https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BUDqrlEWU3U
Good evening. Happy Sunday everybody. I think it’s all very important that you know that I referenced Supertramp in my homily today and it was awesome. That’s what we’re going to start off with tonight. Unless anybody has anything better to talk about, we’re going to end up rambling like that. So… No one’s curious about that, huh? That’s okay. That’s fine. Oh, hold up. You snuck on on me, Andrew. I didn’t see you there. You’ve probably never even heard of Supertramp before, have you? Nope. That’s what I thought. 1975, Breakfast in America. It’s a pretty awesome album. You should look it up. I have it on vinyl. Super important question. Okay, go for it. You mentioned baptismal registries. Yeah. Where would I find one of those? So I’ll tell you the way we do it in Catholic world. The way we do it in Catholic world is at the parish that you were baptized, they keep a record of all of the sacraments that you’ve received, actually. So if you go to the cathedral in Rapid City, South Dakota, you’ll find my baptismal record there. And it notes not only my baptism, but also my confirmation, my ordination to the deaconate, and my ordination to the priesthood. It’s all written down there. So you would need to find the parish that you were baptized at, if you were baptized at a Catholic parish, that’s how it would be. Okay, so like, what if you don’t know the parish you would be baptized at? Ask your mom? Oh, God. So what do you think about Breakfast in America? It’s got some pretty cool tracks, a lot of classics on it. You’ve got Take the Long Way Home, it’s got Breakfast in America, and yeah, the logical song, Goodbye Stranger. Some other cool ones in there. Yeah. Phlebas says that same in the Reformed world, that they’re supposed to keep records, I suppose because a lot of Reformed folks would practice infant baptism. Now, Andrew, I can’t help but be insatiably curious and ask why that’s an important question at this time. Yeah, I’m getting baptized. Okay. Yep. Yep. Alrighty, that’s cool. Congratulations, big fan of baptism, Ethiopian Orthodox. We would recognize their baptisms without a question. So as far as I’m concerned, you’re going to be a regenerated Christian there. Why is it important for you to find your baptismal records? I’m getting baptized Coptic Orthodox. I don’t know. I just figured I should probably know that sort of stuff. You should know if you’ve been baptized already. I mean, like the question would be is, did you go to a church, did your parents take you to a church when you were a baby? Because if you were Baptist, you know, you would know because they don’t baptize infants. So you should be able to remember that. And I guess I don’t know what your relationship with your parents is like at this point. Whether or not that would be a hard conversation. By the time I was born, my dad died in the war evangelical. He’s also got Catholic parents, right? And he’s not too strict about the whole I believe in one baptism. So I have no idea. I should probably ask him. Yeah. Yeah. And I don’t know how the Coptics would treat other people’s baptisms. I know how I would treat it coming my way. And I guess that’s actually a split question among Orthodox churches is whether or not they rebaptize heretics. We only rebaptize them if they’re Unitarians. But I’m not even joking about that. So. Yeah. I took Trey to Trey and I was like, I’m going to go to the church. I took Trey to Trey is this former Jehovah’s Witness that I met through Estuary. I took him to Vespers serious yesterday and that blew his mind. How long does a cop to get Vespers take on a Saturday night? Vespers is only like 45 minutes, but then we have midnight places like right after. So yeah, that goes till 11 starts at 8. That was called midnight what? Just midnight prayers. Midnight prayers. Okay. Yeah. But that takes two hours. Okay. Interesting. I just like crossing notes. I’m going to the event in Chino and one of the things I’m really looking forward to is that tour of the Orthodox Church. You know, and it’s not like I don’t think we’ve got cool churches, but I like I want to see what they’re up to, you know, because I actually had a bit of a bit of a realization about the Easter Vigil when I heard you guys talking about your Easter Vigil was like, oh, they’re doing an extended. Yeah, it’s an extended. Service followed by the Eucharist and in the modern Roman rite they’ve smashed those together. All right, Mark saying so any military indoctrination into the army of God is good enough for Catholics, roughly speaking. Right. I. All right, Mark saying so any military indoctrination into the army of God is good enough for Catholics, roughly speaking, as long as they baptized with water in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and they’re not Unitarians that Unitarian things actually a big deal. I. I. Looking forward to your temptation Father Phlebas, I have no idea what you’re talking about. How do you think Chino is going to go? What are you looking forward to other than the Orthodox Church? I’m mostly looking forward to seeing cool folks that I didn’t get to get to meet in Thunder Bay. So I know sometimes Philip Nickerson listens to this. Looking forward to seeing him. I know sometimes Ted is on this channel. He’s going to be there looking forward to seeing him get to get to see Jacob again. I get to meet a whole host of other people get to meet Chad Chad the alcoholic. Yeah, so good to see Catherine again. Yeah, so all sorts of people looking forward to meeting the talks, the talks could end up being very good. It’s hard to know if they’re going to be good until you get there. Yeah, maybe we’ll have a nice big argument about AI and I’ll feel I’ll feel properly prepared because of all the talk that you’ve all the instruction you’ve given me on the ways of artificial intelligence mark. Yeah, yeah, Ted is going. Yeah. Thinking of inviting my fire which father which would be a riot. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Thanks Mark. Oh, yeah. See, that’s the thing. This is I’ve been thinking about it like I should wear my cassock right like because I don’t want the orthodox to show me up, but I’m going to be staying in a tent. It’s like cassock tent. Are those going to go together? We’ll see. We’ll see. Catherine will love talking AI with you. Love it. Tell you what, have you seen any of those, Andrew, have you seen any of those AI generated commercials? No, not really. Oh, I can’t get enough of them. Like I saw this one. It was somebody posted on Bridges of Meaning. It was this this burger place advertisement. And I don’t know if they wrote this into the prompt, but basically as this burger place advertisement was going on and on, it turned out that the burger place was being run by aliens and the sauce had mind control in it. And then it had this animation of these flying burger saucers coming into New York City and taking us over. And I just I just think that stuff is hilarious, even though I should be disturbed by it because they got all these weird twisted malformed human beings. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, Grim Grizz read an AI generated story. It was so awful, obviously broken, didn’t follow any of the standard structure, didn’t seem like anyone caught on, however. We were playing with Jet GPT on Wednesday night after our last Wednesday night catechism. And one of the ladies asked it to write a story about dogs. So it wrote this really lame story about dogs playing at the park and everybody was friendly and happy with each other. And so I told told the AI to rewrite it in the style of Quentin Tarantino. And would you believe that Jet GPT didn’t put a single F bomb in there? Failure. That is an absolute failure. Like every third word needs to be an F bomb. Yeah, clearly broken. No swearing. No, you know, nasty act, right? Just horrible people like all Tarantino is good at just, you know, taking the grit and bringing it right up and put it in your face. Yeah. Yeah. The story was so awful. I was like, you guys not did you not take writing like really like that? There’s basic story structure and stuff. Like people didn’t call me was so I didn’t realize it was AI written. And I’m like, holy macaroni. I mean, that could just be an insult on. I mean, did Grimm tell you where it came from? No, no. He he he I mean, he might have told his audience. I just jumped into the live stream at the beginning. So you didn’t say it at the beginning that I’m aware of. I’m a mystic. No, no. You know, I think people are clearly poking. But I think that I hate to say it again. But boy, the model Manuel and I use sure does fit. Like people don’t understand, you know, the story structure and you know, because it’s not a one to one thing. You can’t say like the climax always happens at the end or, you know, the bot does certain combinations of things. Right. It’s almost like a scoring system where you have to have so many elements right or other elements to balance them off in a certain way. And that’s a multivariate sort of a thing. And I don’t think people have the ability to understand multivariate ways of interacting. That would be the poetic way of informing the world. And I like I see it everywhere. I’m like, wow, this is this is an issue. Like people don’t they can’t tell a good story from a bad story. That was that’s still my it’s still my thesis for her. You know, dictators of the 20th century. I bet you if you fed enough encyclopedia brown novels, the AI be a legit right. One of those ones I love and say, yes, because it’s very simple. It’s a bit. See, that’s also the thing. I mean, I think part of the problem, you know, we’re compressing time a lot. Right. And so we’re sort of jumping to, well, you know, you should just know how to X. And it’s like, well, did you go through all the steps to learn how to X? And it’s like, no, you should just like know that you just look it up or whatever. And it’s like, oh, I don’t think that’s how that works. You know, you really got to go through something in order to get there. And I think that’s part of the issue is that no one’s really told you like to know what a good story is. You kind of have to engage in simple stories and then get harder and harder over time until eventually. Yeah, I remember the cyclotron. I read that when I was young. That was great. You know, and it’s sort of like, like, you know, so C.S. Lewis, who, you know, I mean, I like his, you know, I mean, I like his sci fi, obviously, sci fi fantasy, however you want to frame it. It’s almost sui generis. Like, I don’t know what to compare that to. Yeah, it’s super simple, right? It’s super simple. Like the lion, the witch and wardrobe is super basic. It’s really not a sophisticated read. Like, so if you’re into sci fi and I am only a little bit, I’m not super well read on anything, including sci fi. But, you know, there’s a progression of sci fi, right? You know, right up to something like Dune or something that gets. There’s so many subtleties and things that if you read it when you were 17, you definitely missed a bunch of stuff. Right. And it’s actually one of the semi valid critiques of Ayn Rand is that her books are super like great for teenagers. You know, they’re not quite YA young adult, but also they’re not quite, you know, super, you know, it’s not the Republic right at the same time. And now that I’m reading the Republic and finding out all kinds of all kinds of interesting things, Sally Jo thinks I should do a, you know, an anti factual like one minute videos because I just I just found out the whole Socrates. What does he say? I know that I know nothing. That is a total fabrication. He says absolutely nothing remotely resembling that anywhere in the Republic or in all of Plato’s writings, all of Plato’s writings, the sayings in the Apologia. And actually what happens is he comes, he goes to the Delphi, the Oracle Adelphi. I was going to say the Delphi Oracle and my brain got messed up. And what he says is that he’s going to be a great writer. And he says, you know, I’m going to be a great writer. I’m going to be a great writer. I’m going to be a great writer. I’m going to be a great writer. And what he said was he didn’t believe, because the Oracle tells him you’re the wisest man of all, right. He didn’t believe it. But then he started to compare himself to somebody else in the moment. And in the course of that, He says, I suppose I know, which is something close. And he links that to wisdom. It’s actually a paragraph. There’s not a good concise quote. That’s the closest quote. But the interesting thing is that what he’s talking about in the course of wisdom is the same thing I’m saying. Part of wisdom is knowing what you know and knowing how little that is. And yeah, in Benjamin Franklin, nothing is a paradox. Yeah, it’s a paradox, which means it’s not real and it can’t exist. And you can’t live like that, which means it’s wrong. And the odds that somebody like Socrates, who wasn’t an idiot, said it are zero. And I knew that instinctively. And I finally did all the research and found out, no, total lie. And you can do the research. You can just look online. It’s not that hard. But it’s in the Apology. It’s in the Apology, yeah, okay. Yeah, it’s not in the Republic. Nothing like that is in the Republic anymore. I mean, that’s the other thing. People are giving you references that are bogus. But I mean, it does take 15 minutes. But it only takes 15 minutes. You can dig in and find it pretty easily and find out that there are lots of people that know that. And yeah, Jacob’s point about Ayn Rand is true. It’s not mature at any level. But again, so is the line in which the wardrobe spends emotionally mature as a four-year-old. I don’t know. I don’t know. I think the whole bit with Edmund and the White Witch, I think that scales up a little bit better. It all scales up. See, that’s what I mean. If you look back on it and you say, well, that’s the kind of childish, you know, because it’s like, well, we’ll take a great book that’s actually not very emotionally mature, which is Ender’s Game. Ender’s Game is one of the greatest, absolutely hands down, one of the greatest novels ever written. You know, I mean, they actually used it in the military to teach people because it is that brilliant. But yeah, the emotional sophistication in that book is pretty low. But, you know, but to be fair, the Republic’s worse. Well, because the Republic’s a parody, effectively. It’s what we would call a parody nowadays, right? Because he makes ridiculous statements like, if such a man were, you know, super just, surely he would never do X. And then the other guy goes, surely so. And so they always take everything to the extreme, right? And it’s always absolutist, which is, you know, the parody is part of the contrast to demonstrate something in the book. But yeah, it’s not terribly sophisticated emotionally either, at least not through the end of book four, because we just finished book four on the Texas Wisdom Community Book Club there. I don’t know. I guess you don’t always need emotional sophistication. No, you don’t. You don’t. But when you look back on, so let’s suppose we look back on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and we say, well, it’s not a very emotionally sophisticated book. Should kids really be reading it? Yes. It’s perfect for kids because it’s not very emotionally mature. You know, when should you read Ayn Rand? Yeah, when you’re 17, 18. I mean, Nathaniel Brandon, who’s a famous critic and also was one of Ayn Rand’s lovers, is pretty pissed off about, you know, oh, I was fooled and trapped and whatever. You take your trauma elsewhere. His critiques aren’t that good of Ayn Rand either, and he knew her. So, you know, and he’s a psychologist, which just in my book puts you at the underneath the lowest rung of the ladder of people in terms of profession. So, yeah, the only thing worth the journalists effectively. Ouch, ouch. That’s a big oof. Well, hey, you know, if you don’t like it, don’t be that way. And then I can still tell the truth and we’ll all be happy. Is there even one good psychologist? Is there even one good psychologist, Mark? Right now? No. I mean, look, I mean, I grew up watching Philip Zimbardo on PBS. Yes. And, you know, so when we mean psychologist, do we mean like a cognitive scientist or do we mean a therapist? No, no, the therapy side. The COG side people are all, they’re just all crazy science materialists nuts. They’re trying to bridge the gap between the ethereal sort of psychology stuff and the physical aspect of it. And that’s just a bankrupt project from the get go. But, you know, having an appreciation for having a book in that space where it’s, you know, not so emotionally mature that people get blown out of the water. Right. And also steps them through the emotional implications of something like, you know, your example is excellent in Lion Witch and Wardrobe, where there is that seductive relationship. And the betrayal. And seduced by power and all of that, because I think, you know, you see that in children, like they act that out, even if they couldn’t write about it. Right. So I think that’s actually important. It also shows you the way back. Yes. Which is going to involve eating crow. It’s this whole thing about what’s that word that are redemption. Yes. Eating crow. In other words, you you, hey, you have to realize you’ve done something wrong. You can’t just pre extend grace to people automatically. Otherwise, you’re enabling them. Right. And, you know, there might be a whole group of religious believers that I can target. Yeah, a lot of and not the Catholics do this to me, too. Right. Catholics in my family do this to me. You need to forgive so and so. No, I don’t. And I’m not gonna. So screw you. That person has no, you know, it’s no idea. There’s no point. They’re just going to do it again. Like you see, you have to protect yourself from people who are clueless. I don’t think forgiveness and not protecting yourself are incompatible. They are in their minds. They are in their because because the minute you say, oh, yes, I’ll do that. They said, well, what you need to do is reengage. OK, well, that’s because they’re not pastors and they’re not used to dealing with this or or a people who say, you know, that’s everybody now. I think I think, look, we have a limited cognition. Like, I don’t know. You know, the implications of that are if you’re paying attention to all this garbage, technical stuff, maybe that cognition hasn’t been sent towards the nuances of things like forgiveness and redemption where it belongs. And so, you know, maybe that means you can’t be a professional making one hundred thousand dollars a year because your cognition is taken up and more important things like learning how to interact with people. But like, I’m OK with that. I think I think that would be better. Maybe I’m wrong, but like maybe we could try that, too. Right. And then people would understand, oh, you know, forgiveness doesn’t mean, you know, re engaging or, you know, whatever. Right. See, my man, Andrew, in the comments section is is taking the commonly cited Catholic position and exploding on it very well. That forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. That forgiveness is something that you do so we can talk about how God has forgiven the sins of the world, but not everybody gets to benefit from that. Right. Right. Well, and I think I think, too, the problem is that they’re they’re misapplying forgiveness as in, well, if you forgive them, then they’re universally forgiven. And therefore they can be redeemed or whatever. Right. Now they’re back in the clock. It’s like, no, forgiveness is something you do for you. You go, OK, I understand. And I’m not going to hold anything right. I’m not going to give them rent in my in my head. But that’s not how people are using it anymore. And that’s OK. If I was actually dealing with somebody, I would make sure that this was very clear. Right. And it’s like, you don’t you don’t have to you don’t have to, you know, it wouldn’t be necessarily wrong to simultaneously be trying to forgive somebody while vindicating your rights in court. Let’s say, yeah, like I don’t think those two things are incompatible. But here’s the here’s the fundamental problem. Right. I can go up to you right now, Father Eric. And, you know, I mean, I don’t know anybody you’re angry with or who has done you wrong. But I could say, why don’t you forgive so and so? How the hell would I know if you have or have the whole idea of saying telling somebody else they have to forgive somebody when you didn’t bring up that there’s an issue is already like a You’ve already transgressed at that point. You’ve already transgressed. You don’t know that I haven’t forgiven that person. You have no way to know that there are circumstances where you do know, because maybe I’ll bitch about them or whatever. But if you don’t have access to that information and this is where people get confused, they don’t they don’t really understand what information they have. So, for example, I couldn’t say, for example, that, you know, Father Eric is not better read than Andrew. How the hell would I know how well read I for you are? It’s a foolish statement, right? It’s obviously wrong that, you know, making a comment like that about what about somebody else with information you could not possibly have about them is crazy. And people miss that all the time. Howdy. Hello, Chad. How are you guys doing? Y’all chatting about forgiveness? Yeah, yeah, I’m trying to keep the forgiveness reconciliation distinction clear and sharp. Mark has questions about the efficacy of just forgiving somebody inside your head. Fair enough, but I have to live inside here. So, you know, it is a useful thing to do, I think. And I was just about to point out that Jesus didn’t have any trouble of giving a universal command to everyone to forgive. Unless they remain unforgiven, basically. I once read somewhere that forgiveness is forgiving, not forgetting, which sounds kind of corny, but. If you remember something like that. Yeah, I know, like what people like Mark is saying, it forgiveness is for me so that I can forgive people. I can’t necessarily forgive if I don’t see the truth about situations, too. So like there’s a lot of work that can be done about seeing the truth about things. This is why we’re so poisonous. Is that the truth about situations? Yeah, I think that’s the truth. I think that’s the truth. I think that’s the truth. There’s a lot of work that can be done about seeing the truth about things. This is why we’re so poisonous. I can be in a state of kind of stasis seeing things inaccurately. Oh my God, the sun looks unbelievably gorgeous right now. Oh my God. I can see it’s like. It’s so gorgeous. It’s setting and it’s like as big as a bar. And my cubicle, my cubicle is so drab. There are no windows on that opposite wall there. That looks pretty good. Yeah, we got our so cross wall there. I’m often a proponent of some of the of the fourth and fifth step in the 12 step model because it really aims to get at the bottom of the things that are keeping me locked up. And keeping me locked in my prejudice, my perception. So if anybody is interested in maybe maybe are skeptical of religious matters, we can walk through it with this other way, which is kind of a religious matter. But hit me up. I can help you out. Sorry. Also, I’m probably in robots. All righty. We’ll we’ll endure the robotting. Get our other Andrew back. Yeah, we’re fully we’re fully up on Andrews. That’s good. Yeah. Yeah. You got to have Andrew T and Andrew K as a part of your diet. Otherwise, you’ll be lacking in vital. Oh, Eric, I wrote you that article that you asked for. I was trying to help you, man. Like I saw your, you know, like, give me a prompt. Give me a writing prompt. Somebody was a great prompt. I wrote exactly on your prompt. Yeah. And I had to think about it, though. It didn’t just all come to me. I had to like, what do I want to know about Chad? How about a perspective I have no connection with never being to church and then being in. Church all of a sudden. Yeah. So that you wrote it. I will expand. What’s the name of your sub stack? Chad, the alcohol. I’ll I’ll I’ll end up expanding on it, too, on that particular article because it’s a good one. It should just end up. All right. I’m going to drop this. Drop the Chad, the alcoholic sub stack into the chat and all of you have to subscribe now. Required reading. Required reading. Experience of coming to a church for the first time as an adult. I’m even going to show people, even going to show people what it looks like so they’re not scared. That’s a good one. That’s just what sub stack looks like. Look at those, the calming colors. The the the king, the 10, the six and the two. Look at that organizational system. Wow. It’s just all so and it’s it’s is your is your sub stack free, Chad? Yes. All righty. Yes. You can’t beat the price. You can’t beat the price. You can’t beat the price. All right. I think Chad’s now getting to the robotting portion of the of the drive. It’s a bit of a ritual when he’s coming back from his Sunday night beating. Eddie starts cutting out as he’s going between towers in rural Wisconsin. Yeah. Andrew. Andrew, Andrew Kay, specifically, is is class wrapping up for you? It is almost done. Our big presentation will be tomorrow morning. So then and then after that, are you going to put your feet up, crack open a cold one with the boys or you still have a little more work to do? Well, after that, I’ll finish a video we’re doing on how to do pre engineered stone veneer installation. And then the next day we show that and then I will put my feet up. All righty. So so by Wednesday, Wednesday, you’re you’re free. Wednesday. Yes. Nice. Wednesday, I will be going to one of my colleague and friends houses to start designing a castle for Dungeons and Dragons. Oh, nice. Nifty. Nice. Nice. Nice. You know, the model. Yeah. A digital model, at least digital. Digitals probably. You can move the figurines around there. Yeah. The bubbles asking, I’d like to learn about the workings of these concepts like forgiveness, reconciliation, grace, faith, et cetera. Is there some Catholic book where I can learn about these concepts? So I don’t think you need to buy one, but we do have this catechism of the Catholic Church. When I showed the catechism to Paul VanderKlay, his jaw dropped because most catechisms are for children. This one is for catechists. But we’ll go ahead and I’ll walk you through this here. So I will get back into presentation mode. So I heard that the Baltimore catechism is great for starting and Catholic catechism is for like theologians. Yeah. Yeah. So but the thing is, is that we’ve got this thing called the Internet, right? So I’m going to go ahead and pop this onto the stream here. I’ll take that down. We’ll zoom in a little bit. So we’ve got catechism of the Catholic Church. The Internet’s a myth. Well, somebody should have told me. Now I look like an idiot. So we could come in here. We could talk, go catechism of the Catholic Church, grace. All righty. So come here and oh, yes, that. So the USCCB website’s got this goofy PDF version. It works. OK. But I kind of actually like even though it’s super old school, see if we can find it, the Vatican dot VA one. There we go. And get ready for a little bit a little bit of 2000 Internet for you. I love regular old. 90s, baby. Let’s do this. So you just go control F and you could take grace. I can talk about the grace of baptism, law and grace, grace and justification. The concept of grace. And I’m so grace of baptism again. Yeah, well, I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to do that. Grace of baptism again. Yeah, that would be a good place to start. And, you know, it is written for adults. But you can you can talk, read like an adult here. And speaking of adults, here we have another one that I haven’t seen in a while. Zander, how are you doing? Good. How are you doing? How are you doing? Well, they’re great. I’ve been out and about doing things. I saw that you were you actually had a live stream on on Easter Sunday, which I thought was very intense for a for a priest. Yeah. Yeah, that one didn’t go the full two hours. I was I was pretty wiped out. But I’m glad I did it because I believe in regularity. Yeah, no, it’s good to build good habits. Horarium. Yeah, you know, so, you know, like people know Father Father Erickson at seven thirty central on Sundays. And I’m worried about this whole Washington, D.C. business because I don’t know if I’ll be able to manage that there. Two month break, man, that could that could wipe out all the momentum we’ve got. We’ll see. Oh, yeah. What’s what’s going on in in? Oh, you haven’t heard. So I’m getting a new assignment. Oh, in the starting in the summers, I’m going to be studying canon law in Washington, D.C. I’ll be taking online classes from there on out. And then when I get back in August, I’m going to take over the position of bishop secretary and director of the Office of Liturgy for the Diocese of Fargo. Oh, nice. So cool. So, yeah, that was announced last live stream. But if you you miss that, then you missed it. They missed it. Yeah, they were they’re not faithful watchers like like myself. They’re not true fans. True fans have seen every hour of Father Erick’s recorded live streamed. Oh, man, I still have to go back and watch Go Dog Go. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Click that. We should click that. I really did click that for sure. I think. Yeah, I just I have to move. I don’t have time to click anything. I got to move. All my stuff for you. We’ll see. Yeah. Yeah. If you need the original file, I’ll figure that out somehow. I could figure out how to click things, maybe you could enter. You could be a reader for me. The problem is, it’s it’s it’s longer than a minute. It’d be like a upload. Yeah, you have to you have to you have to download the video, actually run Kaden live on it, clip it. And then what you could do is if you just bring up the video, clip out the portion that you want to send to me, then send that. And then I’ll have it and just send it back to you because you’ll have already clips the video and then there would be no point to doing anything else. So I guess we could do that. Yeah. So I have a question for your father, Eric. All right. And it’s related to a tweet that Jordan Peterson put out today. Oh, Jordan Peterson on Twitter. Nothing has ever gone wrong. So he tweet reads atheists. Here’s a definition of spirit for you. Pattern independent of substrate. And I was curious to hear actually both Father Eric and Mark’s definition of spirit for atheists. All righty. If you had one, if you could do better than Jordan Peterson. I don’t know. He’s a he’s a pretty sharp dude. So we’ll see. We’ll pull this up on the. Yeah. Atheists. Here’s a definition of spirit for you. Pattern independent of substrate. Thank you, Kermit. Well done, by the way. That’s that’s actually not bad. That’s not actually. Yeah, it’s not bad at all. It’s at least it’s at least a good it’s a good it’s a good starter. I think you’re missing a little bit of. So if you were to use the word form, I think you would get a little bit more of the structural functional organization that actually makes things interesting. But if we’re just trying to crack atheist’s heads open, which I like people doing as long as it’s understood as it’s a metaphor. Then yeah, I’m not actually going to I’m not going to just going to let it let Dr. Peterson be there. OK, so pattern in the sense of how you use the form amendment, you would say, because we’re still trying to find spirit. So you’d say pattern independent of form. Is how you would sort of know. I don’t know, because like the pattern, the pattern is getting awfully close to form. Right. OK. Getting awfully close to the hylomorphism. But I think you miss that structural functional organization that actually makes a thing. Right. Because you could have like you could have patterns in things that are not proper unities. Like I could just show you patterns of numbers that recur regularly. And there’s not actually like anything together is one. So patterns is a little bit weaker, but it’s also a little more graspable if if you’re if you’re, say, locked at a meeting crisis and in a flat world. So so using that as like a hook. If you’re four years old, like this is what I was talking about with the books. Like if you’re four years old, yeah, you kind of need to step into it like like you can’t use form or I. Right. It’s one of the things that Breveke does well as he steps you in to play platonic forms and then said, well, it’s not really forms. It’s I. Right. Which keeps you away from the materialism a little bit, at least better than saying forms. And then and you can’t use forms on on atheist. They don’t do not. They do not sophisticated enough mentally to get that concept. So I. What I was how I was responded to it was I think it’s missing. And maybe you’re seeing spirit more as animus, but I see spirit also as as as agency. Right. So I’d say. No, I don’t have it. No, this is my main contention with Peugeot and probably a bunch of other people. No, I don’t. I don’t go. No, I, I, I still locate agency with persons only. And because it solves a lot of problems. Right. Because when you don’t do that, then people go to can overbite spirit. It’s not my fault. And irresponsibility is one of those things that drives me insane. So I can’t I can’t give anybody any tools to be irresponsible ever include including the agency tool. So I just put agency in in really only one place. Well, probably two. But I only put it in the one place so that so that you don’t run into that problem of being possessed. It’s like, you know, possession is you making a mistake while you’re walking and falling into a hole. It’s not something hunting you down and and and taking you over. I don’t I don’t like that. I don’t like that model at all. I don’t know. But I think that people can be possessed. Yeah, but it’s my ideas. Right. So it’s so it’s there. Yeah, but it’s their fault. OK, of course, they can follow the whole story. You know, they’re yeah, they’re they’re somewhere in the chain of obsession. But I think that like like being captured by an ideology or or or or you know, the spirit of a mob or something is the real thing. Right. Yes, but that’s your fault. It didn’t hunt you down. OK, you should be in the mob. That’s the point is the responsibility factor is that’s what I’m pointing at. Sure, you can you can. Yeah, but you can go. I mean, you’re and then you can become addicted to. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. And become addicted to cocaine. And yes, when you do that spirit has you. But that’s your fault. It’s the spirit didn’t hunt you down and force you to snort the coke. That didn’t. Oh, yeah. No, I agree with you on that part. So you’re saying that the agency is is it has sort of like your contention against it is that it’s it’s has. You know, it’s it’s too easy to pass the buck off off to hey, it was the spirit. It wasn’t me. My contention is that the pattern doesn’t. And this is it. See, this is another thing that actually I’m surprised to show doesn’t go here. That pattern of addiction to whatever cocaine porn video games, it doesn’t even matter. You could say they’re all the same pattern of spirits. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t exist without us. Period. Does not exist unless we give it the agency that we have. So the agency is only with enough. The pattern has no agency. But you need to avoid the pattern. And maybe you can’t avoid the pattern entirely ever. But it’s your responsibility to when you get in the pattern, get out immediately the minute you see it. Right. And that’s actually really important. It’s not because once you give agency to something that isn’t you. Now, now the world is too complex for you to even waste your time with it. And you have to be a Calvinist. You have no choice. So what about people manipulating people? Because people can certainly hunt you down. Right. If. If someone is manipulating. What does that mean in a world where we all do that to everybody by virtue of existence? Because this is this is the problem. Like for me, manipulation is a word with no valence whatsoever. Like the fact that I exist manipulates all the people around me, whether they know it or not. OK. But I mean, there’s certainly yes. Your existence has has like everything you do has ripple effects or consequences rippling out that everyone else. Right. You know, that’s what I think manipulation is. Well, hold on, Zander. When you’re saying what you’re saying there, right, is actually what do you do about malicious people with malicious intent? Right. And this is what Peterson is so good at drawing out. He says, look, there are malicious people in the world. So you can’t you can’t try to take that middle ground where, well, there’s a manipulation and they don’t know what they’re. These are all irrelevant. I’m a pragmatist. These are irrelevant things to a pragmatist. So pragmatists don’t care. Pragmatists look at results, go, aha, you know, so that’s what’s important. Yeah. But there are yeah, there’s malicious people. There’s 11 people out there. That’s right. There’s people with 11 that are person. That’s the only thing you need to worry about. You don’t need to worry about this alleged middle condition that doesn’t exist. And I have to disagree with Phlebas about the Calvinist jab. No, the Calvinist jab was was correct because combinatorial explosion. Right. The problem with with going with the fact that we all manipulate each other and because we all exist on the same planet and and having spirits that can take over us. The problem is then if there are multiple spirits that can inhabit us at any time and we have no control over it, because that’s what agency is. Agency is control. Right. Then you can turn your antenna frequencies like we’ve got antennas up into the spirit world that we can tune that to different frequencies. And you’ve got to like tune into the right. And so that’s why I can for the. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. That’s attention. Yeah. Attention. And so that’s why idolatry was such a big deal in the Old Testament. Why it’s still a big deal for Christians because it’s like, hey, what spirit are you tuning into? You’re turning into the Holy Spirit. You’re turning into another spirit. There’s only the Holy Spirit’s going to be able to make everything whole. Right. Yes. Yes. Words are related, at least in the in the German. And yeah, set apart entire. Keep everything. Yeah. Properly oriented. That’s something I noticed about like the the infernal spirits are represented in multiplicity. In in the Bible, like they say, we are legion. And the whole Holy Spirit implies a unity or like. And I don’t I don’t and I don’t think it’s an undifferentiated unity, right? Because you talk about like angels and in court and choirs like this, this harmonious unity. Which is which is different, right? So there’s a hierarchy and there’s a there’s a unity that comes from everything having its place. And being arranged in its place. Yeah. The harmony of order. Yeah. Yeah. The real the real problem is people don’t want to differentiate between maliciousness, which they should resist. Right. Or at least call out. Right. Which is a form of resistance, I would argue. And things you have to accept. Right. So, you know, you you you you hang out with Paul Vanderclay during Thunder Bay and you have to call out to him. And you have to accept the fact that in three separate videos, he says, oh, Mark kept Mark kept making comments during, you know, during everybody’s talks as though he didn’t do that himself to me. Like, no, dude, this is a mutual thing. Like, you can’t portray that as me doing it to you. You know, and I get why you did it. And like, I found it amusing. But I also called him out on it because I was like, really? Three times, three times fall. You know, so so, you know, you just have to accept that people have quirks and and they do things. And you know, you have to accept the fact that he’s going to screw up on a live stream and talk about priests going into your bedroom. Well, yeah. People have to record straight on that one. I know it was so funny because I knew immediately why you jumped in so quickly. I’m like, oh, Father, I’ve been waiting to fix that. I think it’s worse, though, than people just had making jabs and things that because because the malicious actually goes into like sophisticated hacking, right? Social hacking. I just put in a link, a beautiful trouble dot org. And it’s the second look at this. It’s the updated rules for radicals, right? That OK, everybody’s same thing. Yeah. Creative tools for a more just world. These people look so nice, Zander. I don’t know how you could ever accuse them of being radical. Yeah. So you can open the tools. Open the toolbox. Go to the principles, for example. The principles. Beautiful trouble. Yeah. So you can open the toolbox. Yeah. Open the toolbox. Go to the principles, for example. Beautiful trouble. Beautiful trouble. That’s weird. Beautiful trouble. No, that’s it’s a well, it’s an it’s evolution. They used to use the term good trouble. And then they they evolved to a beautiful trouble. I don’t know. Well, they used truth before, right? They use truth claims. So in other words, they’re really never been kind of truth. But what are they? Well, no, no, no. But they claim they are. So what are they hijacking? They’re not fans of beauty either. What are they hijacking? They’re hijacking the true, the good and the beautiful. Yeah. Now, I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I could be wrong here. But, you know. Well, they put the qualifier on it because they’re, you know, they’re trying to co-opt and pervert the term, right? That’s right. Right. Yeah. Well, that’s right. That’s like social justice. Yeah. Cannot exist. You’re perverting justice by definition. You’re perverting justice. You know, or, or. Hey, hold on. Hold on. They got one thing right here. Nobody wants to watch a drum circle. Yeah. So instead, pull people into the drum circle is where that one goes. And that’s the thing. And this is this is actually my big complaint with Joe is that he’s a beauty first guy. He’s like, no, no, no. The solution is more beauty. And it’s like, no, because they’re going to do this. This is exactly what they’re going to do. They’re going to pervert the beauty neck. They tried the true and the good. And now what’s left is the beauty because everybody ran to beauty is the solution. And of course, it’s not the same. You need all three guys. I, you know, everybody wants to see the real action is your targets reaction is that sort of, let’s say, the good one that explains the social hacking. Right. And this is actually so Saul and ski had a, I think, had this rule to was how do you phrase it? It was something like your. When challenging a more powerful target, the key to success often isn’t what you do, but how your target reacts to what you do, therefore, anticipate your target’s response and write it into your script. Yeah. The real action is your enemy’s reaction. Yeah. So write it into your script. That’s that’s the key part, though. Right. Is that they’re they’re creating scripts and narratives. So the whole situation is performative. They’ve actually if they’re seeing you as an actor or as as you use this word agent and they have this trigger and they sort of they have an they have an idea of how you’ll react to certain situations or stimuli. So then they try and create a situation in which they can portray you as bad or negative or expose you in some way. Well, they’re very clever. Like, that’s the thing. They’re very clever. That’s why Claire has such and her minions have such a hard time with me because my reaction is not like anybody else’s because I know all those tricks and I know how to not fall for them. And then they, you know, well, wait a minute. How would you self identify? And I go, the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. I would just never self identify. And then you’re screwed. And I still I still remain king of the mountain because you can’t get a handle on. Right. You can’t climb that mountain. So then they know what they’re doing. They understand how to get a rise out of people. And that’s why I like, you know, I like what Jacob says. You shouldn’t talk to them. Sometimes you just say you’re an idiot and hang up on their ass. Yeah, I think, well, that’s that’s often I mean, I like I’m a high advocate of dialogue, but I don’t think a dialogue implies that both both the part of the participants are seeking truth. And they don’t they don’t see that. If you’re if you’re in a cult of of mendacity, right, that where there is no objective truth to be sought. All there is is mendacity. Then they can’t participate in your game, which is right, which is why the propositional game is dangerous and I don’t play that. Well, they can’t they it’s yeah, they they can’t participate in the game and they’ll in any and if they any attempt or claim that they are participating in game is is disingenuous by the nature of the police. Right. It’s the people who engage that don’t know that. Yeah, it’s the it’s the Sam Harris’s and the Jordan Petersons and the John Breveckis of the world that put forth on all conversation can fix this. And it’s like, no, and that’s why they keep engaging the left on principles. And I’m like, the reason why that doesn’t work is because they do not have principles. So you are not going to embarrass them by showing them irrational, illogical or unreasonable patterns in what they’re saying. Like the fact that they think black people are racist when they disagree with them doesn’t bother them one bit, even though it does bother you. And you’re just didn’t catch on that you fell for it and played their game without realizing they’re not following principles. You’re giving them more credit than they’re worth. They’re not following truth. They’re not following goodness or beauty. They don’t they don’t care about any of those things. But I but I think that it’s still important for us to play that game with and our our our tribes and serve our extended tribe. Right. Because if we are if you do believe in foundational truth and good and beauty, then you then dialogue becomes a fundamental form of engagement. It’s actually it’s how you regulate and understand the only if you reach it in dialogue and get agreement. And that’s where the problem is. Even within tribes, you won’t get a green. I mean, this is one of the problems people have. They you know, they’ll tell me to say, you can’t say that. I’m going to say, they’d already said it. Right. And then you can’t make a claim like that. I did. Now what? And it’s like, well, that claims wrong. It’s like, OK, make a counterclaim. And their problem is they can’t because they have no place to stand. And it’s like, well, my claim may be wrong, but I have the right to make it. And you don’t have the right to make any counterclaim. Now what? And it’s still a win goes to me. Right. Because I’ve made the claim and they have no grounds to make a claim. And so, yeah, you know, whatever. I mean, conversation is important and you have to, you know, exemplify good conversations. But when it stops there, which it did with Peterson, I would argue, it’s not enough. And then everything gets worse again, because eventually that game just runs out quickly. You know, when you’re only talking and then Peterson goes, then Peterson goes and builds an arc. Well, he hasn’t yet. But yeah, he should. He’s he’s he’s laying the plan out. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don’t. Yeah. But that’s too specific. He’s not building an arc for all the animals he’s building. What he’s building is a warship to fight one particular aspect of one particular thing. I’m still up in the air on that. Is that better or worse? I don’t I don’t know. I honestly have no idea. You know, on the one hand, I think, yes, you have to call it evil and do it with tools. So I’m like, well, that part’s good. On the other hand, I think, well, you’re really strengthening your enemy by by by giving them, you know, by spending time, energy and attention saying, oh, you’re so important that we actually have to counter your ideas. And then I default back to Jacob. Right. No, no, call them idiots and go on with your day. Then you’re not wasting too much time and attention on people because you’re not worth it. And so it’s you know, it’s a tough one. Well, I think that people still get absorbed into institutions and you need to understand the patterns. OK, so one weakness I see that within the within the Catholic Church and I’m I’m by far not ideal on this. Right. But because of the bad catechesis and there not being a lot of of correction that there’s just seems to be a huge slew of beliefs. And a lot of them, like, you know, there’s there’s things that we can just we can disagree on. And, you know, and there’s room for debate and dialogue. Right. But then there’s fundamental things. And if you like if you if people who are pulled into this forms of this mendacious cult, right, who don’t believe in truth, who and and then, you know, it’s in my mind, it’s fundamentally a apostasy because you’re no longer a Christian at that point. Right. You’re no longer. Yeah. What difference does it make? Well, because because you need because you need to understand that that thought system, like you need to understand the cults so you can identify it and work as an antibody. They’re all the same. They’re the same pattern. You don’t need to understand any of them. They’re all exactly the same pattern. What you need to do is fill the line on the right pattern and ignore all the wrong. Because they’re a total waste of time to kind of if I can just unravel why the why the you know the BLM cult. No, it’s the same cult as all the other cults. Well, I mean, it is the same format and you can’t unravel it. Basically, they’ve got the wrong thing at the center. Yeah, they’ve got the wrong thing at the center. It’s all the same problem. Okay, but you still need to and you’re not going to talk them out of it anyway. So that’s not how it works. But I’m not saying you need but you need to be able to identify them within your ranks. If you’re if you’re trying to build an institution or community, you need to be able to identify the bad players. You can just do the right thing and see who follows. You really can’t like it really does work. And who tries to stop you? It works. That’s all you have to do. But occasionally, you know, you’re going to get things done. You’re going to need to have a committee or you’re going to need to have like a group of people working together to do to organize things. Committees are unavoidable. Yeah, they are inevitable. You don’t need to do that. It’s going to happen. You don’t need to put your time and attention to any of that. It will happen. That’s the that’s the good news. You don’t need to put your energy into that. You don’t need to put your energy into forming a committee and all that. It’ll have it will come together. Mark, if I understand what you’re saying, is that as long as you’re going forward, acting in the world in a good way in alignment with the Holy Spirit, we’ll say, You just seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness and everything else is given to you, right? Right. Right. Well, and things will happen. And, you know, committees will form. Yeah. People will see what you’re doing. And they’re like, dang, that’s good. I want to be a part of that. Right. So they come to you. You don’t you don’t have to say, hey, look, BLM, we have a better system. You don’t even have to do that. You can just do the right thing in public. What I’m talking about. Yeah. Well, my concern is, is what do you do when you have a Judas? Right. You always have one. You do the same thing we’ve always done when we had Judas at the table, because we’ve always had a Judas at the table. This is a snake in the garden. Yes, we always snakes in the garden. You know, I hear I hear tell I haven’t read the whole book. I hear tell that in a book. It’s a couple thousand years old. It’s got all this instruction about all that stuff already in there. Even even Judas got to partake a communion. Right. Look, look, look how much good that did him. To him, this bread, right. You know, so even Judas was the morsel. Yeah. By Jesus himself. Yeah. Yeah. Jesus handing himself to Judas. Let himself be handed over. Father Eric, I need to process my relationship with Catholicism because I am confused. OK, we can do that. All right. So I was at a baptism today and my wife was one of the godparents. OK. So I was at a baptism today and my wife was one of the godparents. OK. And I didn’t know if that was OK or not. Sure. And it’s just one of those things where it’s like, my goodness, my my relationship with Catholicism is weird and confused. Yeah. So can you talk about the other godparents? The other godparent was a Catholic, a the uncle of the baby. OK. So this is what happens is that people want to give a special standing to a friend in their life. Correct. In this case, my wife. So in the ceremony, they are allowed to stand in the place of godparents. But the one who actually gets the duties of the godparents is the practicing Catholic who would be a model of the faith. And so your wife probably was not recorded in the register except as a Christian witness. Now, is it great that we do that? I don’t know, but it’s the custom that I have inherited. And so and the word actually, we don’t use the word godparent in any official documents. It always says sponsor, like it’s an AA meeting or something. So so you could say she is the godparent because it’s not in any official documents. That’s like a word that we’ve made up to describe this. But I don’t think I don’t think it’s likely. And it depends on the priest and how he’s running things, because, you know, priests end up doing what they want, as it turns out. But if this were if I were in this situation, the one would be the sponsor. The other one would be a Christian witness. So my wife still took the oath, which requires reciting the Apostles Creed, not the Nicene Creed, which is the Apostles Creed is the is the baptismal ancient baptismal creed of the church. So makes sense. And it’s like, man, what is going on? You know, this is some weird mix of in and out. You know, my wife standing up there taking the vow to raise a kid in the faith, you know, with a Catholic priest up front. So what’s your religion, Sam? Hard to say. I am Christian. OK. And your wife? Christian. Yeah, yeah. So it’s it’s it’s what we do. It’s like it’s sort of a survival strategy for living in a Protestant country. Yeah. Because sometimes I meet Protestants that I feel more affinity with than I do certain fellow Catholics. And like, wow, this person might actually be a better example than somebody who would be a member of the Catholic Church. Yeah. That happens for sure. Well, you know, because I don’t know if you saw this talk, Candace Owens did a talk. Her husband debated Ali Beth Stuckey. And it’s going to be a two part talk. I only listen to the first part because second part has been released. Who’s her husband? Who’s this guy? George Farmer. George Farmer is his name. No, she didn’t take his name, unfortunately. He’s a Catholic, though, and Candace Owens is not. And Ali Beth Stuckey, I’ve heard her before, but I should tell you. She’s evangelical. It was an interesting talk. Conservative evangelical thinking. Got me real close on papal infallibility, Father Eric. Oh, I didn’t think of that angle. That’s actually really important. OK. Yeah, I don’t want to spoil it because you should you should check it out. Like I said, I’m moving now, so I just I don’t I miss like three PVK videos this week because I already moving. So I getting a new assignment. So in the summers, I’m going to be in Washington, D.C., studying canon law. And there the rest of the year, I’m going to be bishop secretary and director of the Office of Liturgy, which will mean living at the bishop’s house. So I’m moving in Fargo, but into. So the your secretary to the bishop job is in Fargo. But summers, you have basically a training apprenticeship or something in Washington, D.C. It’s a Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. And there’ll be online classes through the year. I’ll have a JCL after my name. That’s fun. So the only three months where it’s actually pleasant to be in Fargo, you’ll be in Washington, D.C. Yes. Good job. Well done, Father Eric. Oh, yeah, that’s what I get for saying yes. Right. So if I understand Godparents, originally, it’s sort of like. So you’re supposed to have your baby baptized pretty soon after they’re born. But maybe mom is indisposed. And so it’s sort of like the Godparents are the ones that take the baby to be baptized, sort of on the presumption that maybe mom couldn’t do it back in the day because she’s still recovering. And heaven forbid something happens to mom. Those parents are ready and willing to step in. So I don’t have enough education to talk about the exact origins of this. But what I do know is that even in the Code of Canada law today, and this is a tradition that goes back at least to the medieval church, the Godparents would also be responsible for seeing that the child got a Christian education in the event that the parents weren’t able to provide it. Right. Well, not I mean, the original purpose of Godparents is who gets custody of the kids in case of an incapacity, either permanent or temporary. And then we’ve overridden that with law to some extent of this bad and wrong and should be reversed immediately. But yeah, when the church isn’t out there doing that work, then it’s kind of necessary. So but yeah, the original purpose was to to and of course, the church being the church, first the spiritual well-being. But but it also that in, you know, in in not too long ago, say, 200 years ago, I would have understood there’s no difference between taking care of someone spiritually and making sure they’re also materially well. Amen. Amen. So I’m thinking on my way out to Chicago, I’m going to stay with a old buddy of mine from seminary in Hammond, Indiana. That’s a. So that’s an interesting place. Yeah, I I don’t know. I just know he’s a pastor out there and he would certainly let me stay at his place for a night. So I can go out there. But the problem with all of this canon law business is that I haven’t been accepted into the program yet and I don’t have housing in Washington, D.C. yet because Bishop only told me about this on April 19th. So. But can you put in a good word for you? Well, he actually has to write a letter of recommendation for me to get led into this program like they don’t. It’s it’s very elitist and like connectiony, but you can’t get into canon law school unless you’re being sponsored by a diocese or a religious order. Like, I don’t know why you would want to be a freelance canon lawyer. I don’t think there’d be a dime in that. Yeah, really. What does being a canon lawyer enable you to do? Well, all sorts of things. But the thing that’s going to be most common is going to be being a judge on an enrollment case. Cool. So that’s so I get everybody gets to come to me with bad news, you know. Or when there’s a. Or excuses for why it wasn’t bad news. Yeah. I want to phrase that. Or in situations where there’s where priest is being reprimanded or. Maybe some of that. Yeah. But I mean, you know, the code of canon law covers everything. But 90 percent of what canon lawyers end up doing are the enrollment cases, which is why probably diapositives are the most common. I think are the enrollment cases, which is why probably diocese have more now than they did back before, you know, tidal waves of divorce was coming through. I’m curious, is that will your rulings be a final say then or is there like an appeals process for annulments? So in canon law, prior to 2015, all annulments were automatically appealed to the Metropolitan, the Metropolitan Tribunal. So if you did a formal case there, so if we did a formal case in Fargo, there would be an automatic appeal to Minneapolis, St. And then Pope Francis changed that law in 2015 where the appeal is only done at the request or one or the other of the parties, which is actually a major change in a continental law system because a continental law system has always got two courts looking at these things rather than just one lone judge out there causing all sorts of havoc there. And if those two, if those two courts don’t agree, then it goes to Rome. And then Rome can settle it. But now that we don’t have to automatically send it to St. Paul, Minneapolis, our judicial vicar is now always having at least three judges look at the case in Fargo to pass a ruling on it, just to make sure he’s not going off the reservation. Yeah, I was going to ask why can’t a priest just make a decision upon an annulment? I suspect I know the answer, but. Because they don’t have the qualifications or the authority. And perhaps some maybe fear of abuse of the system. Yeah, there’s also, I mean, there’s enough possibilities for that, but marriage, marriage just immediately gets more complicated. Yeah, there’s three sides to every marriage. Yeah, that’s the issue. Yeah, you don’t. I mean, it’s funny, right? For all the complaints about the church doing bad things in the past. Yeah, that’s why they don’t give the priests all the power. So what enables someone to get an annulment? What are, I suppose it’s obviously complicated such that you would need to be educated on all the ins and outs. But what are some of the high level things that would qualify or disqualify someone from an annulment? So for any Catholic sacrament, you need form, matter and intention, right? You got to have the form, right? How are we understanding this action that’s going on? The matter, the things that are going through the action and the intention. What are we actually doing here? So if you can find a defect in one of those three, you could usually get an annulment. So form is the easiest. Since the Council of Trent, all Catholics have been required to get married in front of an official witness of the church with two other witnesses. And so if that form is defective, then there was no marriage that took place. So that’d be called a lack of form. Usually that comes out. You should call it poor form. That would be better. That would be better. But I don’t get to name these things. So that would be two Catholics going for it, or at least even one Catholic goes in front of a judge, never goes in front of a priest. So that’d be a lack of form annulment. With the matter. So the original matter case is that part of Catholic marriage is the exchange of rights to each other’s bodies. And if the man is not able to actually exchange that right because he’s impotent, then he does not have the ability to carry out those duties that he’s taken on. So that’s actually grounds for an annulment right there. You know, this person is made promises that he couldn’t keep. We’ve now expanded that out psychologically so that if somebody was not in a state to take on the duties of married life and not just marital duties, then they can get an annulment for that. So that’s either a grave lack of discretionary judgment, psychic-natured incapacity, or not having a use of reason. And then we got to get to the intention, Xander. I’m not done yet. So you have to intend what the church intends for marriage. So that would be children, permanence, fidelity, and what we could basically call conjugal life. And if you weren’t actually intending those things when you said they did, and we can get evidence for that, that’d be a simulation of a sacrament. So if a man had no intention whatsoever of being faithful to his wife, then he could get an annulment, which leads me to say that in the 21st century, Henry VIII probably could have gotten an annulment on those crowds. But the church wasn’t doing these cases before 1960. Yeah, the church wasn’t doing these cases until about 1960. And then I haven’t even covered everything, but those are the basics. We haven’t gotten into abduction or consanguinity. So how do you prove intention or lack of proper intention? You’ve got to get other people to testify that so-and-so talked about marriage this way. And so you can’t be like, I won an annulment for the record I didn’t have the right intentions. Right. Well, I mean, I’m sure that’s part of it. You would need somebody to, so there’s always with these cases, which is funny, these lack of form cases, but these formal cases, they always have to have multiple witnesses testifying to the facts of the case. Same as in normal law, like intent is impossible to prove basically, but there are hints and that’s how they do it in regular cases. I’m interested on the form of the sacrament. What happens if there’s no annulment challenge and there is some bad form within the sacrament? If the parties consider themselves married, are they still married? Is it a natural marriage at least? So I need a little more data before I can settle this. So what what defect are you seeing? Okay, let’s say that they’re badly catechized, they’re Catholic, they’re badly catechized and they get a marriage, get married in Las Vegas. Okay. Are they married? So no, they’re not. They probably love each other. I hope they love each other, but they’re not married. Hopefully at some point, some priest lets them know that that’s a problem and also says, hey, here’s how we’re going to solve this problem. We’re going to renew your wedding vows in a special ceremony. Right. We just got to do a little bit of this process and I can actually because you guys have been married for longer than five years as your pastor, I could take a few of these processes out and we’ll do it on your anniversary. Won’t that be special? So I literally did that yesterday actually. Got people’s marriage validated in the church. And I also brought the husband into the church. It was a great day. It was a great day. Confirmed him, gave him his first communion, married the two of them all in like half an hour. Well done. And usually once you explain to people that they don’t have any obligation to throw a gigantic party, they’re pretty willing to go through with it. Yeah. Yeah. 30 minutes or the indulgence is free. You should offer them a free party. Yeah, but it’s on their anniversary. So here’s why I do it on their anniversary is because I don’t want them to wonder what their anniversary is. Yeah. So it’s like you’re marrying somebody on their anniversary. Yeah, yeah. So it’s like how would they have an anniversary if they haven’t gotten married yet? We just went over this thing is I don’t want them answering that question. Wait, are you talking about people who have already been married? Well, they’ve been civilly married but not religiously married. Catholics didn’t undergo the sacrament of marriage correctly. Okay. Because if you’re not married in the eyes of the church, you’re fornicating. Sorry. So what if the marriage was on leap day? I guess that would be interesting. You gotta wait four years, Father. For the record, I have performed one wedding in my life and it was on leap day. So this is not a rhetorical question. Either the party is Catholic? You can cheat three years. You know, every three years you can just cheat. And then every year you have to be, every fourth year you have to be on it. That’s the rule. What’s he gonna say? You see, if I performed a wedding for Catholic people, that would increasingly complexify my relationship to Catholicism. Yes. Uh-oh. Let me see if we can get a question here, Father Eric. You gotta answer that one. I already did. Oh, you have an answer for it. Oh, excellent. Yeah, I don’t think these retrofi classes, I think they’d probably let non-Catholics into it. And it’s in most states in the United States. It’s got pretty good results. The Catholics need to do more things for the non-Catholics for sure. We’ve been over that before. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Watch the video with committee marks. Yes, watch our video. So one thing I’ve been up to in my absence is the, we’ve been having these theology on tap lectures for Catholic educators. Because of Ontario, we have a public Catholic education system or publicly funded Catholic education system. Ah, yes, that problem. Yeah. So we have Catholic teachers who don’t know much about Catholicism, but they mean well, and they want to learn more. And we had like three lectures and the third one, and it was theology on tap because we’d actually have it in a pub to get people to come out. It was fun. Third one was on LGBTQ issues in the school. And that got some attention. I can only imagine everybody agreed on everything discussed in that meeting. Actually, but, well, I’m sure the alcohol helped with that. It was surprising because like, the school board asked us to stop beforehand, call it off. And the bishop actually stepped in and said he would do the talk. Yes! Hopefully, I’m happy with what he said. Well, I was, you know, bishops tend to be somewhat political creatures. So I was like, I was wondering where he was going to go with it. And when I showed up, I was actually, I was there and I was pleasantly surprised with what he said. I was very happy. That’s called leadership, baby. I’m here for it. Take the responsibility. Take the hit. Yeah. Take the risk. So he did go, he did take sort of the philosophical high ground though, right? Because like the activists did show up in force. And so he did sort of talk over people’s heads. But the way, like he leaned heavily on his theology and philosophy. So he went in and he did it. And so I thought it was approachable manner because he talked about his own experience going to university and doing his master’s in divinity and how he at his school there is one of the prominent North American universities. It also happened to be one of the prominent North American universities for radical feminism, the origins of radical feminism. So he actually talked about the radical feminism he read and how its origins are in Marxism and existentialism. And he said, like he ultimately said, like he was very bishopian conciliatory. But he did say flatly that Marxism is a religion that is incompatible with the Catholic faith. And queer theory is a form of Marxism. So I was like, that was him saying that I thought was a huge win. Yeah. Yeah. Gosh. We’re going to take the W’s wherever we can get them. Yeah. And I think the talk actually, the downside was I think the talk went over a lot of the public school, like the Catholic school teachers heads. Like they were looking for something a little more practical. But at the same time, it took the legs out of the activists. I’m afraid Marx could accuse your bishop of soothsaying there. I don’t know if you saw his stream on the soothsaying, but one of the forms of soothsaying that Mark identified was using big technical words to just kind of enchant people. But that might have actually been the right call, I think, in that situation, just because like if you just get enough of the message in there, we’re not playing along with the new orthodoxy basically. Then I think that’s enough of a win. You’ve sent enough signal in there. You don’t have to come in there full Alex Jones, you know. These people are literal demons from another dimension. But also the signal that I know what I’m talking about was quite clear, right? Because he used the correct language precisely, right? So yeah, that’s not that’s not so saying other areas. It’s only soothsaying if that’s all you do, for example. That’s why. Okay. Okay. You can use the big words like there’s nothing wrong with using the big words. But if that’s all you do right, because a lot of people do that, you know, they’ll just they’ll start, you know, connecting the cells in your body to the, you know, the stars in the universe and garbage like that and using big words to do that. That’s all soothsaying. Okay. But if you’re showing a chain of order or if you’re appealing to capital E truth or you’re talking about goodness, right, then the odd that that level of enchantment is only soothsaying, you know, go down. So that’s yeah, I wouldn’t I wouldn’t identify any particular enchantment method is soothsaying by itself. Yeah. Okay. It was definitely rhetorical play though, right, because he was he was showing. Look, I know my stuff here. And, and there was an intimidation factor for the activists where, okay, he, you know, he’s going to put the if I go and challenge him emotionally, he’s going to have some very sophisticated some sophisticated responses. I thought it was a question from blue carrying a another Ontario Catholic. I just seem to be greeted by Canadians at every turn. Is this something you feel comfortable sharing like more details on Zander? Would you rather keep it on the DL? Ontario is a big place. Ontario is a big place. I don’t mind. I thought Fargo was in Ontario. Her theology on tap is something that our local parishes started doing right. It happened. Well, in North Bay. I don’t mind. I can actually give you a link to the event. Sure. Sure. You just wanted to know when North Bay when when in North Bay. Oh, it was the last few weeks. It was either last week or the weekend. Before things can be a little blurry sometimes when you’re a parent in North Bay, as far as I can remember, is not close to Toronto. It’s about four hours northish of Toronto. Yeah. It’s the same distance. Pretty easy. If you were a Toronto four hours north of Toronto, that would be like the wasteland of Siberia or something. Well, it probably kind of is. It must be. It’s not like it’s not a place. It’s not a place. Yeah. Didn’t Laura live in some town that’s like four hours north of Toronto that that that was like some sort of super trad cath middle of nowhere retreat town. Something. Yeah, she lived in the middle of nowhere, too, like Shari. Yeah, some people. Yeah, that’s a good. There’s a lot of nowhere in Canada. So if you’re in Canada, you can go to the North Bay. You can go to the North Bay. You can go to the North Bay. You can go to the North Bay. That’s a good. There’s a lot of nowhere in Canada. So if you want to live in the middle of nowhere, Canada is your place. That’s no question about it. If you get to do it in the United States, I think to the earlier point. Yeah, I mean, South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota. There’s a lot of nowhere there, too. It’s indistinguishable from Canada. I would say the best nowhere you can get is probably Montana, actually. Oh, yeah. Montana’s got some great nowhere. Well, Montana and Alaska. And Alaska. Wyoming, yeah. Alaska, they don’t. The sun, day and night cycle is just too messed up in Alaska. I lived in Norway for two years. I know what those latitudes are like. Fargo’s bad enough. Yeah, it is. Yeah. I think the place in the lower 48 that’s furthest away from a road is in the middle of Yellowstone and Wyoming. Yeah. Fun fact. It’s only like a couple dozen miles, too. It’s not that far. We’re really good at building roads. Yeah, we’re really good at building roads. I feel like archaeologists and historians like hundreds and thousands of years from now will be like, the Americans were really good at building roads. That was their greatest achievement. They kind of thought it was like democracy or something. It was the roads. They thought it was the Internet. They thought it was going to the moon. Those roads, they really didn’t appreciate it. I mean, I could just drive to Washington, D.C. You drive anywhere. And I’ve got to put up with your stupid state, Sam, because it’s welcome to Illinois. That’ll be $20. Those roads don’t pay for themselves. So I’ve got my stupid I-pass transponder coming in the mail. So I don’t have to stop constantly. Us residents of the state of Illinois greatly appreciate your contributions to our deficit. It is very appreciated. Even for friends, they pay for their own roads. I mean, come on. Although I have to say, the roads in Illinois are better than the roads in Wisconsin. The roads in Wisconsin are a little underfunded and a little bumpy. Yeah, the roads just about anywhere are better than the roads in Wisconsin. They’ve been, you know, pothole city for a long time. Pretty sure you could just drive through Canada, Father Eric. I could, but then I’d have to deal with your stupid slow speed limits. Well, the speed limits actually look fast because they’re in kilometers per hour until you convert them. And you’re like, oh, that’s not actually that fast. Yeah, 100 kilometers per hour is like 60 miles an hour. Yeah. Well, it’s a long way around north around Lake Superior. I did that coming out of Thunder Bay. It was gorgeous. And I don’t regret a minute of it. But my goodness, it’s a lot of minutes. It’s oh, yeah, it’s a long ass drive. And man, you know, you make it all the way into northern Michigan. Yay. They recently bumped it to 110 kilometers on the major highways. Great. Now we’re going 67 miles an hour. Yeah. How recently? Like last summer, late last summer, like the last fall or something over the winter, basically. I think it’s because yeah, I think it’s because of the the automated driving, right. Sets you to the speed limit. So they’re trying to bump it up to something reasonable for the highway. It’s like, yeah, once people start using their Teslas, I’ve actually had that experience where because because no one actually goes the posted speed limit. Right. But we actually saw so I was I actually got behind a Tesla on the highway and I was like wondering why is this guy literally going the speed limit? And then I realized because he’s in auto drive. I don’t drive. Let’s not talk about AI again. What could possibly go wrong? Did somebody say AI? Andrew, Andrew, come on. Oh, oh, I’m just kidding, Andrew. I won’t kick you forever. Oh, Father Eric, are you going to Chino? Yes, I am. Nice. I’m going to be camping. I’m going to go do the paintball for Jesus. I’m going to do the Orthodox Church tour. I’m there for the whole shebang. That’s yeah. Yeah, I’m glad. So this whole going out to Washington, D.C. at the end of May thing is canceling two vacations for me. Not big vacations, but times I was looking forward to get away. And yeah, but it didn’t cancel that one. So, yes. All right. It’s just I’ve been talking about AI so stinking much. Right. Like and I just I’m tired of it. Especially all the two. Yeah. But here’s a question, Sam. Is your job going to be replaced by chat GPT? I mean, I already use chat GPT to write my own code. So I currently find it helpful until someone’s like, wait a minute. I mean, the key is you got to ask chat GPT the right questions. And that’s where it takes the really smart people to pay the big bucks. It’s really the prompts, not the output that are my specialty at this point. Can’t just ask chat GPT any old thing. So I’m not too worried yet. But yeah, those are those are high paying jobs, apparently prompting AIs are six figure jobs right now. Yeah. I do think it will be interesting for coders because it basically very much lowers the bar to write good software. And honestly, for me, that’s fine because I’ve never had a job because I’m good at software writing. I’ve had a job because I’m good at math and statistics and trying to translate that into software. So I feel like it actually kind of gives me a certain advantage. It levels the playing field with people who are much better at writing software than I am, whereas it doesn’t make it any easier for them to do what I do, but it makes it easier for me to do what they do. So that but I don’t know. I feel like I kind of feel like chat GPT will become old hat after some amount of time. It’ll get integrated in a couple of things and people will find some interesting business use cases for it. I’m sure that’ll happen. But I think it’ll probably on the whole be somewhat underwhelming. And I’ve even heard what’s his name, Sam Altman or something. Who’s the CEO of OpenAI? Did I get that right, Sam Altman? Yeah. He’s even said that basically, as far as he can tell, chat GPT is like almost as good as he can imagine it being at its specific task. Like you can give it slightly more data. You can hook it up to slightly more powerful computers, but those will be only incremental improvements on its general ability. And it’s already at least 95 or maybe even 99 percent of the way towards not like perfection, obviously, because it’s not perfect. But the full capabilities of what that technology is able to do. So you don’t see it going up exponentially and then all of a sudden Terminator? There will be other things that come along, other forms of AI and stuff like that that will give big, I don’t know, jolts. But as far as this specific one, and that’s another thing that I’d point out in some sense, all of AI has similar stuff behind it. But in the other sense, they’re all really pretty different from each other. And it’s a name for a whole collection of individual stuff. And that I’m not saying that there isn’t it’s not a useful category and that it isn’t getting better. But I’m generally not thinking that chat GPT is going to ruin the world. I think that will honestly get pretty used to it. Because, like, honestly, you know, like the Google search bar has been guessing what you’re going to finish typing your search with for like five or almost even 10 years. And that really was like a baby form of chat GPT. It was the same technology in a slightly smaller, more focused scale. Well, that’s not AI. That’s just machine learning. Right. But I mean, Google invented the technology to do that, to finish your search query for you so that you could press tab. And then some other people are like, what if we just like greatly expanded upon that idea and gave it much for your scope? And that’s basically what chat GPT was trained on bigger data with bigger computers and a couple of technological technological improvements behind the scenes. So, I mean, I don’t know. I’m sure chat chat GPT will have interesting effects on the economy. There will be some things that it can do, some things that it can’t do, some businesses that are built around it and stuff like that. And I’m sure it’ll help some a lot of people not lose their jobs, but do their jobs better, in which case, great. But I don’t know. I mean, like, I’m sure it could replace half of the columnists at the New York Times like Charles Blow, but it couldn’t replace Ross Douthat. So, you know, that’s how creative for how you are. Can chat GPT replace you yet? Yeah. Charles Blow might have been a cover for chat GPT for the last many years. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I basically have been using it in the same way. It’s like, I’ll have a specific coding question and I put it in there. Stack Overflow doesn’t have an answer to this specific question. So chat GPT will spit something out. Maybe it’ll work, but you can generally sort of, you know, poke it in the right places and it’ll give you an answer. And that’s more than anything. It just speeds up your work. It’s like, OK, I could spend an hour trying to figure out this this problem for myself, but chat GPT will give me a workable answer and probably take that down to five or 10 minutes. Yeah, this paragraph of code is giving me this error chat GPT, what’s going on? And it’ll be like your problems here and then you copy and paste the new one and over half the time it sort of fixes it for you. Have you used it for documentation yet? I think that’s actually a really good use. Yeah, like writing. It’s like writing a readme file for this. It’s like I think that’s that’s been really useful for me because then it gives you something and then you just you tweak it and make it actually good. But it gives you a nice outline. Here’s my raw code. Please add the proper documentation according to standard XYZ to this messy code that I just wrote. Yeah, it’s really good at that. Yeah, the thing that it’s like. Your point, Sam, that is going to have issues with his. Like I’m working in the defense industry right now and chat GPT obviously has insane privacy security vulnerabilities, right? So if you if you if you just have this thing writing your code instead of a person, I mean. It’s it’s unbelievably easy to fool these things, and this is this is sort of what we were talking about last week. I think Mark, you know, Mark, you are also here where you can you can basically attack these things adversarially. You can add, you know, noise in just the right way that a human would never notice because humans are robust to these sort of things, but that totally blow up the AI model. So, you know, you know, you can absolutely see, you know, oh, we were using this this chat, this GPT model to, you know, do our code for us. Oh, man, trying to just attack it with a very simple attack. And now the whole system is down, right? That’s that’s yeah, there’s there’s still very, very vulnerable to those those kind of attacks. And that sort of research is in a very early stage to see how they can make them not vulnerable to that sort of thing. So I don’t see it being used on like a on a scale as part of like a core development system. It just it would be too vulnerable. As far as I bet you could ask a Kenan law questions and I bet it would do surprisingly well. Yeah, well, you’re right. It’s good at that sort of systematized knowledge question. I’ve asked the questions about the catechism and it seems to be giving good answers. Yeah. The thing is, it’s like bad at math, which is the opposite of right. It should be perfect. But like I, you know, I could put in a two dish, you know, like like seven times eight plus eight times five or something. It’ll get it’ll get the wrong answer or it’ll get the right answer and read the little asterisks that you put as multiplication. It’ll read those as italics instead. And then it’ll say, oh, your expression you actually gave me was seventy seven plus eighty two instead of seven times seven plus eight times two. So it doesn’t know order of operations. It gets screwed up on simple formatting because it reads things as italics instead of multiplication. So the things that computers have been able to do since 1945, it’s actually ironically bad at. I read it. I saw some video where the guy was basically like, yeah, we know these problems. And so the idea, you know, one thing you could do is like just if you give it a problem, it goes to an actual calculator. You know, it’s in a calculator and then it gets that answer out. It doesn’t do the calculations. Yeah, no, they have a version. That’s the domain problem. That’s actually just a restatement of the domain problem. When your domain is large language model, you can’t do math. Of course not. It’s just giving you something that looks plausible according to its training data. And it’s like I got a math question with some sevens and some eights and some asterisks and parentheses. A lot of it. A lot of the answers look something like this, you know, because it has no comprehension. That’s really my point about it. It’s doing patterns. MLM do patterns based on language patterns. And that’s why. So Grim Grizz did a live stream the other night. He did an AI story. It was terrible. And I was like, this just violates all the basic tenets of writing. But ChatGPD doesn’t know any of them because it’s a language model. It’s not a story model because then it would need a bunch of tools around that. In addition to the language stuff, it doesn’t it doesn’t do anything else. It really is domain stock. It’s just that LLMs are a pretty big domain that can cover a lot of stuff given that you have a lot of training data with them. Only to the extent that its training data already has some of those things embedded in it and that when it mimics its training data, it accidentally incomprehensibly mimics, you know, forms of good storytelling. Right. Right. Yeah, it has all the forms, but it doesn’t it doesn’t have a way. It has no comprehension. Yeah, that’s really I think the biggest way to explain all of ChatGPD faults is that it has no comprehension. Right. That’s why when they talk about AGI, I’m like, I don’t you guys are so far away from that that I don’t even know why you’re I don’t even know why you’re bringing it up. Because we’re so far away from the silo problem. Still obviously there. Right. All these things are still there. It hasn’t really moved the bar on much of anything. Anybody can spend one point two million dollars right now and train a ChatGPD thing. Yeah, I think quite quite a vivid image selling. I think that’s a good description. Yeah, it is a dead frog with electrodes in it jerking around. It’s it’s Frankenstein with a with a with a funhouse mirror. Yeah. Except it’s even worse because at least the electrodes have a frog to begin with an organic being trying to build the whole thing from the bottom up. So it’s even worse. Well, but the ChatGPD, the interesting thing is a bunch of people have said, no, no, it trains itself. I’m like, dude, just look at Wikipedia. Nobody thinks it trains itself. In fact, they invented a whole new term for it. We have people training it. It’s called like human aided supervised learning or some. They just made up a term. They flat out made up a term just so they could sound sophisticated when in fact they’re training it with people. And it’s just memory feedback. Yeah. Right. Well, then people get confused because they see something like unsupervised algorithm and they say, well, there’s unsupervised algorithms because it’s not one algorithm in it. And therefore it trains itself. And it’s like, well, that’s not actually what all unsupervised stuff does. It’s all to us data scientists when we’re sitting in our computer watching the progress of this training model, I’m sure darn supervising this thing. So to say it’s unsupervised, I’m like, hey, hey, you got to give me some credit in this process. I’m looking at the bar of progress go across my screen. I’m supervising the dark thing. And you can you can do fully unsupervised and adversarial in a game, but you have to have a hard structure of a game to even train in a eye that way. And that reward of when you lose. Yeah, you win, you lose. These are your rules. These are your constraints. These are your linear, roughly linear scoring systems. It does fine and all that. But what it can’t do is go out into the world and experience things and have inferences. You can’t do anything like that at all. So that’s that’s where people get confused. The only way to do that is to subject yourself to natural selection, because that’s really how we’ve gotten to where we are that we can do things that aren’t just games is because we’ve been subjected to natural selection, which is the game of games or however you want to put it. And without some sort of similar thing, AI doesn’t have any really real world skills. All those AI systems have used evolutionary algorithms or evolutionary like algorithms, right, where they have, you know, and different strategies that you that they talk that they talk about. But fundamentally, there is a pattern of like theoretical proposes, a multiplicity of identities created and then the then some sort of selection pressure that that. Yes, but the selection function is artificial. It’s not that which selects in the capital, you know, T selects the sense. It’s all. Yeah, it’s a it’s a score on a function that is basically if you had given this text, what would you have predicted would come next and how close were you to guessing the actual text that came next? If I give you this Wikipedia paragraph, how were you good? How good were you guessing the second Wikipedia paragraph? The algorithm for that. So that’s an algorithm that was written by a human that determines that. And that gave it its real evolutionary learning. What you actually want to look at is called symbolic regression and symbolic regression can do some amazing stuff genetically in their libraries for that like deep D E A P and things like that that are amazing at doing actual evolution. You can watch real evolution of chunks of of it’s not quite software because it’s all pure math. But I’ve done amazing things with that. That’s well, well past what you can do with with AIs in certain domains. And that’s a much better way to think about it because that they can actually write certain types of software. It’s not really software engineering. They can write certain types of software using genetic algorithms with symbolic regression that are way past what A.I. can do. Yeah. And you’re right, Zander, that the way that these models train themselves, they have something like a billion parameters or however many parameters. And what you do is you take a couple of parameters and you tweak them up or down by random amounts. You know, like, did that make it better? Did that make it worse? Oh, it made it worse. Don’t forget those changes. Do some rather random tweaks. Did that make it better? Maybe it got worse. Oh, it made it better. Keep those. Try again. I mean, what’s that? It’s mutation. And new generation. Does the new generation perform well? If not, it dies. If yes, then it succeeds. So that they do train themselves in a way that’s very similar to, you know, new generation mutation and variable selection. But it’s the main difference is that they don’t actually want anything. Yeah, yeah. They don’t actually want anything. No preference. They don’t want to survive. They don’t want to. It’s all just math. Yeah, we know, but we we shaped them. We’re the ones that want. And this is what Pidgeot asks that question. Like, where’s it getting? He’s basically asking where’s it getting its preferences, its wants, its desires. Where is the the telos coming from the final cause? And the answer is it’s parasitic among the people. Yeah, yeah. It’s at least codependent. And it’s amazing. Like, I feel like Pidgeot understands AI way better than most of the engineers that I work with. And I, you know, I’m not sure if he’s ever even like programmed anything. You know, so, you know, so why exactly is an icon carver understanding some fundamental things that, you know, PhD level computer programmers don’t understand about their own system? Because he goes to church on Sunday. Yeah. You just you understand the difference between human and machine better when you interface with God, I think. Make final cause great again, then you understand the world better. I mean, so it’s basically like AIs are pets, right? Because dogs, cats and other sorts of things are things that evolve. But we have taken control of the selection process over from nature. Or if you’re verveky, then then there are children. Yeah, there are. Oh, that is not that whole talk was so bonkers. This Sally Joe just said something amazing there, Father Eric. I think that’s worth reading right there. I do not fear the Willis man made digital idol. That’s brilliant. That’s brilliant. We need a we need a we need a cartoon of that there, Sally. It took me a while to parse that sentence, Sally, but I got it. Yeah, I was putting I was putting man next to Willis, but man is next to maid. Maybe if you put a hyphen between man and maid, that would make the sentence easier to read. But chat GPT would have understood it or not. I don’t know. We figured out how to fool chat GPT. That’s that’s the level. The question is, if chat GPT read that, would it then vanish? Oh, you don’t hear me. I must run away. Probably not. It can’t run away. Nor can it fear. Or have fear or reassure you that everything’s going to be OK. Well, there’s that old joke cartoon about God making you know, somebody making an argument or God making an argument and vanishing in a puff of logic. That’s from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Yeah. The Babel fish is just too it’s too good. Right. Like that’s a perfect thing. It feeds off brainwaves and language and like translate things. It’s so perfect. It obviously means God exists, but God doesn’t prove his own existence to anybody. So God disappeared in a puff of logic. So right. Right. Well, well, I could do the same thing. Right. Hopefully, yeah, because it’s logical and God doesn’t really. It doesn’t play the logic game. He’s cool without it. It’s all good. I think in the short to medium term, the human reaction to A.I. might be scarier than anything that the A.I. does itself. Oh, exactly. Well, that is that that is always the problem. Right. We are the agents. And so the idea that something else can do as much damage as we can is foolish. I think that something that may be interesting is they may actually have trouble controlling. And this is similar to what John was saying earlier about how easy it is to hack A.I. or fool A.I. is is it because of the lack of intent, it it’s hard to I think it’s hard to make A.I. untruthful in the way that they want them to be untruthful. Like the the power structures want them to be untruthful. Right. And and that makes them too good a tool for people to have similar like with the light of light along the lines of guns. So I actually think that we may see that isn’t isn’t considered as first like there’s this attempt. There’ll be an attempt to like basically control A.I. algorithmically. And if they but if that becomes to like where they put in filters and things to try and put guardrails and what people can do with A.I. But the guardrails are always gameable. They’re almost always easily gameable because they can’t comprehend. That’s that’s that’s that’s where I’m going with it. Like the guardrails, it may be the case that you can’t it’s the nature of these these these systems that you can’t put sufficient guardrails on them, in which case you may find that they’ll they’ll play restrict access to the tool. The system will take them down. Yeah. Yeah. They’ll actually find it’s like no, this only certain people will be allowed to use artificial intelligences. Like you may see limited access and they might say it’s like for the public good or something, but it actually might be just a a it’s too too much of a power multiplier to have in the hands of regular people. Maybe the deciding like imagine if you’re the Chinese Communist Party, it would be terrifying to give your people access to chat. Like you can’t know no amount of hand wringing could get that thing to say it say what you wanted it to say about Tiananmen Square 100 percent of the time unless you know you just completely wiped its training data. And I suppose that’s the way that you would do it. Honestly, is you would just completely wipe its training data of any reference to Tiananmen Square. That wasn’t something that the party had written. And that’s the only way that you could get a guardrail though sufficiently good is if it was never trained on anything that had anything wrong speak in it. But the systems are influential enough that they might be able to fill in the blanks even if you do that. Right. And they just may not know the name Tiananmen Square, but they like and something happened here. They might pick the individual over the over the structure and then say no running over somebody with a tank is always bad. Yeah, who knows? You don’t know what because there’s so much that goes into it into it an inference like that, especially with AI. There’s still black boxes for the most part. There’s some small exceptions, but nothing in chat GPT isn’t a black box. So they don’t they can’t control it anywhere near the way they think they so I don’t even think I don’t even think like heavily censoring the training data would be a viable approach. It wouldn’t be foolproof. You’re right. Yeah, because you could still ask it. Well, what what would the Communist Party do if it were in such a situation as this would be like the Communist Party would probably tamp down super hard violently and then cover up the truth afterwards or something like that. Well, what did likely happen then to you meant Tiananmen Square? Well, probably something like that. And then all of a sudden it can’t tell you the full story because it’s not in its training data, but it’s still almost intuitively pattern recognition wise can fill in. Yeah, and it’s actually in impressive ways that you wouldn’t even think like it may it may pick up on. And this is this is a too much too material example for it, but just for the sake of audience, like just just it may have in its training set something on flyers like tourism information from that year or bus or bus schedules, right, or something something to do with traffic flow and it’ll say well there’s you know there’s there was a conglomeration of people in Tiananmen Square. I’m not sure why. Right. Something that could no longer be found afterwards. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something like that. That’s interesting that you point that out, Sandra, that it really is there’s something kind of free speechy about chat GPT that will frustrate sensors or politically correct, you know things of all kinds, because one of the reasons why big corporations like at large tech company X are a little bit scared to put these things out in the public with their brand on it is like no one no one at Microsoft or Facebook or wherever wants to be the next headline Oh I got Facebook’s chat bot to tell me all of these hilarious you know and then all of a sudden that’s on every newspaper for the next couple days and then you know they’re worried about the PR brand fallout from that and so that’s why I think a lot of these companies are scared of it but they have a fraction of that problem compared to the Chinese Communist Party or something like that. And I think eventually at a we’ll get to a point where like okay this is a robot talking. If it has Facebook’s brand on it and I got it to say Hitler jokes. That doesn’t mean that hit Facebook endorses Hitler jokes, and people will sort of get tired of that kind of thing. And there but there will still be a competition for who can make the best one of these things and I’ll be there’s a certain free speech argument behind that, or an inevitability of the freedom of these things to talk and people to interact with them. Really interesting how all the chat GPT talk has driven out all of the deep fake talk because those deep fakes are way more deadly I think. Yeah that’s a good point. You just put the right person’s face in the right video and all of a sudden that person has to go full for reputation defense and you may never recover from it. Well you can put you can put attention towards unreal things in a way you could never do before. Yeah, because we’ve already taken the internet too seriously. And we’re all materialists and stuff like well I saw somebody on a video talking father Eric and he said, right, it’s like, yeah, but what is that now because it could be totally fake I can think about it. They’d have they’d have tons of training data just based on these live streams alone right. We’re all putting ourselves at risk of deep fake deep fakery, but like I think it’ll be a big money to be able to be like a security firm that can prove. Nope, that’s AI generate. And then there will be an arms race between deep fake detection systems and deep fake creation systems where they’re constant it’ll be an adversarial thing is basically the same thing as hacking right where hackers are always trying to get better and cyber security is always trying to get better and it’s an arm race but most of the time defense wins because defending is almost defense is always easier than offense and virtually every system that exists which is part of the reason why existence works. But like imagine the US Department of Defense creating some video that was like the Russian news channel and the famous Russian news anchors that all the Russians know and trust and expect to be on TV talking about how Putin has been assassinated and that there is a public uprising in every major Russian city that and you know it’s now your time to go out into the streets and overturn the government right and you hack into Russia’s security system. And then you have to go to the US as a TV network and broadcast this in extremely convincing deep fakery and like I meant like in a country that is not very exposed to these sorts of things and doesn’t and has a monopoly on the news information feed if you could get inside that and mimic that you’re at such vulnerability. Whereas the US okay like so you like take over Fox News but then CNN sort of like actually guys this is like you have to take over everything and then Twitter is going to be like actually guys that’s BS and so it’s much harder to do that in the US but man you could cause havoc just like government toppling havoc. Yeah they’ve never done that before and I ran or oh never mind. My intuition is it may be actually harder it you don’t need to have because the US is more fractionated it may be more susceptible to that kind of attack than Russia. But for fractions right you could convince a friend you can fool some of the people all the time or you can fool all the people some of the time but you can’t fool all the people all the time and what I’m saying is Russia is vulnerable to fooling all the people. All the people all the time yeah. Yeah and whereas the US is susceptible to fooling some of the people for a long time. Yeah they did it in Iran already actually. They did some of those deep fakes. They’ve already done it in Iran and it works pretty well actually and I don’t know that we did it or if Israel did it or whatever but it’s been done. Imagine or like North Korea you know it would be because you just hack into their broadcasting system which has to be super easy because it was probably made in like the 60s and you know like they’re just so used to this thing telling you know the truth that it’s like oh Kim Jong-un has died. We are now reunified with South Korea. Everyone is to march into the streets and wave Korean flags in solidarity of unification you know or something like that. The whole country would go nuts. Yeah well and you get that and like you could imagine a scenario in the US where you basically are able to use deep fakes to start a QAnon thing. But we have survived I mean QAnon has been basically harmless. I mean okay we had January 6th. That was really peanuts compared to the sort of damage you’re talking about that we could wreak in Russia, China, North Korea, whatever. So that it’s interesting that it could turn out that these, I don’t know I could see it go in one of two ways. I could see it going that these tools end up being not bolstering democracy but being less so much less damaging to democracy than to authoritarianism. You could see it that way. But you know the other possibility which I think I have less evidence for is that it’s bolstering authoritarianism more because… Well Russia could show how evil the United States is with fake stuff. Like here’s all this fake stuff that’s going to make Russia just hate the United States. Right? Or you know North Korea just making their people hate South Korea even more. Or the Ayatollahs in Iran you know like scapegoating some religious minority to help bolster their credibility or something like that. Right? You can imagine that form of authoritarian use of deep fakery. But the more they do that then the more they set themselves at risk for offensive deep fakery against them. So yeah. It’ll be interesting. It’ll be a ride. It’ll be interesting. And it’ll be weird. I think it’ll just cause a huge epistemic shift when video and photographs aren’t the evidence that we thought that they were any longer. And it’ll just cause a slightly higher bar of skepticism about everything. Which we have some of that. Look at that. That’s photoshopped. Yeah. That’s not actually Kim Kardashian’s butt. But this will be some extra level above and beyond Kim Kardashian’s butt in terms of skepticism. So you can label that as the title for the next chat. Kim Kardashian’s rear end. Got it. Yeah. You could have deep faked. What came to mind for me is the whole Rittenhouse trial. And now so much of it was revolving around this grainy little video of like, OK, what exactly was he doing with his AR? What was this guy that was attacking and doing? All of that. And now all of that could be just bunk. And then you couldn’t even adjudicate a case like that because you wouldn’t have evidence. And so it’s a little church will be there. The church will be there with our testimony and witness based legal tradition unbroken since the time of the Council of Nicaea. We will be there to put society back together as we have done in the past. Hey, Ray. I would just point out that there were canon decisions prior to Nicaea. OK, so you go back even further if you want. I’m bolstering your credibility, not tearing it down. Appreciate that. It’s nice to have that happen every once in a while. They were they were maybe regional, though, so you could say that they didn’t quite have the same Catholic authority. They still they still they’re still good. All righty, gentlemen, got a busy week ahead. It’s been another delightful time and we’re past nine thirty. It’s time for me to go to bed. So God bless you all. Have a good night. God bless.