent and could read something totally blind. And it’s like, yeah. I have a feeling in this mundane corporate piece that somebody wrote. I was like, oh. So, but yeah. It’s funny. I apologize. Go ahead. Thanks for listening. Your dad sounds like a very interesting fellow. Sorry I’m not able to have him on the stream here. I’m sure he’d have some great stories for us. Oh, he would. Well, you’ll get to see him in heaven. I’ll introduce you. The best parts of him. The best parts of him. All of his great moments. Reuniting. We’ll hope for that. I learned a lot from him. I never took a lot of college. I took a little bit of college for media production with my brother because we were able to do it together. We were always a few grades apart. But he ended up teaching at the media production college because we were taking classes. It was really funny. So he got into teaching filmmaking and sound design and all this kind of stuff. So it was funny. But he loved teaching. And he loved people. I think he would just really love the corner. I know you guys don’t like to call it the corner. Whatever it is you prefer. But he loved the space of ideas and talking with each other. He just loved people. So, yeah. I think my brother and I got our love for learning and reading from him and my mom. Yeah, if, I mean, for those people in America, if they want to hear my dad’s voice, all you have to do is look for boys of freedom, men of honor on YouTube or Spotify or iTunes or something. And you can hear him doing the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, quotes on freedom. And that was done after 9-11. Kind of like an uplifting thing to help people recover from the attack. It was really neat to see him doing the voiceover for it in the studio. It was like, oh, that’s what it was about. Why did he teach me this at school? So, yeah. Yeah. Named George Flynn. That sounds like a beautiful thing to have. It is. It really is. So, doing something serious is kind of like not his usual stick. But it was something he was inspired to do. And we didn’t do it to make money. We did it because we felt like we ought to need to create something. And that was, you know, the artist and him. And it helped a lot of people, encouraged people. That was nice. I’m fascinated. I derailed the conversation. I apologize. But I’m curious what else you guys gleaned from the event. I don’t think that was a derailment. Because it was quite relevant to what Mr. Pergeot had said. Yeah. So, it’s really interesting that this conference happens in America. Because you can listen to all of the universal history videos, right? We’re going to talk about Richard Rolland now, by the way. I love the universal history videos. And they had kind of a geography of how the world works. And what they did was they had a very interesting way of doing things. And they were trying to figure out how the world works. And Rome was in the center of the world. Constantinople was another center. It’s fine. We got the center of Rome, we got the center of Greece. You got Alexandria, you got Egypt. And you got Antioch, you got Syria. And it’s like, oh, boom, you got the four quarters of the compass right there. We don’t really need any more. We’ve got things covered. And then you can go off to the one extreme. And that’s where the crazy Irish people are. The Celts, you know. The Romans called Ireland hibernia. Which just means winter land because it was always cloudy and raining there. They’re like, we’re not going to bother conquering this. There’s no business for us to be there. You go to the other extreme. It was the Persians. It was foreign. So you have this whole geography where you can find yourself and you can find your people in space. And then some Italian sailed across the ocean. And you know, thought he had gotten to the Indies, but really he found a whole new continent. And then a whole bunch of people who didn’t fit in in Europe. Because if you were not a misfit, you didn’t come across the ocean. Because coming across the ocean was a major pain in the butt. Came over here and all settled here. And now we have the United States of America. What is it? What is this place? What is this place that we have? And like the question that was kind of behind all of these other questions is what is our story here? You know, you’ve got Cajot and Peterson. They’re Canadian, right? That’s another type of European immigrant community there. And so we’ve been kind of uprooted in this place. And the really interesting thing to see is just how bullish these folks are on orthodoxy in the United States of America. They’re like, yeah, you know, 200 years when America is all orthodox. And it’s like, well, we could do worse. But there’s already Catholic churches in the United States that are not orthodox. There’s churches in every town. It’s like we might just have like the first in advantage here. There was just waves of Irishmen coming across and they all just built the churches there. There are Italians too. Italians, Czechs, Hungarians, Germans from the civilized parts of Germany. So the point, I mean, one of the things that this conference is really trying to hack out is what is America’s part in this story that began in Genesis, worked its way through Jerusalem and Rome. How do we fit into this? And the exciting thing about something like this is that we actually get to be a part of how that story is getting told. That’s all I had to say about that. How it’s getting told and how it’s getting written, how it’s getting done. Yeah, I think that the conference itself was a representation of the working out of that particular problem. Which leads me into the good part of the conference for me. I got to see Justin Wells in person. I get to see two more Vs in person. I get to be with you again and with Sally Jo again and with Adam again. I get to see the people that are in the audience. I get to see the people that are in the audience. I get to see the people that are in the audience again and with Sally Jo again and with Adam again. So we were all doing our thing. And I’m very grateful for the support, by the way, from all of you. And I got to shake Richard Rowland’s hand in person, which was wonderful. And there’s so many other people I’m forgetting just because overwhelming weekend, really overwhelming weekend. weekend, really overwhelming weekend. A bunch of people, hi I’m a lurker, oh I know a lot of people got out of your channel. You know, it’s those personal interactions where people who were lurking or people who are not as engaged get to engage because they’re there with you in person. And that is part of working out the universal history question. And I think that’s to some extent what Richard Roland was getting at. And oh yeah, Elizabeth and Justine. Elizabeth is super supportive of navigating patterns in general. She’s like a super fan. And she is hysterical. She’s so much fun to be around. Like you can’t be depressed around Elizabeth. She just won’t stand for it. It’s just that simple. You want to cure depression? Elizabeth, problem solved. And that I think was the, I mean for me that was the best aspect. There were a bunch of little things, or maybe not so little things, that happened, both good and bad, all within the conference. But for me really those personal connections and working through that and you know, it’s a ridiculously Greek neighborhood. And for me, Elizabeth, it’s like the highest per capita Greek population in the US because of the sponge farming. And I’m part Greek, so that worked out well for me. I love Greek food. Delicious. So I was all set. But that in-person interaction and then being in a place that is highly ethnic and obviously slanted in a certain direction of orthodoxy. And the Orthodox Church too was gorgeous. And that healing shrine was just amazing. And the conference center was really neat. I wish they had done something about the sound in the gym. But don’t sit in the back. That’s my advice. Don’t sit in the back. Sit in the front if you’re in the gym. Location sound is really, really tough, especially in those kind of environments that are reverberant. Yeah. Yeah. So if you feel like you could talk about it, Mark, you know, you got a lot of good publicity at this conference. Got to shake some hands, got to meet some people in real life, make a few connections. What do you see Gordon for your YouTube channel moving forward? If you could share. Yeah. I picked up a bunch of subs already, which was nice. I think that there’ll be more engagement in general. The Symbolic World crew. Got to meet JP Marceau in person, which is nice because I’ve talked to him many times before online. And I think maybe he’ll have some conversations. And I think it’s going to help shape the direction of the audience on napkin patterns. That’s the hope anyway. Nice. Nice. Well, yeah. Oh, Sally Jo again. Meeting other artists was an excellent thing to me. It really feels like we could build a place for a strong critic. Critique? It might be a critique too. She wants feedback. She thinks the most important thing that’s missing is judgment and feedback. Because in order to get feedback, you fundamentally have to judge. And if you can get them in that mode. And there were some moments of leadership, but there was also always a lack of leadership. And I also learned, if you watched carefully enough, you will notice John Bejo did not want to do this. It was Neil DeGrade. And I met him. We met him on the street before the conference. Mark! And I’m like, why do you know me? This is awesome. I just felt cloud nine. And shaking his hand was wonderful. I mean, just having him. And he’s an amazing guitarist. Like, really amazing. Like, holy crap. Why does everybody not know this guy? He’s amazing. And his wife is a wonderful singer. Just mind-blowing. Dirt Poor Robbins. Listen to Dirt Poor Robbins. And yes, they sound the same in live as on an album. Which I was like, nah, that never happens. No, they do. Identical. I mean, it just is clear. So when you get people to engage and trust that the critiques are valid, because you don’t want, Sally Jo doesn’t want me telling her, well, really your coloration on this is terrible. I have no business. I barely know the word color. I’m still stuck on, there’s only one color, blue. All other things are not colors. I’m not the right person to comment in that way. So that’s, I’ll see you, Emma. So that for me, I think held a lot of potential too. It’s just giving people a space to engage. Well, particularly with the Navigating Patterns team, of course, it’s a little selfish. But in general, people will be better able to engage because of that. And also one thing I should mention is Eamonn. Meeting Eamonn was just like, wow, amazing. He was very interested in the Virtual Cards project. And he’s a game developer guy, board game types. And he was immediately interested. And having him sort of engage is going to be amazing, because he can give us feedback and help. And we’ll see what, I mean, if he has time, if he’ll come up with anything with us, which would be wonderful. But if not, just having his input or knowing we could have his input even is going to be huge for all of us, I think, on the project of sort of the larger Peterson sphere. And I think that’s one of the things that you see. You see that this is a symbolic world representation, really. And there’s some other people there, right? Probably the largest contingent was us, the Peterson sphere folks. And I think that having them recognize that they’re recognized and that they’re important and that at least one group wants to seriously engage and help them build things and also get help from them, like give them things to do, because maybe they don’t have enough to do or whatever. I mean, they have enough to do for their mission. But there are people, talented people there that maybe want to do things that won’t help the mission of Symbolic World. Well, they can come and help us or start other projects and we can help them with those other projects. And I think we made a lot of progress towards that. I didn’t really get to talk to Richard Roll. I’m going to give him a couple days. But I get to talk to him now on Twitter. So I’m going to reach out to him on some stuff that hopefully we can help them with and get rolling for them. But I think that’s going to be reciprocal. I wish I had gotten more time with JP Marceau. But whatever, I’ll catch up with them later, I hope, again. And yeah, I think that the amount of engagement and the amount of camaraderie and community that was generated is going to sort of continue to grow and snowball. I’ve seen a little bit of evidence of that on Twitter already with some of my comments and thanks. I mean, I just have deep gratitude for the whole event. I mean, having people walk up to you and say, I know you are and your channel has been very helpful and tell me, oh, you inspired me and now I’m doing this in Spanish. And I was like, wow, you have a channel in Spanish and you’re sort of mirroring some of the other content in the Peterson sphere. You go, you go, go do that. That’s wonderful. Just having that experience is, I don’t know, it’s so rich. It was wonderful. And I do think that also seeing alive and in person what happens to guys like Peterson when they encounter guys like Father Stephen DeYoung and seeing that contrast. Because one of the things you don’t see with Peterson is that high contrast when he’s on stage with Stephen DeYoung, you do. When he’s on stage and other people are able to engage with him at his level because they know him well enough, maybe not as well as they should or they need to, but well enough, that’s just good for everybody to see. And it gives people ideas and maybe it’ll spawn a bunch of articles for the symbolic world people for their little website and stuff. And maybe it’ll encourage more people to do things in other languages and things. And also, I mean, Jonathan Pichot is so gracious. Just coming up at the end and thank you, thank you this person, thank you that person. And ending on his brother, which I just thought was so good. I really wish Mitcher could have been there. I didn’t have any hope for it, but that would have just been like, I probably would have died. That’s the good news is I’m not dead because had he showed up, I probably would have just died. It would have been so awesome. It would have been like the most awesome thing. You could say like, oh, you’re getting two hours with Peterson. Nope, nope. Mitcher Pichot being there and getting to say hi to him and find out how he’s doing would have been more awesome to me personally. Not that I don’t love Peterson, but if I had to place him in a hierarchy of attention, there it is. Nice, nice, very nice. Yeah, no, I got to hang out this afternoon with Corey’s family, along with Mark, Corey Cobel. He signs on here a lot. And I was afforded the opportunity to play catch with his little four-year-old daughter for hours, hours and hours of catch. And that’s just one of the joys that I get to do as a priest is just being invited into the people’s lives and to get their children all wound up and then leave. It’s quite the wonderful thing that I’m able to do. So yeah, you’re absolutely right. Certainly, this symbolic world conference had great ideas discussed at it. That’s the way that you actually get people in is that you got to like, yeah, we’re going to have great people to give their speeches, give their talks, share what they’ve been up to. That’s how you get people in. That always, and I found this consistently with these events, and this is just kind of a fundamental pattern of reality. We put a shining thing at the center, we have everybody looking at that shining thing in the center, we’re able to draw together in one way or another around that thing. Certainly, the high point of that and the most important version of that is worshiping God, which I expect all of you to do, you are to worship God. And Richard Frohlin told us at the very minimum, pray in the morning and the evening, don’t eat the blood of animals. And you remember the last one, Mark? What was it? I can’t remember. What was it? I can’t remember. Anyway, make sure you say your prayers. Offer sacrifice to God. Yeah, it’s always these relationships that I’m able to leave with. Those things seem to grow and mature and bear fruit over time in a way that as great as the ideas that are discussed are, don’t really have the possibility of doing so. Like Mark and I didn’t hang out that much before Thunder Bay. And it was once we were at Thunder Bay, I’m like, oh, this guy, actually, we’re going to be friends now. I don’t know if you noticed that, Mark. That was a decision. That was a conscious decision on my part. Yeah, that’s usually the only way those things happen for me. Because I’m usually so spread out and like all over the place. I don’t, I can’t go too long down the road. So if somebody doesn’t sort of meet me halfway, then it blows apart pretty quickly. Yeah. Well, I don’t know you about Mark, but I’m really tired. And I think we’ve said all we can tonight about the stuff we’ve been engaging with. So yeah, symbolic World Summit. Enjoyed it. Can recommend it. Hope they do it again. Hope they do it again in winter so that I can come down to Florida from Fargo. Because, boy, it’s just the weather here is just always so nice. And yeah, happy Sunday, everybody. Third Sunday of Lynch. Good night and God bless you all. God bless. Have a journey back, guys.