Theology of Technology: Art vs Artifice in Artificial Intelligence

0:00 The Love of Wisdom

Ernest Chapman0:15 To philosophy.

0:22 So we first met. You need a minute philosophy? No, I'm

Eric Busby0:26 just thinking about philosophy. I break every word down every time, even though I've known it a million times. I'm just thinking love wisdom,

0:30 Techne Logos: The Rational Language of Art

Ernest Chapman0:35 the love of wisdom, right? Philo Sophia, right? And in your studies, you studied the theology of technology,

Eric Busby0:43 yes, and the philosophy of technology and the philosophy of

Ernest Chapman0:46 technology, so the love of wisdom of technology and Theos logos, so the Word of God of technology, of techno logos. Tell me, how does that break down?

Eric Busby0:59 Yeah, well, technology itself. That's where I start, is techne logos in Greek. And techne is the Greek word for art. Okay, whoa, right? But we always say it's like an art form. You know? It's like doing that is he's he does that so well, it's like he's an artist, right? And even if it's a thing like being an accountant. That's an art form, techne, logos. Logos is rational thinking or rational language. So technology is the rational language of art, or being able to describe how to do things. Well, that's fundamentally what technique is.

Ernest Chapman1:37 Technique, right? So that's connected to technique that I think of technique and music and martial arts everywhere, in any any kind of discipline, right?

Eric Busby1:45 And that's what technique is. It's technique, and it's technique. Think of it as like technique logos,

Ernest Chapman1:52 but logos, when I think of logos, I think of the divine word,

Eric Busby1:58 right, rational language and divine Word, John,

Ernest Chapman2:01 or the emanation John, one, one, right? Is he was the logos was the word is in the beginning, was the

Eric Busby2:07 word logos, right? And so man, that goes everywhere for me in my head. But that's the rational way of expressing language about and that's what the Greek word logos is about art or technique. So the technology guys are the guys that forever have existed that said, Hey, why are you putting the logs under the big boulder to roll it up the hill? We could make this thing called the wheel. I mean, I have to keep moving the logs, right? It's a better technique,

2:30 Efficiency as Its Own Entity

Ernest Chapman2:36 but I'm going to lose my job if we have wheels, right?

Eric Busby2:39 You will. You have to start making wheels now. And people are always afraid of that, of innovation. I mean, we have that happening big time right now with AI, but that's next. I think, when you think of like, how change happens and what that's obsessed with, what is techne obsessed with, is efficiency. Right? And efficiency becomes this entity all on its own that starts to want to control everything, and it's bigger than governments, it's bigger than businesses, it's bigger than economies,

Ernest Chapman3:15 bigger than governments, yeah, that's kind of scary, yeah, because if it's bigger than governments on a principled level, then how can it be governed?

Eric Busby3:26 Or does it govern itself? Or is it governing us? Yes. So Jacques a little, the French philosopher would say that. He said, It governs us. We work for it for efficiency. It is the it is the construct, the entity that is moving forward, with or without us, and we serve it. That was his whole premise. And, oh, man, that's a lot of reading, but it's, it's fun reading. It's stretches your mind, because he wrote that the 1950s 50s, yeah,

Ernest Chapman3:57 did you ever, I don't know, with a timeline of his life? Did you ever run it?

4:00 Os Guinness and the Question of Violence

Eric Busby4:01 Ever get to meet him? I met oz Guinness, who did meet him. And Oz is a great thinker. I asked Oz, and I think it was, I must have been like 1992 we're riding in my truck in California with this great philosopher right now. I pick up, and I said, oz, does it? Does it all just come down to violence? And he said, Oh, I hope not. I hope not. And we're talking about, you know, the world and all of its divisions right now, and how people think and everybody hates the other side, and that's this horrible reality that is around us. And does it come to violence? I mean, we see a lot of it. I don't like it. He said, it probably comes down to, can we have discourse? Can we have a civil, you know, like public square, where we can persuade one another, where we can talk about our ideas. And have other people either celebrate them or heckle us or whatever they're going to do, and say, No, that's not a good idea and kick him off the stage. Or, Wow, I really think that's worth considering and thinking about. That was his solution was, you know, having a civil discourse, having the public square.

Ernest Chapman5:20 Do you remember when AOL was called the Global Village? Oh, yeah, vaguely, I haven't thought about that. I remember getting these emails from Steve Case, and he would send everyone emails, because he could send you an email back then, you know. And it was the global village, and he had to wait 30 minutes for a black and white image to download, you know. But that was the global the idea was that we would all become closer across these distances. And then, you know, at one point, Twitter was considered the town square. Now it's X. There's been a lot of argument over, yeah, what that should look like, or does look like?

Eric Busby5:52 And, I mean, Reddit is kind of one of the last spots where you find honest opinion. Maybe, yeah, but somebody will figure out how to monetize, but who

Ernest Chapman6:00 governs it? So now Neil deGrasse Tyson, at one point, got in some hot water for basically discounting the value of philosophy in natural science. I don't remember the exact debate. I'm sure we could, like, pull it up or find there was, like, a love of wisdom. Discount the love of wisdom because, you know, it's about, I'm not going to try to regurgitate his argument. I mean, we could just look it up and figure it up and figure it out, but basically, what you just said actually makes me think it's philosophy is even more important than I already thought it was, that we need principled frameworks to know how to take the right actions and all the all the technical stuff is a sub set of a bigger set. Yeah, if we've got the philosophy part wrong and the principles wrong, we're going to build the wrong things.

Eric Busby6:50 Well, yeah. I mean, look what's happening with AI right now. Like, this week, what's happening with it yesterday, five minutes ago. Like, Oh, what happened while we're talking? You know,

Ernest Chapman6:58 what's your open claw doing right now? While you're over here, it's,

Eric Busby7:02 well, I don't trust it necessarily to work. When I'm not there, it'll make some weird mistake. No, what's happening is people are realizing at the non technical level. So CEOs and CFOs, who read the Wall Street Journal, saw the article on the front page a couple weeks ago that said, Claude code is the way to go. You can, you can do anything with it, anything, yeah. And you don't need engineers anymore, kind of article, yeah. And I think that's trickled into corporate America now. That article, where there are now experiments, like, what could we do with it? And people are discovering things like lovable. And lovable is a no code solution where you can just prompt an app into existence.

Ernest Chapman7:50 This all feels like first quarter 2025, to me, right? But that's because I'm in marketing, and I am my own company, and I've been on the edge of what you can do, watching the doing it, that's the watching them go, oh well, we've been using Microsoft copilot because we need a compliant AI solution inside of our big silo. And me thinking, Okay, have fun with that. And all of a sudden, you can inject Claude code into an Excel spreadsheet, and it can do better work, right than Microsoft. It's eating them alive from the inside out, right? But is there a danger?

Eric Busby8:22 Well, yeah, here's the so I did an experiment because my software engineers are like, looking at me, like, what's going on? Like, it can't do what I can do. Well, right now. Like, give it 10 minutes, let it watch you for 10 minutes, and it can do the thing you just did many, many times over, way faster than a human could do it, but you have to teach it. It's like having a junior dev that's doesn't know how to do it, and you're going to work with that junior Dev and say, Okay, we're going to build this now. Don't do that. Now, switch over here. Do it this way instead. And you're having to explain it takes a lot longer to write code when you're teaching somebody to write code, versus just give it to me. I'll just make it okay, we're done. So you can actually outperform the AI, if it's not been trained or not, doesn't know what to do, but as soon as you teach it that it's going to go much faster than you. Yeah, right. And so when the executives class starts saying, Wow, I could build anything I want. Now, they realized it. They start eliminating Junior product guys, they start eliminating junior devs. You only want the senior thinker there. Like, I just need a senior product guy that I just need a senior engineer who understands if it's making really bad choices. So you were asking about philosophy and if you have the right principles. Well, when all of that goes away and and, like, there's one button left on the internet, just one guy clicks it, and everything happens. The entire world runs. You just have to wake up like, like, I'm lost, right? And just keep pushing the button. Maybe that's what that was actually, um, you've

9:00 The One Button Left

Ernest Chapman9:54 decoded lost. How did that happen so fast?

Eric Busby9:57 Ernest, are you in AI, i. Yeah, am I real? Yeah, no. When, when that happens? I mean, that's not going to happen exactly like that, but when there's only a few buttons left and they're being pushed and the world is running, everybody's going to kind of that point understand. They need to understand what first principles are. They understand philosophy. They need to understand life at a level that they were in a kind of a cloud bubble. Didn't have to think about these things.

Ernest Chapman10:26 Do they know how to do that, though? I mean when, when? Most don't. So the convergence chart I've shared this with you where, you know, we have all human created text across the top, and you have the line that's approaching convergence of AI copy of everything humans have ever made. When that converges. You know, we've talked about this, what what is valuable right now is going to be in between those two lines. As it gets smaller and smaller, value decreases until everyone wins the lottery at the same time and has nothing to do, right? What happens then? What are we left with?

Eric Busby10:58 I hope you had the answer to because here's the thing I've been saying, Oh, you don't have the answer. I have to Ernest, what happens when I get all the earth money and I have my earth money and it's worth nothing? I've been telling a few people in my life. I'm going to ask Ernest, what do I buy with the earth money before it's not worth anything? Is it beans? Is it medical supplies? Is it like, at some level, like, this is economies that are threatened, right? I don't think people are. Maybe some are realizing that the ones that are kind of freaked out, and then they do what I do, start learning yoga and stuff.

11:30 The Ice Storm, Day Three

Ernest Chapman11:38 Well, that's, that's where I'm going with this that I kind of feel like there's been times in my life where the rug has been pulled and the only thing that was left was my relationship with myself, with God and with the people I love and who I am, and I had to then make sure that was cleaned up. You know, that's always a process. It's worth revisiting. What happens if that happens to 350 million people at the same time

Eric Busby12:05 we we saw what happened with the ice storm here. Power went out in Nashville, and it was in my neighborhood. We were out with power for eight days. On day three, there was a shortage of gas cans. The gas stations all up and down the road here ran out of gasoline, and people started becoming who they really were, like the veil had been removed. Kind people became very kind. Generous people became generous. People who are not kind or generous became more of that, not kind and not generous, and started treating people and yelling at people. I saw it with my own eyes. I thought, this is here we are in like apocalyptic ice storm, miniature mode of it's nothing like 350 million people losing their livelihood or their worth, their net worth, like is their net worth measured in dollars?

Ernest Chapman13:06 Well, I wonder about that investment. Maybe we invest now, and we invest in identity, and we invest in, Yes, God connected civilization all the way up and down the line, right?

Eric Busby13:19 Because that can't be taken away or can't efficiency. Can't take that away. What would you

Ernest Chapman13:25 do if you won the lottery and you never had to work again? What would you do?

Eric Busby13:30 I would call you say, Do I need beans or what? You know, I've asked those questions. I think most people ask that question in their head. It's not the things that I think most lottery winners would do, like buying things. I would clean up some things. You know, in my world, take care of things, make sure I'm not ending in ruin, you know, make sure that my family looks at that picture and says, Wow. Okay, good job, dad, and then I would probably do a lot of the things I'm doing right now. I would grab my camera and take pictures of people and capture them, and want to tell their story through my lens, knowing their real story, not just the surface level that the camera sees, but what's behind that I would continue to learn more about myself in this journey of yoga. Like the concept of radical self love is completely foreign to me, but I'm learning it. I kind of want to back it up to like, moderate self love or like I kind of like myself or appreciation, like I can appreciate me, but like, really loving me, seems like this non Christian idea. Why?

Ernest Chapman14:54 Well, why is that not a Christian idea? Well, you think about I was

Eric Busby14:57 asked a question not too long ago, what do you deserve? I and I said nothing, I don't deserve anything. I heard the I hear those words differently than most people who haven't had some kind of childhood trauma or bad situation, because I hear you're going to get what you deserve, and I don't want anything to do with the word deserve, okay, right? It's like it's anchored to that, anchored to that when I reframe it, though, as in what I actually deserve. What have i i Quickly go to, what have I earned? What have I earned that is due to me, not what do I deserve? Deserve? It seems like something that somebody else has to say, You deserve this. So when you think about I remember, I was in seminary in this Korean fellow student walked in, and the professor said, How are you doing? And he said, far better than I deserve. Because if the wages of sin is death, maybe that's what I deserve, and I don't deserve anything other than death, right? That's where that comes from. So saying I deserve something or something is owed me, that's what kind of makes me think that's kind of a traditionally non Christian.

15:30 What Do You Deserve?

Ernest Chapman16:12 Thought when I was in the fifth grade, I was an altar boy. At one point, I thought I might want to be a priest, because I just really loved the divine experience. But I had a moment of like, well, wait a second, why would an all loving God send us to hell for making a technical bookkeeping error, for not believing in a transactional blood sacrifice in the exact prescribed manner that is linguistically correct, that doesn't sound like it almost sounds like a blasphemous statement, like we're limiting God down to what some version of ourselves would do to each other, versus the infinite, loving creator that provides, that provided everything that wants the best for us. My reaction to it was very different from someone else in theology class at Catholic school that that really internalized that sense of shame as a spiritually validated shame. It sounds like you've done some work on that.

Eric Busby17:16 Well, I've recently felt shame for the first time in my life as a concept guilt. Yeah, very familiar with guilt, but shame is a that's an interesting word.

Ernest Chapman17:28 How do you distinguish between those? Because I might have even used the wrong word.

Eric Busby17:33 What do you I was right, but I like the the shame, and this is very personal for me, but I don't mind sharing that shame that I feel is right now paired to needing people in my life that are helping me, like, why can't I solve this on my own? Yeah, and so it's not the kind of shame that comes from a sin or a mistake or not doing something right. It's the kind of shame that comes from Pride right to say I'm a little prideful. I should be able to fix this myself. It's kind of up to me. I should have the energy that that can help me through some of the big issues in my life and what's wrong with me that I have to have other people that are helping me, you know, therapists. There's nothing wrong with that. I know that in my head, but in my heart, I identified that I thought that is what shame is like. I should be

Ernest Chapman18:29 different the act of saying it, it's interesting. This is a really this feels like an interesting argument for why certain kinds of therapy sends people in loops. Because if that feeling is still in your body, even though you're consciously communicating it in an eloquent manner. Then what is the work that takes out the trash so it's not there anymore?

18:30 The Body Keeps the Score

Eric Busby18:55 I can go there big time for me that the trash was a knot in my back, and it was a big knot, and my back has chronic back problems, pain like forever, my whole life. And my wife gave me the book The Body Keeps the Score, and she said, you might want to look at this. And I we've been married for 37 years, so she's known me a while. I flipped through the book, and I started reading it, and it's pretty technical, you know, kind of medical type book, and I couldn't put it down. It was 350, pages, small print. Read it, told it I was done, cover to cover. But wow, that's me. My body has kept the score so the shame stuff, any kind of pain. And I thought, oh, I need to go. Just talk to my wife. We were in the backyard near the bees, and I said, you know, a couple years ago, I would have told. You, I have zero emotional baggage. She laughed pretty hard. Are you kidding me? She goes, you have, like, an entire

Ernest Chapman20:10 carousel at the airport Library of Alexandria, of all the things that happened to you,

Eric Busby20:14 like, so you're saying, I'm like, baggage claim five. And she goes, yeah, pretty much I go. Then I know what to do, because I, when I figure things out, or I'm trying to figure things out, I don't waste time and ruminate. I'm like, I know what to do. I'm going straight to oversized baggage, because if I have a whole carousel of bags which I need to come back to and address, I probably have something in oversized baggage. And I metaphorically walk to oversized baggage, and I'm like, Oh, they're there. No, I'm not talking about that. And I kind of, I regularly have massage therapy that's been a big part of me growing and learning about how my body works. And I was laying on the table, and pretty much every time the elbow comes up the spine to that spot on my back where there's a knot that cannot be worked out, she stopped moving. She just put her elbow there and lean in really hard, and I didn't know like what to do right then, except I knew that, metaphorically, I had gone to oversized baggage, and I knew what to do right then. And I I sighed, I cried, and I said goodbye to my dad. I the way I did it. You know how you think really fast. I went into his bedroom. I saw eight year old little me there, and I said, Come here. Give me your hand. I grabbed his hand. He looks up at me, and I just said goodbye to my dad, and we walked out, and little me says, Hey, can we smile again, and I'm like, what is happening? This happens with her elbow right in that knot. I do all that boom, she moves off of that knot. It's not there anymore. It's been nine months. I don't have that knot in my back. What in the world, the mind body connection is so real there because my body was holding that it was holding that pain. It was hold. I had not told a soul about this. My wife, nobody for 50 years. I hadn't mentioned it, because I'm strong enough, you know, I can handle my problems. I can make this work. But I was done. I couldn't I. I went inside, started learning about my body, keeping the score and what that means, and then I had that massive release of emotional weight. I have been on a very different journey of revisiting things I learned when I was in college, relearning things, starting yoga, because I'm realizing, hey, this, this container in my body, actually is a very important part of me, and I it's teaching me to trust me, and I don't Trust me. Why would I trust me? I was the kid that got us, like, in that situation, right? Like, but I am trustworthy and to myself, instead of just like trying to do that for others, going down that journey and learning all that stuff about me, and that's my story. Everybody has their own story, but doing that work has prepared me for all this. You know, crazy AI revolution happening in 2026 by business people. I'm so calm about it.

21:00 Saying Goodbye to Dad on the Table

Ernest Chapman23:52 That's really interesting. There's this stretch across very different domains that you're in you're like by locating your awareness, yeah? And it's, it's, it has practical impact in all these areas. I mean, I'm thinking too about the the wounded achiever who has to do everything, or has to, has to be the, you know, right? And be at the top of the pile, that that can drive a lot of success, yeah, and can get you to a point in life and business, in the work layer, in that middle layer, if you think God, civilization, work in the middle, family, self, at the bottom, where you can be winning at work and losing in other areas. And I'm not saying you were losing another area.

23:52 Winning at Work, Losing Everywhere Else

Eric Busby24:41 I mean, I think I have that on one of my business cards, but getting at work losing in other areas.

Ernest Chapman24:46 But yet, it almost feels like, for some people, there's a sequence to it where, all right, once we've won at work enough, we've proved something to ourselves, and now we can breathe for a minute and go, Okay, let's explore all this other stuff. And. Mean, photography, right? Philosophy, theology, baseball, right, yoga, and you're still winning at work.

Eric Busby25:11 It actually powers it, no, it makes work win. Makes it better. Yeah, you do better. Why did I

Ernest Chapman25:17 do this the whole time? Yeah, but that breakthrough can could be an example for others, too. It could be something that people model after, you know. So I love sharing that kind of stuff.

Eric Busby25:27 I know that's thanks for letting me share that story. It's the deepest, most personal thing about me is that breakthrough, saying goodbye to my dad, the reaction of the people around me, some don't handle that well. They don't want they have their own stuff that they don't want to I was

Ernest Chapman25:42 thinking about the I was holding my dad's hand the moment he died. I was 13 years old and and so I can identify with that and the pain that that gives you as a child. You know our stories are different, but for me, you know the pain of that, it took decades for me to get to the point where I feel like I've really worked through a lot of the stuff that landed in me, right, like shrapnel when it happened, you know? Yeah, and I had to, I had to figure out how to replace his presence with my actions and parts of my identity that had to try to be him for a time, a little bit out of sequence too.

Eric Busby26:28 Yeah, that's, you know, I don't even have a sequence because I just, I stopped, I I stopped in that kind of growth, yeah. And developed coping mechanisms that ran my life. Some of them are really good.

Ernest Chapman26:54 Okay, what's the best one?

26:55 Reassigning the Hyper-Achiever

Eric Busby26:55 Hyper achiever. Yeah. Hyper achieve that one inside of me that's really good. It's good at doing that. Yeah, and I had to tell my hyper achiever within please have a seat for you moment. And he's looking at me like, Are you firing me or what? Because I like, I can get out of this. I know how. I know lawyers. You know,

Ernest Chapman27:14 I can go to law school. I could be

Eric Busby27:16 and as I kind of settle down into, like, really being, really, just being not a human, doing a human being. For the first time, I'm reassigning that guy to other things, like, I'm not firing him, like, I want you to achieve other things, and I'm going to use that drive that you can have with it. I have, I can be very driven. I want to apply it to other things. I'm still figuring out what those are, but it doesn't have to be the same thing that it was always trying to achieve in order to avoid the box in the corner labeled dad, you know, and my dad, he beat me horribly in that very spot on my back. That's what caused that. That memory was held right there. And having empathy towards somebody that hurt you is a difficult thing to do, to try to understand what would cause somebody to do that, to hurt a child like that, and then really kind of exploring that and doing the emotional work, putting playlists together on Spotify. They're amazing that take me through that whole season of transforming that, or that breakthrough season, really, and then kind of not putting it away, not denying it, but organizing it into a catalog of things on the shelf that I can reference anytime I want. And I had, kind of, emotionally, three or four months of just kind of doing that, and then put I said, You know what? I don't need to look at this anymore. It's not the same as saying it doesn't exist or I don't. It was, I just don't need to. I've kind of done it and not too long ago, so maybe after another few months, I was thinking about that, and I thought, I want to actually do want to look at one of the volumes over there, look at it, pull it off the shelf. But not from a scared, emotional kind of fear point of view, but from a cerebral, intellectual point of view. Want to look at it, at the evidence, and say, was that bad or was it good? I don't know. Was it bad? Like, let me just think about it, not feel it. And I was looking through the chapter metaphorically, of course, of Oh yeah, Dad beating me, yeah, that was bad. And I put it back without the weight of the emotion of it, processing that stuff, doing it right, is completely worth it, because it lets you have, like kung fu mind, like water is out of me, and now I can breathe. I can be I can not have to. Have an agenda. I can just sit and breathe. Isn't that great? I mean, what a silly thing. The the Eric of two years ago would have said, Sit and breathe. Wow. What an achievement, man. You gonna do next?

Ernest Chapman30:16 So I met the Eric of four years ago. Five years ago, yeah, when we first met, I met a hyper achiever that was intimidating, actually, in a cool way. I love people like that. One thing that attracted me to you right away, just wanna tell the story how we because there's some really interesting stuff in here

30:30 Name Target Marketing and the Squirrel

Eric Busby30:35 as you, as you, it's completely opposite of what I've been sharing right now. Yeah, it's a

Ernest Chapman30:39 totally different world. And I love it, because I like to jump around. So I was SVP marketing for hemp, hemp supply chain company that had, like, a white label solution for CBD, companies that wanted to sell extremely high quality products. And so the company I was working for would make these, these products incredible, like hemp, CBD, legal, and, you know, all that stuff. And the problem was we couldn't advertise on the internet because, you know, Facebook would ban you, and Google would ban you. And it was like, I figured out. I found this company called ad critter. I'm like, oh, that's an interesting name and logo and a brand guy. So I'm looking at that. I'm like, that's cool. It's like a little squirrel, you know, like finding finding a nut I was imagining is gonna find my customers. I don't know if you came up with that, but it got my attention and and I went on the website, and I started chatting with this little chat bot, and I started asking, like, Hey, I have this problem. Can you solve it? You know, can I run ads for CBD contract manufacturing? It's like a B to B thing. This is a very small target. We're not selling like retail, right? There's like a small group of people that actually own companies that were selling their we're making their products for them. So somehow someone, not you, got this inquiry and started a little email conversation, and it was like, we might be able to put something together. Come in and talk to Eric, and I got invited to an in person meeting, and you're the president of the company. How the hell did I get in the room with you? But a week later, I'm sitting in your office, and I asked you, Hey, man, not only do I want to do this CBD advertising thing, have you ever heard of name target marketing? Yeah. So tell me about name target marketing. Yeah.

Eric Busby32:30 I mean, I invented name target marketing. We had a trademark, all that stuff. How did I get in the room with that guy? Yeah, that that was fun. I was blown away when you said that, because we're sitting right like this across my desk and you're like, what I really like to know about is named target marketing. I'm like, what like is there who's watching me? This is crazy talk. Well, nobody walks in and asked me about something that I made that's, you know, hard to find,

Ernest Chapman32:55 hard to find, but it was a fantasy of mine for years, because I saw something about it a long time ago. And so how did you come up with that? And what is it named?

Eric Busby33:07 Target marketing is being able to reach an individual with advertising so you can market to a person, so they're they named target, and we're going to market to them. And you know how that works. There's two different methodologies within it. One is called transfusive audience segmentation, and the other one is called dissociative audience segmentation. And they're, they're the transfusive one, you build like 10 audiences, and you put the person in one of them, and then you rotate that person through to the different audiences. And you watch how they how the analytics resonate, almost like watching how a planet that goes around a star makes a star wobble, you know, like gravity. You watch these things, and you can see, oh, I'm as the person seeing the message. Who's seeing the message? The other one dissociative. You just put, let's say you're, you're trying to, I'll make it not what it was, because it was generals and pentagon. Maybe I'll make it. Let's say you want to go after the CEO of a hospital that's in Florida. So make an audience of 10,000 people that are all female college students in Seattle, plus that guy. If any of the analytics come back saying that a male saw the ad, you go, it might be him. If it's two things, it's like, oh, a male in Florida that probably is him. He's the only one in the audience like that, right? That one's a little easier to understand. Just takes a lot of money.

Ernest Chapman34:38 So you got to, you got to basically light 99.9% of your spend on fire to get the point 00, 1% that's hitting that one

Eric Busby34:46 it only works when the you gotta have a good budget, yeah, and when the transaction value is very high, yeah.

Ernest Chapman34:52 Cuz I would imagine your your Return on Ad Spend would be a mess if you were selling a $20 candle.

Eric Busby34:58 No. So, you know, I mean, if. Florida defense contractors show up. That's who shows up.

Ernest Chapman35:03 So, how did that go? So, like, I guess you there's, you can't say everything about it. That's fine. But, like, what can what kind of story is there about? Like, all right, I built this thing. How did you come up with it? What was the use case? Like, what?

35:16 From Content Spiders to People Spiders

Eric Busby35:16 Oh, how I make it in the first place? Yeah. Well, the use case, if we kind of stumbled into it, because we I had built spiders that had crawled the web to find continuing education content, or, like accountants, they call it CPE, or medical doctors, it's the other continuing ed. It turns out nobody cares about CE at all. It doesn't matter. I want my pilot to care about his continuing education. I want my doctor to care about but they don't, because it's like traffic school to all professionals. So I had built this thing to crawl and find all of this content, this pretty much Mom and Pop content, all over the internet, and built a like a Trip Advisor with a ratings and review system for that content so they can see the best stuff doesn't matter they don't like it anyway. And I thought, wow, what are we going to do now? And I was trying to mark market the one for accountants to the 635,000 CPAs in the country. And the cost per click was like, 12 bucks, 15 bucks. You know, it was crazy on the keywords that they for accountants, yeah, I'm like, times 635,000 of them. This is not gonna this is not affordable. So I said, What if I take the spider that crawls the web for content, and instead of crawling it for content, we crawled for people and found, take their professional information and find their personal information. They'll probably get busted by saying this on your podcast. But anyway, taking that personal information, marrying those two together, and then you finding them on social media, finding them in their own

Ernest Chapman36:54 I mean, there's a million companies that do that now, yeah, but you were, like, way ahead of the crowd. Nobody was doing that. Nobody was doing that. I mean, that's been commoditized at this point, where there's just API's that just plug into whatever, you just log in and 20 bucks a month and you can pull whatever you want.

Eric Busby37:10 Yeah, yeah. It wasn't that way when I had to write the stuff to go crawl the web, and then that, when we realized nobody cared about CE content, did well. Time to do something different, and we created name target marketing. And that was a fun ride. Did that when that started having issues, because other people eventually start emulating you, and when they do, you have to innovate, not emulate you have to get ahead of them. Just do the next thing. Don't worry about it. Let them have it. I went home, and that's when ad critter was I looked out the window, saw a squirrel running around, found a nut, said project code name ad critter, and it was a joke, and now we have a neon sign with a squirrel on the front of the building, and it's crazy.

Ernest Chapman37:54 Yeah, it's funny how jokes sometimes become serious.

Eric Busby37:57 Yeah, it's been that's a wonderful journey, you know, but that's, and that's work world, right? Yeah, work world going

Ernest Chapman38:04 really well. But, you know, as I'm sitting in ERIC five or six years ago office, I had no idea that I was sitting in the presence of someone that I could go into all these other worlds with. And one of the, one of the objectives I have for this podcast is to, is to open those layers in these conversations with people that maybe are only even known by some people for the layer that they're most familiar.

Eric Busby38:26 I mean, anybody listening to this that knows me, they might go what? I did not know that exactly. I did not know that about Eric, yeah.

Ernest Chapman38:33 I mean, there's 500 pounds of honey a year, right? There's always something that ties it all together. And so one of the earlier questions I wanted to ask you, that I want to come back to, is, what drove your interest in philosophy and in the theology of technology at a young age? Well, what led

38:54 Arguing With Plato at Sixteen

Eric Busby38:54 that it started. I mean, so my dad was, he worked for IBM, and so I was always around technology. I was a little kid crawling under computer floors and pulling cables and hooking up mainframes, you know, because that's all they had in the 70s, was big building sized computers. So I was always around technology. And then I was I started college at age 16, and I'm sitting in philosophy one a so the first one of the first classes I took first semester, and Thomas P O'Carroll was the professor. He made me so mad. I was like, I do not agree with anything he's saying. And I was 16, right? So pretty arrogant. But I was constantly talking in the class just telling them like that. You know, you're just you are. That's not correct. That's not how you would think about that. Ethically, I was just like doing that. I don't even know what I was. My position was, I was just argumentative, and I decided also I checked out the computer science program, and that was pretty lame. I. So I was like, I'm not majoring in computers because those guys don't know anything either.

Ernest Chapman40:05 I love how you're saying the computer science was lame, and look at what you're doing

Eric Busby40:09 and but it was and there I never I only took one computer class ever, because I just figured it out. But philosophy, I was like, that's hard that I don't understand, like I'm upset about it at a visceral level, because I didn't like what I was hearing. And I need to know more. I need to go get a PhD in Psych and philosophy and come back here and tell that guy why he's wrong. It was like the vengeance to her, you know, philosophy. And I, of course, that's not my that's not what I did, but I did spark an interest in learning that stuff, and it was the hardest material to understand, especially with a young mind, like reading Aristotle, reading the Plato's Republic. You know, is when you're a teenager, is very hard. I couldn't get past certain pages. I'd have to go back and read it again. Like, what is he What is he talking about? This is so hard. Like, it shouldn't it's bothering me that I can't figure out what it means.

Ernest Chapman41:16 That's, that's what I'm looking for. That's it was bothering me. But someone else would have seen that and said, Yeah, whatever. I'm gonna go play football or I'm gonna go,

Eric Busby41:26 No, I just play video games over and over and try it again tomorrow. And what's that? And I kept it's this stat.

Ernest Chapman41:34 That's the driver something's driving you that someone else would have given up. You didn't give up?

Eric Busby41:40 I yeah, I just, I didn't. And some of those pages, it took a very long time for me to get, of course, like decades

Ernest Chapman41:51 teenager reading Aristotle and Plato. I mean, come on, yeah, I

Eric Busby41:55 had a BBS. You know, those were old before websites and board system that you on my computer. You like HyperCard. Little before that, you had to dial my modem. And then if you did, you would get a text that was like, here's my welcome page, and I had a menu that you could choose things. It was called Plato's Academy. I was 14, wow, when I made that, and I made a t shirt out of it that said Plato's Academy. But oh my gosh, the

Ernest Chapman42:24 part of you that encounters that obstacle and then gets your bullhorns out and says, No, I'm punching through it.

42:33 Chief Techne Officer

Eric Busby42:33 It's fight or flight, and I choose fight almost every time, yeah, and I why? I don't know, I run to those things, and I don't, I persist. I stay on it, and I have it a lot of energy behind that, always, and so that being a way of living and understanding like, what does it mean to pursue that and get my degree in philosophy and then go beyond that and get a theological education and learn more while the same time thinking about techne and and I'm doing that academic track while I'm building a career as a CTO, yeah, that's interesting. So I'm over here doing this hard, philosophical, theological stuff, and I'm building a career

Ernest Chapman43:24 in technology, Chief techne officer, right?

Eric Busby43:27 And I'm going, this is kind of fun. Like, whoa, techne, yeah. And I've shared that with people over the years. They just look at me like, I'm you know, okay, he's doing that again. But I think the the driver behind that is what I don't have disrupted right now. This is the interesting part. You would think, Oh, now I have a big emotional breakthrough, and now I'm pursuing yoga and doing things in a different modality, that it breaks this, but it doesn't break that I can still do those things and achieve and stay determined, stay on it. There's some big disconnects for me sometimes, like, just like sitting still and meditating. I'm not doing that. I'm not but I am pursuing things like yoga with the same kind of determination, yeah.

Ernest Chapman44:21 How does a hyper achiever with a degree in philosophy and theology and theology quiet their mind when their mind is one of the things that has gotten them to the level of success that they're at?

Eric Busby44:35 You face fear is how you do that. You have to say, I'm what if I didn't think right now, and I'm terrified of that thought, and so let me face that. And so you sit with your legs crossed on your yoga mat, with your hands on your knees, and my hands down on my knees. You know grounding feels very comfortable in that moment, turning your hands over like OH. Thumbs up. It's terrifying because it means I have to receive something. I'm not driving that. Wow. I have to receive something. And why do I feel like I need to receive something that shouldn't be I should be the guy that determined doing the light up and flip my hands back over, back down. Oh, that feels better. Now I am in control, right? Of being on the ground, anything above that, like receiving or feeling love or all these higher functions within are scary,

45:30 Southern Baptist Yoga

Ernest Chapman45:38 but theology, it's the study of God. God, right? Is that not a preparation for receiving God completely?

Eric Busby45:49 And I know all the right things to say, by the way, like I know I

Ernest Chapman45:53 want to go deeper than that. And, you know, yeah, I know all the right you acknowledged.

Eric Busby45:57 Oh yes, there it is. You know, that's the right Christian theological answer. And, man, he passes these,

Ernest Chapman46:02 yeah, but now you're talking about doing yoga. And I don't know. I mean, some people might might question that, you know, like, what do you open yourself up to? Call it Southern Baptist yoga. Southern Baptist. I interviewed a Gandhi Republican the other day, senator from Nashville, Tennessee that lives in Washington, and state senator. And then came back, there's some interesting overlaps. I love things that are opposite, like Gandhi Republican. I like that definitely confused everybody.

Eric Busby46:28 Yeah, I like confusing in that way. I like weird, but yeah, what were you asked me?

Ernest Chapman46:32 Well, so I was interviewing someone earlier, and she said she's yoga instructor, and she teaches yoga teachers. Christie Lynn Hicks, you're going to love her interview. And she talks about yoga as a technology, and it is not a religion. It is not a part of a religion, and then, in fact, it is part of a different set of philosophies, and that yoga is a philosophy and a technology. It is not a part of the corpus of Hinduism or Vedanta. Those are different things. And when she told me that, I was like, wow, never heard that before. That totally makes sense.

Eric Busby47:08 Well, I've had people ask me, How does yoga integrate or work with the Christian faith that you have? And I say, 100% it's not a problem. And they're like, looking at me, like, What do you mean? It's not a

Ernest Chapman47:19 problem because they think it's a false religion,

Eric Busby47:22 perhaps, or they just don't, or they've heard other people say

Ernest Chapman47:25 that, what is yoga? What do you describe it as? So Well, I mean, the

Eric Busby47:29 way I framed that, for that person, they asked me that was, it's the first commandment, you know, don't have any other gods before me. So if it subordinates to that, we're cool. Like, okay, you know it works. Just don't before is an interesting word. What is a God? And, yeah, don't before me. That means there's something behind that.

Ernest Chapman47:49 Well, what is God and what what is you could turn a lot of things into a God, right? And why is that plural in the Old Testament? Don't have any gods before me, before me, but there's only one God. There's only one God, and that's the person who's speaking, yeah.

Eric Busby48:05 What's that about? So I mean, when we think about that, when we think about your other the first question you asked about that, and I cut you off, what is yoga? Oh, yoga, yeah, to you, it's new to me. It's fully exploring who I am, physically and mentally and spiritually and emotionally, and being that as best I can pursuing being fully me without all of the other things that I have attached to me so that I can then experience the world differently, then I can move through the world differently, with more intention, with a kinder spirit. I like the book. I've been reading a lot of it, you know, I've been reading the ancient texts around it, and I'm thinking about violence, the question I had for oz Guinness and how yoga is non violent. So this pacifist Yogi Eric little different than maybe a few years ago, but it's so peaceful to encounter the rough things that are around from a very still and calm and relaxed point of

Ernest Chapman49:27 view, how does that change the way you show up in these other areas

Eric Busby49:35 I'm learning to be and am more intentional about The things I'm doing. Instead of just kind of bouncing around and doing whatever I want, it's like, oh, I need to do this. And when I do it, I should achieve these things. Achieve and I should be these things when I'm there. Like, Smiling. Smiling is really powerful. If I don't, then. People might not know that I'm actually quite happy, right? If I'm I've probably got a frown on my face is because I'm thinking about something hard, like just be aware. So I think it's I won't be doing a standing split anytime soon with my head, lifting my leg over my head, but I it's important to for me right now to learn how my body's connected to my mind. I've been in my mind my whole life. I live there, right? And the journey down here to my heart is like, Whoa. That's a couple 1000 miles.

Ernest Chapman50:38 And this has all been recently opened up nine months by the healing that you were describing with your father. Yeah, saying goodbye,

Eric Busby50:49 yeah, because that was the the blockage, that was the barrier. I never wanted to say anything about that. Yeah, it I, I think that. Why did I choose then? Why did that happen? It was about a week after my youngest turned 18,

Ernest Chapman51:08 right? So that's interesting, overlap.

Eric Busby51:11 I hit the finish line tape, right? Yeah, I got there. Did it? I didn't hurt her, or my son, either one, I didn't do that, and then it's like I finished the marathon. Now, what?

Ernest Chapman51:27 Wow, putting everyone else first?

Eric Busby51:32 Yeah, I still want to do that. I don't want to put me first at anything. I just don't desire I don't want to do that. But I know that doing that is putting my own oxygen mask on first right, like it's actually better for the other people if I take care of me versus just not.

51:48 The 40-Year Through-Line

Ernest Chapman51:48 You mentioned the full circle at one point. There's a full circle between where you started with Technos and philosophy Philosophia, and where you are now, with applying first principles thinking to running an AI first tech company, right, with a 40 year ramp into that, with a whole lot of just wild rabbit holes in between, right? What's it feel like? What's that, if you sort of reflect on the whole journey, what, what is really happening here? Wow.

Eric Busby52:29 I feel like the the threat, the through line there, all the way through, is related to or maybe actually contextualizing it all for other people, like, I've always been involved in helping other people understand what that means, like what all the things that I've seen like when email came out, that was a time when the internet happened, when social media came on, when we had streaming, when We have mobile, when we have there's so many things that that have happened, API's, that was amazing, object oriented programming, that was a big deal. But every time those things happen along that journey, I've been someone who helps the others around me interpret what that would mean, either by teaching it to them, like the skill or explaining how we would use it. And it's gotten more macro, like, it's not, I'm not coaching on hands on keyboard stuff. Now it's not about that. It's now thinking about, Oh, the biggest innovation, the biggest thing we've seen is AI. It's all those things and more times order of magnitude. It's like crazy big. And the way it's changing things, people are just now starting to go, Well, wait a minute, like we if we don't all have jobs, what is universal basic income anyway? Is it good? Can we make it universal? High income? Because that'd be cool,

Ernest Chapman54:01 or is universal, zero income, but nothing costs anything, right?

Eric Busby54:05 Well, that said that, right? Elon interview said, what imagine when you could get anything you want. It doesn't cost you anything, just ask for it.

Ernest Chapman54:12 I mean, I think that scares me, because so many people I've so if we go into this to the work layer and the civilization layer, the you know, and I've been like this, and am like this in some ways, we get a lot of our identity from the things we do. We are human doers, not human beers. And I'm, I'm with you on shifting into that higher level of thinking, but I also recognize I'm not always there. And can, can hundreds of millions of people do it all at once, and it's not even their idea, and they don't even have this frame to think in. They're just like, What is going on here?

54:59 Human Being vs Human Doing

Eric Busby54:59 Yeah, because. Is that they don't want to think about it. I think maybe they have the capacity, but they don't want to

Ernest Chapman55:06 think about it. I didn't want to think about covid When I was stuck in my house, but I still couldn't go anywhere, because no one would even let me in, because everyone was everything was locked up at one point, there's a point where it doesn't matter if you want to think about it or not. Are we going to if we get to that point where I'm going with this question is kind of piggybacking off your idea of helping other people. I feel like there's a group of people right now that see around corners, that are in privileged positions to understand what's coming, that love humanity, that love our families and our communities and our civilization and want it to not suffer. What can we do to help people navigate the chaos that's coming?

Eric Busby55:55 I think, helping them understand that the doing that you do is not your identity, like trying to get away from that, like, don't, don't associate so much with the thing, because if the thing's not there, you're gonna have to face the fact I got I gave a talk to it was, I was probably, like, 23 years old, very young. A bunch of pastors in Southern California asked me to come talk

Ernest Chapman56:20 to them when you were 23 Yeah, you come talk to us, not the other way around, right?

Eric Busby56:25 And they wanted to know about technology and how that's affecting the next generation. So that's why they brought me in.

Ernest Chapman56:34 What year was this in? Oh,

Eric Busby56:37 had to be in the mid 80s, somewhere in there,

Ernest Chapman56:44 car phones. Remember car phones? Yeah, antenna.

Eric Busby56:49 Curtis, antenna, man, that guy's got a car phone. Yeah, somewhere in there, maybe late 80s. And they asked me, like, what does technology mean? What's going to happen for the next generation? What's that mean for the church, for the church? And I thought, wow, now, now that's the question. I said, you know, do you guys have a dog and they're looking like we invited the wrong guy? I just

Ernest Chapman57:13 want to play with your dog. You got your dog. How many you

Eric Busby57:16 guys have dogs? You know, that's what programmers are going to want. Is a dog, because a dog is real. The dog has needs. The dog has to eat. You have to walk it. You have to pick up after it, and it likes you sometimes matter. Bark at you, might protect you. There's a lot of things a dog does. It's completely natural to have a dog around. But these worlds that we create with software, with programming, they're not always real. And so what you've got to think about is what happens when a bunch of people this was, this is that long ago, I remember when they've constructed their worlds that they live in, right? But they actually live in the real world where there's a dog. How do we connect those two things when you're, like, your VR headset now, right? Like, how does that work? When your actual dog walks up to you, you know, you have to take off the virtual world. So I think that, you know, if you're attached to this virtual world, this created world is a thing that's actually taking over the dog world, right? The real world of jobs. And I go to work, everybody's asking, what jobs are safe from Ai? I think funeral director, that's probably pretty safe. It's great. I don't want a robot funeral director in my life. I think service jobs or, you know, everybody says that, but really, I mean, the guy that comes and fix the plumbing, the robot that comes and fixes the plumbing, I mean, it doesn't matter. He's under the house. He works in the middle of the night. He gets it done. I don't want some of that. Nobody wants all of that, right? But one of my kids had said, AI is going to crash. I'm like, what? Like? What makes you say that? Well, people are not wanting it anymore, and if they don't use it at the highest level, then the amount of money that's being invested in these data centers, it doesn't make sense anymore, and so they'll pull back on that, and it'll,

59:17 Deleting Our Way Back to a Real Candle

Ernest Chapman59:17 it'll retail use case can fluctuate. But this is a dual use tech that has a military they don't realize it's all around. You're using it because your tax dollars are paying for and black budgets are paying for the real use case, which is that it's us or China. Pick one. Yeah, we're just a little layer of dirt on top of that big ball. Yeah, but I hear you about what you're saying with people like not being as attracted to it in different ways. I'm thinking about how user interfaces, you know, Steve Jobs, this whole philosophy of deleting features. What if? What if the convergence is when we see. Actually unplug because, you know, the the newer tools are like a little thing that goes on your ear that doesn't even have a screen, yeah, and you talk to it, and it talks to you, and it gives you whatever you need. You know, Elon's theory about, oh, you're just gonna talk to your phone. It's gonna give you stuff, and there's no computer, and there's no it's just an end point. And, right, you know, edge node on a honest, some other thing. If, what if we delete our way back to the real world with UI, UX design, so that, well, all we're left with is this moment, and these candles, by the way, these candles are on the show because they're real. It's a real it's not a fake candle. There's not a fake candle. You can feel it, yeah, what

Eric Busby1:00:41 do you think real it? That's right, that's important.

Ernest Chapman1:00:44 This, this toast is real. I mean, what? What do you think about that angle? And I'm not even saying it in a bad way, just like, maybe we're just moving into a future where we delete features until there is no user interface in any kind of anything.

Eric Busby1:00:57 The one button, yeah, the one button, the guy pushes and lost.

1:01:00 What Endures: Character and Relationships

Ernest Chapman1:01:00 But if there's one guy pressing the one button, then we're back to sitting around a fire, talking to each other, right?

Eric Busby1:01:07 So what is left is character, personal character and relationships, like I think that's what's left. That's and those are the things that endure. Those are the things we take to heaven. They're the only things we take to heaven, our character and our relationships. Everything else is not important. So, wow, yeah, let's work on those things. So how do I prepare for AI apocalypse, or whatever we want to call it, or just the future, or the big move, the revolution. Work on character. Work on relationships. Invest in relationships. Invest in your character. Those are the things that are going to matter and that you really it's a difficult thing. It's not easy. Those are not super easy. Relationships can be messy. You know, how do you do that?

Ernest Chapman1:02:03 Well, it's also easy to run away from things. And, you know, incentives drive outcomes. And, you know, we met in the work layer, right? And we just jumped around all the other layers, talking about relationships. That's going to be family, identity, community. How do we optimize those layers? Now the work layer is still working right? What I'm talking about is and maybe, maybe it won't fall apart, you know? Maybe it'll just be different. That's fine. I know a lot of people that say I'm very wrong about that. Yeah, it's fine. Maybe they're right, maybe we're wrong, I hope so. If we're wrong, this has been really interesting conversation, but that's fine. But I'm still trying to think, well, let's pretend like none of

Eric Busby1:02:43 this is not gonna it's not gonna happen. Doesn't matter. Okay, the other domains, we still wanna optimize for these things. That's right.

Ernest Chapman1:02:49 So what am I working for?

Eric Busby1:02:52 I saw an atheist and a priest when I was in CCD class, when I was a kid. CCD, yeah, the Catechism, okay, Catholic Stuff. Yeah, he did that too, yeah. And I argue with him the whole time. No, no, they were on this old VCR, or film. I don't know what it was on. You can't argue with the TV. Smart. Yes, very smart. And it was a somebody thought about and a

Ernest Chapman1:03:13 priest, oh, Eric's coming in, put on, give him the VCR.

Eric Busby1:03:16 Do not, don't go live. Do not engage. Go live. I remember that meeting last month, and the at the end, the debate coach or debate facilitator said, Okay, final closing statements, and the atheist said that, I'm sure that there's no God. And the priest said, Well, I'll take this approach. If I'm right, I'll know it, and if he's right, he won't.

Ernest Chapman1:03:49 Wow, that's smart.

Eric Busby1:03:52 Yeah, it was kind of smart. So I the

Ernest Chapman1:03:53 other that atheist has a lot of faith, way

Eric Busby1:03:57 more than an agnostic person, right, right? I mean, that it takes a tremendous amount

Ernest Chapman1:04:01 of faith. I would say that's a religious level of faith. It's

Eric Busby1:04:03 proving a negative. It's it's a fool's errand, but logically. But anyway, I don't mean disrespect to people who consider themselves atheists,

Ernest Chapman1:04:11 but no, I respect the faith of the atheist, but it's faith, but I don't have that much faith. It's a lot of faith. I have enough faith to believe in God. I don't have enough faith to think that he's not, I know that he's not real.

Eric Busby1:04:24 That's yeah, I don't have the Pascal inside that, right? You can't think that big. But the other domains, okay, of life, let's assume there is no AI revolution. Let's assume everything just cooks along and ski that was down the road. We're happy. Still. All stuff we want. The other pieces are still very important, because they are going to endure into eternity, and the only things that go there so like having that character in relationships, like doing that work is very worthwhile, because we're going to spend more time in that. A side of eternity than on this side, like I've got 100 years. Maybe that's nothing to the concept of eternity. Like, if I better make sure I'm doing the things that matter there

Ernest Chapman1:05:13 and doing the things that matter here, that will carry over, right?

Eric Busby1:05:18 So I have my group of five, seven and 10 people in my life that I they're like concentric circles, and my, my group of five are the people that I can't scare with my story. You're one of my five people. I can say, you don't bottom out like I can say things to you, and you go, Yeah, whoa. Okay, yeah, not you know, you can see the warning. You see the doors, door shut. They're like, yeah, stop talking now. Like you can't go get me out. Yeah, and people who love me, and so I have different relationships that I'm mapping out, that I want to invest in and that I need to invest in, and then I need to receive in, not just have a utilitarian chart of relationships, but like to really be working on relationship that takes work and thought and time, and I don't think anybody would lose by doing that. It sounds How can you even argue

1:06:00 Ham Radio and the Weekly Net

Ernest Chapman1:06:20 with that? Well, it makes me think of the whole concept of, you know, preparedness, like having a go bag, having your plans laid, and then just never using him, right for the prepper mentality. But maybe not that extreme, but,

Eric Busby1:06:33 well, I mean, I'm a hammer, you know, operator, so I have ham radios and, oh, I'll

Ernest Chapman1:06:37 have to remember that maybe

Eric Busby1:06:41 I've contacted every continent from my house. But how do you do that? You if you buy the equipment and you get licensed and you never use it, you're not going to be able to operate it.

Ernest Chapman1:06:50 Well, that's good point. Yeah, I got all that water jugs buried in my yard and, you know, meat buckets with spam in it. You know, that's not going to go bad and forget about it. 20 years later, it's still there, right? It's never been cycled.

Eric Busby1:07:05 Oh, yes, the radios are really hard to use. You have to check into the weekly net. So there's a weekly net. I'm the youngest person by a long shot doing this like they're all mentors to me. They call them Elmers, all the Elmers. And you check into this radio, the whole little world gives a whole world. Yeah. So on Tuesday night, 7pm on a certain frequency, we all call into this repeater and we check in. So I'm Kilo three November echo tango. That's My call sign, k3 net. So k3 net checks in, and they know where I'm at. They go, Hey, Eric, how's it going? Pretty good. And then WWE Ford, whatever all the other guys have their call sign. WD, 40. WD, 40. Great guy. If something's squeaking, yeah, you want get Bill over here, we check in and we talk about nothing. We just check in. I'm here. Great. Got you on the log, and then they have a log and a website, and it's like, yeah, he checked in a lot this year. All you do is check in. Why? Because you're learning how to use the equipment again. Every week you're saying, I need to go into this frequency. I use it. I know how to do it. I know how to Wow. I'm practicing it. Because it's not necessarily an easy thing. If I forgot it, if I didn't do it for six months, I go at what is the tone on that 146, 750, and the tone 100 or 750, so by doing that, I'm I'm practicing that. I get good at it. And then what happens? Because we all went to the Red Cross together, me and a bunch of old guys. One of them was also a beekeeper, and I recognized him freaked me out. Like whoa. Crossover hobbies, the what National Weather Service taught us how to be weather spotters, like official ones, and so they're on the same repeater with us. So when the tornadoes are coming, the radar can't see over the curvature of the earth, but there's spotters out there with ham radios, and they'll call. You'll hear them. You know, it's Howard. Yeah, what's Howard doing? He's got he saw something in the air looked like pretty big debris, planks of a barn in the air. It's about this high off the ground. And then you see, if you're watching Channel Four, you see the news weather person hold their ear, and they go, we're seeing rotation in this county, you're like, it came from our radio, like, it's really fun to be like, 30 seconds ahead of the news. But point being practicing that like routinely means that if I have to use it, I am prepared practicing whatever that is relationally, or whatever that is. You know just within myself means that I'm ready when the storm comes.

Ernest Chapman1:09:46 I mean that just makes me think of martial arts training. Black Belt is white belt applied under pressure because you practiced it so many times you can do it unconsciously. Me under pressure,

Eric Busby1:10:02 correctly, unconscious competence,

Ernest Chapman1:10:04 within a margin of error, that where you still come out ahead, right? But like you're you're telling me that you're doing your ham radio SOP once a week, right? And you're doing the basics. And how long you've been doing this years. I mean, years? Yeah, it's pretty wild. Fundamentals never go away. Yeah, you have to

Eric Busby1:10:24 do the fundamental. And yeah, you know, you still practice your jump shot. If you're a basketball player, you just

Ernest Chapman1:10:30 always do, well, there's often one correct way to hit a bull's eye in 10,000 ways to miss, right?

Eric Busby1:10:37 And so that's what I think anyway, in the different domains and the spheres of living a proper life. It's just paying attention like, wake up. That's that Taoist. I think it's Taoist. Quote, great. I think it's great fear, great awakening. That's not fear. I'll use that. Remember it right now, the great now, great fear, great awakening, oh, doubt, it's what it is. Great doubt, great awakening, okay, little doubt, little awakening, no doubt, no awakening

Ernest Chapman1:11:22 the Tao of St Thomas. Think about that, yeah,

Eric Busby1:11:26 like, if you don't doubt anything, you can't wake up and realize you're over. So have a bunch of doubt and then, and then turn that into, like, what am I waking up to? What I don't understand it? That's what's behind. When I was in that philosophy one a class, and I got upset. I doubted it. I was like, I doubt No. And then this great awakening that comes as a result.

1:11:30 The Word to the One in Pain

Ernest Chapman1:11:53 So last question, there's a there's someone watching this be one person, the name target.

Eric Busby1:12:01 Sorry, I had to come after you. There's

Ernest Chapman1:12:03 one person watching this that that is at a point in their life when they're in a great amount of pain. What can you tell them, to encourage them to actually face it the way you have

Eric Busby1:12:21 Well, first I would say I'm very sorry that they're feeling that it's deep within me. I can empathize, even though I don't know them. I may never have them cross my path in my life, but I'm sorry that they are facing that. I don't know what they would be facing. But I know what it's like to face something incredibly burdensome, incredibly painful, that you don't mention for 50 years, to lock it away, I kept it on the top shelf and locked away, right? But the time, it's always it's always right. I'm thinking of a song right now. Time's always right to fix what's wrong that sometimes I would say, I'm sorry they're feeling that. And it's worth it to not walk away from it again. And I know that here, if I heard that, I would have said, Oh, and walked away from it. And a lot of more times, maybe 1000 more times. But that day, when you face it, and if you have the help around you to help you do that, it's not what it might not be, what you think, it might be a lot easier than you think, because we build these things up in our minds. You know, that box, that oversized box, that said, Dad, you know, when I opened it up, there was nothing in there. It's just an echo. And I don't know that's probably not everybody's experience, but it was mine, and I think, and I read and talked to a lot of people who they have a similar kind of thing, whereas it just wasn't as hard as they thought. It's like a relief, almost. So I would encourage them to to face the pain, face the fears. I think it's like three. I think it's exactly 365, times in the Bible, it says, Have no fear. 365 times, just like the days in the year. I think that's true. I'll have to check afterwards in the comments below

Ernest Chapman1:14:32 another toast. See the love of wisdom?

Eric Busby1:14:35 Yes, I know not everything that comes out of my mouth is wise, but

Ernest Chapman1:14:42 that's a wise thing to say. But I do love wisdom. That's why it's the love of wisdom, right? That's right pursuit. Thank you.

Eric Busby1:14:58 Ernest. Transcribed by https://otter.ai