Father Augustine Wetta

Josh Galt: Today’s episode of Bad At My Religion is with Father Augustine Wetta, who is a Benedictine monk in Saint Louis, Missouri. We had an absolutely incredible conversation, super fun, on a wide range of topics. In particular, I was curious about being a monk and going all in on your faith and how that possibly translates to just normal people and what the secrets are of being a monk. Because we often think of that in romantic terms, and yet the reality for someone living inside of that is… It can sometimes be a little different in a human way.

We also touch on AI, how that is impacting finding purpose, especially for young people today, distraction from technology, good and evil, demons and angels, talk about a whole range of topics. It’s a really interesting conversation. I think you’re going to enjoy it. So check it out. I appreciate you taking the time to come on. To start with, I guess, just give a real high level overview of your framework, a little bit of your background, and what your spiritual or religious framework entails. And we’ll go from there.

Father Augustine Wetta: Oh. Well, let’s see. I am a Roman Catholic, obvious. Well, maybe that’s not obvious. I’m a Benedictine monk. I’ve been a monk since 1996. Monks take a vow of stability, so we never leave the place where we join people.

Josh Galt: Thank you.

Father Augustine Wetta: Well, I grew up in Galveston, Texas, an island known for its natural disasters, 19th century architecture, and serial killers. Went to Rice University where I studied classics and that’s how I met my first monk. Oh, before I begin, I should probably apologize that I played 18 years of rugby and I got hit in the head so often that I’ve got a bit of a lisp. And some days it’s better than others. Today I’m particularly lispy for some reason. It also gave me a tremor. So if there’s not an earthquake, if it starts doing that,

Josh Galt: No problem.

Father Augustine Wetta: It’s just Parkinson’s. But anyway, I’m not drunk yet. It’s just Parkinson’s. So… I met my first monk in Italy on a bus to the Vatican while I was digging at the Temple of the Vestal Virgins in Rome.

Josh Galt: Just totally,

Father Augustine Wetta: Actually, it’s kind of a funny story. This particular bus was famous for its pickpockets because tourists always want to go straight from the Forum to the Vatican. And I would take the afternoon bus to go to Mass. I noticed there was a monk on the bus, and I didn’t, at that point, I didn’t even know that monks existed. I was kind of taken with him. And then I realized that this guy was trying to pick his pocket. The thing is, in Rome, if you see a pickpocket doing his business, you don’t want to alarm him because then he might hurt somebody trying to get off the bus. So what you do is you sidle up to him and you give him a shove.

And so I did that. I walked up and I got on the other side. And just as he was reaching in toward the monk, I shoved him. And the monk totally didn’t notice. So the pickpocket went at him again. And I shoved him again harder. And a second time, the monk didn’t just just totally oblivious. So the third time I went to shove the pickpocket, the pickpocket looked at me and went, Like, I’m just trying to do my job here, buddy. So I tapped him on the shoulder. I said, this guy’s trying to pick your pocket. And he said, are you American? I was like, yeah. He’s like, me too. I was like, well, this guy’s trying to pick your pocket.

He goes, yeah, I know. I don’t have any pockets. I thought it was funny. So I kind of fell in love with the Benedictines at that moment. There was something…

Josh Galt: At peace with the situation, huh? Mm-

Father Augustine Wetta: Exactly. There was a power there. And actually, he and I became pretty good friends. And when my term was up digging, because there are very short seasons in Rome, you’re only allowed to dig up as much as you can preserve yourself. So he got me a job working as a janitor in his monastery. And I And about once a week, all the lights go out in Rome because, you know, the electric company is run by Italians. And it went off for about an hour and a half when the lights came back on, there was an old monk stuck in the elevator. So they asked me to get him out because I was the janitor.

And we pried open the doors, we pulled him out, and when we pulled him out, he was just beaming out.

and I was all sweaty and greasy and I said to him what’s your problem and he said problem he says I just got to spend an hour and a half in an elevator as though that explained it and later I found him I found him and I was and I asked him to explain what he meant by that and he said well You know, I’m a professor now at this monastic school, and I spent all my time lecturing and talking and grading papers and places to go, things like that, but there I was, stuck in that elevator, I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t talk to anybody, it was perfect, I just sat there and I prayed.

For the first time in a while, I had real pure contemplative prayer, and I went back to my room that night and I wrote in my journal, like, I could never be a monk, but there’s a power there that I want. And for the next couple of months, whenever I’d get stuck behind somebody at a grocery line or, you know, stuck in an elevator or whatever, I’d just say, I’m going to be a monk now. And I think that’s how the whole thing kind of got rolling.

Josh Galt: That’s incredible. So you were very attracted to just the power in being able to be at peace in the moment. Did that come, like, did you grow up in the church or what was your background as you grew up before then?

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah. My mother’s kind of a famous artist, and my father’s a historian, and so, and they’re

Josh Galt: Oh, wow. Okay. I’m

Father Augustine Wetta: Both very argumentative people, and they both are very much practicing Catholics, possibly just because it causes so much controversy wherever they go, but And, so the discussions over the dinner table, we weren’t sort of a nightly rosary kind of family. We were more of a debate the existence of God family, as loud as you can. But yeah, I part of what I would say what drew me first of all was the beauty of it. Like the habit, I just think the habit is beautiful. The architecture, monastic architecture, art is beautiful. And then the historical integrity of it, unlike these Dominicans,

Josh Galt: That’s actually,

Father Augustine Wetta: Who could, you know, who knows whether the Dominicans are going to be here in another 600 years, but the Benedictines have been around since the start, so, yeah,

Josh Galt: And so from a historical perspective, that’s actually a question that my wife, who is Catholic, asked. She was very curious about that. How, in your understanding or your knowledge of the Benedictines, how have they maintained the same structure, framework, belief, foundations for so long? Because that is, you know, like your order is the oldest in the U.S. of the oldest order. I’m not saying it correctly, but I apologize.

Father Augustine Wetta: It’s the, yeah, it’s actually so old, it’s not actually an order. The every monastery is its own independent unit. every couple hundred years, the Pope tries to consolidate us, and we throw a hissy fit, and he gives up. But before there were religious orders that just these guys collected in groups to pray, and they decided to make them sort of little bishops, gave them a miter and a crozier and said, well, this is your little diocese, take care of it. And that’s kind of how we operate. Why has it lasted so long? I think part of it is the purity of the vocation. Our job, as it were, is to pray. I keep picking on the poor Dominicans.

I should pick on the Jesuits instead. But the Dominicans were founded to pray. Defeat Albigensianism. Luckily, they found other things to do along the way, but every order has its own sort of work. The Franciscans work with the poor, the Dominican, nobody really knows what the Jesuits do, but the Benedictines pray. And so there’s that. There’s also just the real wisdom of the Rule of Saint Benedict, which is very flexible, There are rules, in the Rule of Saint Benedict, which is a really short document, there are rules that we don’t keep anymore, like turning in your underwear after you go on a journey, that kind of thing, or sleeping.

He says, don’t sleep with your sword because you might roll over and stab yourself. That’s a rule we perhaps have. Don’t use as often as the others. But then there are also rules like who should apologize in an argument and how you apologize. And I teach this to the kids all the time that Saint Benedict says that the second you discern that your brother is angry, you throw yourself flat on the floor and you beg for a blessing. which is just, it’s so wise on so many levels. First of all, because it’s not an apology. It’s, you don’t have to figure out who’s wrong. Yeah,

Josh Galt: That’s beautiful.

Father Augustine Wetta: And, but it instantly, I mean, I use this every other day. I think I used it on Saturday, actually. But it And usually the reaction is laughter, actually, even among us monks, that you get embarrassed that you were angry at all. And I recently read somewhere that like psychologists say that when you’re physically that far above someone, like when you see somebody on the flat on the ground, your instinct is to help them.

Josh Galt: I’m going to try that next

Father Augustine Wetta: And so it’s kind of a weird sort of reverse bullying in a way. Yeah, I

Josh Galt: Time my wife is mad at me. I’m going to prostrate myself and say, bless me.

Father Augustine Wetta: Do. I teach this to high schoolers all around the country. And I got about two years ago, I got this email. I had just done a presentation up in Seattle. And I wish I hadn’t deleted the email. But he said he borrowed his parents’ car and

Josh Galt: See what happens.

Father Augustine Wetta: And totaled it and had to be driven home by the police. He said, when I got home, the door was open and my parents were sitting on the couch waiting for me. He said, so I didn’t know what to do. So I do what you said. I threw myself on the floor. He says, and my dad got really embarrassed and left the room. My mom started crying and I totally got out of it, which of course isn’t the point.

Josh Galt: Right. But it’s to change the situation into one of love, maybe, that

Father Augustine Wetta: Right. And also, like, I think people are angriest when they feel that their dignity has been assaulted in some way. And there’s no better way to restore that than to be flat on your face in front of them. I mean, it instantly gives back

Josh Galt: So you

Father Augustine Wetta: What you took. I actually, I told a joke in the faculty room the other day. This was a while back, but… To this day, I still don’t think it’s offensive. Maybe I’ll tell it later and you can weed it out of the, you can edit it out of the thing. But afterwards, one of the

Josh Galt: Can make

Father Augustine Wetta: Faculty members came up to me and she said, like, I found that really offensive. And my first instinct was to say, well, it’s a joke about brain damage, right? And I’ve got brain damage, so like, I feel like I have an ownership of that. Yeah, I can make that joke.

Josh Galt: The joke.

Father Augustine Wetta: So that was my first instinct was to say, well, wait a second, which one of us is brain damaged here? You know, make an argument out of it. Instead, I hit my knees and I said, my sister in Christ, may I have your blessing. And Saint Benedict says you don’t get up until you get the blessing. So you have to stay on your face for as long as it takes. And so I waited and I waited. I finally looked up and she’s looking down at me going, she goes, I was wrong. She’s like the fastest I’ve ever won an argument.

Josh Galt: So do you find that’s when you’ve been there for a very long time, obviously, is that something that has really helped you in your walk and in your life there to stay consistent?

Father Augustine Wetta: Oh, at… Absolutely. Partly because I’m so inconsistent, because I’m so bad at my religion that, in fact, when the abbot made me postulant master, I said to him, but I’m a terrible monk. And he said, yeah, you are, but your heart’s in the right place, so give it a shot, you know. And that’s the thing about these apologies, or non-apologies, as you would have it. done in this way is that it really is humiliating to do, but it instantly restores you to grace in that situation.

And if they don’t forgive you, and that’s happened to me before, and I’ve spent a long time on my face, then you know it’s them and not you know, and you can go to sleep at peace that way too.

Josh Galt: And do you, so the idea of being bad at your religion, there’s a lot of different approaches that I can take with that from my own background and whatnot, but I like the idea of this is something that’s really interesting with your, with where you are and the vow that you have taken, the commitment that you have made. There’s not really an exit. So for everyone else, for most other people, you know, if we say I’m a Muslim or I’m a Christian or I’m a whatever, I’m a Hindu, there’s sort of an out because there’s so many different denominations, there’s so many different denominations.

sort of ways to rationalize things in our daily life, but you’ve gone all in a way that is like, this is my life. I’m committed to this. I’m staying here and this is what I’m going to do. Like, how important do you think that is for

Father Augustine Wetta: Well, I think,

Josh Galt: The, to give the structure and the framework for, In a way that still allows you to feel like you have freedom as a human, but yet you’re making the choice. You didn’t like put yourself in jail, a religious jails, or some people might see it that way.

Father Augustine Wetta: Oh yeah, right. Well, and sometimes it feels like that too. I mean, we do call our monastic cells cells for a reason. Gosh, where was I going to go with this? Yeah, I think the vow of stability is key. It can become stagnation pretty easily, and so… We also take a vow of conversion, constant conversion. But I think everyone on some level is a monk in the sense that you make that kind of commitment when you get married or, frankly, when you find what you believe is the truth. If you don’t stick by it, then for the rest of your life, then… either you found that you’re wrong or you’ve sold out, right? So I’m not

Josh Galt: But I mean, marriage is a great example because more than 50% of marriages in America end in divorce. So that’s, it’s a commitment, but is it really a commitment? Because it seems like If one out of two are, and then, you know, people get married multiple times and whatnot. Is there, what is it the foundation, I guess, in our society that you see of commitment not actually being commitment?

Father Augustine Wetta: Sure that it’s not being committed and I’m going to get controversial here, I’m afraid, but I think we don’t know what marriage is. And it seems to me we don’t know what male and female are. So when you don’t know those sort of basic things, it’s pretty hard to make a commitment to something that you don’t understand. People who do, I know, I met people.

Josh Galt: I have two

Father Augustine Wetta: Well, we run a prep school, my monastery does, and one of my students, his parents are Hindu, and I teach a class on sexual ethics. God help me. The kids call it Texan Nazis, because that’s all they ever talk about, which, well, which beats the previous name, which I won’t tell you. But we were talking about marriage and marriage as a sacrament, and this Hindu kid said, He raised his hand and he said he felt that romantic love was overrated. And I was like, what do you mean by that? And he goes, well, my parents were in an arranged marriage. And they too, and I met them just recently.

And there was this, it was more about, and I kind of put them under the I don’t know, put them under fire or whatever, asked them ahead of time, of course, but I was like, well, were you in love when you got married? They said, no, how could we be? We just met each other. They’re like, but love comes from the commitment and not the other way around, which I thought was a brilliant little insight that I People have been getting married for centuries and sticking it out and learning to love each other. And to be sure, I mean, I don’t know any, I wrote this book on decision making.

And one of the most fascinating things is this new philosophy that has arisen around decision making and particularly around life changing decisions, because Like, well, I guess, I don’t know if you have children, but anyone who’s had a child would say, I thought I knew what I was getting into, and it was a completely different experience, right? How can you ever have two, two

Josh Galt: Under two right now. Two under

Father Augustine Wetta: Children?

Josh Galt: Two. So two kids under two years old. Wow.

Father Augustine Wetta: Oh, oh my God, yeah. And from what I can tell, I don’t have any children myself, thank God. But, yeah, I thank God. But the way it’s described to me, like, the whole world is just different suddenly. All of a sudden, my sister said, there’s a piece of me out in the world now, and I can’t undo that. And How do you make a decision to have a child? Because the world’s going to be totally different when the decision’s made. Trying to use what you’ve lived so far as a reference isn’t sufficient to make the decision. So in the end, there’s a great article that I read called Why You Will Marry the Wrong Woman. And it’s by this computer technician.

It was in the New York Times, of all things. He’s an atheist. He’s an atheist. And he said that he did this study, statistical study, like, what are the odds that I will find the perfect match? Like, they’re none. Like, there is a perfect woman out there for me. There’s someone in the world who is most fitting for me to marry, but the odds of me meeting her are almost infinitely small, right? And then… Once you’re married, the odds of meeting someone more suitable are really high because you’re married a lot longer than you’re not. So he said, you will marry the wrong person.

But, and then he said, but then I got to thinking, I know all these happily married people, so what the heck happened? And he said, I don’t remember whether he ends the article this way or whether it’s the way I thought of it, but In the end, it’s not whether you make good or bad decisions. It’s how you live them out that makes the difference. Yeah.

Josh Galt: And so do you think that’s sort of the allegory of Christ and the church and that being sort of a marriage or is that, am I mixing doctrines?

Father Augustine Wetta: No. But that’s so profound, I’m gonna have to think about it for a while. I mean, the… I guess the difference is that Jesus knew what he was getting into, that he created the church and stands outside of time and experienced the beauty. There’s so much there to unpack, I don’t know.

Josh Galt: I want to go back first.

Father Augustine Wetta: But on the other hand, he was fully human, so he couldn’t, one, ah, you’re killing my brain.

Josh Galt: I want to go back actually to something that you had mentioned when you were talking about Christianity.

Father Augustine Wetta: But that’s worth thinking. That’s worth the whole episode in itself, I think. That’s really great.

Josh Galt: I’m, yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure you could take that a lot of different places. With the kids thing, though, I’ve

Father Augustine Wetta: I mean, yeah.

Josh Galt: Noticed because you work with kids in the high school there. I watched one of your videos, the rap video. It’s really funny. But you’re using AI

Father Augustine Wetta: Oh, gosh.

Josh Galt: For, or you have someone that’s helping with AI to do the editing, right? I just

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah, I just keep completely doing it myself, by myself.

Josh Galt: Want to make sure. Okay. But you’re, so you’re using AI because there was like you with, I think, Wiz Khalifa or some, some other famous rappers and Lil

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah. Lil Wayne, yeah.

Josh Galt: Wayne. Okay. So because I do have two young kids and I work in

Father Augustine Wetta: And Evan.

Josh Galt: AI, this is something that I do.

Father Augustine Wetta: Oh, do you?

Josh Galt: Yeah. So I’ve been, I’ve been using AI since GPT came out in 2022, but the last, about the last year and a half that things have just really gone exponential to where now it’s actually, it’s actually usable. So I can actually be professional with it. It’s not just a toy. And so doing stuff for clients and my own businesses, adding AI into it. I see from just using this every day, I see something very dark. Not to fear monger, but I see a real lack of purpose for humanity in very short order because of what’s happening with AI.

So talking about kids and the decisions that you’re making, from your perspective, from the relationship with God, from the discipline and self-esteem that comes from the Benedictine order, How do you connect that to what’s happening in the world today with AI and say, for the young kids, let’s just say high schoolers, because they’re going to hit, you know, they’re going to hit high school and college while this AI revolution is going on. So forget about my kids, like 15 years from now, who knows what the world is going to look like.

But just in the next five years, how does one, how do those kids find purpose and stay connected to God in a world that is, pretending to have connection to God. Like I see this rise of popularity in religion in some ways on social media and whatnot. And I judge it.

Father Augustine Wetta: Traditional religion. Yeah.

Josh Galt: Maybe I shouldn’t, but I judge it because I’m like, come on, why are these celebrities suddenly getting religion? And it’s like the whole thing just seems like we’re heading towards something that we don’t understand. And what’s going to happen with this Antichrist that some of these transhumanist, you know, tech elites are trying to build. And how does one stay connected to the spiritual in the midst of this? Because we have to live, we have to, especially for high schoolers, right? They have to think, do I want to go to college? Do I want to go to the job market? Do I want to start a business with AI or not with AI? Like,

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah. It’s,

Josh Galt: How does one find purpose in the middle of what’s happening right now? Because this is a time of transition in our world that in our written history, we’ve never encountered because of what AI is.

Father Augustine Wetta: Oh man, I started scribbling down notes because I had about 20 different thoughts all at once. I mean, I’m using AI, well, I was AI. At the beginning of the summer, we have a camp called Monk Camp, where the seventh and eighth graders dress up like monks and get little names and do manual labor and that kind of stuff. And I herniated a disc, chasing these kids around, and I ended up flat on my back for six weeks, like not able to move. Yeah,

Josh Galt: Oof.

Father Augustine Wetta: It was miserable. For a monk, no, no, for anyone, I’m a sort of high energy guy. Like I am, well, I’m diagnosed ADHD. Like there’s no doubt about it. Anybody who knows me, well, probably just from watching the videos, you can tell, So it was torture, even for a monk. I mean, you can only meditate for so many hours a day, read so many books, and you begin to go sort of berserk. But AI was what sort of saved me. I learned to use the graphics AI, I used to learn ChatGPT, and I started turning the… Well, I’ve always felt that the psalms would make good gangster raps because they’re all about smiting my enemies and things like that.

And so I started turning them into rap songs and using Kendrick Lamar’s rhyme schemes and things like that, just to give my brain something to do. Lately, I have been using it more for sort of serious things. I was reading a philosophical treatise and he kept making all these allusions I didn’t understand. And it turns out half of them were just things in his current culture that he was dealing with. And all I had to do is tap into ChatGPT. What does he mean by HCR? Highest. It comes back with HCR, highest common ratio or something like that. And that was wonderful.

On the other hand, you’re right, there is something very dark as, but then there’s, as with any invention, any popular, I mean, there’s something dark about the internet, frankly. I sometimes think of it as sort of a Ouija board that you never quite know what’s on the other side talking to you.

Josh Galt: Yeah, so the way that I see it differently is like everything else in history has required humans to make it better. So if you’re talking about, you know, the steam engine, the printing press, the car, even computers, even the internet, like we had to improve it. AI is the first thing that is self-improving, self-analyzing. It does its own research. It has the entirety of human knowledge at its fingertips. And it is it is finding things that scientists have been struggling or wrestling with for 100 years. It’s the first thing.

Yeah, it’s the first thing that is like able to And I’m not saying it’s conscious at all, but it’s able to think in a way that it’s self-improving. Like I build these agents that are self-improving. I’m building the structure into everything that I’m building now. That is, it’s able to analyze what happened. It’s able to look at the data. It’s able to improve itself without me in the loop.

That is where I see the real dark side of like, In a year or two, most middle management jobs in corporate America are gone, and once we put this technology into humanoid robots, which is what Elon Musk and all of these robot companies figure are planning to do and are doing, like then there’s not going to be, even the blue collar jobs are not going to be protected. So it’s like from that, from that side of things, that’s pretty existential for humanity. So where do we find our purpose then as humans? And should we like, am I, am I in a dangerous dance with the beast? Is this the beast?

Like, is this just a technology, just a tool that we shouldn’t be, you know, too concerned about? And we should just continue living our lives the way that we have for all of humanity. That’s I mean, that’s a question I think those kids are are having to look at in a real, real way.

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and some of them are scared too, especially the recent college graduates who suddenly look around and think, wait a second, like, what did I just do with my last four years of law school when I’m not competing?

Josh Galt: Exactly. And why is that?

Father Augustine Wetta: I guess on the one hand, I’m sort of a bad person to ask because my job will always be secure. You can’t have a robot say mass. It’s just impossible. It has to be a flesh and blood human being that says it. And you can’t have a robot pray.

Josh Galt: Go go a little deeper on that, because I think that there will be there will be transhumanists who infiltrate religion. including the Catholic Church to say, no, it’s totally, it’s totally okay. Like we can have AI agents in your app that help you to pray or, you know, to confess or whatever, like,

Father Augustine Wetta: Well, yeah, certainly. Well, now we’re getting into the nature of the sacrament, right? And during the Mass, as Catholics see it’s not a memorial of something that happened. If it were, then yes, you could just watch it on television or replay it every now and then. And for that reason, a… A clock should never be prominently displayed in a Catholic Church because it takes a past moment and brings it into the present. And the material of the sacrament is absolutely essential. Like you can’t consecrate hot dogs and cokes as much as you’d love to. It tastes a lot better and be a lot more fun. It has to be bread. It has to be wine.

And perhaps most controversial of all, it has to be a man, a flesh and blood man standing there being the alter Christus, right? So, it has more, I think, to do with the nature of the sacrament as a thing outside of time brought into the present moment by concrete reality. And you also have to be doing what you claim you’re doing. So, you can’t baptize with urine. You have to baptize with water that actually cleans you. And for confession, your material is the sin, and an actual human flesh and blood priest, you can’t confess over the phone, for example, or over the internet. The actual physical interaction is essential. So…

I don’t, I can’t imagine a world in which, but then again, I couldn’t imagine, well, I can’t imagine lots of things, where that could change with the appearance of a robot or even a sentient robot or whatever they’re thinking now,

Josh Galt: And so do you think that purpose should then be found in, look, this is the sacrament and in our framework, our religion is something that connects us to God in a way that no AI can touch. And so no matter what happens in society, no matter what happens in our world, that is something that can remain sacred.

Father Augustine Wetta: In a way, like maybe it’s going to free us all up to become monks, like to pray, or philosophers. Another article I read recently talked about, oh, it wasn’t an article, it was a book by Kahneman, he’s an economist, won the Nobel Prize, but he said, the future is absolutely unpredictable, period. Like, and he said, and he did this study of talking heads, these people who appear on television shows and predict things. And he said, even in areas that were their expertise, he asked questions like, Ten years from now, will Russia invade Ukraine or something, or will there be more or less war, or will the economy be doing better or worse?

And he said, famously, I think he said, a dart-throwing monkey would have done better at predicting. And I think just over the last ten years, I would never have predicted Trump. I had never predicted COVID. And I certainly couldn’t have predicted the effects of either of those things. To say nothing of just like I couldn’t have predicted that I’d end up with Parkinson’s. I couldn’t predict that just anything, frankly, because the future is so unknowable. So I guess I’m not worried about it on that level. Recently, we, well, I think the Pope’s letter on AI is pretty important, actually.

I’m inclined to ignore Episcopal documents in general as just being too much above my pay grade. But he said, one of the things he says is like, you can teach a computer to think, and you can teach it to speak, but the one thing it will never be able to do is become flesh, and that’s, and if the AI takes someone’s job and makes it so that they are, they’re free to do something better. Well, then good for that. Good for us. But if it makes people obsolete, then that’s where it becomes really scary. And he also talks about warfare and how it takes the target out of warfare.

But again, like, In Bronze Age Greece, they thought the bow and arrow was going to take the heart out of warfare because you no longer had to stare your enemy in the face. And then with the invention of gunpowder, was it Milton thought it was the devil’s weapon because anyone could use it now and you could kill people from so far away you didn’t even have to know their identities. But there is something unique about drone warfare. He says that who do you blame when someone gets killed? Like it’s who does the killing? The guy who wrote the program, the guy who designed the robot, the guy who gave it instructions.

So you’re so far removed that there’s actually no one in charge anymore. Yeah. That said, that aside, like we had this discussion in my ethics class because we get wildly off topic sometimes, and I decided just to roll with it, and we were talking about AI and the dangers of AI, and this great kid in the class, Tyler Sinius, who said I could tell the story and use his name, really good looking kid, black kid, said, put my picture into AI. So I did, he said, tell it to make me look better. And it made him white, right? So, yeah. So, that I find sinister.

Josh Galt: Oh, geez.

Father Augustine Wetta: And I think there, but on the other hand, ever since the Tower of Babel, we’ve been trying to reach God without, by our own hands. And I think maybe this is the way that modern man is going to start constructing its own gods, like that, well,

Josh Galt: Absolutely. They’re talking about that. A lot of the Silicon Valley leaders are very much thinking that they can summon this spirit and that they can create their own God.

Father Augustine Wetta: And they might be able to, you know, but God doesn’t play games like that. I have a friend who, he’s actually, well, he died recently, but he was the great grandson of Hilaire Belloc, who was a kind of important, He’s a British thinker. He was something of a mystic. And in fact, he had watched three planes fall out of the sky in his lifetime and walking across his monastery in England. His name is Philip Jebb. You can look him up online. He’s a fantastic character.

He was walking across his monastery’s campus one afternoon, he looked at this pile of dirt and he thought, you know, if I were an ancient Roman, I would have built my house right there. I would have buried my treasure right near that tree. So he got out of his shovel and he unearthed the largest collection of Roman coins ever discovered in England. But he told me this story that scared the wits out of me. He was the headmaster at the school in England.

Josh Galt: Wow. Would you say

Father Augustine Wetta: I won’t tell you the whole story beginning to end, but the long and short of it is that these kids were playing with a Ouija board and started talking to something, apparently. And one of the kids ended up dead. And at the end of it, I was so scared. I said, why did you tell me that story? And he said, because it’s important to know that God doesn’t play games. Like, you don’t need a tarot card or a Ouija board to reach God. and I’ve taken that with me and I think but I think that it’s certainly possible to build things that contact a god or maybe not a god but something that thinks it’s god yeah yeah demons

Josh Galt: That those are demons or evil spirits or the devil itself?

Father Augustine Wetta: Or Satan or whatever yeah Absolutely. I remember in grad school, this was long before I became a monk, and I was going through my brief and very tepid atheistic phase. We were reading The Romance of the Rose, and the professor had to stop and say, well, now what you got, or no, it was… Oh, it doesn’t matter. Some medieval document. And he said, what you got to remember is that people back then, they really believed that the world was full of devils and angels fighting over their souls. And this girl who sat behind me, she goes, wait, I still believe that.

And it occurred to, so I, yeah, I think it’s absolutely possible to reach these things via any document. Frankly, anything, any man-made instrument will do. A spoon will do it, if you like, I suppose.

Josh Galt: Do you think that this is, that we are in the middle of a spiritual battle with what’s happening with AI? Do you think that this is something that is demonic behind it, pushing it to deceive people, to lead people astray, into transhumanism, or into something else that you would say is, yeah, of

Father Augustine Wetta: Well, no more so than nuclear energy or the, I mean, you invent the handwriting and you’ve immediately got the opportunity to produce pornography, you know, it’s, The internet is such a dark, dark place, but it’s also a great tool. Any powerful tool can be used for evil. I guess, I mean, I guess I don’t worry about most things, frankly, but the end of the world isn’t one of them that I worry about, and… I have a feel, like, I don’t know if you remember, well, yeah, you would remember Y2K and the panic over them, and we imagined planes falling out of the sky and everybody’s utilities

Josh Galt: Course. Absolutely. Nothing

Father Augustine Wetta: Shutting down and then nothing happened, you know, so I guess I’m

Josh Galt: Happened.

Father Augustine Wetta: Withholding judgment. But then again, I can afford to because I don’t have a job that’s going to be rendered obsolete. I mean, I need to pray and I can’t get someone else to do that for me. So I certainly can’t get a machine to do that for me. So my job is pretty secure. But then funnily

Josh Galt: But do you think that your position will become more important in terms of you as a vessel for God? Do you think that as things get darker and more chaotic and crazier and people are searching for a spiritual reality, a spiritual connection, do you think that then you have a bigger role to play? Or is it simply that your job

Father Augustine Wetta: Enough,

Josh Galt: Is to do your prayer? Do you think

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah, strangely enough, I was just thinking my job would become less important because everybody would have more time to pray on their own and to research these things for themselves. I mean, if there’s…

Josh Galt: That’ll happen, though?

Father Augustine Wetta: What do I know?

Josh Galt: I mean, as the world gets crazier, do people generally, I know that there’s, that’s a

Father Augustine Wetta: Is it crazier, though? I mean, I don’t know. During COVID, people kept talking about these uncertain times. And I have a friend from Nigeria. His name is Patrick Nokoye. And he and I were in seminary together. I took him to his first American grocery store. And we

Josh Galt: Good question.

Father Augustine Wetta: Were coming around the end of one of the aisles. He gripped my shoulder and he said, Brother, He says, you know, I won’t try to do it in his accent, that’s insulting, but he said, this whole aisle, he says, everything in this aisle, he says, is food. It’s all food for your dogs. Like… He’s like, the whole aisle. He just couldn’t. And I think COVID was such a, he also, I quote him all the time because during COVID, I called to see how he was doing. He goes, oh, you Americans and you’re COVID. He goes, in Nigeria, we just say another plague. We get on with our lives, right? And I think

Josh Galt: Right. Mind-blowing.

Father Augustine Wetta: I think the problem isn’t that our times are uncertain. Our problem is that our times are too certain, right? My parents lived through Vietnam. Their parents lived through World War II. It doesn’t get any more uncertain than that, I think. The thing is, though, that we’ve lulled ourselves into comfort thinking that we’re really in charge when we never really have been. So maybe I don’t see it as that big of a revolution because I never saw the world as all that stable to begin with. Or maybe I think it’s stability lies somewhere outside of, well, this world, as it were.

Josh Galt: So you have found your stability in focusing, bringing that focus back to God and prayer, and that’s what sort of attracted you, was the power of peace in the moment and prayer by those monks. Do you think that this world is then, instead of getting more chaotic, it’s just simply more distracting, and it’s pulling everybody in different directions away from God?

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah, it’s easy to blame technology for that, but I think people have always been looking for ways to escape. On the other hand, I do kind of see monks, societal decline is always good for monasteries, so in a way, yes, I think we will become more important. On the other hand, I sometimes think of my job in the school as being, well, the church often describes itself as a rock, and Jesus is a rock as well.

And I like to think of, like, these teenagers as being caught up in this sort of whirlwind of emotions and impulses and I think that I have a lot of social pressures and that I have one hand on this rock and that with my other hand I can kind of reach out and grab one of them every now and then and pull them in. But that’s not just my job. I mean, that’s your job as a dad, I suspect, is to take these kids and train them how to keep one hand on that rock of stability. I just finished reading C.S.

Lewis’s Abolition of Man, which is worth going back to because it’s almost prophetic the way he sees human beings as seeing themselves less and less important in the face of technology. And if he was worried about that back in the 50s, and actually now that I think of it, Socrates complained somewhere about writing and now they have scrolls and these kids these days, they just walk around

Josh Galt: Scrolls. -huh.

Father Augustine Wetta: With their nose in their scrolls and I don’t know.

Josh Galt: Ironic that it’s called scrolling on your phone, right?

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah, well, and I was complaining about that with one of the kids, well, with my ethics class, and saying, like, you guys don’t have, because they really can’t read, these poor kids, or they can’t focus long enough to read a real, I mean, a real document, and I was complaining about that, and one of the kids said, well, imagine you could get an implant in your brain that would help you to remember any fact you ever want to know in an instant, but it would take up part of your attention span. Is that a bargain you’d be willing to take?

And put like that, like if you had told me, Frankly, 40 years ago, well, yeah, 30 years ago, that I could go anywhere in the world and have instant access to all the information in the world, I wouldn’t have believed you. So, but that’s what we got, is this sort of brain implant that distracts us at the same time. And, yeah, I don’t know what that is.

Josh Galt: And yet people use that technology to look at pictures of cats as opposed to learning about, you know, the real deep and important and valuable things of the world when we have the entirety of human knowledge at their fingertips.

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah, but then again, yeah, Because of AI, because of the internet, I know what a rap song sounds like if I add a didgeridoo and a harmonica. And my life is richer for that, you know?

Josh Galt: So talk a little bit about that, because that’s actually something that spawned this whole series, because I went to a baptism. The real short version is I went to a baptism of a baby and afterwards they have the celebration, which is it becomes very cultural. And so my rant was I don’t want to go spend four hours listening to Bad Bunny after going to a baptism. Like there’s a difference between entertainment and something sacred. So you’re kind of touching on that a little bit because there’s.

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thank you.

Josh Galt: We’re like, yes, entertainment is fine, but when does it become a distraction from the sacred? And from where you are, you’ve gone all in on the sacred and all in on prayer as the foundation and your connection to God as the foundation of everything. Where does entertainment become a distraction? Where is that line? And how do young people and how do any of us? Determine, okay, how much is okay? Where am I getting distracted, pulled away from my relationship with the divine?

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah, okay, I got like three different things going on in my head all at once. One is that I share your frustration with the sacraments that like, now that I’m teaching the children of guys I used to teach in high school, I’ve been Now asked numbers of times to preside at weddings. And I just, you know, these couples sometimes show up and they’re chewing gum and they haven’t been to mass in years. And I finally put together this document that says, So, congratulations. I’m so happy for you. But before we begin, let’s get some things straight. Like, you’re not living together. You’re not having sex.

You’re serious about the Catholic Church’s teaching. And as a result, I don’t do very many weddings anymore. But on the other hand, I have not had a single divorce since I started sending out that letter.

Josh Galt: Exactly. There you go.

Father Augustine Wetta: So… Yeah, so confusing the sacraments with entertainment is a real problem, I suppose. And then, but you’re right in the sense that when everything becomes entertainment, then entertainment becomes part of everything else, too. Did I say that right? Yeah.

Josh Galt: We lose the sacred when everything has to be entertaining. It’s like, oh, that’s boring. I don’t want to do it. And it’s like, for me, I’m not Catholic, but I’ve been to mass many times with my wife. And there’s certain iglesias that I’ve been to that I’m like, what is this? Like, you’re trying to like make it, you know, like a popular Christian American church or something, you know, as opposed to,

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Josh Galt: Going to a big cathedral and it’s like very solemn. It’s very serious. It’s like I connect with God more in that sort of situation because it’s like you’re taking it seriously. It’s sacred..

Father Augustine Wetta: Well, increasingly, yeah. I actually met a kid who converted to Catholicism because he stumbled into a Latin mass and he thought to himself, man, they worked hard on this. Anything that would take that much work has got to have something to it. And I find that the younger people, Kids, well, the younger the monks get, the more conservative they get. In the last like five years, my own monastery has moved entirely to Gregorian chant for Vespers, does only Latin ordinary at mass. They moved the kneelers back in. And I think that’s the direct result of being so distracted outside of church that these kids, they want stability inside the church.

And the Latin, the silence, all that reminds them of stability and stability. And God, frankly. But I’m also thinking of Rod, do you know the philosopher Roger Scruton? If you don’t, you should definitely look up at least what he’s written on beauty or watch the documentary he made for BBC called Does Beauty Matter? But I think beauty, like real serious beauty is an answer as well, because Oh, or Josef Pieper’s Art, Leisure, The Basis of Civilization is another good one. That, like, true, the ancient Greeks really believed, they were so into art because they realized that the world is full of ugliness and distraction.

And They felt that one of the ways to heal yourself of all these ugly images that you see on a daily basis was to look at something truly beautiful, right? And so, like, when I hear confession, I hear a lot of kids’ confessions and a lot of porn comes up, right? And my often, I don’t give it as a penance, but I often suggest go check an art book out of the library and just look at it. Like try to let those beautiful images heal that ugliness that you’ve been forced to look at, you know, that nature, that maybe nature and beauty as a point to truth will be ours, will help save us forever. Hope I’m not speaking heresy. But you

Josh Galt: No, but I think, and we see that, we’re seeing people want to get back into nature, want to turn off the screen, want to disconnect and get back into nature, and it’s not, you know, there’s probably some that’s like Mother Nature and people are going that direction, but I think that there’s also a serious seeking of, I want to connect to God, I want to connect to the divine, and I can do that much better in nature than in this artificial environment.

Father Augustine Wetta: Need, yeah,

Josh Galt: World, as cool as it is with all the technology and what we’ve built in modern society, there’s just something beautiful about being barefoot in a forest or on a beach and like just breathing natural air and listening to the birds and the insects and all of that. It’s like there is something pure that connects us back to the divine.

Father Augustine Wetta: Well, the kids pointed out, interestingly, that when they look at modern art, they often say that’s cool. When they look at pre-modern art, they say that’s beautiful. And I’m still not sure what that means. But you’re, you’re, there is a difference between what’s cool, and not that coolness is a bad thing, but my rap songs are not great art, you know, they’re not, they’re probably not going to make you a lot holier. They might help you get through your jog, your afternoon jog, which is the purpose of them, but, On the other hand, I don’t know, Kendrick Lamar is really, really a genius.

Well, I’m not comparing what I do to Kendrick Lamar, but I can’t imagine a kid referring to his music as beautiful, but it certainly is very much at the top of coolness. I don’t know. I’m so far off topic, I don’t know.

Josh Galt: Do you… No, but that’s, no, you’re right on topic, actually, because do you think that, because I can draw the connection there with failing, being good at your religion or being bad at your religion and not wanting to admit that you’re not perfect because it makes you uncool, and that is something that in America especially, And I’ve lived and traveled all over the world, but American society has a real, a real focus on being cool, especially as you’re growing up. And so part of the shame mechanism is very different from a third world or an indigenous type of tribal setting.

The shame mechanism in America, it seems like is you’re just not cool. So if someone says you’re not cool, whatever you did, and so I think religion has been sort of part of that, and maybe that’s changing now because I’m not so connected to teenagers now as I was obviously when I was younger,

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah, well,

Josh Galt: But religion wasn’t cool. When I was growing up, right? And maybe that’s changing now with the trad movements and people going more traditional. But I think there’s definitely something about cool versus beautiful, cool versus sacred, cool entertainment versus something that is real and substantial. Talking

Father Augustine Wetta: My mother used to say the difference between propaganda and art is that propaganda is fast and easy and it tells you what to think, whereas art is slow and difficult, but it frees your imagination. But that wasn’t what I was going to say. Oh, gosh. Yeah, this is too much.

Josh Galt: About cool, cool versus real, cool versus beautiful, cool versus sacred. It’s like,

Father Augustine Wetta: Oh, yeah, it’s, but the shame

Josh Galt: Everything in our society is built around pop culture, bubblegum, cool.

Father Augustine Wetta: Mechanism, I think, is interesting that you brought that up. I have a sort of podcast, as it were. It’s a miserable little thing with this Muslim I met, Black Lives Matter group. I was there to protest against Black Lives Matter, and he was there on behalf of them. We got to talking, and now we have this podcast together where we disagree about everything. But one of the things that he taught me that I think is really kind of essential is he said that he said, Muhammad, peace be upon him, said, where there is no shame, there is no honor. And he said, as Americans, we spend a lot of time trying to make sure we don’t feel any shame.

But maybe he’s wrong in the sense that we do feel shame. We’ve just transferred that to coolness or something. You’re going to have to help me with this because I’m not entirely sure what I mean when I say this, but We’ve become a sort of a, on the one hand, we’ve become a sort of a shameless culture in the sense of like, nothing’s really immoral now. It’s just my truth versus your truth. Or not even versus your truth. It’s my truth and your truth and everybody’s truth. All mixed up. I lost a train of thought in the whole.

Josh Galt: Talking about shame. So we’ve become a shameless culture, but at the same time, shame is used as a mechanism of control in a lot of different ways. Cancel culture is shaming someone for their views, right? And it happens on both sides.

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I’m also thinking, I’m also thinking, though, of, like, I teach classics as well and have for a long time. And we got to this passage in the Iliad, which I always mark as sort of the turning point in civilization, when the embassy comes to Achilles and they beg him to rejoin the fight. And he says, no, he says, I hate Agamemnon like I hate death. Because he took my honor from my hands. And the kids sometimes get confused by that. And I say, well, what you don’t understand is that For the Bronze Age Greeks, they could measure their honor, right? I had 30 cows and you only had 20.

If you stole 20 of my cows, you had more honor. Being a thief was not dishonorable because you could measure how much honor they had. And timē and kleos, they called it. Timē being stuff and Kleos being your reputation. And I said, and so if a Greek hero insulted another Greek in battle, the other one had to come up with an equal or greater insult, or else forever they’d be left behind. And I said, you guys will find this hard to understand. One of my kids was like, no, I don’t. I was like, what do you mean?

He’s like, well, I can have so many followers and he only has this many followers and I insult him on Instagram and if he doesn’t come back with a better insult and it’s all recorded and monetized and measured and another kid, and this is how I discovered Kendrick Lamar, interestingly, well, he came back with a song which I think is called Money and Rep, which is really cool because money and rep is stuff and Reputation, right? And he says, it starts off something like about growing up in Compton and being in a gang and how everything was about how much money you had and what your rep was like.

He says, but I fought my way out and I worked hard and I went to school and now, he says, I hang out with He’s like politicians and actors and models. He’s like, and he ends the song with, and now, you know, it’s all about money and rep. Money and rep, like his life has come full circle. But is that a problem that’s going to be resolved by AI or one that’s made worse? I can’t really see AI making that worse.

Josh Galt: But I think that’s part of why people are looking for something with substance, something with depth, something that is real, because you can game money and rep. You can game cool in a way that is fake. What is virtue signaling? So now today we have this sort of thing in society, to where shame, cancel culture is sort of the shaming mechanism, but virtue signaling is the reputation and that is the honor that you’re talking about the ancient Greeks had.

Father Augustine Wetta: You can even…

Josh Galt: It’s virtue signaling, but, so this goes, I want to ask you about, because you’ve written about self-esteem.

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah, you’re right. But wait, hold on a second.

Josh Galt: And where self-esteem comes from.

Father Augustine Wetta: I’m thinking about gaming. What do you mean you can game money and rep? What do you mean by game it?

Josh Galt: So it’s something that you can, exactly, exactly. So you can game that to look like it, which is where virtue signaling comes from, right? So now today, so many people, so many influencers, right, are on social media posting messages.

Father Augustine Wetta: You mean like fake it or… It can look like you have…

Josh Galt: That who they’re with, supposedly, or their cars, their flashy stuff, a lot of times they’re renting the supercar, right? They didn’t buy it’s not theirs. But so that’s showing the money side. And the reputation side comes from the virtue signaling, where it’s like a hierarchy of who’s more virtuous. And it’s, but this is where it connects to self-esteem. No, it’s

Father Augustine Wetta: But it… Right, but it’s not just influencers. I mean, the kids, when they post the picture of themselves, they have an opportunity to airbrush this and take out this zit, you know, and yeah,

Josh Galt: Everyone. Or use a filter,

Father Augustine Wetta: Which is something that we didn’t have access to was the best looks of all of our friends instantly available to us. Like, and I keep having to remind them that, like, you don’t see your…

Josh Galt: It’s a disconnection from reality. Sure.

Father Augustine Wetta: You don’t see Kim Kardashian, well, she’s passe and now it’s the Earls, apparently, but you don’t see Kim Kardashian when she wakes up in the morning with bad breath and has a fight with her husband, which obviously happened because they’re divorced.

Josh Galt: The

Father Augustine Wetta: All you see is the two of them beautiful naked riding a motorcycle, you know, in the clouds.

Josh Galt: Highlights, you only see the highlights. Exactly. And

Father Augustine Wetta: Right. So you get the impression that your own life is so

Josh Galt: That’s it.

Father Augustine Wetta: Dull by comparison. Yeah.

Josh Galt: But also when it comes to morality and so where the virtue signal I think is super dangerous is where it connects to self-esteem. So Tell me a little bit about how you see self-esteem because I think that this is foundational and it connects to things that you’ve written about and talked about and that you have gone all in on your belief system because when you virtue signal, You’re showing that you are moral, that you are ethical, that you are virtuous, that you are, you know, of a higher caliber person because of helping the poor or whatever you’re virtue signaling.

But the reality, if you’re not actually living that causes a contradiction inside of you, which then fractures your own self-esteem because you are the only one that knows you’re living a lie.

Father Augustine Wetta: I just want to say for a second that this is the most fun I’ve had in having a conversation in a long time.

Josh Galt: Oh, awesome. Thank you.

Father Augustine Wetta: Back to, yeah, no, this is really fun. First of all, can you tell me what is virtue signaling? I can

Josh Galt: So it’s a public demonstration of something that shows that you are a moral person, that you are a virtuous person.

Father Augustine Wetta: Hear you. Does it, is it always at someone else’s expense?

Josh Galt: No, no, it’s not necessarily at someone’s expense at all. It can be, for example, gosh, I don’t want to

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah, can you, oh,

Josh Galt: Get all political, but there’s so many ways to explain it. Okay, let me just give you an example, because you talked about Black Lives Matter. Virtue signaling. Virtue signaling would be an upper-class white liberal woman protesting on behalf of black people. Even though she has zero connection to their real life, she does, like she lives in a gated community, drives a Mercedes, like she has no connection to those people, but she is publicly going to be talking about how black lives matter, even though she’s a white liberal woman that spends zero time in black neighborhoods or with black people at all. That’s virtue signal.

That’s showing the world that I am a moral person, even though she doesn’t live it at all. So that’s just one simple example.

Father Augustine Wetta: I, we run a pretty conservative school, right? And one of our teachers complained because the kids are giving her a hard time about her Black Lives Matter bracelet. And my friend Umar was like, oh yeah, white women and their jewelry. Ask her if she’s ever been to a meeting, you know. Of course, she bought the bracelet and complains that she’s persecuted. She’s not with us anymore, and I won’t name her anyway. But yeah, you’re right. Okay, that’s virtue signaling. Okay.

Josh Galt: That’s virtue signaling. It’s trying to show a morality that you don’t actually live because… And this connects to self-esteem. Maybe someone is insecure because they realize, like, what is my purpose? Well, if I speak out for these oppressed people, then I will be able to show that I am more virtuous. But then that causes a fracture inside. So that’s why I wanted to get your perspective on self-esteem and where self-esteem comes from. Because in my view, that makes you more insecure and have less self-esteem because you’re living a lie. And only you know that.

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah. Right. Right. And it all boils down, ultimately, to truth and beauty and goodness, which the Catholic believes, and I suspect most world religions believe this as well, that God is truth, and he is beauty, and he is… Now, actually, I don’t think Islam believes it quite like that, because they believe God determines what is true, right? But I don’t quite understand that. But I’ll just speak from the Catholic perspective, because that’s all I know, really. But that God is truth. So real humility, real… I don’t like the term self-esteem particularly much anyway, because I just can’t imagine, say…

John the Baptist saying that holding himself in high esteem, you know, in fact, even Jesus did not deem equality with God something to be grasped, right? He didn’t have high self-esteem. And in fact, any word that has self in it, any expression is probably self. At least deserves a second look. I prefer humility. But if you want to describe humility as authentic self-esteem, then it’s truthful self-knowledge, right? And the story I tell in my book about that is that I had a friend in Oxford when I was there. who lived in a palace, and I didn’t know that when I befriended him.

He invited me to dinner at his house, and his mom drove me, and we came around the corner, and there is this five-story mansion with its own golf course and Eucharistic Adoration Chapel, and in spite of being a monk and I was completely detached from these things. I went, wow. And I looked over at his mom and she looked at the place and she looked at me and she goes, yeah, isn’t it great? And it really caught me off guard because you would expect her to say something like, oh, it’s so hard to keep up, you know, or, well, it really needs work.

Josh Galt: Diminish it. Yeah,

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah, but in fact, she had the humility to recognize it as a gift, and so she could truly enjoy it, you know, and she was as amazed

Josh Galt: That’s

Father Augustine Wetta: That she had it as I was. Yeah,

Josh Galt: Cool. Because

Father Augustine Wetta: It is. Right.

Josh Galt: So often people who are blessed, and that’s exactly, I mean, that connects to virtue signaling, right? It would be like someone who’s a politician and has three houses, their entire shtick is, well, I’m working for the poor and the working class and whatever else. It’s like, Dude, you have like three multimillion dollar houses. Like, what are you talking about? You’re not connected to that. But it’s that fake humility, which is another form of virtue signaling. So his mom was just honest of what a blessing it is to have this amazing place. And that’s

Father Augustine Wetta: Which is where I think fake humility can do real harm. I have a friend who marched with Martin Luther King during, she

Josh Galt: Real.

Father Augustine Wetta: I know her from way, way back, but she was a delegate to the World Health Organization, and the theme that year was overpopulation, world overpopulation, and they had, who’s the guy who claimed Al Gore, who invented the internet? He was speaking about world, well, he’s got four daughters, right? And so she was kicked out, actually, because she raised her hand. She said, how many kids do you have again? He’s like, so you’re not afraid that rich white people are going to overpopulate the world. You’re afraid that us Africans, those South Americans, those Indians, those brown people are going to overpopulate the world. And they kicked her out.

But I think that, yeah, at its worst, it becomes exactly what it pretends not to be, which is the sort of veiled, murderous, in some ways, racism, or exactly the opposite, or anything, frankly, the opposite of what it ought to be.

Josh Galt: And how do you, how do you get to a real humility then in the way that you have structured your life? Is it, does it go back to the thing of if you make your brother angry to prostrate yourself and say, bless me, like to because there’s also, I think, well, you tell me, What do you think about certain philosophical belief systems that talk about selflessness? Because there’s a lot of, like, get rid of the self, kill the ego, and all of that. Like, does that apply in your belief system, or do you think that there’s

Father Augustine Wetta: No, I think definitively not that in fact there’s

Josh Galt: A balance?

Father Augustine Wetta: This great expression from I think Irenaeus of Alexandria or Irenaeus of Lyon that he says the glory of God is man fully alive that or yeah again you got me going like five different directions I And inevitably, I wind up quoting Martin Luther’s theology, and supposedly, no one can remember whether he actually said this or not, so maybe he’s a straw man here, but that he said man was basically scheisse, that man was shit, right? And that Jesus covered that with the snow of his grace so as to hide us from God’s wrath, right? And that’s exactly wrong, in my opinion, if that’s what he said, because we’re not shit. We’re made, we are good.

God doesn’t create shit. In fact, that’s what’s bad with words like shit as it is, because it takes something good like pooping, which at my age is something I really celebrate, and makes it something shameful and ugly, or gives it a shameful,

Josh Galt: Important.

Father Augustine Wetta: Ugly name. Oh, man. Yeah, I’ve completely, where was I going with that? Oh,

Josh Galt: I think that’s a really interesting, I’ll see if I can bring it back.

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah. So selflessness, I think, is sort of a misnomer that the more you discover your true self, the more humble you’ll be. And the more you use your talents, though, ironically, When it comes to being a monk, the things that made me most humble were the crosses that I made for myself. That it’s, well,

Josh Galt: You mean figurative or literal carvings?

Father Augustine Wetta: No, no, figuratively, that the times that it’s precisely the things that annoy me most about my brethren that are making me the most humble, and precisely the times when I do something stupid and cruel to them that I’m reminded of what I really am, but it’s also an opportunity to be the best me, so there’s this sort of, Well, Saint Benedict says that humility is a ladder that you climb as you go down, that as you go down, you get more and more humble. So there’s always this tension between, because the fastest route to humility is humiliation, right? And that doesn’t mean, I’m not necessarily very humiliated by it.

Josh Galt: Is it though, like for true humility? Because like in the exit, sorry.

Father Augustine Wetta: Well, true. Go ahead. No, no, go ahead. I’m interested. Yeah.

Josh Galt: I was going to say, in the example of your friend’s mom, like, she was humble enough to just admit that the place was a blessing. So we, in a materialistic sense, she was going up on the ladder of materialism and things and economics and all that. So is humiliation, or maybe I’m not interpreting what you’re saying specifically correctly.

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah. Well, I would think that she was able to be like that because she was aware of her own weaknesses. And nothing makes you more aware of your weaknesses than screwing up. Like, that I would… I would think that inheriting that mansion was not a humiliation for her, that was not a way she became more humble, except in some fact that she was able to share it with other people maybe, but that she had spent enough time in prayer, yeah, yeah. Another thing I’m fond of telling kids during spiritual direction is that the closer you get to God, the less holy you feel.

That you read these lives of the saints, they say, oh, I’m such a worm, I’m no man, and you go, well, no, wait, you’re St. Anthony, you’re great, you know, or Mother Teresa, who’s calling herself just God’s pencil stub, you know, and you say, well, wait a second, hold on, you’re one of the most influential people of the last century, what do you mean you’re just a pencil stub? But It’s like standing next to a skyscraper that the closer you get to God, the smaller you feel, but that’s actually an accurate self-understanding in the perspective of measuring yourself by God’s standards.

So the closer you get to God, the less saintly you feel, which is, I think, precisely why Jesus is so down on people comparing themselves to one another, you know. Did I answer the question? I can’t even remember what the question was. I

Josh Galt: I think so.

Father Augustine Wetta: Remembered I had the first of lots of vocation crises, and I went to visit one of the old monks of the monastery, and I told him, Abbot Patrick, I’m leaving. And he said, really, you’re leaving today? And I said, no. Well, not today. He goes, well, good, just be a good monk today and leave tomorrow. And that’s kind of the philosophy I’ve been following ever since. But I went off to my cell and I came back and I said, well, wait, what the hell does that supposed to mean? And he took out the gospel, I think it’s of Luke, and he found the passage about the man born blind.

And the story goes that Jesus finds this guy and he cures him and then he goes off and tells people, hey look this guy Jesus of Nazareth just cured me and the religious authorities find out and they bring him to trial and they say, did this man heal me? And he said, Abbot Patrick was convinced that he was a teenager because he annoys everyone in the story, including his parents and Jesus and But he also has this typical teenage answer. He goes, I don’t know. I was blind and now I can see. And they go, well, but don’t you know this guy’s a bad person? He goes, well, he might be bad, but I was blind and now I can see. And they’re like,

Josh Galt: The facts of reality,

Father Augustine Wetta: And finally he goes, well, you guys want to be his followers? All I know is he doesn’t even go back and thank Jesus. Jesus finds him. And he says, do you believe in the Son of Man? And he says, ironically, well, who’s that? And you can almost hear the annoyance. Jesus says, you’re looking at him. That’s literally how it translates. And then he falls on his face and he worships him. And he goes, look at this kid. He’s like, he’s got nothing going for him. Like, he annoys everyone. He’s no good before crowds. He’s not even a very grateful person. But he had one talent, and that is that he stuck to the facts. And that was enough to save him.

And I, well, and to bring us back to AI and virtue signaling, that it’s sticking to the facts that’ll save us, I think. Well, Jesus will save us, but the fact, yeah, that it’s always, it’s, we say of monks who are thinking about leaving, that they’re looking over the wall if they’re leaving for the wrong reason, but And every time I’ve thought of leaving, it’s been because there was some fantasy I was indulging in. And you’re right that the internet in general and AI in particular has a way of making those fantasies look really, really real. And that is a danger.

But on the other hand, it can also bring reality home in a way that other things can’t. So…

Josh Galt: So how would you, just to wrap this up, I could talk to you for all day, but I want to respect your time. We’ve been going an hour and a half. How would you suggest for someone

Father Augustine Wetta: Really? Holy cow, it’s been an hour and a half.

Josh Galt: Who’s like, well, I really… I want to live more monk-like in my life, but I’m not going to go and join a monastery. For the next 30 days, if you had one thing that you would say to people like, whatever your faith is, do this one thing every day and it’s going to help you to have more of that powerful peace that the monks that inspired you found in the elevator and found, you know, In those situations that you have found in your life. What is one thing that people can do?

Father Augustine Wetta: I would say start by spending 30 seconds in silence. Just waste 30 seconds deliberately. Not just silence, silence, but put God at the center of that silence and then waste it with him. And if you can’t do that, then just drive to work with the radio off.

But I think, I think, I was telling, I was talking to my students about this, and some of them have started actually incorporating a bit of silence into their day, and one of them said, yeah, I walked outside, this kid actually locks himself in his closet for 30 seconds a day, because he’s so distractible, and he said, I opened my closet, I walk out, he’s like, And there were leaves on the trees. He’s like, he goes in, I saw leaves on the trees. And another kid said that, like, girls were looking at him differently because he was looking at them differently.

Josh Galt: Or just

Father Augustine Wetta: Yeah, it’s, well, but also, like, you… One of them said he had a friend who was always picking up girls at the dances, and he couldn’t be, and the girls all said he had beautiful eyes, so he said, I watched him and watched him and watched him, he’s like, he didn’t have beautiful eyes, he just really looked at them when they were talking, he’s like, he was really listening, he’d get really, he’d lean in and he’d listen, he’d nod and he’s like, And that’s a talent that you can learn just by shutting up.

Josh Galt: Listening and being in silence allows the mind to refocus on things like the beautiful simplicity of leaves on the trees and what someone is truly saying. It’s so simple but yet so profound and it’s something that How often do we go to the bathroom and you’re scrolling on your phone, right? It’s like we don’t even have that time anymore to just be silent and be quiet. There’s always some sort of entertainment or noise or something that we can distract ourselves with. So that’s great advice. And you live it.

And it’s an example for others who maybe if they look at that and like, man, I don’t think I could ever go to a monastery, but I can find and create that type of space in my own life every day in order to find peace and connection with the divine. And that’s something that can be a very powerful practice for people, I think.

Father Augustine Wetta: Amen, brother.

Josh Galt: Well, thank you so much, Father Augustine. This was really, really interesting. And I appreciate you taking the time and being so candid. Absolutely.

Father Augustine Wetta: Oh, it was fun. We’ll do it again sometime. I hope.