https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=GPaN2-Q52f0
Good evening and happy Sunday everybody. Hope you all made it to church. First thing in the morning, I was actually sitting in a deer blind an elevated deer blind in Minnesota. My brother and I went out hunting. I’m fairly, but my dad, he didn’t grow up hunting. We started hunting when we lived in Montana. I was in eighth grade. We’re not the most experienced hunters and that didn’t really make any difference today because we were, me and my brother were just sitting out there in our deer blind on a friend’s property and nothing walked by. Hmm. And I was also on Saturday evening was sitting in the very same deer blind sitting in the woods as the sun was going down. And had a very interesting experience there but I want to talk about something I read over a decade ago. When I first entered seminary I read a ton of GK Chesterton I had gotten a brand new Kindle at that point, and I downloaded 36 GK Chesterton books for 99 cents which was just an absolute bargain. And one of those in that big collection was magic. Magic wasn’t a novel, it was a play that GK Chesterton had written. It’s set in, I believe it’s set in Ireland. There’s two characters that have kind of stood out to me from that. They’re a brother and a sister. The brother is, has gone off to the big city. He’s gone off to the university. He’s in the university, he’s imbibed all of the late 19th, early 20th century fashions available to an educated man in the English speaking world. And so he’s become a rationalist, a skeptic, a materialist. Does not believe in spirits, does not believe in evolution, does not, sorry, doesn’t believe in God or miracles or any of these sorts of things. So that was the brother. And then the sister, the sister, everybody’s a little bit worried for the sister’s sake because she keeps on saying that she has seen fairies in the woods outside of their family’s property. When I was brand new in seminary, the sister in that story was completely incomprehensible to me. I did not know what she would even be talking about. As the story goes, as it turns out, the sister is actually the more sane of the two and the skeptical, rational, materialist brother turns out to be the one who’s more imbalanced. And I accepted the story, but the brother was the one that I would have connected with at the time that I had read this story. But last night, while sitting in the woods, sitting in the tree stand, I finally understood the sister a little bit better. The sun was setting, it was getting a little bit chillier, and we were coming close to the end of hunting time. And I was just kind of looking around, looking for deer, because that’s why we were there. And then I kind of peered off far away and, you know, you know what your mind does is that your mind plays tricks on you, your eyes play tricks on you. You know, just kind of looking at a particular tree, it kind of looked like a really skinny person all of a sudden. You know, one of these trees off the distance in the woods there. That I think not too long ago, I would have just said, ah, my eyes are just playing tricks on me. But with all of this stuff that we’ve been talking about the past couple of years, angels and demons, spirits of all sorts, I decided, or it was decided for me, that I was just going to take this instinct and this intuition that there was something else out there. Seriously, even though I knew that this figure that I saw was a tree, it was a tree I had looked at a hundred times during the day while desperately scanning for deer. And all of a sudden I had the sense that what was around me in the gloom, in the gathering dusk, the trees and the dirt and the sticks and the grass and the leaves, the gathering dusk, the gathering dusk, that that place around me had a real personality, that there were, there was something more to it. There was, I think, what more traditional cultures would say, some sort of a guardian spirit in these woods. And then I looked forward at some other trees and I got the distinct impression that those trees were also two guys just standing there. For the rest of the weekend while I was sitting out there, it was, yeah, there’s people in these woods. Now, did I see anything with my eyeballs that would give me any sort of evidence for some kind of a spirit? Was there any kind of a miraculous happening? No. Do I believe that physically present there was anything besides the sticks and the dirt and the trees and the leaves and the blue jays and the squirrels? No, but there was just this mysterious sense about the place that gave me a little bit of insight into this character that I had read in a book those many years ago. And yeah, now I can understand why all ancient people would have believed that every wood, every set of woods would have had their guardian spirits and nymphs and dryads and such things. And maybe, just maybe, that’s the better way of relating to the woods than just thinking about them as woods. That was really neat and interesting. That was cool. Glad you enjoyed it. Yeah. Somebody enjoyed it there. Yeah, it’s just… Oh, go ahead. I just never understood that until last night, so share that insight. Yeah. Two things I… Two things Trivial thought that your story made me think of is my uncle and his sons were hunters, and we knew a lot of other hunters. And a lot of what draws most of the hunters to the woods is not that they’re going to actually get something, it’s just spending the time in the woods. It’s like them connecting to nature, connecting to each other, just being in the outdoors. And I think you articulated beautifully what maybe some of them were feeling and they didn’t know how to verbalize it. It’s really interesting. So I started hunting with my dad when I was in about eighth grade. Neither of us are particularly skilled. We don’t have the traditions built up with it. Fortunately, we do have our friends who will take us out, take us along, kind of show us the ropes there. And my poor brother, he went out with us last year just to see what it was all about. Last year, we sat in a deer blind, a big deer blind. We even slept out there for about three days and horrible weather, barely even saw any deer, didn’t take any shots. This year, you know, my brother, the first morning we were underdressed. We froze in the deer stand. He had to go out and buy some extra layers of clothing, which got the job done. Didn’t see any deer, didn’t take any shots. And what does my brother say? But oh, yeah, we’re definitely doing this next year. That’s cool. Right. You know, I’ve taken a few deer, you know, so I’ve at least had the opportunity to complete the process, you know, when he’s he’s put all this this time and energy into it as as God announces a venison. But yeah, just being out in the woods is good for you. Yeah, I have one dear friend who doesn’t involve the shooting sports or hunting or anything, but she loves this. You know, when she can’t go into the park and being in the outdoors, it rejuvenates her. She really loves trees. Ironically, your story. I think there’s just something beautiful. I don’t know. Does it speak to us on a nonverbal conscious layer in our subconscious or something? Well, I kind of remember what started this thought process. Now that I think back to it, it was the thought that I was unequipped to deal with these woods as I currently was. Oh, you know, last night we were better dressed. We were a little better insulated, a little better prepared for the weather that we were facing. But, you know, it was getting dark and we knew it was going to get below freezing last night. And just the sense that these woods that we were in, you know, there was it’s not like it was a hostile force, like a hostile personality to them. But it was kind of alien and not necessarily going to look out for us. So spending the night in the woods without shelter or a sleeping bag or fire starters would have been probably pretty dangerous considering this time of the year. And I think that’s actually a more natural way to relate to something like the great outdoors rather than seeing it as a resource to be exploited or looking at it as land that’s underutilized because people only use it for hunting or something like that. It’s actually much more natural to relate to it as a personality, when that’s a little foreign and kind of indifferent to you. You have a personality that didn’t offer up any dear to us. So, yeah, I have a funny weather story. Several years ago, you know, I was in the woods and I was walking in the woods and I saw a deer. So, yeah, I have a funny weather story. Several years ago, we had a COVID had forced one of my friend’s favorite convention to meet online instead. And so people gathered at their houses and because of COVID, my friend decided to go in the backyard in October, which is not it was cold. I’m not an outdoors person very much. I enjoy, you know, when it’s nice, but I’m not really one to spend outdoors in the cold. But I did it for the it was the rabbit room, Hutchmoot. And they called it Hutchmoot Homebound. And so they pulled their big TV outside and ran wires and stuff so we could watch the live streaming of the different events. And so we had our lawn chairs and he had gotten a pop-up tent and put it over the TV area to keep it protected and stuff. And the pop-up tent went right along the edge of the fence. At the end of the three days, Sunday afternoon, we’re packing up everything. All of a sudden, it’s been windy pretty much the last two days. A huge gust of wind swept the pop-up tent up and halfway over to the next door neighbor’s yard. And it was like the TV was not there. It was taken in already. So there was no damage or anything like that. But it was like, whoa, OK, nature is like volatile. In charge. It’s in charge. We’ve got these illusions about us really being in charge here. But it’s like we get enough snow. The city shuts down. We can’t deal with that all at once. It’ll get moved eventually. But yeah, sometimes nature is just going to do what nature wants. And we get to put up with this. Mark is uncharacteristically quite wrong here. Talking about how nature is pure and innocent and kind. But nature was so kind that it would have sent a buck for my brother to shoot so that he wouldn’t have gone home empty handed. Here’s Mark just spouting nonsense as usual. Doesn’t know how the world works. Really? I don’t know. That was a really neat story. Yeah, I’m going to be thinking about that one for a while. Finally, what they would call this re-enchanting the world. Yeah. I’ve read only a few of Chesterton’s works. Orthodoxy and the other one either before or after that. Heretics. Heretics, yeah. Heretics and Orthodoxy were put together. Yeah. And then I also, one of my favorites was actually used as an excerpt in one of the Christian media classes I took years ago at a church library. And I’m going to butcher the name of it. You might remember what it is. But something about fairyland. Chesterton talking about how… That’s chapter four of Orthodoxy, I think. The ethics of Elfland. Yes, that’s it. And talking about how stories better prepare children for real life and understanding the magic in life. Not the occult magic, but the more amazing, beautiful, and terrifying nature of nature. So in life. And it tells a true story and it talks about the importance of those types of fairy tales. Teaching a truth that’s not able to be articulated or understood right off the bat. But it’s interesting. And you know, what you can communicate very simply and in a very engaging manner. If you were to try and describe that, you know, technically and precisely, it would take hours and hours and hours of talking. And it wouldn’t cover everything. Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. All right. Here’s Mark Beck on form training for the poetic way of informing the world. Yeah, there’s a great quote that I’m going to butcher, but I’m going to try to attempt to say it. Basically, the intellectual or the academic tend to explain a simple thing very complicatedly. And then the artist takes a complicated topic and makes it simple. I know it’s not perfect, but there’s that quote out there somewhere. But the simple things you see are all complicated. Yes. Yeah, true. Spatch says hello. I say hello back. Hello. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So there’s I don’t know there’s there’s more. There’s more wisdom in the old stories about spirits in the woods that tells you how to relate to the woods than there is in, you know, showing somebody a technical diagram of a tree and the soil and pictures of some of the animals that might live there. Yeah, there’s, there’s, as you know, like, I’ll go a little off topic a little bit, but the Japanese tend to have these spirits and things. I don’t know what they’re called. I apologize. They’re like mini gods. And they capture like different essences of nature and different stories of usually of bad things. Like, I don’t want to meet that thing. And, but there’s some kind of wisdom in it. If you look deeper than justice, you know, it’s more of a myth. And, but there’s a wisdom deeper inside that it teaches you, it teaches you how to relate to the woods. Right. Yeah. So another thing, another thing that happened while I was out hunting is, you know, we get 30 minutes past sundown. And that’s when shooting time stops. And so now it’s time to, now it’s time to go on. And so I put my headlamp on to get out because it was getting darker and not lighter. And I was immediately convinced that the headlamp drove the woods away, or the spirit of the woods away. Wow. It was just, it was just like, yeah, yeah, once I’ve got the headlight on and if I, if I build a fire, that would press it out. You know, interesting. I don’t know, its power was kind of linked with darkness there. And it wakes up when I’m going to sleep, something like that. Anyway, just, just an interesting sensation for somebody who, as I’ve set up multiple streams, I’m a recovering materialist. It’s, it’s difficult for me to think outside the terms of chemistry and physics and biology. I have a different question for you. I’m a learner. I love learning. I’m always looking for the next shiny. I don’t retain the information, but I like learning about stuff. But one of the things that I, I’ve, last month I joined SCA, which is a society of, okay, society of creative anachronisms, which basically is a medieval reenactment and education organization. So there’s lots of fun stuff to learn there, not only the organization stuff and the protocols and how they do court and all this kind of stuff, but also the thousand years of history from 600 to the 1600s. And one of the things that I got me curious was learning how people learn and taught during that timeframe. And I figured coming from the Catholic tradition, you might have stumbled on something interesting, a tidbit or something like that, that might have stuck in your car all these years. Yeah, about learning in the middle ages. You know, there was something that we looked at in seminary. Oh, it was. To be able to pull it up real quickly here. It was a letter that St. Thomas Aquinas wrote to a young. Okay, yeah, this is way too long. I’m trying to look for it right now. If you have a link out, I’d be glad to like go to it as well. It’s super short. It’s super short. So, oh, my goodness. It doesn’t look like it’s on Aquinas.cc. One quick Google search here. Okay. Yeah, no rush. I could talk a little bit about some of the stuff I’m learning in the SCA while you’re looking for that. I’m learning about the organization itself. There’s like five different tracks to gain rank and stuff. So everybody starts off as minor nobility, my lord or my lady, mid-lord or my lady, not lord and lady yet. You get that as you awarded it. So you can either become a laurel, which is someone who learns the arts and sciences, anything that they did back then from metallurgy, blacksmithing to cooking to clothes making to fiber arts to candle making, any of that kind of stuff. That’s all called arts and sciences in the SCA. And they can go up that track and win different awards and nobility and different types of, you know, acknowledgment. There’s a whole bunch of documentation in that one. And there’s one that’s called the Pelican, which you might know the reference of. It’s referred to the Pelican, the Pelican plucked its breast to feed its young, the blood, so that he has nothing, she had nothing left to feed him. So she’s going to feed him herself kind of thing. Self-sacrificing, service oriented. It’s used a lot in the, in I guess medieval times or whatever. Right. Because that was based on the works of Aristotle, who said that Pelicans did that. And he didn’t have binoculars to see that when the Pelican put its beak down and that big red thing popped up, that was just the inside of its bullet and it was feeding its children, fishing it and caught it. It looked like it was, you know, pecking itself down and blood was coming out. Oh, interesting. It’s too good of a story not to be true. So we still use it as, in some Catholic churches, you’ll see, you know, the Pelican pecking itself and feeding its young blood. But it’s, yeah, it’s not zoologically true. Right. Yeah. So those are for all the service people. So people who volunteer to be on the boards to help run events, to volunteering, to help set up, tear down, bring gear, all the mechanics of actually running an organization. So those are, that’s the order of the Pelican. And they have their own heraldry and metals and things like that. There’s also the chivalrous orders, which is the, what’s it called, basically the fighting arts and the defense. So I think it’s called, I’m blanking on the name right now, of course, but basically heavy weapons, swords, axes, those kind of things. They actually learn how to fight in a safe, very safe way. Everything’s insured and whatnot. And they try to do it as historically possible as they can while keeping things safe and accommodating modern needs like eyeglasses. Which is exactly how people would have trained in those days is they wouldn’t have tried to, you know, take each other’s heads off. Yeah. Yeah. And so it’s more of a fun thing. And in order to become a king or queen or a baron, you’d have to win at the tournaments. So that’s the track to becoming a king or queen, which is interesting. And then the queen actually is the consulate. So she gets crowned because the guy wins kind of thing. And let’s see, defense is the people with the rapiers, which is precursor to the fencing. They’re more for protection and part of the court entourage kind of thing. And they also do a lot of training and safety moderation and stuff like that, which is interesting. And there was one other one. There’s the bards are a part of the arts and sciences, I think. I’m trying to remember what the other one was. I can’t remember right now. But yeah. Yeah. But they’re not, you know, it’s like the the loyals are like really into historical accuracy and everybody else is just doing it because it’s fun. It’s more of a game and play kind of thing. You know, everybody’s got to have a hobby. Yeah. And the most cool thing is they’re very, very community oriented, very much about chivalry, doing right thing, helping each other. They are very generous with their time and knowledge. I’ve been going to the SCA free events for like, since February. And it’s just been like nonstop learning and it’s so awesome. I learned one thing that you probably already know about that your audience may not. There was there was the monks used to have apiaries, hives and stuff and lots of lots of honey. And they used to make tons of candles. And what they do is they would take a bunch of honeycombs that were still filled to the market square and then they would give the children the honeycomb. And as the children ate the honey, they would tell them Bible stories. And then when the when when the children were done with the honey combs, they would take back the empty ones. And then they finished their Bible stories and stuff. And then they also they would like not only were they teaching them, but they were also watching to make sure they’re OK while the parents are doing marketplace stuff. And then they would take back the empty honeycombs and make candles out of them. They had a so class of honey back then. That sounds like a great day right there. You entertain children, you get to give them the medieval equipment of candy, give them some Bible stories. Yes, bribery by the church, a longstanding tradition. Nowadays, we usually do it with pizza. But honey is. Yeah. And why nobody needed daycare back in the day, because the monks were going to tell your kids about how you made fun of Elisha for being bald. I think it was the old saying that 40 she bears would come out of the she bear would come out of the woods and maul them. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I call it positive reinforcement. Now, I’m curious about if I could dig a little bit. Sure. In front of potentially everybody ever, because we’re doing this on YouTube. I think it’s about really enjoying learning but not retaining anything. I retained some of it. Whatever’s interesting sticks in my craw. Yeah, yeah. When you asked me about learning in the medieval ages and that sort of thing, it made me think of part of the summa where Thomas Aquinas talks about the vice of curiosity. Oh, yes. And the point is that, you know, learning something, gathering information actually brings pleasure to you. And that’s something that you can experience pleasure from, and therefore it needs to be moderated by the virtue of temperance, such that you’re going after the right things and going after the right knowledge that you need and doing so in a disciplined way and not in a unfocused or unguided way. And so I’m not accusing you of, I don’t know you well enough to accuse you of, of really having the vice of curiosity badly with that. But it’s a, yeah, it’s a real interesting thought and, you know, I worry sometimes with some of the stuff I do on YouTube that I’m not contributing to it contributing to the problem because things like YouTube videos can actually really feed into the vice of curiosity. Oh yeah. In a, in a bad way. I, you know, I appreciate what you said because I, I should be I should be careful because there’s an old story of little women where each of the children were allowed to do each whatever their heart desired for the whole day. And then most of them, of all four of the daughters ended up being very vexed and very unhappy by the end of it. And, you know, one of my, my delights is actually reading interesting new stuff. I tend to be more nonfiction oriented because I have some practical, like writing and learning about book marketing for the book that anthology that I’m working on things like that I like to learn. One of the things I wanted to learn to understand things better with SEO marketing, and which is search engine optimization for those who might not know, basically getting up in the ranks, not like trying to cheat the system kind of stuff it’s just like understanding basic stuff like what is, what do I need to do kind of thing. And it’s, I learned the first year and I haven’t done any of the others. I’m like, this is more like math. But, you know, I, I do enjoy learning I, I took a strength building personality testing years ago and discovered one of my things is one of my entire five attributes it’s input. It’s like I’m constantly looking for input for news and interesting things and trying to connect things together. So I think it’s part of my wiring. But there is a whole thing in the Bible where Paul talks about, you know, women who are led astray by, you know, constant learning, and they fall easy prey to nerds who will guys, you know, So there’s that dynamic too, but I, I don’t think I do it but I should be more cautious of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I wasn’t I wasn’t intending to start throwing darts at you. I appreciate that. Yeah. But it was a good point. Because, you know, it’s like YouTube like you were saying could be in social media is like, you got to find out what happened next like in a story, you know, and what’s what new interesting thing will pique my curiosity. And you’re always looking for the next thing. I don’t watch YouTube as much as I used to. I follow Paul Van der Kley a lot and John Vivek and I have some cultural things like there’s a Japanese like, I don’t know what he’s called, but he basically he and his wife are looking traditional Japanese cultural things that they do. And so they answer questions and entire little videos about that, you know, different things like that. And I just don’t watch as much video. I, I’m like, now I’m more busy. Now I’m doing SCA stuff. Now I’m working on the book project. Now I’m trying to go to different networking meetings and stuff. And, you know, taking care of my family obligations and all that kind of stuff being a caregiver and all that. So it’s like I have more tactile real thing to, you know, and that I don’t have as much time to spend on YouTube. But I’m like, whenever I see your thing is up. I’m like, I gotta see if I can jump in. Well, you made it. Here we are. Yeah. One of the things I really enjoy about your, your like open chat kind of thing is basically having real depth to communication, not just chit chat. It’s like interesting, like things I never thought of, like the whole thing in the words thing. That was beautiful. I was like, you know, that was really nice. As, as, you know, as value to your heart kind of thing. Well, thank you. I appreciate hearing that. You know, this, this whole YouTube thing kind of frightens me. Like I can, it is very easy for me to imagine myself, you know, getting really into YouTube, getting really into the analytics, you know, looking constantly to see how I’m doing and start, you know, start off as like playing a game, you know, but then I’ll start getting an audience. The audience is going to have an effect on me. They’re going to want to amplify certain things that I’m doing. And when I see, you know, oh boy, you know, that video that I did about so-and-so, you know, when I kind of threw a little bit of shade at him. Oh boy, that really got some, that got some attention there. Maybe if I do another video like that, where I pick another fight with somebody, maybe that’ll get me even a little bit more attention. And then I go and I do that and oh my, I got a hundred new subscribers from that video. Wow. I could just keep on doing this there. And then the YouTube algorithm just keeps on feeding me that little, Hey, more subscribers. Hey, more views, you know, and all of a sudden I’ve not gone out to do what I wanted to do initially, which was to be of service to somebody. And instead now I find myself being in service to the algorithm and whatever it wants to feed people in this attention eating device. But what we’re doing right here, at least as a few stop gaps against that, because instead of feeding the algorithm, I’m just interacting, if only virtually with the people here. That seems a little safer. Yeah, I have some thoughts as a writer. I’ve been trying to learn about branding and there’s a thing in writing sphere called the writer’s platform. So basically you need to build an audience in order to sell books. And it’s not just a transactional thing. You actually need to be authentically who you say you are, even though you don’t share your whole private world with the audience. You know, maybe you do. Yeah, some people do. Yes. And I’m not comfortable with that. You shouldn’t be. Yeah, I’m like, I like my privacy. I’m a very private person. But I’m like, you know, how do I do this? How do I figure out who I am? Because I’m like a very multifaceted person. Most people, you know, most people are even when I think they’re just single minded, like an architect. You only get a small slice of them. Right, exactly. And I have so many varied interests. And I’m like, how do I distill that and find a niche, as they say, and, you know, gather a community around me and do this while actually keeping my integrity intact. Don’t succumb to the political culture. You know, that’s like that. I mean, if you are standing for what you believe in, and you’re trying to speak the truth. I can, even if I disagree with your opinion, I respect you. You know, but I don’t really want to enter the culture. You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t. I think of, you know, like, what would I say to, I’ll just take a name familiar to most everybody here. What would I say to Ben Shapiro? If I had a good conversation with him? And I would say, you know, depending on where we had gotten this wouldn’t be the first thing I would say to him. But it would be like, how you doing? Like, this is your, you’re just doing culture war stuff, you know, for like three hours a day, five days a week. And that’s like, that’s how you make your money. That’s how you pay your bills. Is this, is this, are you okay, man? You know, because this is the sort of stuff that’s going to grind you down if you don’t have, and I would even say the same sort of thing to anybody in politics, you know, it’s like keeping your heart pure in this kind of situation with these kinds of conversations is going to be day gone near impossible. Yeah, so I’m not sure. Ted, are there any forest spirits in Arkansas? Are there any forest spirits in Arkansas? Wow, what a question. I would assume so, but. I believe I encountered one in Minnesota. Oh, interesting. Okay, you’ll have to go back to the beginning of the stream to hear about that. I was hoping you would. I will tell you all of my encounters with such things have been in South America. So this was another thought. Another thought is that this land I was on was either on or near a reservation where I was hunting. Look, you know, I was having a conversation about this with Matt Wyden that I got a young man that I met in Chino. And he spent a bunch of time in Nepal. I want to actually have a conversation with him about this just because I think a lot of people find this fascinating. But like describing a couple of experiences that he’s like, oh, yeah, that’s that’s demons. Like, oh, OK, that makes sense. Yeah. But when I was in when I was in the Andes and then I went down to the rainforest, I had a couple of experiences that I just like wasn’t looking for it. No idea what was going on. And then looking back on it years later. And there’s some weird stuff going on. It wasn’t quite that weird. Oh, OK. And it was off to go back. It was more like the blind and brutal force of nature, which if I didn’t show it the appropriate respect, it would take me out. Yes. Yeah, that’s right. So that’s really interesting because I can actually split my experiences down there into two categories. One, let’s say related specifically to the cults that predated ink and civilization there. And the other category is exactly of this like intense encounter with the indifference of nonhuman creation. And it’s just you just feel like it like it it just hits you like. So I get the same feeling about very large machines, which you should be a little more, you know, like a big grain auger will just take your hand right off. It doesn’t care. Oh, no question. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there are certain things where I start to like put myself imaginatively and say like local conditions like inside the grain auger is a great example of it or like the chain of a chainsaw. You know, I’m thinking about the centripetal forces, the friction, all that stuff that’s going on when you’re just the chainsaw is just screaming and it makes me feel queasy. And as I tell people, it’s like chainsaws don’t differentiate between tree limbs and human limbs. They don’t care. Yeah, I don’t care. I was going to I when I started listening to a little bit of what you all were talking about with the culture war stuff. I didn’t want to I didn’t want to point out that there’s something kind of it’s like weirdly poignant. If you go back and listen to Peterson lectures that he put his maps of meaning lectures that he has on YouTube, he actually spends a long time and one of them talking about what happens to people when they end up in positions of influence. I forgot about that. Yeah, it’s weird. I don’t remember it by now, but that’s what can you remember what he said? Basically, he said, like, pray to God that you don’t end up in a position like that, because it’s really, really hard. And if you think that you’re going to like, you really need to get ready because it will probably chew you up and spit you out. And, and frankly, part of the tragedy is that, like, I think that he has to some degree walked the path that he outlined as saying, like, this is what happens to people. And then, you know, eight years later, like, or however long it’s been 10 years later, like, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of echoes of that. So, yeah, there’s Valerie, I hear you like not wanting to be part of the culture war. I mean, there’s also the whole, you know, mimetic aspect of it. I don’t know if you and Father Eric talked about that at all. Yeah, were you like, when you when you the degree to what you’re defining yourself as being against something versus towards some goal towards something good, then you have it. There’s just there’s all kinds of negative things that come from that. But particularly, so when you start playing the game of like, we’re going to show how the enemy is wrong. I mean, I’m almost through the Lord of the Rings again, reading through it. I’m like, this is a thing over and over. You know, it’s like, here’s the ring. You know, we could just use it. We beat Sauron. We could just beat Sauron if we just use the ring. Yeah, but the point is not to beat Sauron. The point is to remove this evil from the world. And I think that’s the point. I think there’s a lot of wisdom there for viewing what goes on in those discourses, where people are just like, they’re ready to use the ring. Right. Yeah. So I hear that. There’s one I had a personal experience with. I think it was a little bit of a personal snap feel and communication between some friends who are more liberal. I tend to be more conservative and libertarian, but I have a lot of liberal, moderate friends. So I’m like, you know, in my friend group, I’m kind of the only one who’s conservative. And they said something which got me upset. I tried to calm down for a few hours. I’m like, OK, this is not going away. I need to say something. But it was not, I’m going to teach them this I’m right and they’re wrong thing. It was like, you know, I thought they were straw manning people. And it really bothered me. And they were just a moment slip of how they said it. And we had this very productive, very mutually respectful back and forth conversation on our social media platform, on the Discord server. It’s not connected with any other. This is a private friend thing. And it was it was so not culture war. It was like I was learning about them. They were learning about me. We’re we’re speaking from the heart sincerely. I that kind of conversation, even though that’s hard and messy, those are the type of conversations that need to happen. Not this. I hate you. You’re evil. You’re misguided. You’re an idiot. You know, I’m right. You’re wrong. Little sound by YouTube, Twitter nonsense that goes on. And it’s like, you know, it’s but not everybody is willing to have those conversations. Many from people are just very stuck in their their worldview and their thing. They’re right. And everybody else is wrong. They try and communicate with somebody. What it turns into is an attempt to manipulate them and attempts to dominate them and attempt to recreate this person in their in your own image, whether you like it or not. Yeah, that’s what that’s what I see on Facebook all the time, you know, especially around an election. Right. Oh, my goodness. And there’s and it’s you know, it just makes you sick because you’re not supposed to be treated like that. You know, yeah, it’s where the contrast that you have with your experience is that you were you already in the context of we’ll say a good good friendship there. Yeah. And you were willing to risk, you know, because I’m sure part of this was, you know, when you said this, I was upset by that, which is an OK thing to say. And that that’s a risk to bring that sort of thing up in a conversation. You know, brings with it the reward of a greater intimacy if you can handle that risk properly. So anyway, friendship. So that was like, you know, the best way it could have turned out is we we both misunderstood misunderstood each other, didn’t know more depth about each other. We both revealed stuff. And so that was like, you know, the best way it could have turned out is we we both misunderstood misunderstood each other, didn’t know more depth about each other. And, you know, if things can be talking about mutual respect and love, you know, you see, I think it’s a love and not the respect without sacrificing the truth. Right. Right. The sincerity of the relationship. That’s the balance is sometimes, you know, which I can fall into, because I tend to be more diplomatic and agreeable is I tend to like I don’t want to deal with this whole snafu. I’m just move on with my life. But this one, I think, when the conflict could actually have some great fruit. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Hello, Mark. How you doing? Hey, good. Good. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of what we’re seeing is just we’re trying to operate at the wrong scale. Right. And so when you’re talking about if there’s a culture war, you’re part of the culture. You’re in it. Sorry. I don’t know what else to say. Maybe the best way I can phrase is I don’t want to engage in war and the culture. I have particular opinions and everything. Yeah, but again, if that’s not. But it’s a matter of but it’s a matter of framing. Like if you think there’s a culture war, you’re in it. You’re in the culture. You don’t the culture. The culture is you. Right. It’s not entirely you. You are in. You are part of a culture. So if there is a culture war, you’re in it. And so if you don’t want to be in it, you shouldn’t think of the world that way. And that solves a bunch of problems. Right. You think, oh, these guys are too political or too economic. But the bottom line is like and this is what and this is what Ted’s fighting in some sense with convivium. Right. We’re not going to go there this upcoming weekend and try to work out like what do we need to do about the WEF? Unlike Peterson and maybe maybe there’s a role for Peterson to do that. Maybe I doubt it. But that’s a different discussion. What we’re going to do is get together and talk about poetry and our relationship to something we have in common. Right. And maybe we haven’t read the poem in common yet or heard it in common, but we will. Right. And that will give us a point of connection. And so that point of scale of being with somebody in person or talking to somebody, say, in real time online even, which is much better than sniping back and forth on Twitter, which happens quite a bit on Twitter. That’s because of the loss of intimacy. So on the one hand, technology can make us all connected. Right. But the quality of that connection attenuates. And so it’s a less quality connection, less deep connection. And and like the fact of being finite being means that you intrinsically you have an intrinsic degradation of the quality of your relationships as you try to increase the number of them. Like that’s just like it’s a hard limit on how we exist. But Mark, to your point, like there is a pun in the fact that this is called convivium. Right. Because it’s coming from the Latin of like to live together, right. Right. Life together. And it also means to feast. And so there’s this notion exactly of the opposite of that, of this idea that there are other ways to resolve this. I actually, I really, I like that framing of saying, you know, if you think of it as a culture war, then you’re a war. And I almost like the notion of culture, even in the way that we use it, I don’t even think it’s the right way to walk. Like maybe thinking of it in terms of tradition would be a better like not who are we going to beat out on the public stage? But like, what are we going to hand down? Yeah. Because there’s all sorts of interesting things. Like, for instance, if you look at the demographics of the Amish population in the U.S., it’s been skyrocketing for the last like 40 or 50 years. Really? Wow. Because they have tradition and you hear sure every once in a while you’ll get some vocal person who comes out of an Amish community and they like run the media, you know, some media circuit by being like, oh, I escaped the crazy Amishness. But if you just like look at what’s going on with the Amish, most of them just continue to hang out in those communities and have big families and they don’t want to. Yeah. And so so if you like, they’re not winning the culture war because they’re not going out there and engaging in the same patterns of yelling. Right. There’s this it’s Jacques Jacques Loul made this point about propaganda as soon as the society moves to the realm of propaganda, the only way to you fight propaganda with propaganda and so to try to fight it is to lose because then you’re just doing more propaganda. And if you have to, you have to shift, you got to shift to some other mode if you actually want to like move towards something that’s good versus winning. And I put that in like the biggest air quotes possible. Right. I’m sure Mark and I are thinking of the exact same 80s movie right now. Strange game. The only winning move is not to play. Exactly. Yes. Exactly. Yes. Well, yeah, that’s the that’s pretty much the ending line. Right. And that’s the and that’s the I mean, that’s when that that’s the exit of the of one of the main characters is a movie, which is the computer oddly enough. Right. And I think probably the first movie that has that that that way of relating to a machine is war. Unlike 2001 war games just really nails the relationship, the intimate relationship between person and computer and how it goes horribly wrong and scale. What is the game he wants to play? Look, and this is the funny part about war games. The computer wants to play chess. He wants to play global thermonuclear war so badly that he says it twice and the computer finally says, well, I really want to get along with you. So I’ll play global thermonuclear war until you can see intimacy. You can see scale. You can see the problem of technology. Like, really, it’s actually all in that movie, guys. And that was when I how old is that movie? I don’t know. I think. Yeah, it’s way back there. A lot of this stuff is pre-stage in the 80s. That’s one of the problems of technology and everybody being connected is now you can know far too much about what’s going on in Israel and Palestine with Hamas. Right. So now we have three players on the stage that no matter what you do living in the U.S., you’re not going to have much of an impact on. I say no impact because everything we do matters, as Peterson would say, but you’re not going to have enough of an impact to really do anything about the large scale conflict. You could have a great impact on the life of one family in that region, irrespective of which of the, quote, three buckets you want to contribute to or try to harm. Right. Because that’s the thing, too. Right. You’re trying to deprive at least one of them of something. But ultimately, just like the culture war, it’s a frame you can’t really participate in in a meaningful fashion. And it takes you a lot of time, energy and attention to do a Palestine Israel Hamas thing, whereas you could just do a nice thing for your neighbor that would take the same amount of time, energy and attention, but have a really outsized impact relative to what you could do for that for that conflict. Can I can I read this quote from the Return of the King? Absolutely. That is the edition, the very edition that I read when I was a lad with the photos on it. Oh, yes. So what also just as an aside, one of my proudest moments as a father is when we had the Lord of the Rings coloring book. And one of my daughters had it open to Aragorn and and my son comes up and he goes, Papa. And then he turned the page and it was Gandalf. He’s like, oh, Jesus. Not bad. Jesus has broken up over three characters in that book, but not bad. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So this is this is when this is when Sam has the ring when photos in the tower in Kiereth Ungol. Already the ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason. Wild fantasies arose in his mind and he saw Samwise the strong hero of the age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land. And armies flocking to his call as he marched to the overthrow of Baudouin. And then all the clouds rolled away and the white sun shone and at his command, the veil of Borgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit. He had only to put on the ring and claim it for his own and all this could be. In that hour of trial, it was the love of his master that helped the most to hold him firm, but also deep down in him, lived still unconquered his plain hobbit sense. He knew in the core of his heart that he was not large enough to bear such a burden, even if such visions were not a mere cheat to betray him. The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and do, not a garden sworn to a realm, his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command. Wow. Beautiful. He’s like a writer, like a real writer. There’s more scale and intimacy and all that right there. And it is the problem of scale and intimacy related, right? Because, yeah, intimacy doesn’t scale the way you want it to. Exactly. Yeah. Never mind. I have to say everything or nothing. We’re going to scale it correctly coming up here, Ted. One of the things I was thinking of is like, you know, I’m having to work on my bio for the anthology and I have some nice credits and stuff and I’m trying to figure it out and I’ve got a rough draft figured out. But in all the online articles about what you should put in there as an author, they link to all of these very successful authors that have all these wonderful success stuff cited in their bio. And I’m like, I don’t have any of that. And I’m like, you want me to have a bio like a, you know, J.K. Rowland or, you know, all these other famous authors. And I’m like, but I don’t have those credentials. And the world is like attracted to success and credentials as validating you as a person, as someone to listen to. And I was just thinking about that economy and like, and we’re talking about having the ring and either putting it on or getting rid of the evil. And I’m like, well, one of the temptations is to have the success so that you be, you know, worthy of wanting, you know, the people’s attention and all that kind of stuff. Look at that. Look at that Ted Stewart’s Earth Mover. That’s all you need right there. Right. What’s he doing? He moves there. He’s putting on a poetry convivium, baby. That’s all you need. People point at what they think the highest is. And like, fair enough, you’re not supposed to point at the lowest. But the thing that’s highest is not you’re not there. Like you’re not there yet. And then that’s OK. Like there’s nothing wrong with that. Like all those authors had bios that didn’t say that before they had those accomplishments. And nobody goes back. And because it’s the problem of scale when you’re looking higher, sometimes you look at the wrong things. Right. You’re supposed to be looking for the pattern, not for the implementation. And right now, in the age of gnosis, as I like to call it on Twitter, we’re very much stuck at looking at implementations and not at patterns. And the number of people I talk to who claim to me in some form or another that they’re as smart or smarter than Elon Musk and therefore should have as much money. And no, really. And like almost in those words even. And I tell them, look, maybe you are. But did you ever sleep under your desk at work? And they’re like, no, I would never do that. Well, then there you go. Right. Because Elon Musk did. Right. And so it’s like, well, you’re not willing to do what he did. So you can you can take this one trait and say, well, I’m as good a writer as Stephen King or better. I don’t really know. My opinion. But whatever. Are you willing to sit there and actually write long novels? Because there’s no freaking way in hell I’m writing long novels. I couldn’t do that if I wanted to. Average is 10 pages a day. That’s writing and editing. That’s nuts. That’s that’s insane. That’s not even it’s just the guy the guy just like sneezes and he’s got a paragraph. Yeah. Mark, I want to I want to I want to go back on something you said. There was there’s really interesting. And this has actually been in my head because as I’m preparing for convivial for my talk for convivial where you said you want to point it, you know, we don’t point at the lowest. We point at the highest. And and to say that in contrast, you know, in contrast with Samwise, because, you know, so much of the point of Frodo and Sam is the fact that like they’re too small for to see what they were like that’s why they succeed. And so it actually connects with one of the big points that has you says, right, which is it like he’s always like reality is infractal. Right. But, you know, there’s like fractals and then there’s self similar fractals. And he doesn’t I don’t think he’s like spend enough time on math. But right. Reality is a self similar fractal. Right. It’s not a fractal. It’s a self similar fractal. Yes. And so there’s a Serpinski triangle for anybody who needs to Google what that means. It’s a it’s a technical designation. The same same same gripe I have with him. Actually, is it no, no, it’s self similar. Yes. Yeah. So I mean, but and the easy one is a tree. Right. Because if you cut the branch of a tree off and you turn it upright, it looks like a small tree. And then you cut a branch off of that and it’s like and they just look like smaller trees. It’s trees all the way down. Right. And so the cool thing about poetry, I mean, and other things do this. Like we just did this reading the Lord of the Rings. But like and you do this all the time in your own life. This is why like it’s actually worth engaging in like everyday life. It’s because because of this fact. And so you can point to something that’s low down. And if you focus your attention on it the right way, you’re actually seeing the whole thing by looking at this. Right. And so changing a diaper, taking out the trash, making a garden, having a conversation with a friend, all of these things that all it’s not like you have to like somehow rest this into like, oh, I’m wasting my time by doing this. No, no, no, no, no. There’s a way to get all that line. You’re experiencing absolutely the whole universe all the way down and all the way up when you’re in right relationship with where you are in the moment. And that’s what we don’t appreciate. And it would be wrong to say, not that you said this or anything, be wrong to say that looking at the hobbits would be looking down or that or that when Sam looking at the small garden that he’s looking down, he’s not. He’s looking where he’s at. He’s looking at the scale at which he exists. Right. Instead of trying to scale up. He’s trying to look at the scale right where he’s at. You know, while still looking up. It’s not that he never looks up. Hey, Sandy. Yeah. Hi, Tia. Hi, Sandy. I was just gonna say when and this works well with Sandy’s name, which like humility shares an etymological root with humus soil. Right. So there’s this there’s this connection there of looking at where you’re at. Like, I like that mark looking at where you’re at. It’s like, and then we think it’s in August. Yes, this patch of dirt right here. And when you think of St. Augustine saying that humility is the gateway to all the other virtues or Lewis saying there’s some great Lewis quote where basically says the present is the only time in which to act. So it is the present is the place of all virtue of all love of all of these things. There’s a sense of being like, you look at the place that you’re at. And like, this is this is where the potential lies. Well, and that goes back to what you were saying about tradition and culture war. Right. So if you take if you take my video on culture war on navigating patterns, right, I basically claim there’s no such thing as a cultural war. What’s actually happening is there’s people fighting for culture as such. And there’s people trying to destroy culture as such. Right. Because if you’re going to statues, you’re not handing anything down traditionally. And what they’re really doing is rebelling against tradition, because tradition is the thing they see as constraining them because they’re not dealing with the trauma of having been constrained by their parents or their relatives or their teachers or whatever, whatever other billion things that is. They don’t want to blame people for problems. Like, there’s some appeal like I wish I wish people didn’t cause problems. Right. But, but actually, they do. All problems are actually created by people, unfortunately. And so that’s what it ends up to be is that is that the healthier way to think about it is. Yeah, they’re they’re not they’re rebelling against tradition, because tradition is constraining they want freedom from constraint and consequence. And then that’s causing them to rebel against culture itself, because that’s what culture is. It’s it’s the tradition that you that you hand down ultimately say I actually I like that framing that was that was really neat. Hi, Sandy. Hey, you think we’re crazy tonight. No, I hopped on because what you’re talking about. I was actually trying to write because I’m doing like, OK, it’s one of those things where you chop the word meaning up. National Novel Writing Month NaNoWriMo. I don’t write novels. Yeah, I’ve done it in the past. I just am skipping this year, but I’m more power to you. I believe in you. You can do it. Yeah, you have to write the original challenge. And there’s many rebels who don’t try to do the word count, but you try to write 50,000 50,000 words in a month until you write a novel in a month. And then you edit it afterwards. So usually they recommend don’t try to go editing. Just keep writing through the first draft. Yeah, you never you never edit while you write. That’s that’s the way to kill your writing. You know, value when you’re talking about writing and you to Sandy and you’re talking about scale and writing, you know, writing your bio and all of this. There’s probably is kind of like when we moved back to my hometown that I grew up in. Hey, Cory. And there’s a guy that I sort of known, but like, you know, sometimes you’re just like not aware enough to really engage with kind of like with who they are. And he’s like, you know, he’s a singer songwriter, probably produces an album like every three years, written a ton of original stuff like and none of it’s like astonishingly good. Like he’s it’s really fun. You know, he’s like all kinds like local events and stuff and like got lots of friends and people in the community love him and he’s very good at playing like restaurants and bars and stuff. But he’s not like big, right? Like he never made it. And like, it finally struck me like how wonderful it is that this man is like, stuck with making music for the people in his town for like 15 years. And he did. He wasn’t just like, well, you know, I don’t have like 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and I’m not touring the country. So like, I guess I’ll just give this up. Right. Because then we all would have been deprived of this guy’s music. But instead he’s like, he’s willing to engage with music and being a public musician at a level that most people are like, would consider to be failure and has like, enriched so many people’s lives because of that. It really like reframed a lot of my thinking about that stuff. And he’s also, you know, as it wouldn’t surprise you, like a very humble man in like a very positive way. And like, it’s I think it’s this humility that it gives him the capacity to like, actually see what he’s doing. That’s really encouraging on so many levels. My dad was an actor, writer, director. He never made it big. But he worked on real projects and stuff and other people’s movies, but we never were able to get financing for his movie before he had his heart attack about 10, 13 years ago. And he loved teaching and he taught a lot about filmmaking, voiceover, screenwriting, different things like that. And his talent moved people and encouraged people like your musician friend. And we realized how much of an impact he had afterwards, even though we knew he had thousands of students and lots of friends and allies in the media industry. But there is something for being part of the majority of people in the arts and entertainment industry who never make it big. And that’s most of the world and we don’t we don’t appreciate that. If you take the Blue Ridge Parkway out in North Carolina, north of Asheville there, and you get on over there, there’s actually one of the one of the lookout areas and there’s like a thousand of damn things. I tried to visit them all up because that’s the way I am. And the convertible is soon realized, yeah, this is gonna take like literally a month to go like where I was going. So I decided not to. But at one of the lookout areas, it says on a clear day, which is, you know, not the usual for the for the Smoky Mountains because that’s roughly where I’m at. You can hear music playing from down in the valley. And those people are relatively isolated. Like maybe they have access to Blue Ridge Parkway. Maybe you can’t just get on and off wherever you want. It goes across the top of the mountains. So and you can hear the train sometimes, you know, taking stuff in and out of the mountains. But like that’s real. And Rafe Kelly has a wonderful story about well, wonderful, but also tragic story about about visiting people in Appalachia that he knew when he was a kid and how they the Walmart moves in and basically their whole culture collapses. But it is that small town, you know, little one person doing whatever like those stories. I mean, if you really listen, those stories are everywhere. Like that’s actually the world. The world isn’t, you know, forge Clooney. Right. It’s not. To answer Lynn’s question. Yes, I do have a hearing loss. I was born with vision and hearing loss. And my brother and I worked with my dad in media production. So it was kind of ironic. He was eyes and ears. We’re not blind or deaf, but we have. So we need our glasses and our hearing aids. But yeah, sorry about interrupting you, Mark. That’s all right. Corey, what’s going on? Good to see you. Hiya. It’s good to see you. I saw Sandy and haven’t talked to you in so long. So it’s good. You know, I’m planning on having I’m planning on having a guitar available for you. I can give you I’m going to have my banjo. There’s a young man from my church coming up with mandolin. So we’re going to be the battle of evermore by Led Zeppelin. Oh, oh, I don’t know, man. Don’t touch that song. I’m going to disappoint you with my guitar. It’s just about Lord of the Rings, isn’t it? It is. It is. It’s one of the songs that they do about Lord of the Rings. Yeah, they have a few. But that’s like that to me is that that that album version. Like, I don’t even like that the Road to Clarkson version and I’m like, nah, nah, not Clarksville rather. No, I’m a purist. I’m a complete that that one song I’m a complete purist on. That’s not the world, Mark. That’s not the world. The world doesn’t exist on vinyl. The world exists in real life. It means embedded in the community. You just went over that mark. No, that that and and Beethoven six blue label. Don’t touch those. Just saying I heard Beethoven live. We’ll wait for you to go sit on the can before we sing it. There you go. I did. I did. I at one point I started listening through a bunch of like you can find on podcast is like people who put it like folk music podcast. There’s this awesome one from New Zealand, some New Zealand public radio guy does Folk Music Hour and a couple of them. They’ll like run through like one or two songs and like all of these variations and like when they first found publications of it and like One of the things that’s fascinating about folk music is that you’ll find out that like one set of lyrics will be like have been sung like four different tunes and each of those tunes will generally have like 10 to 15 different lyrics that are sung to it. This is like and then, you know, everyone’s like putting some twist on it and like and there’s this this fast. It just feels like there’s a big thing that’s growing. But what’s so interesting to your point mark about the people in the blue in Appalachia is, you know, I don’t know that much about it. But my understanding is basically like all of modern American music is basically just downstream of those those folk styles that eventually got picked up by someone. To some degree or another into blues and rock and roll and all these other musical styles that became pop music and so the whole like here it is up here, the sort of produced thing. It’s all just immediately downstream of yeah people living out in Appalachia or in the Delta or wherever, you know. The Delta. Making it happen with a, you know, probably a homemade banjo with crawdad claws for the tuning pegs. There’s a guy on the, he does hang out on my Discord occasion and see him in months. But, you know, he’s in, I think it’s called Muscle Shoals. This is like a famous place for musicians and they just come flittering through, right? And then like all the big names have been there, like all the big names. And they go in, they get some of the local flavor, and then they leave with it. Right? And Zeppelin’s famous for that. Like all of Zeppelin’s music is completely stolen. It’s all stolen blues, right? And the thing that enabled, there’s some wacky stories. The thing that enabled them was the guy who started Atlantic Record. That story’s like, man, you find that straight. That was, I learned that on PBS. They had some special on, I met Erdogan there. That story’s like freaking mind blowing. Like, wait a minute. That guy influenced everything. And he was just the son of a diplomat who liked to hang out in the city parks in New York, basically, and listen to the gritty black person music or something is how they characterize it. I was like, what? This is wild. But yeah, and that, and he started that record company and that got big in England. And they were bootlegging and illegally taking them over from France and, you know, against the law, all kinds of wacky stuff. And then that launch, Zeppelin gets interested in that, you know, Jimmy Page in particular and Robert Plant. And that launches a whole bunch of stuff that you don’t even realize. And then, of course, Zeppelin gets to be at Atlantic Records and like with their hero. And yeah, it’s, that whole thing is wild, right? Because it all does start at the bottom. It all does start at the bottom. That’s why the Emergences Good crowd has, you know, like I see what they’re saying. It’s just that when it’s not drawn towards the highest, right, then, you know, and the highest is not Led Zeppelin becoming famous, right? The greatest rock band of all time, probably by almost any measure, right? It’s not that. It’s that the people at the bottom, the folk, the people playing folk music in the valley, right? They’re the ones that are in the most tune with the highest. And in some ways, the people who come through and morph it are, you know, not necessarily in tune with the highest, although you listen to like the Battle of Evermore and then you start to rethink, well, maybe they were right on it. There’s an interesting musical. Oh, go ahead. Oh, no, you go for it, Valerie. I have a tidbit and I’ll be done. In the SCA, there’s different types of music, and one of them is called F.I.L.K. And it’s basically a parody or kind of an homage to older songs. And it could be, I guess there’s also, there’s a thing in Spotify called Bawdcore, which is actually probably technically should be called F.I.L.K. They take medieval and Renaissance instruments and play covers of more contemporary songs. And so it’s kind of interesting. So that’s a musical tidbit I just picked up from the SCA. What were you going to say, Ted? Oh, let me gather my thoughts for a second. Mark was talking about this movement. Oh, yeah. So singing in choir and church, there’s certain particularly Latin hymns that we just like, you know, come back to over and over and over. And I started paying attention and like all of them is like author anonymous. It just came out of, you know, generally that means like came from a monastery. Someone in a monastery wrote it is generally what that means. But like, all the, basically like all the core hymns in the Latin church, it’s like, we don’t know where they came from. They’re just there. Like they’ve just been given to us basically. It’s really fascinating. And like I could, you know, I could pull my hymn along and find some of them. But like really on any given Sunday, half to two thirds of the hymns that we’re singing are, you know, the operatory or during communion or the recessional or whatever. They’re all like, there’s no writer associated with them. Attribution for artists is brand new. It’s actually one of the feelings of the Renaissance. That’s like the Renaissance. That’s one of the Renaissance great evils of the Renaissance is attribution. The other one is Michelangelo and the pointing. Yes. Well, we won’t even need to talk about that. But here’s what’s interesting is that it occurred to me that the place that we have the closest notion of like of the medieval idea of art is actually with memes. Because memes aren’t trying to be like, they’re not trying to express idiosyncrasy. They’re trying to express something that everyone understands. Right. It speaks to everyone. So it’s for it’s actually intended to like bring insight to the person and they’re all anonymous and everyone’s plagiarizing off of everyone and you just steal it and run with it. And if you want to change it a little bit, then it’s fine. And you and you’re welcome to. But I was like, how memes are basic. The way visual memes work is like the same way that art used to. I just thought of an interesting way. The same way. That’s the same way that Richard Groland talks about iconography as well. Just how it kind of emerges from a particular culture. There is particularity associated with it. But it’s a thing that’s reflective of a thing that everybody recognizes as having emerged from a thing that really actually exists in the way people live together. I think we should bring it back to the virtual discussion. Does this say something like a culture isn’t that there’s not a distinct culture until it has its own like an icon that has come out of it? Yeah, he says that a Christian nation, he says, and he actually took this from Dr. Petitza in the Ethics of Beauty. A nation cannot call itself a Christian nation until it has manifested an icon of the Holy Virgin. Like it has a national icon of the Holy Virgin. Yeah, yeah. Right. But when you when somebody says that, it’s obvious. It’s like, oh, wait a minute. Of course, you have to have your own unique something to be identifiable. And therefore, until you create your own symbols, you’re not identifiable. And therefore, you’re not a separate group because you don’t have an identifiable set of identifiers. Or you just have it miraculously imprinted on a poor man’s poncho. Yep. Or you find it in the middle of a… That creates your culture for you. That’s actually a lot faster. Yeah. Well, no. Well, over a billion baptisms in 10 years points. Well, we’ll talk about this also. This links back to what Mark was saying earlier about how it’s not necessarily like you can create art and music that links into the highest. And I think that’s an example, one of the best examples of how that happens. It just seems to emerge. It almost just seems to come from heaven in a sense. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s required for there to be good art either. Good art can… You emanate and emerge. Point towards the highest by just being real, by being in contact with the realities that people are experiencing. But reality is specifically linked to, I think, suffering and beauty. So like, those are the two things that touch reality and point you towards the highest. Usually implicitly. Cory, this sounds like a conversation that you and I had on a pilgrimage at one point. I’ll fix you up when we… I’ll fix you up when we… I can give you an inquiry. Don’t worry. Sounds good, Mark. I’ll be ready to engage. I’m going to clear out. I’ll see some of you in person very soon, which is wonderful. If any of you don’t have your weekend plans settled yet, just look at the link down below. There’s still tickets available, Ted. The ticket timer may have run out, but email me. I’ll get on there and change it to make sure. Yeah, there’s definitely space. I think Grim is coming back from Wisconsin. Did you get him to stop by? You know what’s so funny is someone was like, oh, I think Emma said, oh, Grim can’t believe you’re putting this on. He didn’t know about it. And I went back and looked at my text messages and I texted Grim. I did. That’s Grim. There’s still time. We got Danny coming. That’s good. It’ll be fun. So what are you guys going to do? See you, Ted. Take care, Ted. Bye-bye. So, Corey, what you were saying, that kind of half went over my head because I was busy thinking about art and music and why we do them just randomly anyway. And I like writing poems. So I like writing poems. Something bad happens. I write poems. I was at one of the pubs down in Guelph yesterday hanging out with some of the one of several writer groups that I know that are local. There’s a lot of people in this area that write stuff, really interesting people, too. And I always feel like they’re way more intelligent than me because they use. Yes, I can tell you that. They’ll use the literary terms or they’ll be like the discussion of the Lord of the Rings that’s happening here. I can watch that movie. I have not read the books. My son has. We talk about that. But I’ve watched the movies like six times, but it doesn’t file in my brain in the same way. I don’t remember the scenes. I don’t remember the names of the different. It doesn’t have to. It sits in my memory in completely different ways. Good. That’s better. When I’m by myself, that’s fine. I like singing random songs and tunes. That don’t really come from anywhere, don’t necessarily go anywhere. But when you talk to people who do things properly, that’s not properly then, you know, like I’m like I got like two guitars on the ceiling. I’m like, I’m out of here. I’m like, I’m going to be right back. properly. That’s not properly. I got like two guitars on the wall behind me. Do you think I can play those things? No, my first guitar. I was twenty when I got it. I still cannot play guitar and I took piano lessons for 10 years. Do you think I can play? I cannot play piano. No. Um I don’t know why. I don’t play guitar. I don’t play guitar very well. I don’t play guitar very well either. They look good so they are convenient. One day maybe I’ll start practicing again. How did it happen recently? Yeah. I had fun with one of the teachers that I had. He moved to BC because he would just, I was supposed to be taking lessons but I would go in and start singing stuff and he would go well let me play and then we can record that. Then we would put it in my phone and he could Like, that’s fun, you know? That is fun. And what you were saying too, Sandy, like it’s, I think that’s, it really sucks that that’s kind of the way that we think in our cultures, that if you don’t know the terminology and you don’t know like a Mixolydian mode versus a, you know, whatever, like, I took three levels of security for five minutes of fame to pass the exam. I knew what it meant. Most of the songwriters that we were talking about earlier that emerged from Appalachia didn’t have any experience. They literally had a thing that they were experimenting with and they wanted to create something that was real, that was reflective of their experiences. And like you said before, like to expand a little bit on what I said before, we can use different terms to talk about it. You are only going to create art about things that are meaningful to you. And then, you know, meaning and how you look for meaning is one of the big subjects, right? To me, I would struggle to think of something other than stuff that makes you suffer and stuff that strikes you as beautiful. Yeah. Those are the two things to me that I think are indicative of meaning, at least on a level of subjective experience, like at a phenomenological kind of level. And I heard you say that, but what do you mean by that? Like, why is that one thing? I guess I’ve been thinking about this and I could be wrong. I mean, I’m not engaged in it. I don’t think you’re wrong. I just asked you to explain it. No, no, yeah. So I’ve been thinking about how human experience, okay, I have to explain like the way that I got to here too. Cause I’ve been thinking a lot about the problem of pain, I guess, for like, that’s really the thing that got me interested in philosophy as a little kid to start with. And I’ve been thinking about how God reveals himself to us and how he makes himself apparent to us. He discloses himself to us. I especially started thinking about this a lot after the DC conference. He discloses himself to us in ways, in addition to just through the church specifically or through the scripture specifically. He’s certainly like divine revelation in that sense is where you see the fullness of the truth. And really nothing else comes together until you have that. But thinking about natural philosophy and how just the created world and our own experience, human experience also points towards him. And I was trying to think about how we ought to think about that because it’s fair to say that the most fundamental aspect of human existence, and some people have made this argument, is suffering. How does suffering, especially as such a deeply intrinsic part of human experience point to God? And then it’s just, I’ve been absorbing so much Jordan Peterson and so much Reveke and so much Pajot recently. I started to think about, okay, Peterson talked about how even beauty is a thing that when you really encounter it, it’s a fearful thing. It’s a thing that you fear to engage with. And I spent the last year developing kind of a model to think about consciousness where you can think of your worldview as like an actual structure. It’s the same structure as a culture, by the way. It’s just a fractal higher. And it has two different mechanisms. It gets built and it gets broken. That’s really the two things. You can think of that as order and chaos actually. So when you’re a child, when you’re a baby, you don’t have much of a structure yet. And so everything is new to you and everything is building up and building up and you’re like a sponge you’re absorbing. Every experience that you have is, as far as you know, just reality. Until you have a fully developed, when you’re closer to being an adult, you have a developed consciousness, a developed worldview. You kind of have a sense of how you think the world works. But then you’re able to experience things that don’t fit into that worldview. And so you experience just like, this is just learning in general. You can experience something and either it makes sense in the worldview that you have, like you’re able to integrate it with what you already understand is how the world works, or it encounters you or you encounter something that doesn’t make sense. And the only way for you to make sense of it is to break a part of the worldview that you have. And that’s experienced as suffering. That can be a small thing. Like that can be just like, it can be a thing that just doesn’t make sense to you that you don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about. Like, ooh, I think I had a weird experience in the forest one time that might’ve been a ghost, but like I’m just gonna log that away and not think about it too much. It’s like, oh, I remember that one time, that was weird. I don’t know how to explain that. Then there’s on the other end of the spectrum, you can go to war and you can experience human beings doing things to other human beings that you literally cannot conceive of because you were brought up in a human society that valued human life. And especially when you yourself are forced to participate in that sort of thing, it can, you can’t just ignore it either. It’s super salient to you. That’s the thing that forces you to, you can’t just ignore it. It has to come into contact with your existing worldview. And it breaks often a significant portion of your worldview. And that’s actually, I’ve been working on how that actually is the best way to understand what PTSD is is when you experience kind of a chain reaction where one of your core axioms say, is destroyed in your worldview. You can think of it as like an architectural structure. It breaks other pieces, other pieces that are dependent on that central pillar also collapse. And when your worldview collapses, this is your meeting making structure. It is no different from psychosis. You literally lose your ability to perceive reality. So we have these two things, but then you can, yeah, yeah. There’s one more piece. Go for it then. Okay, so those are two ways of, two mechanisms, two extremes maybe. When something, when you have to integrate something that you can’t make sense of in your worldview, you experience it as suffering. But there’s suffering, which just breaks your worldview. And then there’s beauty, which also breaks your worldview, but gives you something to reintegrate it in a more accurate picture of what reality is. So my question, do people just talk about worldview or do you actually know when you have a worldview? The introspection part doesn’t work. You can talk about worldview in the abstract above you, but it’s kind of pointless because you don’t know what your worldview is. You don’t notice you have a worldview until it bumps into somebody else’s, which has a contradictory axiom. So you may think that, we’re all pretty tolerant Christian form sorts of people. And then you bump into, let’s say a group of people who think that another group of people just, the whole world would be better off if they were wiped off the map entirely. And you encounter that, you’re like, whoa. And it’s not like these people are actively destroying things. We don’t have any evidence of that. They’re a malicious force. It’s just, they don’t belong here. They should be wiped out. And it’s like, I don’t believe that. That’s how you normally have a worldview because that doesn’t fit in. I tried to figure out how different people, anthropologists and psychologists use and define the word culture, because that’s a really important word that we use for a whole bunch of different things without thinking about it too hard. Actually the best way to understand culture, like my definition that I think is the most accurate one, we have a culture to the degree that we have a shared worldview. That is exactly what a culture is. And so to your point, if you have a, obviously everything won’t be exactly the same, but if at the highest, most abstract levels, like the ordering principles of our society is essentially pretty close to the same for all the people at the highest level stuff, not like individual experience, but like, I believe that there’s value in human life. Something super high up like that. Virtues and values have to match. And if your virtues and values match, then you have a similar enough culture. And that’s scale. But it’s also, it’s still necessary though, because none of us as human beings, if you’re a Christian, you believe that it’s impossible for you to have a perfect worldview that encompasses all of reality. You can’t do that because that’s God, only God does that. And so part of the human process and part of the human existence is to open yourself up to these experiences of letting yourself be broken so that it might be reconformed into something that is more true than whatever part of your worldview is wrong. Yeah, the thing that you might be missing from Verveki though is Verveki talks about the axis of awe and horror. Right? No, that’s exactly what I’m thinking of. Beauty can go either way. And that’s actually really important, right? Well, experientially. So does horror have to mean or imply the things we think of as horror that shows up in movies where you’re monsters or some form of, or can horror be? No, no, that horror is beyond that. That’s one form of horror, but horror is beyond that. It’s so horror. So I’m talking about just that, the level of subjective experience. So was I. You as an individual. Yeah, so horror in that case is just the aberration that you can’t make sense of. I think my, I ask it because one of my, my memory doesn’t work properly. Well, it works properly for what it does, but like I’m really in my memoir, I’ve been writing a little bit about some of the difficult places of life. And one of the descriptors is a somewhat insignificant thing around my mom and what PTSD feels like. But then the other thing that I was thinking about when you were talking, Corey, was I don’t have the same style, form or context of childhood memories that my sister does. She has actual memories. I have flash scenes or things that are. And one of the ones when you said horror, I was thinking I have this very intense sense of being around nine months old and being held upside down and screaming at my mother to turn me up right. And she was talking to my dad. We were in the car and I don’t even know if it’s true, but this is a very intense. When you describe horror, that’s something that I see. But it doesn’t fit into some of the understanding of some of the definitions you were giving me. No, it does actually. That’s exactly what he’s talking about because for some people upside down is thrilling. And for some people upside down is terrifying. And that’s really, that’s the difference right there. Yeah, but it depends on the context. And what I meant by it doesn’t fit. It doesn’t depend on the context. It depends on your attitude and the context. And that’s where people get confused because they want like, oh, the context of always being upside down in the car while people are yelling means horror. Oh no. But it doesn’t for everybody, right? So some people have a positive affect to things and they naturally move towards awe and experience less horror just as a way of. Do you mind if I try Sandy? It’s one of several times Mark when I actually expected to die because I felt like I was upside down for that long that, you know. But what I meant when I said it doesn’t fit the context, what I mean is the context in which the kind of words that Corey was using exist for me is, the philosophical discussions, the psychological discussions. If it fits in that context of, hey, this is something to do with school and higher understanding of things. And the ways that you create different definitions around something you want to take apart theoretically and not just applicably. So let me try a little bit Sandy and see if this helps. I see where you’re coming from. I’m good, it’s just kind of interesting. So I’m kind of like, oh, geez, that’s weird. Yeah, no. And it’s, so it’s difficult to do without the diagram and La Familia, his point in there too is actually relevant to this as well. So I’ve got a diagram that I use, that’s the mountain, right? It’s using Matthew Peugeot’s symbolism diagrams to understand how things are closer to the bottom. You know, if there’s a X, Y axis or the Y axis goes up and down. As you go farther down, it’s more particular. It’s unique to the individual and it is less abstract. So it’s like individual experiences and single individual as far as they apply to a specific person and they apply to a specific experience of a specific person. So take what you just talked about, this memory that you have, that would be at the bottom and is completely unique to you. And it is an actual memory that you have, regardless of how like historically accurate it is, it is a thing that forms part of your worldview because it’s part of your memory and it’s part of the way that you process reality. And that is participatory. That’s the other piece too. As you go down to more particular, it’s more at the level of the participatory. As you go up, this is more abstract. This is more of the stuff that you can use words to describe. Further down, you can’t use words to help somebody really experience the things that you experience. Music and poetry are somewhere like in between, but like you cannot have a person experience exactly what you experienced as you experienced it. It’s not possible. That’s in the right side. But up here, yeah, yeah, yeah, unless you’re like inception or something. Like in creative writing, in some of the, at least in the style of writing that I do, which seems very basic to me because of how I, because of the pattern I use. In creative writing, you can help somebody experience it, but they won’t necessarily experience it the same way that I did and in which my words framed it for myself. They’re looking at it from their side. That’s right. Yeah. So if you have, so imagine you have your little pyramid worldview over here and your friend’s little pyramid worldview over here. There are gonna be some shared things, especially as you go higher up to more abstract stuff that using the same words to describe concepts at a very abstract level. Then as you move farther down, you have more particularities and more differences. And this is part of when you have a true interaction, like an honest, pulled nothing back interaction between two people, not at a surface level, at the personal level, then you actually experience the same thing that we’re kind of talking about. You can call it the aberration or horror or awe. It’s the thing that you don’t know how to make sense of. But to the degree that you can link up with somebody and have a little bit more of a shared understanding at a lower level, it is a much more personal and much more, it’s a much deeper and more meaningful kind of connection that the lower down that you can go to a degree. And I think poetry and music helps with that. And so does estuary, by the way. So one more dumb question. Do you mean make sense of it in a cognitive way or do you mean make sense of it in a more bodily integrative way? I can’t say that word today, integrative way. Definitely not a dumb question. I would include the second half of what you said in cognitive, but I mean the second half of what you mean. So like it’s more of a connection at the participatory level, if that makes sense. No, it doesn’t. It’s intimate. It’s intimate. Bodily and more embodied. Like the second thing that you say. Okay, because there’s some things that I know that Jack and I shared as a concept between us didn’t really need explaining. There’s some things, yeah. And those things sometimes are more real than the things that you fight the words on. Well, they all are. Yeah, words are not real. That’s part of the problem. Words make everything less real. Words are definitionally abstract. Language is an abstraction by definition. It’s what language is. And so- What is this word, Mark, and I disagree. It’s one, it’s four. I disagree as well. It’s less real. It’s actually less real. It’s real. It’s just, it is abstract, but I don’t think that abstracting are necessarily less real. Right, so one of the partially formed songs that I’ve kind of played with over the years talks about, it’s a song about prayer, but it’s also a song about connection to God in the sense that when, I guess what you guys would describe as the horror, that within the song, I described that place as being to the point where my actual pain is the prayer, because the words just don’t, I can’t think of it off top of my head. It’s the song that comes back once in a blue moon when I need it. I’ve got it written down somewhere. I’ve got a whole crap load of stuff written down somewhere. I think that’s in the same category as the Bible verse that talks about how the Holy Spirit intercedes on your behalf when you don’t know the words to pray. I think it’s exactly that. But it also lives in that. And I think you’re right. I deeply feel what you’re saying. Yeah, and it lives in that same place where you were talking initially about suffering. And I love, so because I love words. I’ve always loved words. Words are their own little entity, and you can kind of, sometimes they just wanna play. And sometimes they kind of hit my joy place because they wanna play. So the words suffer. I mean, if you look at the old, old children’s songs we would sing, there was one that had suffer the little children to come unto me, right? And, but it doesn’t mean, people try to explain it to you as if it means they have to suffer so as they can go to Jesus. I’m like, don’t be stupid. We used to use that word in a way that meant allow. Don’t block, don’t prevent them from coming to me. It was a form of openness and permission. Whereas we think of pain as something that closes us and cuts us off from others. But it’s- It’s linked to this idea that the passions are something that happened to us. Right. And so the passion of Christ was something that happened to him. He didn’t go out and crucify himself, right? And so this idea that, oh yeah, the passions and the worst sorts of passions are the ones that come to us when we really don’t want them to come upon us. That we’re going to suffer and it’s something that’s, we can’t escape and we would want to escape because it’s painful and we don’t wanna be there. And yet there we are, we’re suffering men. Well, I think you’re deeply right, Sandy. There’s a deep change in our- But Vicki has a whole section on that too. You’re right, like it actually means to allow. It refers to a posture, to refrain from hindering. Or to fail to prevent. Right, but it’s a posture, right? And the change is the way we use the term suffering is totally incorrect, right? That’s the way they used to use the word struggle, right? Which is what we should be reviving. And the thing that we call suffering should be reserved as something that’s not optional but can be increased or decreased based on our struggle. And that’s actually really important. You need that third position because everything can’t be a binary between suffering and no suffering even, or suffering and happiness or even suffering content. It doesn’t work. But the process of life is a struggle. Breathing is a struggle. Where we get locked up in words is precisely when we lock the words down to this concept too tightly. And we don’t understand that just because we say a monster jumped out from the woods doesn’t mean it’s horror, right? That’s not what it means. A monster jumping up from the woods could be awe as well. And you kind of see that in Jonathan Majeaux’s God’s Dog book actually, where the attitude of most of the group is, a horrible dog-hitted man, or the dog-hitted creature coming out of the woods, right? And the leader of the group is kind of like, eh, I don’t know, he seems okay to me. Let’s see what we can do with him, right? And so he doesn’t have that same response. He doesn’t get wrapped up in the language. And yeah, Corey, music is more real than language to me, even though music might be more abstract. It’s not the abstraction I object to. I’m saying language isn’t real. Language is the affectation. Not that that’s a bad thing. We need language. I’m using it right now. Let’s not get crazy, right? But it’s less real because it has so many ways to point. And the age of Gnosis stuff that I treat about, that’s what this is about. You get locked in to this idea that you should have an exact recollection, like historically accurate recollection of something. And that’s a good thing. When I think that just the opposite is true, actually you don’t want that. I don’t, like, I can’t do quotes, as many quotes as you may think I do. I actually can’t do quotes. I’m terrible at quoting things. I’ve read lots of things. I have an eidetic memory very occasionally, and it never works when I wanna quote something, ever. It never works when I wanna remember something. It just pisses me off. But in that struggle, because that’s a struggle for me, because I keep going, oh, I want this eidetic memory, and I wanna train my memory. And then I’m like, no, you don’t. That’s where I learned to grow and understand, oh, there’s these patterns, and now I don’t need to remember how things happen because I can see things before they happen because I know this pattern. And it just makes a bunch of things in life a hell of a lot easier because you’re not always struggling to get the exact thing correct anymore. You’re not looking for accuracy and precision. You’ve broken out of that, and now you’re able to engage more fully, more poetically with poetic information in the world, with music, with language, with poetry, with story, with participation. You don’t understand what people are getting out of a liturgy, even if you’re not participating, unless you see the pattern. If you try to follow along exactly with the words, you won’t get it. So I’m gonna push back a little bit on the words not being real. I see some truth in what you’re saying, Mark. It might be that the words and language speak to a different part of our brains and our heart than music and art, visual stuff. Art and music might speak more to our right brain or the more unconscious side of our brains. Words are mingled between the two. Some people are more language-oriented, and some people aren’t. You’re very verbose by a particular guy, so I’m not saying that’s the case for you. No, no, that’s McGillchrist, and I agree with McGillchrist. I mean, our knowledge engine models is exactly the same thing. This is Vervecky’s propositional knowing. Propositional knowing is language knowing. It’s not the other types of knowing. And once you have that model, it actually unlocks a bunch of stuff for you to understand people in the world. Yeah, one other thought is maybe it touches us differently. So I have some friends who have special keyboards that they got the actual keys for, and they click differently. Some are more clickety-clackety, more quieter, more have the punch that they like, and all this kind of stuff. And some people are very hypersensitive to the feel of that. Oh, you were saying you have that, huh? Okay, and other people, I can’t tell the difference between them at all. They just feel like keys to me. And so maybe that’s how some people are wired to more sensitive stuff. Definitely we have different sensitivities. I mean, this keyboard, this is like a 160 keyboard when it came out. I type 30% faster on this keyboard. Some people get on this keyboard, they type the same speed as they do on the stupid chiclet keyboards on their laptops, which are just terrible to me. But again, there’s a fundamental difference, and McGilchrist probably does a better job, I haven’t read his book. Probably does a better job of talking about this than I ever could. There is a fundamental difference. And yeah, some people work better on the left side, some people work better on the right side. But the difference is actually there, and it’s actually marked. And once you understand that, it helps you to understand and relate to people better. Because you can go, oh, this person is more in the pattern, and this person is more in the precision and accuracy category. And what that really helps you with, the thing that we think is neat about the model that we came up with is it explains all the forms of autism. It doesn’t explain how they happen, but it explains what they look like and why they’re that way. And it’s like, oh, wait a minute. And then the corollary to that is it explains psychosis. Because psychosis is effectively the opposite set of relationships in the model. So once you have a powerful model like that, and it’s to some extent based on John Bervecki’s four Ps of knowing, we’ve done away with that, that’s he describes information not knowing, right? And then we fixed it so that the knowing is further up the stack basically. And that allows you to understand what’s going on in the world better in terms of influence, right? Because top down power from above control, that’s not how things are happening. And everybody knows that. And that’s why people are losing their minds, right? Because they keep wanting it to be that way because it explains a problem and it also explains the solution to that problem, which is change the person at the top, right? So we just vote differently and it’ll fix the issue. But then of course that happens because both parties have been in control in the US, right? And it doesn’t work. And then they get more insane. And then they hold on further to this political frame or an economic frame or whatever, where it’s top down power from above and that doesn’t work. And then they get more insane, right? And that’s what’s breaking the culture apart to some extent. I’m gonna jump back. I’m looking forward to talking to you this weekend. Sorry, go ahead. It’s gonna be great. I was gonna say, Mark, I’m gonna jump back for a second too when you mentioned the monster in the wood. I’m a bit of a visual thinker. So the second that you said that, what it meant to me was as an example was the wood on the edge of the hill and the sun comes up over the hill in the morning. And all of a sudden the radiance bursts through the trees and spreads into this giant glow. And that is a monster. It could be for you. Yeah, I mean, some people are overwhelmed by beauty and it becomes a horror to them. It’s not a bad monster. I’ve seen that all the time. Well, but that’s what I mean. Mark, you’re a monster too. That is a monster. I don’t mean monster in the sense of, people are afraid of, I don’t either. But that sense of this… That can be horror or awe. And it depends on the person. It’s a monster in the sense of awe. Just like you’re awed every time you see Mark with his four left hands. Four left hands. Mark has four left hands, by the way. Okay. But that’s the thing. Anything can be that way. It could be a creature, right? It could be a fairy, right? It could be beauty itself. It could be a sunrise. It could be a sunset. It could be this pen. It could be a pen. If you do not live in a society with writing, with plastic, with ink, and you look at this and it’s like, what is that? Nencils, erasers. Or if you see it as a constraint. You could see it as a constraint. You could have grown up knowing what it was and seeing it as a constraint. I mean, look, I know former Catholics who were traumatized by actual rulers. They don’t have any rulers in their house. I’m like, what do you mean you don’t have rulers in your house? And they don’t know why. And then I’m the one that figures it out for them. And I go, oh, wait a minute, you went to Catholic school. And they’re like, yeah. And I’m like, that’s why you don’t have any rulers. And usually they don’t get it then either. And I go, oh, were you ever hit by a ruler? And then it all comes flooding back and they actually remember it. They go, oh yeah, I remember I was hit by a ruler. I’m like, that’s why you have no rulers in your house. And that’s happened to me multiple times. I’ve been like, this is nuts. Not a little 12 inch ruler, the yardstick my mother kept behind the door in the kitchen. They won’t have any rulers in their house. They want a little, they want a plastic ones. They want like any ruler. So they’ve associated measurement with punishment. Like actual physical measuring of something in inches with punishments. Some of them don’t have tape measures for that reason. But of course it is. It’s going to be flowing. We talk about measuring up to something. No, no, you’re right. Well, no, and you’re supposed to, and you should, and you have to, right? Not in that context where you get it smacked into you. Hopefully not, but some people did and they’re traumatized by that. These nuns had 42nd graders in a room. Most of them. Yeah, most of them weren’t like that though either. Are you saying that the nuns are probably more traumatized than those children? It’s entirely possible. Trauma can be mutual. Some of them were, but some of them were mean. And that happened, like, and that’s the thing. Like it just, it turns out, Cory, believe it or not, are you sitting down? Like sit down. If you get groups of people together, you get large variations. And it doesn’t matter who gets the group together. It could be the government. It could be the church. It could be the community, right? And you’re going to get the same set of problems because it just turns out that people are the source of problems. And that they’re the source of all the problems. And the question is, which, which, see? That’s why we want to make sure you’re sitting down first. And it just turns out that which set of problems manifests has to do with the virtues and values, or the worldview, of that sort of organization. And if you want to see how worldview plays out, you should read American Nations by Colin Woodard. Because he talks a lot about the success of America being that the really high level virtues and values are close enough, right? But then if your values don’t match, you can move within the country and find where they do match. And there’s a nice thesis going around that says, that’s why we’re having problems. Because we’re actually running out of space to do that. Those little groups are bumping up against each other. And that hasn’t happened since before we were a country. That actually, and he goes over this in the book, that happened a lot before we were in the country. There were battles, and people died over Long Island and parts of Connecticut and upstate. And you have weird places that now you’re like, what? That weren’t parts of states. There were no states. It was before all that. So we don’t appreciate that that’s a factor, the ability to move to where people share miniature worldview. But the overarching worldview may match. And that’s why I was saying earlier, it scales. And that scale is actually really important, because that kind of explains why you need a government and a church, right? And a local community, right? You need something that isn’t government or church, right? You need a place to live. Can’t live in the government, can’t live in the church, can’t live in an economic thing, right? You need all of those things. And because they all operate at different scales on you. Oy. Oy is right. Oy is right. We are coming to the end of this livestream. Very happy to have you all on. But I do want to say, Sandy, you always bring a special kind of chaos to these streams. And I really appreciate it. There’s a very best kind. It’s like me and Mark and Corey and Ted, we’re all regulars here. We start vibing. We start exploring all the different ways that we agree with each other. And I’m not even saying that that’s a bad thing. But having you come in here and just bring your chaotic energy brings out something different. And it’s a beautiful thing. It’s the kind that inspires awe, not horror. Yes. For us, anyway. You’ve kept us on the awe side. You haven’t pushed us into horror. Andrew, you’ve just been a quiet, steady presence this entire time. And Valerie, you’ve been on this whole time. You’ve been doing this as much as I have. So it’s been a delight to have each and every single one of you on here. Thank you for hosting us. It’s always interesting being able to tune in when I can and see what meaningful conversation you guys are having. Hopefully, it stays that way. So thank you for tuning in. Good night. And God bless you all. God bless. Good night. See you.