Fun experience and also some really great reading at the end that comes from https://theancienttradition.com/1-the-ancient-tradition/ A podcast i highly recommend

THE PROMPT: I gave it a 7200 token raw input transcription. I asked for markdown formatting, good section titles, bolding important words, good quote formatting, write every word as is and to correct obvious spelling mistakes (could be seen as conflicting rules) also to give a recap of spelling mistakes fixed.

can you read through this transcript then format this transcript in markdown without the time marks and write it out with better arganization to be read nicely and easier to read. Look at spelling make sure there were no transcription mistakes Your goal is to write every single word from the document just formatted better. Do not leave out any word, the goal is a better formatted true transcription. use markdown and you can be creative with how you format things and look for the intent and different sections and add section titles and maybe bold words or important sections and block quotes and stuff like that. After you do the Re-write then report on if you had to change any spelling or not

Not a perfect prompt but i had to do some of this because i was trying o3-mini and kept getting errors so i made it more emphatic on some parts. (o3-mini still failed)

RESULTS - o3-mini = FAIL 3400 tokens -Did not follow rules and cut half the text, recapped instead of formatted transcription - o3-mini-high = PASS 7100 tokens- nicely formatted though given a conflicting rule it didn't follow rule to fix spelling mistakes. Quotes were well formatted. Bolding was minimal but good. Paragraphs were split with weird formatting. (77 seconds of thinking) - Grok3 Think = PASS 7400 tokens - even better formatting, fixed spelling mistakes and researched correct spellings of obscure historical things. Everything was basically perfect (158 seconds of thinking)

• o1 = FAIL 4300 tokens - Great formatting and followed bolding rule and did good job with quote formatting. (46 seconds of thinking)

• o1 PRO = PASS 7300 tokens - it gave precedence to one rule over another and did not fix spelling mistakes. There were a few formatting decisions that weren't great and bolding was not amazing. Paragraph issues as well. (228 seconds of thinking)

• GPT 4.5 = FAIL 1100 tokens - It just did a recap... and a short one.

VERDICT = Grok3 is the Winner by a mile.

I was surprised because i expected o1-Pro to nail it and for this to be an easy task for other models like o1 and o3-mini-high. They did ok but when you compare how well Grok3 did ... there is no argument i will use Grok 3 anytime and everytime for this. It still took it's sweet time (second longest) but when it starts to output the text it's dang fast.

Here was the output below Original transcription found here https://theancienttradition.com/1-the-ancient-tradition/

The Ancient Tradition Podcast - Inaugural Episode

Music

You’re listening to The Ancient Tradition. A Wonk Media Production. Music provided by Joseph McDade. Here is your host, Dr. Jack Logan.

Introduction and Welcome

Welcome to the Ancient Tradition podcast. I’m your host, Jack Logan. Jack is short for Jacqueline. Since this is the inaugural edition, it’s only fitting that I start by way of introduction with a little bit of background, give you some information about what brought this podcast to fruition, and that starts way back in the mid-90s when I was thinking a lot about religion and spirituality. So I started reading and I read loads and loads of books.

Background and Inspiration

And that included things from academic articles to scholarly books. And I even dove into the sacred religious writings themselves. And I tried to read on a whole array of religious traditions. And this included the ancient Egyptian religion, the Hellenistic mystery religions, early Christianity. I read about a whole bunch of Native American folk religions. I just tried to get the lay of the religious landscape. And the more and more I read, the more I started to notice that there were these remarkable similarities between these apparently different religious traditions. And this is, in the modern world, this is a lot how these religious traditions are perceived as being vastly different from each other. But as I was reading, I was getting really a much different perception of the world’s religions. Because instead of being vastly different from each other, I was seeing an abundance of really remarkable similarities and correspondences between them.

And this was apparent in the symbols that they used, the cosmogonies, which are ancient creation stories about how the world came to be. I could see similarities in the liturgies, in the rituals, especially in the architecture. I mean, really just everywhere. And it was in these books that these similarities were being pointed out by reputable scholars. These were scholars that went to pretty prestigious universities. They were the ones pointing out these similarities. And they came from a kind of a variety of backgrounds. They were in comparative religion, ancient cosmology, anthropology, archeoastronomy, just kind of an array. And so these were not wackadoodle pseudo-scientists. These were legitimate academic scholars, which just made what they had to say ring a little more deeply. Several of them argued that the evidence was so abundant and profound and that the threads between the religions were so apparent that it was really almost incontrovertible that the religions of today were descendants of some common source, a single religious tradition that originated in deep antiquity.

Scholarly Voices on a Unified Tradition

Let me just give you a feel for some of what they wrote. One of these scholars by the name of Lord Raglan, he’s passed away now. He used to be a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. And he wrote, and he’s talking here about the similarities in religious customs that he saw. He says:

There are some remarkable customs which are found in every continent. The probability is that these customs spread over the world from one center.

And he continues, and this time he’s talking about similarities that he sees in religious rites. He says:

These rites are all found in one form or another in most religions, whether ancient or modern, savage or civilized. Striking resemblances, for example, have been pointed out between the rituals of Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, and the ancient religion of Mexico. It seems absurd to suppose that these resemblances, which run through all known forms of ritual, are the results of instinct or of coincidence. What the facts suggest is that whatever the ultimate origin of ritual, all extant rituals are derived from a single ritual system.

You know, I was reading stuff like this and this was kind of blowing my mind a little bit. They were arguing that in deep antiquity was this original religion from which all of the religions of today sprung. Here is another one of these scholars. His name is René Guénon and he was a French intellectual. He notes a lot of correspondences in particularly in initiation rites and he wrote:

From all of the comparisons brought forward, we can already draw a conclusion. When one finds such concordances everywhere, is this not more than a mere indication of the existence of a primordial tradition?

Primordial means in the beginning or from the start. He continues:

There is but one unique tradition from which every orthodox traditional form is derived.

A little more contemporary scholar by the name of Mircea Eliade, he has passed away now and I’m gonna definitely talk about him more in just a minute, but he wrote:

"Continuous reading reveals above all the fundamental unity of religious phenomena."

And I’ve definitely seen that. The more and more I read, the more and more I’m seeing it just everywhere because you know what you’re seeing now. You’ll just glaze over it if you’re reading and being like, I don’t know why there’s a bird on a pole. But once you realize that this bird on this pole is everywhere, you start to see it everywhere.

A more contemporary scholar than even Mircea Eliade, a gentleman by the name of Marinus van der Sluis. He’s probably younger than I am, but he’s a scholar out of the Netherlands. And he did a lot of his research on cosmological traditions, ancient cosmological traditions. And he noticed that there was just a lot of consistencies all over the world in these cosmologies. He writes:

It emerges that practically all cultures sustain surprisingly similar notions about the origin, the constitution, and the destiny of the cosmos. A single template can be distilled, a story told around the globe.

So I’m reading books and I’m reading quotes just like that. And this is entirely new to me. I had no idea that there was evidence and an abundance of it that pointed to a single, unique religious tradition in deep antiquity. I had to know more. So for the past couple of decades, I’ve tried to make a very serious study of it. And it’s turned out to be this unbelievable ride. It’s been a great adventure. And even though I’m still deep into the books, I’ve got a stack right next to me lined up, ready to be read. This was never an academic pursuit for me. It always was and it continues to be a spiritual one.

The Telephone Game Analogy

You know, I kind of thought about this in terms of the telephone game. I don’t know if you’ve ever played the telephone game, but if you haven’t, it’s a pretty fun game. But basically what happens is somebody starts with a message and then they relay that message to the ear of the person next to them. And it’s passed down the line from person to person to person. And as the message is passed from person to person, the original message gets skewed or altered. And sometimes there’s a player who just intentionally corrupts the message just for fun. But when the game is finished, then the last person who received the message recites it back to the entire group. And then it’s compared to the original message. And the differences between those messages, people usually laugh because it’s a pretty, pretty funny change from the original to the last.

So for example, the original message may have been something like a dog named Moose ran loose through the spruce forest, chasing a goose. But after it’s been passed through the group, it might end up something like a goose and a moose chased a dog up a spruce. So through the process of passing the message down from person to person, elements of the original message are lost or altered. But other elements remain stubbornly intact, and that’s where the magic is there. There seems to be threads of the original message that usually remain. So like in the example I just gave you, you’ve got a goose and a moose and a dog and a spruce, it kind of gets jumbled up a little bit, but those features of it, the goose and the moose and the dog and the spruce stay stubbornly intact.

So I wondered from a religious perspective, if I could kind of take the telephone game and work it in reverse. I could start with the elements that stayed stubbornly intact and work kind of my way backwards. If I could, then I just might be able to reconstruct the world’s original pure theology. The idea was that, you know, kind of the farther back I went, the closer I would get to the original doctrines. And so this was really a search for the untainted, uncorrupted, unpolluted original religious doctrine or theology that had been imparted to human beings.

The Spiritual Quest

And so at its core it really was a study as a way to search for truth or spiritual truth. I hoped I’d learn by reconstructing the ancient theology the answers to a lot of really important questions. And what’s interesting is that there are loads and loads of books out there but there isn’t a single one that I could find that puts it all together into one comprehensive understanding of what this ancient tradition was characterized by. What did it look like? So that’s what I’m going to attempt to do in this podcast is put the pieces together and create kind of more of a comprehensive view of it.

Hopefully it will answer. Well, it will because I already know what’s coming ahead. It will provide a lot of answers for the really important questions like:

• Who is God?
• What is God like?
• What was taught in this tradition?
• What was the basic theology?
• How did they teach the theology or impart it to others?
• Why do human beings even need religion? Which I think is a great question.
• And was that original tradition an organized religion? If not, okay, but if it was, how was it structured?
• How does it explain the purpose of this earthly experience?
• What happens after we die?

So there’s some really profound existential questions that should be addressed by the ancient tradition. And I don’t wanna like give all of it away, but it will answer every single one of those questions. And what’s really neat is that individual parts converge into this beautiful unity and kind of wholeness that you would just not expect unless there was something true about it.

So if I’m gonna take this approach seriously, I’d have to set aside any of the preconceived religious or spiritual or theological notions and should just go with where the stubbornly intact bits and elements led. And that’s not easy to do. And I recognize it’s not an easy thing to do, especially if one has been raised in a particular religious tradition. But this is going to be the only way that I’d be able to attempt a reconstruction of the pure religious tradition of the ancients, which I refer to in this podcast as the ancient tradition.

And what I didn’t know then, but I know now, is that this was gonna turn into just an amazing adventure, an adventure of a lifetime. And I’m constantly surprised. In fact, just this morning, I read a Japanese myth that knocked my socks off because of how well it preserved in Japanese cultural terms, key elements of the ancient tradition. And I’m constantly surprised and enlightened. It’s been an amazingly fun ride, meaningful, very fulfilling.

Purpose of the Podcast

Before my study, I’d never heard any of this. And almost everyone I talked to had never heard of any of this before too. I just don’t know how this is, you know, we’re in 2022, 23. And I thought, what if I put it into a podcast and shared with others what I found? You know, this would at least force me to organize my thoughts and put together an outline of the ideas. And these were things I’d been thinking about for many years. I also felt that this podcast might be a worthwhile venture because I was thinking about the world that we live in and man you look outside and it just feels like that there is chaos and confusion in abundance.

You know there’s no other way to say it but that this is a challenging spiritual environment to live in. It seems that for many the world is a spiritual wilderness. People don’t know where to look and they especially don’t know what to believe. All they know is that they don’t feel whole and they feel like something is missing. So I thought a podcast would be an excellent way to share that exciting evidence, and for me, mind-boggling evidence of this pure ancient religious tradition, along with its theological tenets. So those who are searching can see for themselves. I hope it might provide a few answers for those who are searching, or at least point you or them in the right direction.

The ancient tradition is theologically rich. It provides answers for all of the fundamental existential questions a human being could ask. Like I mentioned earlier, this has never been an academic pursuit for me. It’s always been a spiritual pursuit. My research has been a search for evidence of spiritual truths. I believed that if there was a purpose to this earthly existence, then God at some point would have to have given those spiritual truths to human beings. Or how else would we human beings have ever known if there was a God or what was true or not and what the purpose of this whole earthly experience was.

Exploring Mircea Eliade

And in the process of reading, I came across a remarkable scholar, a gentleman by the name of Mircea Eliade, who I quoted earlier. And I didn’t know it at the time, but I would later find out that Eliade, before he passed away, he was actually the chair of the Department of History of Religions at the University of Chicago. And I found out that he was actually quite famous in many academic circles. He was known as one of, if not the foremost scholar of comparative religion in the world. And after his death, the University of Chicago established the Mircea Eliade Chair in the history of religions as a way to honor his many contributions to the field. And he’s written a lot of books. He’s written many, many books, all of which, every single one of them, in my opinion, are worth reading. And many of them will play a really important role in helping establish the ancient tradition.

Companion Website

This podcast has a companion website called theancienttradition.com. And if you visit theancienttradition.com and you wanna learn more about Eliade, you can go to the menu and search under scholars. And there I have a list of all of the noteworthy scholars that I recommend reading for those who are interested in pursuing more, and you’ll find Eliade there.

Evidence from Aboriginal Traditions

But while I was reading one of Eliade’s books, a book titled, Rites and Symbols of Initiations. I came across this amazing account of Aboriginal peoples or Aboriginal tribes in New South Wales, Australia. So like if you looked at a map of Australia, and actually it’s on the website, you’ll see it there, in the southeastern corner, that’s referred to as New South Wales, and above that is Queensland. And so we’re kind of in that region of Australia. I’m reading this story about them, and they claimed that the rituals that they performed in their sacred ceremonies were the same rituals that had been given to the first ancestors in the beginning.

So in these legends, they tell how Bayami, now Bayami is their creator god, and how Bayami after the creation imparts to the first ancestors a religious tradition. And this is a religious tradition that’s characterized by initiation rites. Bayami, the creator god, explains to the first ancestors that these sacred rituals were to be performed only in a sacred place on sacred ground. And this sacred ground, along with those sacred rituals, were known among Australian Aboriginals as the Bora, B-O-R-A.

A gentleman by the name of Robert Matthews, he’s a specialist in Aboriginal anthropology. He studied a lot of those legends, and he wrote that the Bora ground itself is Bayami’s camp. And one of the things I love about all this research is that the same elements or concepts or themes that we see all over the world are expressed in cultural or ethnic terms. And so Bayami, their creator god, his first camp, they use the word camp. We would probably never use the word camp, but since Aboriginal peoples developed camps in many places, they’re referring to where Bayami’s home is a camp.

So the sacred rituals were only to be performed in Bayami’s camp or where Bayami, the creator god, dwelt, which was a very sacred place. Today we might refer to where Bayami dwelt as like a temple where the god dwells. Eliade wrote, speaking of the Aboriginal descendants of the first ancestors, this is what he wrote:

This is to say that the participants in the initiation ceremony reactualized the mythical peri