Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein w/ John Hill and Jesan Sorrells

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Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this

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is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,

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episode number

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161.

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Yes, we are rolling on and on. We are

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almost three quarters of the way fully through

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2025 and well,

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we’re in the middle of our Sci Fi Month, so

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let’s go ahead and get this started. From the most important book

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in the Torah, or what the Gentiles term the Old

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Testament, comes this interesting story that acts as

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a chapter break in the much longer story of

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the seemingly, or must have seemed to him,

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interminable exile of a man named Moses.

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And I quote, Moses agreed to stay with the man who gave

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his daughter Zipporah to Moses in marriage.

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Zipporah gave birth to a son and Moses named him

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Gershom, saying quote, I have

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become a foreigner in a foreign land.

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Close quote Exodus 2:21

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22 KJ V

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or in other translations the text reads I have become a

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stranger in a strange land.

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Our book today is probably the best attempt

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by any human being that I’ve read to date

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to attempt to construct how a non human mind, a stranger in

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essence, would operate in what to them and

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to their perception of reality would seem like a very

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strange land. Meaning earth. Indeed,

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there is an idea in philosophy and in

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psychology called theory of mind, and it states I got this from

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Wikipedia, the following in psychology and

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philosophy, theory of mind, often abbreviated T o m,

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refers to the capacity to understand other individuals by ascribing mental

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states to them. A theory of mind includes the understanding that

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others beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions and thoughts may be different

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from one’s own. Possessing a functional theory of mind is crucial for

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success in everyday human social interactions. People utilize a theory of

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mind when analyzing, judging, and inferring other

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people’s behaviors.

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But what does a theory of mind mean when the mind theorizing about

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other people is as unlike a human mind as an

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ant’s mind is unlike an elephant’s mind?

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And what does all this theorizing and empathizing mean when we throw

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into the mix the mysteries of Mars, predicting an

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impregnable human future, and of course, whatever might

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or might not have happened at Roswell

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all those many years ago, as was

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postulated on that great 1990 show of which I was a big

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fan, the X Files.

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Today, on this episode of the podcast, we will be

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exploring probably what are some unanswerable questions

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by exploring insights provided for us from a book

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that the Library of Congress named as One of the 88 quote

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unquote books that shaped America Stranger

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in a Strange Land by Robert

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Heinlein Leaders, there are

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more things floating around in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in

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whatever your current philosophy might

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be. And of

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course, we will be joined today on our show

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by our co host, rejoining us from episode number

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159 where we discussed Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of

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Electric Sheep? Back comfortably and safely

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from vacationing in an undisclosed

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location deep in the heart of the American west, which we had to believe several

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times because he was a ruffian and couldn’t control himself.

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Episode 159 John Hill,

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aka Small Mountain how you doing, John?

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Thank you for protecting me from myself and weeping out

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any bad attempts to kind of share where I was. We are back in

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the saddle. I know everyone is very confused when I do take a vacation. Believe

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me, it was kind of confusing for me as well. But we’re back in the

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saddle and I am so excited to talk about this book

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with you because for anyone who’s listening to this,

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this was my idea, by the way. Right? I don’t know. I don’t know if

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you’re going to bring that up or not, but I’m the one who floated this

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book to you and I can’t wait to hear

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what your thoughts are on it. So this book,

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for lack of a better term, I won’t say struck me dumb,

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but I could definitely see where 30 years ago, if

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I had read this when I was 15 or 16, and then some

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somewhat more impressionable years, particularly with my

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viewing of the X Files. I’m going to bring that up here

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extensively. And something else on the show, which I almost

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never get into my literal

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encyclopedic knowledge of conspiracy theories of

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all kinds. You laugh, but there

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are. There are. Well, there are.

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When I talk about conspiracy theories, I’m one of those people

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that tells other people that are getting into conspiracy theories now to

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don’t do it. Don’t, don’t do it. It’s. It’s. It’s a

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rabbit hole. And if you go down it, there’s

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never an end. I’m like, I’m like. I’m like, what’s his name?

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Not Lithgow. Who was the father in A National

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Treasure? Who yells at Nick Cage?

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Was it John Voight or something? John Voight. Yes, it was John Voight. John Voight

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was the actor. He was. He had a great line as the dad. He’s like,

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there’s never. You’re never gonna find a treasure because then there’s gonna be another clue

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and there’s gonna be another clue and then there’s gonna be another clue and there’s

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gonna be another clue and this is gonna be another clue and there’s gonna. Be

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another clue and you never gonna get to the end of it. And he’s like

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all frustrated, yelling and then he runs out of the room. He was right.

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Maybe not that movie, but that’s.

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If I’d read this book with the way I was

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deeply influenced by conspiracy theories and not for like a little bitty

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tiny bit of time. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All

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of my teenage years and a good chunk of my twenties were, were, were

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phenomenal around what may be

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going on on the underside of the world. That is not, quote, unquote, common

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knowledge. And so

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that’s why I brought up theory of mind. This is why I brought up X

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Files. This is why I brought up what may or may not

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have happened at Roswell, by the way. A conspiracy theory that began with

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absolutely no help from the Internet. We’ll talk about that here today.

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So this book would have literally probably struck me

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dumb if I had read it earlier now, having been

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through all that and having come

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out somewhat

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scarred on the other side.

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The most, huh, ever in history. Well, I’m like Jay

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Z. What scars will scab. What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do

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to me? It’s fine.

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I look at Heinlein, I looked at this, this piece of writing a little bit,

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a little bit differently, but I still have that.

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There’s still that 15 to 18 year old Haysan in there that’s

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still yelling at me that I’m a punk. And so it’s fine.

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So we’re going to explore Heinlein, we’re going to explore the theories, we’re going to

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explore the ideas, we’re going to explore the big themes from this.

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I would encourage people to go back and listen to episode number 160, which is

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our intro episode where we talk about Heinlein’s background, we talk about who

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he was, how he came to write this book.

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Something that’s fascinating that I would like to bring up here. And I don’t know,

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John, if you know this, but he was a person

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who he, he claimed, he alleged that

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he finished writing this book in, in 1950,

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which I kind of actually believe. And then he withheld the, the

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manuscript for 10 years from publication. He made a

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decision to censor, for lack of a better term, himself, because he

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didn’t think society was ready for his ideas. And

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so I Look at it. And I have to

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put it in the context of that, of that writing, where he

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goes in the book. And then of course, there’s things that.

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And we’ll talk about many of these things today on the show, but there’s things

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that have popped out of the ether that

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he had no bead on, like zero beat on whatsoever.

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And yeah, so we’ll talk about all of that.

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As usual, I will point out that this book is viciously protected

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by copyright. So we will not read directly from the

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book. We’ll summarize sort of some overarching themes

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from the book so people can get a flavor of this. By the way,

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can I add a. Little color to this? Yeah, go ahead. Add a little color

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while I’m turning towards the first part. Yes, go ahead. Now, because

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I didn’t realize this. Are you reading the unabridged version or are you reading

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the mass market original version that was originally published?

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I am reading. Let me see, let me look at the copyright. I am

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reading the original version, not the mass market version.

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Okay, what’s the date? Let’s see. I have

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1961. And then renew

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1989 by his wife Virginia, and then

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assigned 2003 to the Robert A. And Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

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by Penguin Random House. So

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what, what is fascinating to me about this whole thing, okay. I have a lot

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of history around Heinlein in this book, specifically because I was

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11 when I read this book, right? Okay. I had gone to my brother.

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My brother was five years older than me and a half brother. And so his,

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his dad had all this pulpy science fiction, right? So the Burrows,

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the Chronicles of Mars. Right. And you know, very

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wide but very pulpy science fiction fantasy stuff. And so

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I’m reading a lot and I’m in fourth or fifth grade and I go to

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my brother and I was like, hey, do you have any books I can read?

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I’m tired of Judy Bloom and Beverly Cleary and stuff. And he was like,

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yeah, okay. And he goes over and he starts like looking at his

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shelf and he pulls some books off of it and he’s like, don’t

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tell mom, okay? You know, I’m not gonna tell mom and everything else like this,

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right? And so in those books were,

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I mean, books that were not really, I mean, 11 year

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old. I mean, there’s, there’s, there’s so much going on in this book. Right.

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But this was in, this was in 90, right.

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So I had never read the full unabridged version of this. Right. The version

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that I read was the, was the version that is kind of

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talked about in this book and it was always very weird because this

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wasn’t my first Heinlein book. Right, Heinlein. Heinlein. Heinlein. I don’t know

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exactly the right way to say it. We’re just gonna go along with it. Rah.

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Is how I think about them in my. So my path

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to here was like Number of the Beast was the first thing by his that

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I had read and just because the title sounded cool and it’s about multi

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dimensions and time travel and all this very interesting stuff, but the themes were the

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same. And so like this was actually my third, third or fourth book

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by his that I had read and it wasn’t my favorite, right? Because

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I was already getting used to this kind of Sorkin esque dialogue

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that happens between high line characters and that wasn’t

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really very prevalent in the. The, the other version of it. So

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fast forward to reading this book. Right?

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I go pick it up off the shelf. Now the, the reason why me and

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my wife are together is actually because of this book. Because the first night we

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hung out after meeting up and going and having a drink together, we get,

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you know, back to her place, we’re hanging out just as friends and all this

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other stuff, nothing crazy happened. And I see this exact book

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on her shelf and I was like, oh, I can have different kinds of

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conversations with this person and stuff like that. And that’s what led to the relationship,

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right? So she is a fan of his stuff as well. And so

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she’d read this one and it was her favorite book and was always very confusing

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to me. Why? Right? Because to me it always felt the, the

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stunted of. Of all the material that I’d read.

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So fast forward to this. I’m reading it again. It’s been a very long time,

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right, since I’d read it because it wasn’t one of my favorites. And I’m going

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through this book and I’m like, oh my God, like this is completely

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different, you know. So I plowed through the book last week, right? I read most

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of it over the weekend. I think I read about 300 pages between Saturday and

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Sunday and I’m like floored. But I’m also

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realizing because I’d read the foreword by his wife about the path of this book

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and how publishers were asking him to take it down and to make it smaller

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and everything else like this. So my point, my point of view on it was

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that he knew that it was going to be polarizing and probably people weren’t going

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to be ready for it. And so I think he took

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some meat out of it. And I think they were still concerned about how big,

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like, how much it would sell, right? And of course they’re going to talk about

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it as, like, they try to censor it and stuff like this, but, like, it’s

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a business, right? And you can’t take too big of a flyer, right? You got

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to put out something that sells. And when we look at the impact that this

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book had during that time, I think there’s a lot of room to be like,

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hey, the publishers had some good perspective on chopping

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this thing down into something that would sell and actually have a

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chance to, like, impact. But holy crap, I finished the

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book and then I went sleuthing to try to go figure out, like, what are

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the differences between this book and, like, as a writer,

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oh, man. Like, he didn’t just go through and, like, chop out huge chunks. He

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went and he rewrote the whole thing, right? So, like, you

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have to go page by page to see the differences, but everything that comes out

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of it is the depth that makes the book so good. In my personal.

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Because now after reading it the second time, I’m like, huh, how did I short

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sight this book about? You know, because it’s talking about philosophy and, you know,

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religion and great wealth and appreciating and, like, all these things that,

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like, I now have, I guess, connection to.

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And I’m like, God, like, why was I. And then I. I actually had to

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go Googling and researching, and then I found this guy who kind of talked about

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the differences between the original version and the unabridged version. And then, like, there it

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is, right? That depth, that nuance, all of that stuff. And

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here’s the thing, some people don’t like it, but if you’re. If you’re a fan

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of his writing, you’re probably not going to like

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the shortened up version. And that was a whole interesting

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kind of like, moment yesterday after finishing the book and then being like, okay, cool,

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I want to go see what I missed. And I hadn’t missed anything. But

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the depth of it was not present at all. Very

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fascinating for me as a guy who loves this author, likes this book a

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lot, coming to it now after a person who thinks and studies these

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things that I pay attention to. Well. And Heinlein came

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to, I think, writing this book in

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a way that was reflective

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of sort of an

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overarching ethos that he held as a human being. And his

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overarching Ethos was.

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Mid. Not mid, early, early 20th century progressive. He was an early

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20th century progressive and everything that goes along with that.

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So, you know, one of the things that we’ve

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explored or one of the themes that we’ve explored on this podcast heavily

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is when you read fiction looking for leadership lessons from the

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early 20th century. And I’m talking about the Dos

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Passos and the Fitzgeralds and the Hemingways and the Faulkners

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and the, the, you know, the folks in that realm, and then

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everybody that kind of comes off of them, black,

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white, female, doesn’t matter what genre,

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because they were all sort of aping the same kind of thing because of what

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happened at the end of World War I. Right. And they’re trying to redefine World

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War I. So Heinlein was born in what, 1907.

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And so being born in 1907, he would

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have, I mean, he tried to get into the military

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and, and then did serve in the military. He missed World War

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II by literally that much. And so

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these. He had two different strains in his two parallel

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tracks in his head that most

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moderns don’t understand. Like we, we in the modern era,

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on the other side of the progressive era and on the other side of the

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fall of the Berlin Wall. Politically and culturally, in America,

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we think that anybody who has served in a war, for good or ill, we

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think that anybody who has served in a war must be reflexively conservative.

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We just think that. And part of that, it comes out of our Vietnam experience,

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where the people who went and served in that war

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may have been more reflexively conservative than those who were at Woodstock.

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Okay, and that’s, and by the way, that’s, that’s. This is just

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sort of the nature of culture and how the culture, like, flows through a nation

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state. Right? But if you look at the progressives

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from the early 20th century, I give those people a lot

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of grace. And normally I’m not a person to do that, but I give those

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people a lot of grace politically because here’s the thing. They didn’t know

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the things we know about Marxism. They didn’t

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know the things that we know about Soviet Communism. They didn’t know the

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things that we know now about the purges in China. They

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didn’t read the writings of Mao and Lenin until later

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on. There was actual embargoes on information

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getting out of the Soviet Union that would have

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caused people to be less, shall we say,

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supportive of even watered down

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versions of that, like Upton Sinclair. If Upton Sinclair had had access to the

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information that Walter Durante had access to. He probably wouldn’t have been

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as progressive and as progressively

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socialist in his writings as he was now. With that being said,

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George Orwell, who was a European, 1984,

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Animal Farm, had access to all that information because Europe’s right there.

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He had access to all of it. And Orwell was still

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a card carrying socialist. He believed you could

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slice that cake very thin and get something off of there

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that didn’t have the gulags and the purges and the famine and the non and

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the pogroms and the nonsense and the detention camps and the concentration camps. He

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believed you could throw away all of that and you could still have something that

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would move the world. And so when he writes 1984, when he writes

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Animal Farm, those are polemics against Stalin,

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okay? He’s the first political writer against Stalin

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in a major genre of any kind post World War II.

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Now Heinlein, on the other hand. Let’s talk about

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science fiction. Science fiction at the time when Heinlein even took

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it up wasn’t. I mean, you had H.G. wells and

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that was really about it. And you talk about Edgar Rice Burroughs and

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Pulpit and that was. It was considered to be kids stuff, right? Like comic books,

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right? It was considered to be kids stuff. And so what Heinlein, along with Arthur

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C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov did. Oh yeah, was they

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all those guys. And I would throw Ray Bradbury in there, although he’s not thrown

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in there, but I would throw Ray Bradbury in there. And only because he, he

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wrote in multiple different gen. Rose had refused to define himself. God bless him. I

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love that man for that. He refused to be pigeonholed. He’s like, no, I’m just

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a typist, it’s fine, just whatever. Love that.

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But. But those guys

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took a genre that was considered to be stuff to your point that

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you would find on a kid’s shelf and made it something that adults

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could appreciate. And Heinlein, look, Heinlein was going to put

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in his progressivism, he was going to put in his ideas about politics, he was

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going to put his ideas about philosophy, he’s going to put in his ideas about

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the potential human future, but he was also

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going to bring over that, that military quote unquote, discipline

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into his writing. And I see, I see strains of that. Not

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even strange of that. That’s all over the place in Stranger in a Strange Land.

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Like you talk about him rewriting certain sections. The only way you can do that

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is if. Is if you have a. Not rigid, but you

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have the discipline that comes from. And you know what I’m talking about here. The

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discipline that comes from having marched around and wrote in

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ROTC for 10,000 years and then thinking that that was the thing you were

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going to go do, you know? So I look at

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Heinlein as a rich

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repository of this kind of, that kind of

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the merging of those two tracks of thinking, the military track, of the

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progressive track, in a way that we really not

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can’t get to. It will take a while for us to come out of this

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cultural moment to get to somebody like that again, because we’re just

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too bifurcated right now. We’re just, we’re just too bifurcated on our thought process.

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So I, I love that,

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right? Because, like, it’s been a long time since I’ve really kind of like, steeped

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in a bunch of hindland and everything else like this, right? And getting, getting back

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used to Jabal Harshaw as a character and how he, how

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he, you know, goes around and stuff. Like, this was

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interesting, right? You know, like, by the way, as I’m, I’m the son

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of a lawyer, everything that Jabal did, and I’ve been Sarah,

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my lawyers my entire life. Is this on the podcast for a while now.

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That’s exactly what lawyers do, exactly how they behave. He nailed it

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perfectly. I mean, I mean, like,

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now I do think that, I think it’s easy to

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read this book and see Jubbal as, like, this, you know,

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out of touch, out of date Persona, and he treats women badly. And, you

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know, and like, I, I, I saw some reviews of people just like, pending this,

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like, badly and everything, but then get to the end of it, right? Where he

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kind of like, shares some of the stuff of, you know, like,

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I really appreciated that, that one conversation where I think he calls in Anne and

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he’s like, have I ever been rude to you? And, and she was like, no.

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Right? And, and to me, that was such, like, a moment of like, there

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00:22:27,050 –> 00:22:30,870
is, there is, and I hate this. I

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do not like this. But all the people that I rail against

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who are going to treat people as disposable or specifically

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salespeople, and you don’t want it enough, so we’re just going to write you off

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and everything. They, if they run enough volume, they will filter out

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and be left with people who are motivated by the way

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that they’re motivating them. Right? And relationships, I think, are

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00:22:53,030 –> 00:22:56,850
the same thing, right? Some people want a stronger presence and then

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other people don’t. Right? And so I was kind of going through it and then

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00:23:00,410 –> 00:23:04,250
I was kind of like, oh God. Like, you know, and then. But wait

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00:23:04,250 –> 00:23:07,930
a minute. Some. That’s what some people are looking for, right?

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And. And like, I need to kind of remember that whenever, whenever I get a

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little judgmental and heavy handed with it and stuff like that, because it’s just not

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for me. And that’s okay. Right, right, exactly.

379
00:23:20,350 –> 00:23:23,550
Let’s do this. Let me summarize part one so people have sort of an idea

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00:23:23,550 –> 00:23:27,230
of what it is. Yeah, sorry. We got super centric because it’s

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00:23:27,230 –> 00:23:30,990
good. It’s good. Yeah. There’s so much in this.

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00:23:30,990 –> 00:23:34,790
There’s a lot. Yeah, there is. I can only read maybe

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00:23:34,790 –> 00:23:38,430
a few pieces here. So I’m going to read

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00:23:38,430 –> 00:23:42,030
just the opening of part one that I have his immaculate origin, and then I’ll

385
00:23:42,030 –> 00:23:45,030
talk a little bit about what part one is. And by the way, the book

386
00:23:45,030 –> 00:23:48,510
is structured really interesting to me in an interesting way to me.

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00:23:48,750 –> 00:23:51,850
There’s a part one, a part two, part three, part four, and a part five.

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00:23:53,370 –> 00:23:56,210
And it’s, you know, it’s a well over five at least. The version I have

389
00:23:56,210 –> 00:23:59,930
is over 500 pages. And so these pages are.

390
00:23:59,930 –> 00:24:03,250
I mean, these sections are chunks like you have to follow through a narrative structure

391
00:24:03,250 –> 00:24:06,890
in this. And then he very cleverly ties the narrative structure from one

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00:24:06,890 –> 00:24:10,010
section into the next section and sort of lets bleed and go.

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Lets them. Lets each section bleed into the next

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so it doesn’t feel as if it’s bifurcated.

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And he sort of is. Is. He’s writing in

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the mode that weirdly enough, Tolkien and

397
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probably C.S. lewis were also writing in the format. Just

398
00:24:30,620 –> 00:24:33,180
shows up different. Right? It just shows up different. It’s the same stuff that we

399
00:24:33,180 –> 00:24:36,380
were seeing in the, in the Philip K. Dick book. Right. Of all this. Like

400
00:24:36,700 –> 00:24:40,500
this, like the thing that struck me was that was how. How wide

401
00:24:40,500 –> 00:24:43,420
the locus is in the beginning and then how he kind of zooms in and

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00:24:43,420 –> 00:24:46,780
then all of a sudden it goes from. Right. Because like the first two times,

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00:24:46,860 –> 00:24:50,260
three times maybe, I think it’s kind of like, okay, like, whoa, right, we’re blown

404
00:24:50,260 –> 00:24:53,580
back out to space and like all these things. The third planet of okay, okay,

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00:24:53,580 –> 00:24:57,420
okay. And then I do think he does a great job of just gradually

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00:24:57,500 –> 00:25:00,420
shortening this. And then all of a sudden you’re back in there and it’s not

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00:25:00,420 –> 00:25:04,220
a jarring effect. And the thing that I appreciate is that it’s

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00:25:04,220 –> 00:25:07,900
not the, it’s not the prologue of the chapter in italics. Right, right.

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And so then they don’t have to put any like, thought or effort or craft

410
00:25:10,620 –> 00:25:14,440
into how they’re gonna. Right? It’s. It’s lazy writing. It’s lazy

411
00:25:14,440 –> 00:25:17,840
world building. Right? And as a guy who reads a lot of science fiction fantasy,

412
00:25:18,240 –> 00:25:21,960
I just like when people figure out a way to weave it in as

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opposed to here’s three pages of exposition because we’re lazy. And you’re just supposed to

414
00:25:25,560 –> 00:25:28,880
appreciate it because this is part of how, like not be, better be.

415
00:25:29,200 –> 00:25:32,960
Sorry. Soapbox, deep breath. Don’t be. Don’t

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be a lazy writer in any genre. Well, well.

417
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So it’s really hard. And I know this as a

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facilitator who spends. I used to spend a lot of my life,

419
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not so much now as I did in the past,

420
00:25:48,610 –> 00:25:52,250
but when you are speaking extemporaneously or even

421
00:25:52,250 –> 00:25:55,890
from notes and you are speaking live to a group, like I just did this

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00:25:56,290 –> 00:26:00,130
last, this weekend, right? When you are speaking live to a group

423
00:26:00,130 –> 00:26:03,810
or you are speaking extemporaneously

424
00:26:04,130 –> 00:26:07,810
from notes that you have written, but you’re not bounded

425
00:26:07,810 –> 00:26:11,650
by that. The hardest thing to do is to do transitions.

426
00:26:11,810 –> 00:26:15,650
That is the hardest thing to do because you not only have to transition yourself,

427
00:26:16,130 –> 00:26:19,850
you have to transition the audience. Which is why on this show

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00:26:19,850 –> 00:26:23,690
we take a pause and then we do our transition. I love that. Kind of

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00:26:23,690 –> 00:26:24,130
like this

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00:26:29,010 –> 00:26:32,610
for part one. His Maculate Origin Once

431
00:26:32,610 –> 00:26:35,970
upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine.

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Michael Smith. The first human expedition to Mars was

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selected on the theory that the greatest danger to man was man himself.

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00:26:44,130 –> 00:26:47,370
At that time. Eight Terran years after the founding of the first human colony on

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00:26:47,370 –> 00:26:51,090
Luna, an interplanetary trip made by humans had to be made in free

436
00:26:51,090 –> 00:26:54,850
fall orbits from Terra to Mars. 258 Terran

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days the same for return plus 455 days

438
00:26:58,610 –> 00:27:02,410
waiting at Mars while the planets crawled back into position for the return

439
00:27:02,730 –> 00:27:06,250
orbit. Only by refueling at a space station could the

440
00:27:06,250 –> 00:27:09,770
envoy make the trip. Once at Mars, she might return if she did not

441
00:27:09,770 –> 00:27:13,490
crash. If water could be found to fill her reaction tanks, if a thousand things

442
00:27:13,490 –> 00:27:17,210
did not go wrong. Eight humans crowded together for almost

443
00:27:17,210 –> 00:27:21,050
three Terran years had better get along much better than humans usually did. And

444
00:27:21,050 –> 00:27:24,690
all male crew was vetoed as unhealthy and unstable for married

445
00:27:24,690 –> 00:27:28,450
couples was considered optimum if necessary specialties could be found in

446
00:27:28,450 –> 00:27:32,220
such combination. This is your opening

447
00:27:33,260 –> 00:27:36,780
and it’s interesting because this

448
00:27:36,780 –> 00:27:40,220
entire piece, this entire first part is about

449
00:27:40,700 –> 00:27:43,900
the finding of. And it totally

450
00:27:44,620 –> 00:27:47,660
blows you away. When you get like 25 pages in, you realize, oh, this is

451
00:27:47,660 –> 00:27:51,460
what he’s doing. A man

452
00:27:51,460 –> 00:27:54,860
is found on Mars by an expedition that goes to

453
00:27:55,590 –> 00:27:58,950
find out what happened to the previous expedition, the one that he initially sets up.

454
00:27:59,430 –> 00:28:03,270
And from that previous expedition, a child was born, but a child that

455
00:28:03,270 –> 00:28:06,990
was raised in a Martian environment, not in

456
00:28:06,990 –> 00:28:10,790
a human environment. In essence, a. Then this is

457
00:28:10,790 –> 00:28:14,470
why I quoted from the Old Testament, a stranger, right,

458
00:28:14,950 –> 00:28:18,750
but was raised in a strange land, but not strange

459
00:28:18,750 –> 00:28:21,760
to him, strange to the human beings coming to

460
00:28:22,480 –> 00:28:23,920
see him. And

461
00:28:26,560 –> 00:28:30,320
the first kind of sort of thing, the first beat, maybe the first thing

462
00:28:30,320 –> 00:28:34,160
that, that I picked up from this book, particularly in reading the first part

463
00:28:34,160 –> 00:28:36,640
of it. It took me a little while to sort of conceptualize where I wanted

464
00:28:36,640 –> 00:28:40,240
to go and talking about this because I was so

465
00:28:41,040 –> 00:28:43,120
not enamored. I was so

466
00:28:45,200 –> 00:28:48,570
intrigued is the word. By the idea that.

467
00:28:50,810 –> 00:28:54,610
By an idea that was actually planted by Ray Bradbury in Martian Chronicles, even

468
00:28:54,610 –> 00:28:58,330
though Martian Chronicles was written after Stranger to Stranger to Strange Land. And we are

469
00:28:58,330 –> 00:29:01,770
going to cover Martian Chronicles, by the way, on the podcast here. So

470
00:29:02,250 –> 00:29:06,050
stay tuned for that if you need a co host. I think

471
00:29:06,050 –> 00:29:09,570
I know a guy. Oh, well, I might not get invited back after asking you

472
00:29:09,570 –> 00:29:12,810
to read this one. I’ve got. I’ve got. I’ve got a guy. I’ve got a

473
00:29:12,810 –> 00:29:16,540
guy. But yeah, but I think

474
00:29:16,540 –> 00:29:20,380
this book acts as a sequel to Martian

475
00:29:20,380 –> 00:29:23,980
Chronicles because the clever thing that Ray Bradbury does at Martian Chronicles

476
00:29:24,220 –> 00:29:27,740
is he makes a claim that I think Heinlein takes to its logical

477
00:29:27,740 –> 00:29:30,860
conclusion. Even though Heinlein wrote Martian Chronicles,

478
00:29:31,660 –> 00:29:35,380
sorry, Stranger in a Strange Land, probably right around the same time Martian Chronicles was

479
00:29:35,380 –> 00:29:38,820
coming out. They were probably written in parallel, so there’s no way they would have

480
00:29:38,820 –> 00:29:42,340
known what each other were, what each other was writing. But it just says that

481
00:29:42,340 –> 00:29:46,140
there’s other things in the Zeitgeist other than just when it comes to creativity. There’s

482
00:29:46,140 –> 00:29:49,740
other things in the Zeitgeist floating around. Ideas don’t just come to one person.

483
00:29:51,820 –> 00:29:55,500
So there’s an idea in Martian Chronicles, and it’s probably the most intriguing idea that

484
00:29:55,500 –> 00:29:58,780
Ray Bradbury ever came up with. And it is the idea that

485
00:29:58,780 –> 00:30:01,660
Mars changes you more than you change it.

486
00:30:03,820 –> 00:30:07,620
And Heinlein takes that to

487
00:30:07,620 –> 00:30:11,340
its logical conclusion with a child unto us, a child is

488
00:30:11,340 –> 00:30:15,100
born anyway.

489
00:30:15,900 –> 00:30:19,660
And don’t worry, that’s going to pop up later on. And.

490
00:30:20,780 –> 00:30:24,220
And that’s why he. Because Heinlein was also clever and snarky.

491
00:30:25,260 –> 00:30:28,980
That’s why he calls it his immaculate origin. Not Immaculate Origin, his

492
00:30:28,980 –> 00:30:32,660
immaculate Origin. So the. The mission goes back to Or a

493
00:30:32,660 –> 00:30:36,060
return mission is made to Mars after the first mission, quote unquote, fails.

494
00:30:36,650 –> 00:30:40,370
The child is found all, all grown up. But having grown up

495
00:30:40,370 –> 00:30:43,970
in low Martian gravity and having grown up around, well,

496
00:30:43,970 –> 00:30:47,690
Martian people, if people is really the term that you want to

497
00:30:47,690 –> 00:30:51,450
use, and he is then. And even he and she.

498
00:30:51,450 –> 00:30:54,490
And gender doesn’t really. Doesn’t really stick either.

499
00:30:55,690 –> 00:30:59,290
But that person, that entity is brought back to, to Earth

500
00:30:59,450 –> 00:31:02,730
and then from there we kick off into the action.

501
00:31:03,420 –> 00:31:06,700
By the way, he’s held in quarantine in a hospital

502
00:31:07,740 –> 00:31:11,020
initially. That creates some problems. And

503
00:31:11,580 –> 00:31:15,420
people are not allowed, human people are not allowed to have interaction

504
00:31:15,420 –> 00:31:18,220
with him with the exception of a nurse named Jill.

505
00:31:19,100 –> 00:31:21,100
That’s going to be important later on as well.

506
00:31:23,500 –> 00:31:26,540
One of the things that struck me in the very first section though, beyond just

507
00:31:26,540 –> 00:31:28,700
those things, is I,

508
00:31:31,910 –> 00:31:35,550
I so,

509
00:31:35,550 –> 00:31:39,030
so this book has made me. It’s not made me. Has brought me to the

510
00:31:39,030 –> 00:31:42,270
point where I need to admit something. On the show and I talked about conspiracy

511
00:31:42,270 –> 00:31:45,670
theories and things like that, I want to believe.

512
00:31:46,070 –> 00:31:49,710
I want to believe that all the conspiracy theories are true. I absolutely,

513
00:31:49,710 –> 00:31:53,390
desperately want to believe that they are all true. And by the way, true meaning

514
00:31:53,390 –> 00:31:56,950
factual and meaning non falsifiable

515
00:31:56,950 –> 00:32:00,550
against reality. I want to believe that there are

516
00:32:00,550 –> 00:32:04,030
shadowy cabals running things, doing weird stuff. I

517
00:32:04,030 –> 00:32:07,390
absolutely want to believe that. I want to believe that

518
00:32:07,790 –> 00:32:11,469
there are people in power doing weird things and hiding weird things from us.

519
00:32:11,469 –> 00:32:14,350
Because from my perception of reality for many years,

520
00:32:15,470 –> 00:32:18,990
there are. You get to a certain point on explanations of things and it’s either

521
00:32:18,990 –> 00:32:22,470
incompetence and stupidity or its

522
00:32:22,470 –> 00:32:24,510
competency and venal evil.

523
00:32:27,230 –> 00:32:30,590
Those seem to be our only two choices. Now, there is a third option. There

524
00:32:30,590 –> 00:32:33,790
is a third option there. And the third option is, and it is a Minority

525
00:32:33,790 –> 00:32:37,429
Report to frame from another book title by Philip K.

526
00:32:37,429 –> 00:32:41,030
Dick, the Minority Report. There is that there are good people

527
00:32:41,030 –> 00:32:43,310
who have stumbled into bad things.

528
00:32:44,990 –> 00:32:48,360
Now, because I filter

529
00:32:48,920 –> 00:32:52,600
most things in the world through the way I

530
00:32:52,600 –> 00:32:55,120
look at the world. And one of the things that influences my worldview. I said

531
00:32:55,120 –> 00:32:58,720
this before with John. One of those things that influences my worldview is my

532
00:32:58,720 –> 00:33:02,280
religion and how I interpret that in the world, both for how I walk through

533
00:33:02,280 –> 00:33:06,000
as an individual, but also how other systems and processes work and how I should

534
00:33:06,000 –> 00:33:07,880
relate to those systems and what I should do.

535
00:33:11,640 –> 00:33:15,300
I do believe that there is good in the world, but I also believe in

536
00:33:15,300 –> 00:33:19,020
the existence of evil. I absolutely believe in the existence of evil.

537
00:33:19,420 –> 00:33:23,260
Now, how we define evil, what label we put on it, who gets

538
00:33:23,260 –> 00:33:26,900
to define it? By the way, this also comes up in part two of

539
00:33:26,900 –> 00:33:30,340
Stranger to Strange Land. I loved Jubal Hershel

540
00:33:30,340 –> 00:33:34,100
Harshaw’s sort of having to go through his nonsense with, with

541
00:33:34,100 –> 00:33:37,940
all of that. That was great. I’m glad Heinlein had the courage

542
00:33:37,940 –> 00:33:40,900
and the guts to actually write that down because he thought, I could tell you

543
00:33:40,900 –> 00:33:44,440
for a fact, that’s what he thought was going to get him in trouble. I

544
00:33:44,440 –> 00:33:47,560
mean, I think it’s much more the religion stuff that happens. Oh, yeah, it was

545
00:33:47,560 –> 00:33:51,160
the religious stuff. It was. But see, the first. He writes the first part of

546
00:33:51,160 –> 00:33:54,920
that and then in part four and five, he takes that to

547
00:33:54,920 –> 00:33:57,840
its logical conclusion and he thought that was what was going to get him in

548
00:33:57,840 –> 00:34:01,280
trouble. We’ll talk about this later on. But what he didn’t understand

549
00:34:01,600 –> 00:34:05,280
was religion was. And yes, I do

550
00:34:05,280 –> 00:34:09,000
mean Christianity in America was, was hitting its

551
00:34:09,000 –> 00:34:12,240
high water mark in the 1950s, 1960s and

552
00:34:12,240 –> 00:34:16,000
1970s. That was the high watermark of religiosity in America. And

553
00:34:16,000 –> 00:34:19,760
everything has been. And I know secular atheists and

554
00:34:19,760 –> 00:34:22,800
people who come from a more pagan background, people come from other religious traditions. Don’t

555
00:34:22,800 –> 00:34:26,560
believe me. I’m deep in the Christian religion. Let me tell you,

556
00:34:27,280 –> 00:34:30,960
the water is going out of the tub. The water

557
00:34:31,040 –> 00:34:34,620
is going out of the tub. We are well on our way to

558
00:34:34,620 –> 00:34:37,900
being, I think it will happen in my generation, in my time, to being as

559
00:34:37,900 –> 00:34:41,580
irreligious Christianity irreligious

560
00:34:41,820 –> 00:34:45,140
as most of Europe. Whether this is a good thing or bad thing, we can

561
00:34:45,140 –> 00:34:48,500
argue about whether this will free us, like Sam Harris, from our

562
00:34:48,500 –> 00:34:51,860
superstition or not, is we could argue about that. And we will, by the way,

563
00:34:51,860 –> 00:34:55,660
we’ll argue about that. But it is, as a matter

564
00:34:55,660 –> 00:34:59,390
of factual act actually happening. And

565
00:34:59,390 –> 00:35:03,230
that’s what Heinlein couldn’t have predicted. But that’s going a little bit

566
00:35:03,230 –> 00:35:06,710
ahead of ourselves to pull it back. The question I have for John,

567
00:35:06,870 –> 00:35:09,950
because this is a huge question for me in the first part of this, with

568
00:35:09,950 –> 00:35:12,670
all my conspiracy theory mindset, belief in evil, da da, da, da, da, all this.

569
00:35:12,670 –> 00:35:16,510
Okay, what if. I’m going to ask

570
00:35:16,510 –> 00:35:20,110
you a Ray Bradbury question? Oh, God, am I sitting

571
00:35:20,110 –> 00:35:23,030
down? Sit down. Here’s a Ray Bradbury question.

572
00:35:24,230 –> 00:35:27,660
What if the world’s out there, are really populated by the leftover

573
00:35:27,660 –> 00:35:31,220
signals of our fever dreams? What if people are going to show up?

574
00:35:31,540 –> 00:35:33,540
People, what if aliens

575
00:35:36,260 –> 00:35:39,860
are going to show up? Not like an Independence Day and

576
00:35:39,860 –> 00:35:43,340
blast us out of the sky, but instead are going to show up and give

577
00:35:43,340 –> 00:35:46,980
us every, every Edenic thing we could

578
00:35:46,980 –> 00:35:49,940
possibly ever want in exchange for our slavery.

579
00:35:52,190 –> 00:35:55,630
That scares me more. That scares me more. That

580
00:35:55,630 –> 00:35:59,430
scares me more. Because we’ll

581
00:35:59,430 –> 00:36:02,830
just say yes because we’re looking for God.

582
00:36:05,950 –> 00:36:09,150
Okay. I think, I think that statement is, is very,

583
00:36:10,110 –> 00:36:13,790
very important to the, to

584
00:36:13,790 –> 00:36:15,630
the conversation. Right. Because,

585
00:36:18,060 –> 00:36:21,500
oh, man, there’s a lot. I’ll let you chew on that for a little bit.

586
00:36:21,980 –> 00:36:25,580
No, I, I. So I wrote notes about this book because I, I

587
00:36:25,660 –> 00:36:28,220
had so much to talk about it with you. And there, and there’s this line

588
00:36:28,220 –> 00:36:30,540
in here that I wrote. Where is it?

589
00:36:32,140 –> 00:36:35,060
And I didn’t put the page number on this, but it says, ben, the foulest

590
00:36:35,060 –> 00:36:38,220
sinner of all is the hypocrite who makes a racket out of religion.

591
00:36:41,180 –> 00:36:43,860
And I read that line and I was like, oh, my. Like I was in

592
00:36:43,860 –> 00:36:46,620
the middle of the flow seat. I’ve got headphones on. I’m ignoring my family. I’m

593
00:36:46,620 –> 00:36:49,000
trying to finish this book so we can talk about it, everything. And I was

594
00:36:49,000 –> 00:36:51,320
like, oh, my God, where’s my phone? Right? So I’m putting this thing in here

595
00:36:51,320 –> 00:36:53,160
because, man, I.

596
00:36:56,440 –> 00:36:56,920
Oh.

597
00:37:00,440 –> 00:37:03,320
I think that the, I think that the effort to tell people

598
00:37:04,360 –> 00:37:07,800
don’t even bother thinking about it is a much bigger problem

599
00:37:08,360 –> 00:37:11,880
than, than the idea that, like

600
00:37:12,120 –> 00:37:15,650
that, that it might be there. Right. Because, you know,

601
00:37:15,730 –> 00:37:16,290
whenever

602
00:37:19,410 –> 00:37:23,170
I can see as, as I was reading this book, I can, I could

603
00:37:23,170 –> 00:37:26,850
see how much like, of this I have picked up along,

604
00:37:27,570 –> 00:37:31,170
along the years. Right? The skepticism, the. Yeah.

605
00:37:31,170 –> 00:37:34,930
The pushback against authority and always being concerned and everything else like

606
00:37:34,930 –> 00:37:37,330
this. Right. Because like, I’m reading this book and I was like, oh, this is,

607
00:37:37,330 –> 00:37:39,850
this is. Well, I’ve read a lot of Highline. Right. Like, I mean, I just

608
00:37:39,850 –> 00:37:43,690
had. So, you know, his idea, like one of his, his

609
00:37:43,690 –> 00:37:46,970
very most popular ideas in all of his books is that, like, if you’ve not

610
00:37:46,970 –> 00:37:50,810
served in the military, you shouldn’t vote right now, he doesn’t really talk

611
00:37:50,810 –> 00:37:53,490
about all of that stuff here because it’s very contained in the lanes that he’s

612
00:37:53,490 –> 00:37:56,650
trying to like, push on and polarize and everything. But, like, you know, he’s, he’s

613
00:37:56,650 –> 00:38:00,450
a very interesting author. Right. And

614
00:38:00,690 –> 00:38:04,490
I know, I know this is, this is not going to be a super

615
00:38:04,490 –> 00:38:08,330
popular opinion. So I hope anyone who hears this and takes issue with it

616
00:38:08,330 –> 00:38:11,530
is listening intentionally and closely. I think a lot of people

617
00:38:12,730 –> 00:38:16,250
are looking for God as an escape

618
00:38:16,250 –> 00:38:18,010
hatch because they’re really scared of death.

619
00:38:19,850 –> 00:38:23,690
Oh, I’d agree with that. I think. Well, and actually, actually I would even go

620
00:38:23,690 –> 00:38:27,330
a step further. I think they’re scared of living. I would, I would

621
00:38:27,330 –> 00:38:30,250
agree with, with that whole thing, right, because we talked about this.

622
00:38:30,890 –> 00:38:33,930
We, we talked about this. I think on the last thing, right, I saw this

623
00:38:33,930 –> 00:38:36,650
bumper sticker and it was like, hey, if you’re living like there is no Jesus,

624
00:38:36,650 –> 00:38:40,460
I hope you’re right. And, and we had this conversation because philosophically for me,

625
00:38:40,460 –> 00:38:43,940
I’m like, do we, do you guys really want the don’t have anything better to

626
00:38:43,940 –> 00:38:47,740
do crowd? Because to me, that kind of goes against the idea of the

627
00:38:47,740 –> 00:38:50,940
philosophy behind the whole thing, right?

628
00:38:51,820 –> 00:38:55,660
And that, that to me means. So at the

629
00:38:55,660 –> 00:38:59,340
high, at the high water mark of the 20th century of religion, we were.

630
00:38:59,500 –> 00:39:02,700
Christianity was taking everybody. Everybody. Oh, yeah, I know, I know.

631
00:39:04,070 –> 00:39:07,910
But now what you’re seeing as the

632
00:39:07,910 –> 00:39:11,750
wave goes out is you’re seeing. Well, I’ll

633
00:39:11,750 –> 00:39:15,470
give you a statistic. So among younger millennials and gen

634
00:39:15,470 –> 00:39:19,109
zers, the ones who do attend church, which church attendance is

635
00:39:19,190 –> 00:39:22,950
ridiculously down in the basement with all of them. But the ones

636
00:39:22,950 –> 00:39:26,790
who do attend church, they are not attending mainline Protestant churches.

637
00:39:26,790 –> 00:39:29,750
They’re not attending the kinds of churches that

638
00:39:30,250 –> 00:39:33,370
Heinlein saddle rises with the foster rights.

639
00:39:34,010 –> 00:39:37,450
They’re not attending those kinds of churches. They’re tending. They’re attending Eastern

640
00:39:37,450 –> 00:39:41,250
Orthodox, traditional Roman Catholic, the return of the

641
00:39:41,250 –> 00:39:44,930
Latin mass, the return of traditional Protestantism. The

642
00:39:44,930 –> 00:39:48,690
kinds of warfare that people who are not involved with that

643
00:39:48,690 –> 00:39:52,410
world don’t pay attention to that’s going on right now

644
00:39:52,970 –> 00:39:56,330
is kind of unbelievable. And Heinlein could not have predicted any of that

645
00:39:56,740 –> 00:40:00,500
at all. He would have been totally blind to that would have been totally blind

646
00:40:00,500 –> 00:40:04,100
to that. And so what you’re seeing is a return not to,

647
00:40:05,140 –> 00:40:08,700
not, not, not a because. Because younger

648
00:40:08,700 –> 00:40:12,500
millennials and older zoomers and younger zoomers,

649
00:40:12,500 –> 00:40:16,100
too, have already been through the,

650
00:40:16,260 –> 00:40:19,780
the hedonistic pagan stuff of Brave New World.

651
00:40:20,420 –> 00:40:24,160
And they’ve gotten to the end of, from their perspective, they’ve gotten to the end

652
00:40:24,160 –> 00:40:27,960
of that. And now they’re asking the meaning question, but they’re asking

653
00:40:27,960 –> 00:40:31,440
the meaning question without having ever had a

654
00:40:31,440 –> 00:40:35,280
religious sort of underpinning, right? And so if you’re asking

655
00:40:35,280 –> 00:40:38,880
the meaning question, but with no religious underpinning and everything else philosophically does

656
00:40:38,880 –> 00:40:42,040
not, does not serve or does not fulfill.

657
00:40:43,000 –> 00:40:45,080
Where are you going to go? Where are you going to go to? The hardest

658
00:40:45,080 –> 00:40:47,880
thing possible, you’re going to go to, you’re not going to go to the megachurch

659
00:40:47,880 –> 00:40:50,860
with 800 people every Sunday. You’re going to go to the

660
00:40:51,260 –> 00:40:55,100
smaller church in your town with maybe 100 people every Sunday and get

661
00:40:55,100 –> 00:40:58,620
baptized. And I’m hearing stuff like this happening

662
00:40:58,620 –> 00:41:02,140
all of the time. And again, not in the media centers, not on the east

663
00:41:02,140 –> 00:41:05,660
coast, not on the west coast, not even, weirdly enough, the place where we live.

664
00:41:06,380 –> 00:41:09,660
I’m hearing about this happening in the massive center of the country,

665
00:41:10,460 –> 00:41:13,020
and it. It gives me a chill because.

666
00:41:14,140 –> 00:41:17,580
Well, for a whole variety of reasons. But one of the things that

667
00:41:17,580 –> 00:41:21,340
we’ve never successfully done in America ever in a

668
00:41:21,420 –> 00:41:24,300
Christian tradition is we have never.

669
00:41:27,020 –> 00:41:30,540
And Jonathan Edwards was probably. I was talking with a friend of mine who’s a

670
00:41:30,620 –> 00:41:34,340
pastor a little bit, not about this, but about something related to this

671
00:41:34,340 –> 00:41:37,900
and it relate. But it relates here. He said that Jonathan Edwards was probably

672
00:41:38,540 –> 00:41:41,660
who was ahead of the Second Great Awakening, back in the 18th century,

673
00:41:42,770 –> 00:41:46,090
just before the Civil War. Jonathan Edwards was probably the best preacher that

674
00:41:46,090 –> 00:41:49,770
America’s ever produced that came out of an American tradition that wasn’t trying

675
00:41:49,770 –> 00:41:52,890
to do something that came out of Europe. He wasn’t trying to replicate a European

676
00:41:52,890 –> 00:41:56,730
religious tradition here. But he. He

677
00:41:56,730 –> 00:42:00,370
got a disease at the age of like, 45 or 46, something like that,

678
00:42:00,370 –> 00:42:04,210
and he died within 48 hours. Oh, wow. Right.

679
00:42:04,290 –> 00:42:07,650
Like, he hadn’t even hit, like, his peak. And back in the day,

680
00:42:08,090 –> 00:42:10,850
you started hitting your peak as a pastor when you were in your 50s, because

681
00:42:10,850 –> 00:42:14,650
you were old enough to have known something and live some life. Right? Okay. Well,

682
00:42:14,650 –> 00:42:17,770
once Jonathan Edwards was struck down, for lack of a better term,

683
00:42:19,530 –> 00:42:23,170
you had a bunch of people fall back into that

684
00:42:23,170 –> 00:42:26,290
space. And this is where you get the strains of

685
00:42:26,290 –> 00:42:29,930
Mormonism. This is where you get nlds.

686
00:42:30,170 –> 00:42:33,850
This is where you get sort of the more cultish kind of

687
00:42:33,850 –> 00:42:37,610
things. This is also where the Baptist Church really begins to sort of

688
00:42:37,610 –> 00:42:41,010
take off and really begins to arc out from rest of mainline

689
00:42:41,010 –> 00:42:44,610
Protestantism. The Presbyterians crack up. The

690
00:42:44,610 –> 00:42:48,090
Episcopalians are trying to hold everything together. So all these sects in

691
00:42:48,090 –> 00:42:51,489
America start jostling for believers.

692
00:42:51,890 –> 00:42:54,850
The mid 20th century was the high point of that jostling.

693
00:42:55,650 –> 00:42:59,170
Now we’re on the downhill slide of that jostling. And what’s happening is,

694
00:42:59,810 –> 00:43:02,730
again, for those people who aren’t paying attention to any of this because you’re in

695
00:43:02,730 –> 00:43:05,610
a business context or it’s just not something that you care about or you’re doing

696
00:43:05,610 –> 00:43:08,950
something else on Sundays, like maybe during the New York Times crossword puzzle or whatever,

697
00:43:08,950 –> 00:43:12,510
okay, fine. I’m just here to tell you this is starting.

698
00:43:12,910 –> 00:43:16,710
The concentration of this is beginning, and I don’t know

699
00:43:16,710 –> 00:43:19,550
where this winds up. I don’t know. I don’t know where it winds up at.

700
00:43:19,790 –> 00:43:22,750
But I do know that when people don’t believe in anything, they don’t just go

701
00:43:22,750 –> 00:43:26,590
to believing in nothing. They’re going to backfill that eschatology with something.

702
00:43:26,590 –> 00:43:30,070
And Heinlein do this too, by the way. That’s why he wrote about, that’s why

703
00:43:30,070 –> 00:43:32,830
he wrote about this. But anyway, sorry, go ahead. I.

704
00:43:37,000 –> 00:43:40,320
Okay, so we live in the south, right? And yeah,

705
00:43:40,320 –> 00:43:43,720
exactly. My, my, my Bible phase was very much a Southern

706
00:43:43,720 –> 00:43:47,520
Baptist kind of mode, right. And I went to, we said you. Were

707
00:43:47,520 –> 00:43:51,240
11 in 1990. Yeah. So you were at the back end.

708
00:43:51,320 –> 00:43:54,200
Yeah. You were at the back end of the Seeker Sensitive movement. You were at

709
00:43:54,200 –> 00:43:57,560
the back end of like Rick Warren and big mega churches and all that kind

710
00:43:57,560 –> 00:44:01,240
of stuff. Yes. And so this is really important because my grandmother was,

711
00:44:01,240 –> 00:44:05,070
was very much a big Bible person, right? And so

712
00:44:05,070 –> 00:44:07,150
whenever I went to her and I, and I told her that I wanted a

713
00:44:07,150 –> 00:44:10,990
Bible, she got very excited, right. And I’m, my parents are divorced.

714
00:44:10,990 –> 00:44:13,670
I’m trying to figure it out and someone invited me to go to church, right?

715
00:44:13,670 –> 00:44:17,510
And I’m like, okay, cool, I’ll go to church. And, and

716
00:44:17,510 –> 00:44:21,270
my grandmother’s like a Kenneth Copeland fan, right. You know, she’s into it, right. And

717
00:44:21,270 –> 00:44:24,950
so every day growing up in South Fort Worth, right, I’m driving past

718
00:44:24,950 –> 00:44:28,670
that gated off compound, it is his out there in the middle of the

719
00:44:28,670 –> 00:44:32,360
boondocks with like razor wire along the top of it. And

720
00:44:32,360 –> 00:44:35,240
there’s always these events and my grandmother’s going to it and I’m reading this book

721
00:44:35,240 –> 00:44:37,640
and, you know, kind of doesn’t feel like

722
00:44:38,920 –> 00:44:42,520
it all makes a lot of sense, you know, in living here in the south

723
00:44:42,520 –> 00:44:46,200
with these mega churches, right? In these, these huge things and the guys with the

724
00:44:46,200 –> 00:44:49,800
planes and, you know, all this other stuff, it does make it very

725
00:44:49,800 –> 00:44:53,560
easy for me to reinforce the negative view that I have. Right. But

726
00:44:53,640 –> 00:44:57,470
that being said, I, I, I go out of my way

727
00:44:57,470 –> 00:45:01,110
to spend time with people who have a spiritual path that is

728
00:45:01,110 –> 00:45:04,950
true to them and does not involve me being a project to

729
00:45:04,950 –> 00:45:08,630
them. Right. Because whenever people, you know, kind of get a

730
00:45:08,630 –> 00:45:12,110
glimpse of like, how I think and, you know, approach different things and stuff like

731
00:45:12,110 –> 00:45:13,990
this. There’s a lot of people who are like, john, you want to come church

732
00:45:13,990 –> 00:45:17,550
me? No, thank you. Let’s not do that. Right, right. And

733
00:45:17,630 –> 00:45:21,230
it’s not, it’s not anything. That’s just not for me at this

734
00:45:21,230 –> 00:45:25,040
stage, you know, so going

735
00:45:25,040 –> 00:45:28,840
through this book and, you know, being this, you know, progressive person

736
00:45:28,840 –> 00:45:31,800
and you know, trying to think about the future of things as opposed to trying

737
00:45:31,800 –> 00:45:35,600
to hold on to the past of things. It’s been very interesting

738
00:45:35,600 –> 00:45:39,240
going through this because I’m not seeing the stuff that you’re seeing and

739
00:45:39,240 –> 00:45:42,800
hearing about. I’m just seeing this full court press of, you know,

740
00:45:43,200 –> 00:45:46,560
let’s talk about potentially the, the laws of Oklahoma’s

741
00:45:46,560 –> 00:45:50,180
Oklahoma school teachers, right, that are moving from certain states, having to go

742
00:45:50,180 –> 00:45:53,620
through a very fundamentalist, religious kind of

743
00:45:55,700 –> 00:45:59,220
vetting to see if you can even teach. So that way they can teach

744
00:45:59,220 –> 00:46:02,940
what, what, what they want to be taught as opposed to different things

745
00:46:02,940 –> 00:46:06,500
like that. So like I can see, I look. At all those things, I look

746
00:46:06,500 –> 00:46:10,260
at all those things, I see them as rear guard actions because, well,

747
00:46:10,260 –> 00:46:13,740
I mean, the water is moving in a different direction already. I think, I like,

748
00:46:13,740 –> 00:46:17,460
I think that they are as well. But like. Okay, let’s just, okay,

749
00:46:17,460 –> 00:46:21,100
let’s fast forward a little bit, right? If you’re, if you’re a top tier

750
00:46:21,100 –> 00:46:24,060
teacher who doesn’t believe in all of that stuff, are you ever going to go

751
00:46:24,060 –> 00:46:27,900
teach in Oklahoma? No. You’re not even going to try? Right. But

752
00:46:27,900 –> 00:46:30,540
I would, but I would assert that a top tier teacher.

753
00:46:32,380 –> 00:46:35,620
I’ll frame it this way. If I could look at a top tier teacher’s TikTok

754
00:46:35,620 –> 00:46:38,940
algorithm. I don’t think Oklahoma even pops up on their

755
00:46:38,940 –> 00:46:42,140
radar. No, I know. Right. And so, and so essentially,

756
00:46:43,020 –> 00:46:46,530
in my not so well informed opinion,

757
00:46:46,850 –> 00:46:49,890
it’s like walling off Japan. Sure.

758
00:46:50,370 –> 00:46:53,890
Right. So on a long enough timeline, right, it won’t be next week, it won’t

759
00:46:53,890 –> 00:46:57,570
be next semester or anything else like this, but a long enough timeline, right. If,

760
00:46:57,650 –> 00:47:01,450
if there are, if there are no progressive ideals coming into the teachers that are

761
00:47:01,450 –> 00:47:05,010
teaching the people, right. What happens to those people,

762
00:47:05,410 –> 00:47:09,170
right? There’s, there’s eventually going to be this big kind of gap, right,

763
00:47:09,510 –> 00:47:13,270
of not everyone thinks and feels the same way.

764
00:47:13,430 –> 00:47:17,230
Right. So go ahead. Perhaps, I would say

765
00:47:17,230 –> 00:47:21,030
perhaps. And I think Heinlein was anticipating this and this is why

766
00:47:21,030 –> 00:47:23,510
he set up the Foster. Right. Sort of ideal.

767
00:47:24,710 –> 00:47:26,710
My thought is. And this

768
00:47:29,830 –> 00:47:33,510
gets in the aliens piece, right? So my thought is if there

769
00:47:33,510 –> 00:47:36,320
is anything out there that is more advanced than us,

770
00:47:37,280 –> 00:47:40,840
that thing will already know, just like Valentin

771
00:47:40,840 –> 00:47:44,560
Michael Smith did, what’s in our hearts and minds, whether

772
00:47:44,560 –> 00:47:48,400
we’re walled off from each other or not, and will seek to

773
00:47:48,400 –> 00:47:51,600
provide all of that to every possible individual.

774
00:47:52,640 –> 00:47:56,480
And of course we’ll have the means materially to do so.

775
00:47:57,360 –> 00:48:01,120
And now we’ve got everybody going in this direction Regardless of

776
00:48:01,120 –> 00:48:04,250
whether they’re walled off or not. And the people who will really be,

777
00:48:06,170 –> 00:48:09,890
well, the people who will. Who will be, shall

778
00:48:09,890 –> 00:48:13,450
we say, her son and Angra at the party

779
00:48:14,330 –> 00:48:17,410
are going to be people who are going to look at that and go, oh,

780
00:48:17,410 –> 00:48:21,170
that ain’t it on both sides, by the way. One side of the wall

781
00:48:21,170 –> 00:48:24,810
or the other side of the wall. And we’ll go, that.

782
00:48:25,690 –> 00:48:29,240
That ain’t it. And my concern has always been, or my

783
00:48:29,240 –> 00:48:33,080
fear has always been a chill just even bringing this up now. My

784
00:48:33,080 –> 00:48:36,600
fear has always been that there aren’t enough people on either side of the wall

785
00:48:37,160 –> 00:48:40,480
who are critically thinking it’s going to be a really tiny

786
00:48:40,480 –> 00:48:44,280
teapot. That’s my. That scares the hell

787
00:48:44,280 –> 00:48:47,880
out of me. Actually, to be quite blunt, because

788
00:48:48,920 –> 00:48:52,760
that’s always my biggest concern, right? Because, like, I don’t think that we’re

789
00:48:53,880 –> 00:48:57,320
served by, like, the old stuff that, like, my family would talk about when I

790
00:48:57,320 –> 00:48:59,800
was a kid. You know, we don’t talk about these things, Right. I don’t even

791
00:48:59,800 –> 00:49:03,540
tell Mike who I voted for. I don’t think that’s ultimately helping. Right.

792
00:49:03,540 –> 00:49:07,380
I think that that leads to these little dead

793
00:49:07,380 –> 00:49:11,020
zones of, you know, understanding other people and asking

794
00:49:11,020 –> 00:49:14,220
questions. Right? And then it evolves down to, please help me understand how you could

795
00:49:14,220 –> 00:49:17,820
even vote for someone else. Well, when you say it like that, you don’t have

796
00:49:17,820 –> 00:49:21,220
the language to get it right. And the part that I think

797
00:49:21,220 –> 00:49:24,940
Heinlein does the most amazing job of framing this

798
00:49:24,940 –> 00:49:28,540
up is whenever he has that stinky

799
00:49:28,620 –> 00:49:32,300
character who is Arabic, right. And has

800
00:49:32,300 –> 00:49:35,900
his map of the world based upon a different language that is not English.

801
00:49:36,300 –> 00:49:39,580
And they fundamentally do. I think one of.

802
00:49:39,900 –> 00:49:43,339
If they didn’t, if they didn’t do this part in the book, no one would

803
00:49:43,339 –> 00:49:46,580
have read the book, in my personal opinion. But him framing that, that idea that

804
00:49:46,580 –> 00:49:49,540
the language create the labels that we use, and if you’re not using the same

805
00:49:49,540 –> 00:49:53,030
language, you don’t have a conception or understanding of what these things are. Are.

806
00:49:53,830 –> 00:49:57,590
Is. I think, like, I have goosebumps talking to you about

807
00:49:57,590 –> 00:50:00,310
it right now. Because the, the art and the elegance.

808
00:50:01,110 –> 00:50:04,670
Because what I took away from the book is

809
00:50:04,670 –> 00:50:07,710
fundamentally so different than yours, right? Because the thing that I took away is like,

810
00:50:07,710 –> 00:50:11,510
hey, love is the thing that ultimately matters, right? And it’s

811
00:50:11,510 –> 00:50:14,590
not whose lane is right and which labels are right. And, and we’re okay. Because

812
00:50:14,590 –> 00:50:17,670
that’s my biggest frustration whenever I talk with a.

813
00:50:18,230 –> 00:50:21,920
A very Christian, focused Christian who thinks, well,

814
00:50:21,920 –> 00:50:25,680
my lane is the only lane. Everyone else is going to Hell, because all.

815
00:50:25,680 –> 00:50:29,200
Okay, so like, what about this, Lane? Oh, yeah, they’re going to hell too. Okay,

816
00:50:29,200 –> 00:50:31,200
so they don’t go because they don’t go to your church.

817
00:50:32,560 –> 00:50:36,360
There’s, there’s, there’s, there’s nothing of value in any

818
00:50:36,360 –> 00:50:40,120
of these beliefs. Absolutely. Right, right. And those people in

819
00:50:40,120 –> 00:50:43,960
my experience have the least actual knowledge and understanding of the

820
00:50:43,960 –> 00:50:46,800
history around these things. And, and it leads to

821
00:50:47,200 –> 00:50:50,850
wanting to put the Bible in the book on this

822
00:50:50,930 –> 00:50:54,610
pedestal of this is all absolutely correct and truthful and

823
00:50:54,610 –> 00:50:57,610
valid. And so that way you can go around and be like, well, yours is

824
00:50:57,610 –> 00:51:01,170
garbage because mine has to be true. Right. So it creates this gap of dissonance.

825
00:51:02,050 –> 00:51:05,770
But this is a strain that has been, it’s either been a minority strain or

826
00:51:05,770 –> 00:51:09,330
a majority strain in the American republic going all the way back to the founding.

827
00:51:10,370 –> 00:51:13,930
You know, my wife and I were watching John Adams last night. Great,

828
00:51:14,330 –> 00:51:18,090
great, you know, show. You recommend it?

829
00:51:18,090 –> 00:51:21,930
Oh, I highly recommend it. Okay, for sure.

830
00:51:21,930 –> 00:51:25,290
Yeah. It’s the, I watched it myself probably

831
00:51:29,529 –> 00:51:33,090
10 or 12 years ago maybe. And

832
00:51:33,090 –> 00:51:36,730
now, you know, we’re home, you know, we homeschool our kids. And so

833
00:51:36,890 –> 00:51:39,860
my wife was like, hey, you know, what’s a good thing that, that we could

834
00:51:39,860 –> 00:51:43,660
watch with, you know, my 8 year old that won’t like, you

835
00:51:43,660 –> 00:51:47,380
know, be some stupid cartoon. And I was like, well, we were

836
00:51:47,380 –> 00:51:50,020
going kind of going through the movie list last night and we were maybe going

837
00:51:50,020 –> 00:51:52,300
to do Buried My Heart Wounded Nino’s like, that’s going to be too much for

838
00:51:52,300 –> 00:51:56,020
him. I was like, John Adams is probably good

839
00:51:56,020 –> 00:51:59,780
spot to start because he already sort of understands a little bit

840
00:51:59,780 –> 00:52:02,900
about the American Revolution. He already sort of understands a little bit about

841
00:52:03,140 –> 00:52:06,520
intersections between people inside of the American

842
00:52:06,600 –> 00:52:09,960
Revolution. He doesn’t understand the depth of relationships and all of that because he’s eight

843
00:52:10,440 –> 00:52:13,560
and everything doesn’t have to go to an eight year old. You can drip things

844
00:52:13,560 –> 00:52:17,000
out. It’s fine folks. You don’t have to like,

845
00:52:17,720 –> 00:52:20,440
anyway, whenever I’m not, I’m not

846
00:52:21,000 –> 00:52:24,680
radicalizing my child right away. It’s gradual

847
00:52:24,680 –> 00:52:28,520
process. Not a, not an immediate one. I have patience, I got a long time.

848
00:52:29,320 –> 00:52:33,040
So. So he understands some of the dynamics, understands

849
00:52:33,040 –> 00:52:36,010
some of the things or whatever. And so we could sit down and we could

850
00:52:36,010 –> 00:52:39,810
watch this. Plus like it’s got old timey sounding language. There’s not a lot of

851
00:52:39,810 –> 00:52:43,490
curtain, there’s not any cursing. And the worst thing in there

852
00:52:43,490 –> 00:52:47,210
is that, you know, Benjamin Franklin smokes a pipe or no, John

853
00:52:47,210 –> 00:52:50,290
Adams smokes a pipe. And Benjamin Franklin’s Benjamin Franklin. Okay,

854
00:52:50,930 –> 00:52:54,650
so he liked it because of, you know, the visuals and all

855
00:52:54,650 –> 00:52:57,890
of that. But he also was starting to pick up on some of the language,

856
00:52:57,890 –> 00:53:01,200
particularly when they started writing the Declaration of Independence. And

857
00:53:01,680 –> 00:53:05,160
he’s quoting back to the show, the

858
00:53:05,160 –> 00:53:07,840
Declaration of Independence. I was like, okay, good. That’s in there. That’s good.

859
00:53:09,040 –> 00:53:12,000
The point that I’m making is that

860
00:53:12,640 –> 00:53:16,319
in that show, the strain

861
00:53:16,319 –> 00:53:19,760
of religious osity that they show, that was in

862
00:53:19,760 –> 00:53:23,600
Boston at the time, which 200

863
00:53:23,600 –> 00:53:27,400
and what, almost 50 some odd years later, you can’t find a strain of religiosity

864
00:53:27,400 –> 00:53:30,990
in Boston to save your life. That

865
00:53:31,070 –> 00:53:33,870
strain was huge in driving the founding.

866
00:53:34,990 –> 00:53:38,750
It was massively gigantic because those people were what, three,

867
00:53:38,750 –> 00:53:42,550
maybe four generations away from the Puritans. Something like

868
00:53:42,550 –> 00:53:46,270
that. Something like that. And so their conception of the

869
00:53:46,270 –> 00:53:48,590
world was very much driven by

870
00:53:50,350 –> 00:53:53,870
not only God saved the King, which they said

871
00:53:53,870 –> 00:53:57,540
completely unironically, by the way, but also

872
00:53:57,620 –> 00:54:00,580
was driven by we need

873
00:54:01,380 –> 00:54:05,020
something else. We need to. As a lawyer

874
00:54:05,020 –> 00:54:08,860
buddy of mine said, we need to close the loop on the

875
00:54:08,860 –> 00:54:12,220
Magna Carta. Right. Which is really what they were doing. They were closing the loop

876
00:54:12,220 –> 00:54:15,780
on the Magna Carta. Does the King have a divine right to rule

877
00:54:15,780 –> 00:54:18,340
or not? What does divine mean?

878
00:54:19,460 –> 00:54:22,230
How do we set up Gods on earth? And it’s interesting how they’re setting up

879
00:54:22,230 –> 00:54:25,790
Thomas Jefferson too. I’m noticing some things about him that I didn’t notice before. How

880
00:54:25,790 –> 00:54:29,230
they set up his. Him as. Him as a character. That was very interesting.

881
00:54:30,990 –> 00:54:34,590
But my point is this. There is that strain that has been in the American

882
00:54:34,670 –> 00:54:38,390
founding ever since the beginning. And then there’s cussedness that

883
00:54:38,390 –> 00:54:42,150
just comes off of that. That’s irreligious. Like Thomas Jefferson

884
00:54:42,150 –> 00:54:45,710
did. He made his own. And we’ll close this in a minute. But Thomas

885
00:54:45,710 –> 00:54:48,820
Jefferson created his own Bible. Most people don’t know this, where he cut out all

886
00:54:48,820 –> 00:54:51,980
the parts that he found to be objectionable and just left, like, left like the

887
00:54:51,980 –> 00:54:54,500
red, the red lines from Jesus.

888
00:54:55,540 –> 00:54:59,300
Like, we’ve been making up our own thing ever since we got here. Yeah.

889
00:54:59,700 –> 00:55:03,380
And that was part of the promise, quote unquote. The way that it was

890
00:55:03,380 –> 00:55:06,740
framed in an American context. That you would be able to come here.

891
00:55:08,980 –> 00:55:11,860
Yes. There would already be people here. But you, please, you can wipe those people

892
00:55:11,860 –> 00:55:15,100
out. Let’s not talk about that. Would you be able to come here?

893
00:55:15,500 –> 00:55:18,220
Oh, yeah, let’s not talk about that. Oh, and they were fine with it, by

894
00:55:18,220 –> 00:55:20,780
the way. They were like, no, we, we have, we have the guns, we have

895
00:55:20,780 –> 00:55:24,540
the Bible. We have the. Right. What. What’s. What’s the problem? Like, why is there

896
00:55:24,540 –> 00:55:28,180
an issue? People must be savages. Yeah. Like, come on, what do we do? Well.

897
00:55:28,180 –> 00:55:30,780
Well. And what’s interesting is you go to, like, the American Southwest, and the Spanish

898
00:55:30,780 –> 00:55:34,580
talked about. The Spanish talked about the Indians the exact same thing. So

899
00:55:34,580 –> 00:55:38,020
it wasn’t just. It wasn’t just an English Puritan thing. It was the whole

900
00:55:38,020 –> 00:55:41,580
European conception of the world thing. Right. I mean,

901
00:55:41,660 –> 00:55:45,260
we kind of like how we. We have a. We have a recurring

902
00:55:45,260 –> 00:55:49,100
theme. We do loving to short sight. Anyone else who is not

903
00:55:50,460 –> 00:55:54,100
in Europe blink of an eye at the same technological level that we

904
00:55:54,100 –> 00:55:57,660
are, right? Because. Because we get here, right, and we’re on

905
00:55:57,660 –> 00:56:01,260
boats with muskets and everything, and we’re like, yeah, but you guys are the simpletons,

906
00:56:01,260 –> 00:56:04,700
so we just deserve to take all this away from you. Like, which, by the

907
00:56:04,700 –> 00:56:08,420
way, we’ve explored in science fiction. That’s the whole point of War of the

908
00:56:08,420 –> 00:56:12,090
Worlds. Absolutely. Yeah. That’s the whole point of that book. Is

909
00:56:12,090 –> 00:56:15,570
that someone else or. Or Independence Day. Right. For those of you. The original

910
00:56:15,570 –> 00:56:18,570
Independence Day, like, something comes from the outside and is like, hey, guess what? We’re

911
00:56:18,570 –> 00:56:22,170
gonna colonize you and take your. Take your air and your water, because

912
00:56:22,170 –> 00:56:26,010
you’re. You don’t have the weapons to defend yourself. So

913
00:56:26,010 –> 00:56:29,730
this. This dynamic plays out, you know, in multiple ways across

914
00:56:29,730 –> 00:56:32,810
the American continent. And I just think we’re in.

915
00:56:33,290 –> 00:56:36,780
No, not. I think my concern is if my

916
00:56:36,780 –> 00:56:40,340
conspiracy theories are right and we’re in a lot of

917
00:56:40,340 –> 00:56:43,900
trouble. And our. And one of the things

918
00:56:43,900 –> 00:56:47,500
that’s sort of an undercurrent in this book that’s not really talked about is the

919
00:56:47,500 –> 00:56:51,220
failures of elites to understand exactly what. What

920
00:56:51,220 –> 00:56:52,740
Valentin Michael Smith was.

921
00:56:54,900 –> 00:56:58,420
They failed to understand exactly what he was, from the Secretary

922
00:56:58,420 –> 00:57:02,180
General all the way to the guy who was running the Church of

923
00:57:02,180 –> 00:57:05,960
the Fosser. Right? All of the elites, the pre. All of them. Anytime

924
00:57:05,960 –> 00:57:09,640
they had any interaction with him, they had absolutely zero understanding of what they were

925
00:57:09,640 –> 00:57:12,400
dealing with. And I think that’s a hell of a lot more common than we

926
00:57:12,400 –> 00:57:16,080
give it credit for. Oh, well, like, I mean, we’re saying the same thing. We’re

927
00:57:16,080 –> 00:57:19,800
just talking, like. I’m talking about the broader civilization thing, and you’re.

928
00:57:19,800 –> 00:57:23,600
And you’re talking about the specific. But that’s absolutely true. Right? Like.

929
00:57:24,960 –> 00:57:28,200
And to me, that goes back to, like, the language and the map and the

930
00:57:28,200 –> 00:57:32,040
labels and everything else like this. Like, I had a version of this, and

931
00:57:32,840 –> 00:57:35,880
it’s so funny that this happened to this, like, I don’t like the word luck

932
00:57:35,880 –> 00:57:39,720
really bothers me, right? And whenever someone is like, oh, John,

933
00:57:39,880 –> 00:57:43,720
you only are here because you got lucky, right? Bothers me right?

934
00:57:46,280 –> 00:57:50,120
Now, I also, I don’t have a, I don’t have

935
00:57:50,120 –> 00:57:53,560
a problem with the word fortunate. I am fortunate to be here,

936
00:57:53,800 –> 00:57:57,200
okay? But luck to me, in my reality,

937
00:57:57,520 –> 00:58:01,360
in my definition of that word, means that like, you

938
00:58:01,360 –> 00:58:05,120
know, these are all just coin flips up to this thing, right?

939
00:58:05,360 –> 00:58:09,160
My, my whole job, the reason I get hired to do the work

940
00:58:09,160 –> 00:58:12,760
that I do is about finding ways to put the coin

941
00:58:12,760 –> 00:58:16,560
flips into our favor, right? As a sales consultant and a sales trainer

942
00:58:16,560 –> 00:58:20,280
and, you know, a conversationalist, I teach people how to

943
00:58:20,280 –> 00:58:23,080
have the kinds of conversations so that way they can be heard and be seen

944
00:58:23,080 –> 00:58:26,140
for who they are. So that way they don’t get treated like a salesperson and

945
00:58:26,140 –> 00:58:29,500
can just get rejected out to half court, right? And a lot of times that

946
00:58:29,500 –> 00:58:33,180
just comes down to not being expectant but being

947
00:58:33,180 –> 00:58:36,380
enabling as the other person in the conversation. Like,

948
00:58:36,700 –> 00:58:40,460
I, it’s, it’s weird because like, as a, as a

949
00:58:40,460 –> 00:58:44,260
big, dumb, tall white guy, right? I get to go through

950
00:58:44,260 –> 00:58:47,660
life with, with a lot of privilege, right? A lot of people are not going

951
00:58:47,660 –> 00:58:50,570
to mess with me like they would If I was 5, 7. They won’t talk

952
00:58:50,570 –> 00:58:52,730
back to me like I would if I was a woman or a person of

953
00:58:52,730 –> 00:58:56,530
color. I, you know, I get, I get a whole lot of leeway and then

954
00:58:57,010 –> 00:59:00,730
I put on my role as a salesperson and I

955
00:59:00,730 –> 00:59:03,890
don’t get the same leeway, right? I get rejected, I get

956
00:59:04,290 –> 00:59:08,130
cursed at, I get called everything but my name in some of these situations,

957
00:59:08,130 –> 00:59:11,370
right? Just because of the, of the label that I wear. And that label is

958
00:59:11,370 –> 00:59:14,890
tied to a lot of stigma, right? In convention of what selling actually

959
00:59:14,890 –> 00:59:18,460
is, right? So these people who were like, oh, John, you just want to sell

960
00:59:18,460 –> 00:59:21,860
me. Let’s not jump ahead. I don’t even know if you’re tall enough to ride

961
00:59:21,860 –> 00:59:25,540
this ride, okay? That’s just how it works in my head,

962
00:59:25,540 –> 00:59:28,460
right? And for all those people who are, who were

963
00:59:29,260 –> 00:59:32,979
looking to hold that up so that way they don’t have to spend. Okay,

964
00:59:32,979 –> 00:59:36,780
cool. Like, much like, I’m sure you know

965
00:59:36,780 –> 00:59:40,300
when you’re talking to someone who does not put you in the right bucket, I

966
00:59:40,300 –> 00:59:43,260
know when someone is not putting me in the right bucket as a professional person,

967
00:59:43,680 –> 00:59:47,480
right? And so when we’re, when I’m going through this book

968
00:59:47,480 –> 00:59:51,080
and I’m seeing all these people intentionally kind of you

969
00:59:51,080 –> 00:59:54,400
know, not intentionally. They think that they’re making reasonable

970
00:59:55,760 –> 00:59:58,640
adjustments to this person. Right.

971
00:59:59,920 –> 01:00:03,000
It’s because they’re moving too fast and not giving anyone the benefit of the doubt.

972
01:00:03,000 –> 01:00:06,000
They’re not taking the time to go figure out, okay, what does the man from

973
01:00:06,000 –> 01:00:09,820
Mars label actually mean? What does that mean? In practice, it’s just easier

974
01:00:09,820 –> 01:00:12,220
to be, oh, you’re stupid. You don’t get it. So I’m going to run all

975
01:00:12,220 –> 01:00:15,700
over you, and you’re not going to get any of these things. Right? The other

976
01:00:15,700 –> 01:00:19,540
part, I think that the book, I think, does a great

977
01:00:19,540 –> 01:00:22,660
job of is, like, pulling these lanes of,

978
01:00:23,620 –> 01:00:27,420
you know, the. The actual reality not being anything close to

979
01:00:27,420 –> 01:00:31,180
what people perceive it to be. And he does a really good job of

980
01:00:31,180 –> 01:00:35,020
hauling it out, Right? You know, he talks about the part about being really

981
01:00:35,020 –> 01:00:38,870
rich and, like, great wealth and how it’s a job in and

982
01:00:38,870 –> 01:00:41,910
of itself. And, like, if you’re not. If you don’t want that job, don’t. Don’t

983
01:00:41,910 –> 01:00:44,950
even aspire for it, because it’ll. It’ll eat you. Right? And I was. And I

984
01:00:44,950 –> 01:00:47,470
was like, yep, that’s true. And I got to talk about this with all my

985
01:00:47,470 –> 01:00:50,470
clients, because everyone thinks that they got to be the next Uber or else it

986
01:00:50,470 –> 01:00:53,630
doesn’t make sense to start, which is just the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. But

987
01:00:53,630 –> 01:00:57,310
it’s fine. Let’s talk about building something you’re actually happy to work in as

988
01:00:57,310 –> 01:01:00,390
opposed to this thing that, like, is sucking the soul out of your butt. Okay,

989
01:01:00,390 –> 01:01:02,470
but we’ll talk about that another time. And

990
01:01:04,160 –> 01:01:07,840
from that perspective, the. The Arabic, right? How Jubal

991
01:01:08,720 –> 01:01:12,400
reasons these people out so that way they see the gaps in their

992
01:01:12,400 –> 01:01:15,720
own understanding, right? You know, they do it about wealth. They do it at the

993
01:01:15,720 –> 01:01:19,360
end whenever Ben Caxton goes to the nest and then comes back and he’s like,

994
01:01:19,760 –> 01:01:23,600
they’re not wrong. You’re the idiot. Like, it is so

995
01:01:23,600 –> 01:01:27,240
well crafted. And if you have. If you have any

996
01:01:27,240 –> 01:01:30,930
room to want to think

997
01:01:30,930 –> 01:01:34,770
about other things, right? Think about the other perspective. Because

998
01:01:34,770 –> 01:01:37,530
you sent me the script of this thing, right? And you. And you. And you

999
01:01:37,530 –> 01:01:41,210
had this. This kind of Hasan question in there, right? And I. I know what

1000
01:01:41,210 –> 01:01:43,770
you’re doing. Right? I get it. I get it. You’re trying, right? You’re trying to

1001
01:01:43,770 –> 01:01:47,370
push that button. And. And I was. I was ready for that question,

1002
01:01:47,370 –> 01:01:51,210
right? Because I. I fundamentally. I go back to that. To

1003
01:01:51,210 –> 01:01:54,730
that Arabic conversation, right? If we

1004
01:01:55,350 –> 01:01:58,710
lived in a culture to where there wasn’t a press

1005
01:01:58,950 –> 01:02:02,790
for religion, okay? And If. Because when I hear

1006
01:02:02,790 –> 01:02:06,590
you talk about how it’s trending downward, right. I perceive

1007
01:02:06,590 –> 01:02:09,950
you to see that as a negative thing. Okay. Which, and I can understand why

1008
01:02:09,950 –> 01:02:13,110
that’s fine. I’m not, I’m not here to argue that. But what I think is

1009
01:02:13,430 –> 01:02:17,270
the only reason it was that high was because there wasn’t room for people to

1010
01:02:17,270 –> 01:02:20,270
be themselves and to be like, hey, I don’t see value in that. So I’m

1011
01:02:20,270 –> 01:02:22,490
going to go off on my own. I’m going to go educate. Am I going

1012
01:02:22,490 –> 01:02:26,250
to inform myself? I’m going to go read these other books as opposed

1013
01:02:26,250 –> 01:02:29,170
to just listening to the guy in the front of the pulpit tell me that

1014
01:02:29,170 –> 01:02:32,770
it’s not worth my time. Right? Like, and that’s

1015
01:02:32,770 –> 01:02:36,530
where that line that I, that I put out to you is. Is so

1016
01:02:36,530 –> 01:02:40,250
interesting to me. But I also love how he talks about. And I forget the

1017
01:02:40,250 –> 01:02:43,570
page of this book, but he talks about how so much religion is around this,

1018
01:02:43,570 –> 01:02:47,130
like, huge leap of faith, right? And they put it up there.

1019
01:02:47,210 –> 01:02:50,890
And I could remember going to people like, like, as a kid, right? I’m going

1020
01:02:50,890 –> 01:02:54,280
through my. Through my Bible phase. I’m. I’m going. I’m going to disciple now in

1021
01:02:54,280 –> 01:02:57,840
church camp, I gave up and gave my testimony because someone told me on

1022
01:02:57,840 –> 01:03:00,400
that I’m not a real Christian if I don’t do this thing and everything else

1023
01:03:00,400 –> 01:03:04,160
like this. And then I’m going and asking, like, how do we

1024
01:03:04,160 –> 01:03:06,400
know? How do we know? How do we know? And it was just faith and

1025
01:03:06,400 –> 01:03:09,440
faith and faith and faith and faith. And it was just like, cool. Can’t go

1026
01:03:09,440 –> 01:03:12,360
with you, right? Like, I just. I just can’t, you know?

1027
01:03:12,920 –> 01:03:16,600
And I think the idea that,

1028
01:03:16,600 –> 01:03:20,280
like, language provides a different scaffolding, a different way to think about

1029
01:03:20,440 –> 01:03:24,100
labels and interpretations of them and stuff like this. Because if it really is

1030
01:03:24,100 –> 01:03:27,740
just about love, right? Is any lane that pushes

1031
01:03:27,740 –> 01:03:31,580
love ultimately that bad? I mean, isn’t it better than,

1032
01:03:31,580 –> 01:03:35,260
like, not believing anything at all and pushing people away? Because

1033
01:03:35,420 –> 01:03:39,060
there are so many of the used car sales people pushing that

1034
01:03:39,060 –> 01:03:42,780
method of like, hey, you know, the, the foster rights.

1035
01:03:42,780 –> 01:03:46,380
I. Dude, I’ve been in those conversations, right? Well, hey, you’re a sinner. You can

1036
01:03:46,380 –> 01:03:49,460
still come to church with us. Okay, cool. How excited am I supposed to be

1037
01:03:49,460 –> 01:03:52,710
now? So

1038
01:03:53,190 –> 01:03:56,910
it’s. It’s interesting. So I’m. Let. Let me do this. Let’s.

1039
01:03:56,910 –> 01:04:00,550
Let’s transition to the second part because I want to talk about Jubal. Yeah.

1040
01:04:01,030 –> 01:04:03,670
Critical to understand all of this.

1041
01:04:05,110 –> 01:04:08,550
And I have a. I have a I have another thought underneath, because

1042
01:04:09,030 –> 01:04:11,870
I. I don’t just read one book at a time. I read like five books

1043
01:04:11,870 –> 01:04:15,590
at a time. Same. And I also have. Well, and I also

1044
01:04:15,590 –> 01:04:19,190
read books in different genres. So currently I am reading a bunch of books

1045
01:04:21,730 –> 01:04:24,930
in the Jewish tradition around the Old Testament. Okay,

1046
01:04:25,090 –> 01:04:28,770
okay. And Judaism may have something for

1047
01:04:28,770 –> 01:04:32,130
you or an answer to a question that you actually have,

1048
01:04:32,450 –> 01:04:35,970
at least, as I understand it from my extremely limited

1049
01:04:36,370 –> 01:04:40,210
understanding of what exactly is going on in that faith tradition,

1050
01:04:40,610 –> 01:04:43,730
which informs, not necessarily American

1051
01:04:43,890 –> 01:04:46,940
Christianity, but which informs Christianity, period,

1052
01:04:47,900 –> 01:04:51,140
which I think is also something that Heinlein misses. This is why he leaps to

1053
01:04:51,140 –> 01:04:54,820
Islam, which is fascinating to me. And he

1054
01:04:54,820 –> 01:04:58,340
didn’t leap backward to Judaism. That’s incredibly

1055
01:04:58,340 –> 01:05:00,700
fascinating to me. And I’m going to tell you why. I think he does it.

1056
01:05:00,779 –> 01:05:04,500
Like, Like, I mean, my perspective is, is that he’s doing

1057
01:05:04,500 –> 01:05:08,300
it to piss people off. Right. I think if he, yeah, if he

1058
01:05:08,300 –> 01:05:11,060
made it Judaism, it would be close enough that a lot of people be like,

1059
01:05:11,060 –> 01:05:14,830
yeah, we can believe the same things, but. But when we take like in, you

1060
01:05:14,830 –> 01:05:18,430
know, it wasn’t like in like the 80s and 90s where, like, hey, let’s just

1061
01:05:18,510 –> 01:05:22,230
put a guy in the Cape, right? And I’m. And I’m forgetting what the actual

1062
01:05:22,230 –> 01:05:25,270
technical term is, but let’s put someone in Middle Eastern garb and make him the

1063
01:05:25,270 –> 01:05:28,150
bad guy, right? Like, sure, yeah. Like, like we’re not in that part of the

1064
01:05:28,150 –> 01:05:31,710
culture. But I think, I think that

1065
01:05:31,790 –> 01:05:35,630
if the, if he hadn’t made it Arabic in something so big

1066
01:05:35,630 –> 01:05:39,270
and so known and so much of, like, oh, against us, we can’t ever be

1067
01:05:39,270 –> 01:05:42,800
on the same page. I, I don’t think anybody would have. Would have taken the

1068
01:05:42,800 –> 01:05:45,960
note. I think he made it Arabic because in

1069
01:05:45,960 –> 01:05:49,560
1950, no one knew and no one knew,

1070
01:05:49,640 –> 01:05:53,360
very few people in America knew exactly what

1071
01:05:53,360 –> 01:05:55,800
was in the Quran. Because

1072
01:05:56,840 –> 01:06:00,080
during that period of time in the Middle east, if you go back and look

1073
01:06:00,080 –> 01:06:03,840
at it, they were just coming out of Cologne, British colonialism, which is why

1074
01:06:03,840 –> 01:06:07,400
the character in here, you know, sort of is framed in British context.

1075
01:06:08,640 –> 01:06:11,760
The other thing that had happened, which was a big geopolitical event,

1076
01:06:12,880 –> 01:06:16,680
was the Nuremberg Trials. And so you weren’t going to go

1077
01:06:16,680 –> 01:06:20,520
and beat up on the Jews because from your cultural

1078
01:06:20,520 –> 01:06:24,160
perspective, in 1950, they had already been beat up on

1079
01:06:24,160 –> 01:06:28,000
enough. I mean, the state of the modern nation, state of Israel wasn’t established till

1080
01:06:28,000 –> 01:06:31,200
1948. So the time that

1081
01:06:31,200 –> 01:06:34,880
Heinlein is researching and writing and putting together his thoughts for this book,

1082
01:06:35,600 –> 01:06:39,080
the modern nation State of Israel is beginning to rise. The Nuremberg

1083
01:06:39,080 –> 01:06:42,880
Trials are happening. We are actually finding out.

1084
01:06:42,960 –> 01:06:46,480
Not actually we. The world is having to deal with,

1085
01:06:46,960 –> 01:06:50,760
particularly the secular nation state world is having to deal with

1086
01:06:50,760 –> 01:06:54,360
what they let Hitler get away with. Lot of

1087
01:06:54,360 –> 01:06:58,080
dynamics there. And so I wonder if

1088
01:06:58,080 –> 01:07:00,000
he picked Islam

1089
01:07:02,090 –> 01:07:05,770
because it was the. It was the least offensive option out of

1090
01:07:05,770 –> 01:07:09,450
the three. That’s what you find a point in. In a time

1091
01:07:09,450 –> 01:07:13,050
when least offensive meant nobody knew enough to go

1092
01:07:13,050 –> 01:07:16,769
and check him or go and correct him. Right. And

1093
01:07:16,769 –> 01:07:20,610
he could be sort of the. And I’m not from a malicious standpoint, but

1094
01:07:20,610 –> 01:07:24,290
he could sort of be the. The person who kind of defines this as an

1095
01:07:24,290 –> 01:07:28,130
exotic other, which Edward Said would come along a lot

1096
01:07:28,130 –> 01:07:30,650
later and talk about the othering of the Orientals,

1097
01:07:31,850 –> 01:07:35,530
which, to Highland’s credit, he doesn’t use that term here in the book, but

1098
01:07:36,810 –> 01:07:39,770
that was something that was floating around in the 50s and 60s in. In America.

1099
01:07:39,770 –> 01:07:43,610
I mean, the Shah of Iran was running things in Iran from 19 or.

1100
01:07:43,610 –> 01:07:47,130
Yeah, with Shah was running things in Iran from the 1950s to the 1970s.

1101
01:07:47,290 –> 01:07:50,890
I mean, Iran was a modern. If you look at pictures from that time,

1102
01:07:50,890 –> 01:07:54,690
Iran was a modern Persian nation state. You had people walking

1103
01:07:54,690 –> 01:07:58,370
around, you know, women walking around ungarbed. You know, at the

1104
01:07:58,370 –> 01:08:02,170
same time, in Turkey, the. I can’t remember the general,

1105
01:08:02,490 –> 01:08:06,330
but he had banned all fundamentalism, period, full stop. He said, we’re going to

1106
01:08:06,330 –> 01:08:10,130
be. We’re going to be a. We’re going to be a modern

1107
01:08:10,130 –> 01:08:13,690
nation state. And so he took all those people that we currently

1108
01:08:13,690 –> 01:08:17,490
associate with fundamentalist Islam and he basically locked them up in

1109
01:08:17,490 –> 01:08:21,260
gulags and told them to shut up. Which is

1110
01:08:21,340 –> 01:08:25,020
like, absolutely the best way to quell any kind of like. Oh, yeah,

1111
01:08:25,660 –> 01:08:29,380
it didn’t turn out to be a problem at all. No, it’s fine. No, that

1112
01:08:29,380 –> 01:08:33,220
didn’t. That didn’t have any ramifications in the latter part of the 20th

1113
01:08:33,220 –> 01:08:36,860
century at all. Yeah, not at all. No, no. And the

1114
01:08:36,860 –> 01:08:40,700
Saudis at that time. Well, I mean, the Saudi royal family,

1115
01:08:41,020 –> 01:08:44,740
by the way, side note, Saudi Arabia is an entire country

1116
01:08:44,740 –> 01:08:48,139
named after one family. So

1117
01:08:48,139 –> 01:08:51,779
anyway, the Saudi. Just a side note, just something. Yeah, well.

1118
01:08:52,019 –> 01:08:55,739
Well, there they were at a time where the

1119
01:08:55,739 –> 01:08:58,819
number one rule, and it still is the number one rule in the Saudi royal

1120
01:08:58,819 –> 01:09:02,459
family is we control the oil. The oil never stops

1121
01:09:02,459 –> 01:09:06,259
flowing. That’s the number one rule. After that, you could do whatever you want. After

1122
01:09:06,259 –> 01:09:09,499
that, you can start up madrasas, you could be fundamentalists, you could be

1123
01:09:09,499 –> 01:09:12,910
Wahhabi, whatever you want. But the oil never stops

1124
01:09:12,910 –> 01:09:16,550
flowing and we control the oil. That’s why they kicked Osama bin Laden out of

1125
01:09:16,550 –> 01:09:20,230
their country and sent him to Afghanistan because they couldn’t handle that dude anymore.

1126
01:09:21,510 –> 01:09:23,670
Anyway, that was all going to happen 20

1127
01:09:25,430 –> 01:09:29,190
years, you know, ahead. Which is why, again, I look at this book

1128
01:09:29,190 –> 01:09:32,790
through, you know, the lens of all the historical stuff that happened after

1129
01:09:32,790 –> 01:09:36,230
Heinlein wrote it. And so to your point, I get what you’re saying,

1130
01:09:36,630 –> 01:09:40,130
but I think at that time it was, it was considered an exotic religion

1131
01:09:40,530 –> 01:09:44,290
that would have been a religion of modernity moving forward and.

1132
01:09:44,290 –> 01:09:48,130
Like, you know, heard. Yes, right. It

1133
01:09:48,130 –> 01:09:51,850
is so unknown that he can kind of drop his flags.

1134
01:09:51,850 –> 01:09:53,810
Right. And there’s not going to be a whole lot of people over him and

1135
01:09:53,810 –> 01:09:57,650
everything else like this. But I’ve read a lot of, a lot of this

1136
01:09:57,650 –> 01:10:01,330
guy. Yeah. I don’t think he’s pulling punches in the name of

1137
01:10:02,690 –> 01:10:05,650
will. These people have been beat up enough. So let’s find someone else to beat

1138
01:10:05,650 –> 01:10:09,030
up on. Right. Like, I, I don’t like, like, I don’t see him.

1139
01:10:09,430 –> 01:10:13,150
I do, I do think after, I mean, I’ve read a lot of Heinlein that

1140
01:10:13,150 –> 01:10:16,470
if he thought that, that the, that, that,

1141
01:10:16,790 –> 01:10:19,590
that the Judaism lens would have been better, he would have gone with it. Whether

1142
01:10:19,590 –> 01:10:23,390
or not he thought that they’d been beat up enough or not. I think he

1143
01:10:23,390 –> 01:10:26,310
was very intentional in the analogy. Okay,

1144
01:10:27,590 –> 01:10:29,910
well, let’s look at, let’s look at Jubal because I want to, I want to

1145
01:10:29,910 –> 01:10:33,670
switch to this. And so we pick up in part two

1146
01:10:34,640 –> 01:10:38,440
of Stranger in a Strange Land. Part two is called

1147
01:10:38,440 –> 01:10:42,000
his preposterous heritage. And the vast majority of part two

1148
01:10:42,240 –> 01:10:45,880
is consumed with, and I love it, how he turns the term preposterous. The

1149
01:10:45,880 –> 01:10:49,640
preposterous nature of exactly how Valentine Michael

1150
01:10:49,640 –> 01:10:53,480
Smith comes into his. Well, comes into his

1151
01:10:53,480 –> 01:10:56,640
inheritance, comes into dealing with human beings,

1152
01:10:57,280 –> 01:11:00,480
comes into moving from being unable to

1153
01:11:01,280 –> 01:11:05,000
walk in, in the different gravity

1154
01:11:05,000 –> 01:11:08,280
well of Earth all the way to being able to swim

1155
01:11:08,600 –> 01:11:12,080
and transport, transpose and

1156
01:11:12,080 –> 01:11:15,880
transport himself out of his body from the bottom of a swimming pool while

1157
01:11:15,880 –> 01:11:19,560
there are black helicopters. Remember I said I’m a conspiracy theory guy.

1158
01:11:19,720 –> 01:11:22,200
While there are black helicopters flying overhead.

1159
01:11:24,440 –> 01:11:27,720
I’m just going to read this little tiny piece here. While Mrs. Douglas

1160
01:11:29,350 –> 01:11:33,030
was speaking freely on a subject she knew little about. God, I loved that sentence

1161
01:11:33,030 –> 01:11:36,790
so much. Jubal E. Harshaw, LLB, MD,

1162
01:11:36,950 –> 01:11:40,550
ScD, Bonvauvant Gourmet Sybarite,

1163
01:11:40,550 –> 01:11:44,309
popular author, extraordinary and neo pessimist philosopher,

1164
01:11:44,550 –> 01:11:48,230
was sitting by his pool at his home in the Poconos, scratching the

1165
01:11:48,230 –> 01:11:51,670
gray thatch on his chest and watching his three secretaries splash in the pool.

1166
01:11:51,990 –> 01:11:55,520
They were all amazingly beautiful. They were also amazingly good secretaries.

1167
01:11:55,600 –> 01:11:58,880
In Harshaw’s opinion, the principle of least action required that

1168
01:11:59,520 –> 01:12:03,320
utility and beauty be combined. Hold

1169
01:12:03,320 –> 01:12:06,880
on one second. My wife is calling. I’m gonna pause. 3Rd.

1170
01:12:08,640 –> 01:12:11,840
All right, let’s pick up here from the break.

1171
01:12:13,920 –> 01:12:17,360
All right. So. So, yeah, we read that little piece there about

1172
01:12:17,600 –> 01:12:20,930
Jubal, and that’s a great opening

1173
01:12:21,250 –> 01:12:24,970
to what’s going to be happening, what’s happening in the rest of part

1174
01:12:24,970 –> 01:12:27,890
two, where we go into the full

1175
01:12:30,050 –> 01:12:33,850
depth and breadth of Jubal Harshaw from the

1176
01:12:33,850 –> 01:12:37,410
nature of who he is as a lawyer and as a

1177
01:12:37,570 –> 01:12:41,330
barrister of the law and understanding the law and of course, as a

1178
01:12:41,330 –> 01:12:44,970
manipulator of the law, as any good lawyer actually

1179
01:12:44,970 –> 01:12:48,690
is, all the way to his understanding of

1180
01:12:49,200 –> 01:12:52,960
religion and his understanding of. Exactly. Or no, his beginning.

1181
01:12:52,960 –> 01:12:56,000
The beginning of his understanding of what exactly?

1182
01:12:58,080 –> 01:13:01,720
Valentin Michael Smith, the. The man

1183
01:13:01,720 –> 01:13:05,279
from Mars. Right. What exactly is that going to.

1184
01:13:05,360 –> 01:13:09,080
To mean? We also learned more about the man from Mars and how

1185
01:13:09,080 –> 01:13:12,720
his brain works and how he is

1186
01:13:12,880 –> 01:13:16,540
engaging with. With humans in this. In

1187
01:13:16,540 –> 01:13:20,020
this new world, right, that he has now been dropped into

1188
01:13:20,740 –> 01:13:22,100
unceremoniously.

1189
01:13:24,260 –> 01:13:27,620
And the things that occur to me in this section

1190
01:13:28,260 –> 01:13:32,060
really focus around. And I love how

1191
01:13:32,060 –> 01:13:35,820
part two is called his preposterous heritage, because the beginning

1192
01:13:35,820 –> 01:13:38,420
of it was preposterous. Well, not the beginning of it. The beginning of it and

1193
01:13:38,420 –> 01:13:41,260
the end of it all the way to the end is preposterous. It has touches

1194
01:13:41,260 –> 01:13:44,040
of Elmer Gantry. If you ever read that book

1195
01:13:45,160 –> 01:13:48,280
I was reading or I was listening to music this weekend while I was

1196
01:13:48,280 –> 01:13:52,040
chainsawing tree limbs on my property, because that’s what I do

1197
01:13:52,040 –> 01:13:55,720
to relax. And, you know, I was listening to everything from David

1198
01:13:55,720 –> 01:13:59,200
Bowie and Space Oddity all the way to Neil

1199
01:13:59,200 –> 01:14:02,360
diamond and Brother Love’s traveling salvation show,

1200
01:14:02,920 –> 01:14:06,520
which is. Which is a. A beat that harkens back

1201
01:14:06,520 –> 01:14:10,010
to those. Those proto Kenneth Copeland

1202
01:14:10,010 –> 01:14:13,450
preachers roamed the south, saving

1203
01:14:13,450 –> 01:14:17,290
everybody, right, Laying on hands and. And delivering the

1204
01:14:17,290 –> 01:14:19,250
Holy Spirit, such as it were.

1205
01:14:21,810 –> 01:14:25,450
Now, I. I am a person who can only live in the time

1206
01:14:25,450 –> 01:14:29,130
that I’m in. I can only live in 2025. I can’t live in 1950

1207
01:14:29,130 –> 01:14:32,970
or 1855 or 1965. And I came along and

1208
01:14:32,970 –> 01:14:36,430
was born after all of that was all over. I was born

1209
01:14:36,430 –> 01:14:40,230
in the backwash of cynicism and skepticism. I was

1210
01:14:40,230 –> 01:14:43,990
born in that time. I came of age in that time. And not just

1211
01:14:43,990 –> 01:14:47,710
cynicism, skepticism around religion, but cynicism and skepticism around institutions

1212
01:14:48,350 –> 01:14:51,550
all over the place, including particularly political institutions,

1213
01:14:51,950 –> 01:14:55,310
which Jubal spends a lot of his time running up against.

1214
01:14:55,630 –> 01:14:59,070
So I will say this, as a character, most of the things that I found

1215
01:14:59,070 –> 01:15:02,610
him doing in the book I found to be amusing, but not particularly

1216
01:15:02,610 –> 01:15:06,290
surprising because we live in a deeply cynical, a deeply

1217
01:15:06,450 –> 01:15:10,050
cynical time that can spot that Noel

1218
01:15:10,050 –> 01:15:13,570
no, that is so good

1219
01:15:14,610 –> 01:15:18,010
at spotting hypocrisy with ironic

1220
01:15:18,010 –> 01:15:21,170
detachment that we don’t

1221
01:15:21,330 –> 01:15:23,730
recognize sincerity

1222
01:15:24,930 –> 01:15:28,750
and we don’t trust sincerity. By the way, this is what Valentin

1223
01:15:28,750 –> 01:15:32,350
Michael Smith ultimately has to overcome, and this is why he uses church to do

1224
01:15:32,350 –> 01:15:35,790
it. But some interesting things that occurred to me. So I have friends in a

1225
01:15:35,790 –> 01:15:39,470
lot of different areas, and some of my friends are psychologists and therapists, and.

1226
01:15:41,630 –> 01:15:44,990
They. Pointed out to me something that’s very interesting. Political

1227
01:15:45,070 –> 01:15:48,270
identity is now being shaped by ninth grade,

1228
01:15:49,230 –> 01:15:52,870
and I believe I’ve said that before on the show. And I look at this

1229
01:15:52,870 –> 01:15:55,470
as political identity replacing religious identity.

1230
01:15:56,710 –> 01:15:59,950
Now, the problem with that, of course, is that political identity is usually based on

1231
01:15:59,950 –> 01:16:03,430
a party or a person or a movement. And those things

1232
01:16:03,590 –> 01:16:07,110
always ultimately fail, particularly

1233
01:16:07,990 –> 01:16:11,550
or shift. Usually they

1234
01:16:11,550 –> 01:16:15,390
shift, but particularly when you’re young and you’re a true believer, you see that shift

1235
01:16:15,390 –> 01:16:19,190
as a failure. And this is where you get purity tests. You get ideological

1236
01:16:19,190 –> 01:16:22,630
purity tests, which currently there is a party in our country

1237
01:16:23,350 –> 01:16:27,030
that is, is, is should have had a revolution but didn’t

1238
01:16:27,110 –> 01:16:29,790
and is going to have to go through a whole bunch of ideological purity tests

1239
01:16:29,790 –> 01:16:33,190
to get back to something resembling a center.

1240
01:16:34,630 –> 01:16:38,110
And it’s going to be, it’s going to be quite, it’s going to be quite

1241
01:16:38,110 –> 01:16:40,630
nonsensical, I think, over the next 25 years.

1242
01:16:41,910 –> 01:16:45,110
And they have no one but themselves to blame, by the way, this political party

1243
01:16:45,110 –> 01:16:48,630
in America. But you also see

1244
01:16:48,710 –> 01:16:52,550
a weird intersection in our time, speaking of being in our time.

1245
01:16:52,870 –> 01:16:55,630
And I have kids that are younger and I’ve talked about them on the podcast

1246
01:16:55,630 –> 01:16:58,870
before. We have, in our time, a state where

1247
01:16:59,990 –> 01:17:03,670
human beings use number one, we’re the most in America. We’re the,

1248
01:17:03,670 –> 01:17:07,030
we are the country with the highest rate of diagnosed mental health

1249
01:17:07,350 –> 01:17:10,790
maladies out of any country on the planet. We have, we have it by a

1250
01:17:10,790 –> 01:17:14,590
country mile. We also have pharmaceutical companies that advertise on our

1251
01:17:14,590 –> 01:17:18,380
televisions, which I have a problem with, and advertise every solution

1252
01:17:18,380 –> 01:17:21,660
and every pill with every side effect for these mental health maladies.

1253
01:17:22,220 –> 01:17:25,860
We’re probably the culture that uses the most therapeutic language on the

1254
01:17:25,860 –> 01:17:29,340
planet, and yet we have the highest rate of

1255
01:17:29,340 –> 01:17:33,140
anxiety and depression out of any other country on the planet. Now, I’m not

1256
01:17:33,140 –> 01:17:36,540
making up these statistics. These are things. I’m not making up these facts. These are

1257
01:17:36,540 –> 01:17:39,580
things that you can go and find out on Google if you want to.

1258
01:17:41,340 –> 01:17:45,020
So we live in a time where social cohesion has

1259
01:17:45,020 –> 01:17:48,700
begun to fall apart. And maybe I’m being impacted because the last

1260
01:17:48,700 –> 01:17:52,180
couple of weeks I had an amazing social experiment, an amazing

1261
01:17:52,180 –> 01:17:55,500
anthropological experiment with a corporate entity

1262
01:17:57,660 –> 01:18:01,180
where low trust social cohesion were the name of the lack of social

1263
01:18:01,180 –> 01:18:04,860
cohesion were the name of the game. And so maybe I’m being influenced by that

1264
01:18:04,860 –> 01:18:08,220
in my looking at this book, but I wonder

1265
01:18:09,260 –> 01:18:12,980
in our time, how we can interact with

1266
01:18:12,980 –> 01:18:15,500
people. This is why I brought up theory of mind. And so this is a

1267
01:18:15,500 –> 01:18:19,270
question maybe for John. And in our time, how can we interact with

1268
01:18:19,270 –> 01:18:22,990
somebody? How can we interact with other people when we don’t even

1269
01:18:22,990 –> 01:18:26,630
have. We don’t even have a fully? Even in the best of times,

1270
01:18:26,630 –> 01:18:29,630
we struggle with theory of mind and we are not currently

1271
01:18:30,110 –> 01:18:33,950
psychologically or philosophically in the best of mind. So

1272
01:18:33,950 –> 01:18:37,310
how do we. How can we interact with each other?

1273
01:18:37,550 –> 01:18:40,750
How can we interact with each other? We don’t even seek to understand each other’s

1274
01:18:40,750 –> 01:18:44,480
minds. How do we do that? Or. Or is it

1275
01:18:44,480 –> 01:18:48,080
going to take someone coming from the outside for us to actually figure

1276
01:18:48,080 –> 01:18:51,800
out that, oh my gosh, that person has a. Has a mind,

1277
01:18:51,800 –> 01:18:54,480
and oh my gosh, their mind might not work like mine. And oh my gosh,

1278
01:18:54,480 –> 01:18:58,040
that’s actually something that I might want to be curious about rather

1279
01:18:58,119 –> 01:19:01,920
than just stay up. That’s uninteresting to me. And I’m going to,

1280
01:19:01,920 –> 01:19:05,680
you know, wall myself off on Blue sky or Twitter or

1281
01:19:05,680 –> 01:19:09,450
LA or Oklahoma because I just don’t need to deal with those people. People.

1282
01:19:09,770 –> 01:19:13,530
Yeah. Yeah. How do we. This is, I mean, this is a

1283
01:19:13,530 –> 01:19:17,050
question of our time. I know you see it. This is the driving question

1284
01:19:17,130 –> 01:19:20,970
of our era. How do we. How do we handle that? How do we use

1285
01:19:20,970 –> 01:19:23,130
Heinlein to handle that? Well.

1286
01:19:25,770 –> 01:19:29,610
Beautiful question. Like, and I think you worded it very deeply and

1287
01:19:29,610 –> 01:19:33,370
intentionally, and I appreciate it. And I think that the hard. I

1288
01:19:33,370 –> 01:19:36,940
think the first thing is, like, don’t expect to get the

1289
01:19:36,940 –> 01:19:40,700
benefit of the doubt. Right. And this is, I’m curious

1290
01:19:40,700 –> 01:19:43,580
to your thoughts on this because we were kind of talking about it before and

1291
01:19:43,580 –> 01:19:46,900
this is essentially kind of the gist of my, of the book that I have

1292
01:19:46,900 –> 01:19:49,860
been working on for a while. So I might be seeing this vein Because I’ve

1293
01:19:49,860 –> 01:19:50,899
been working on it for a while.

1294
01:19:57,380 –> 01:20:00,580
No one wants to be changed. First of all, was the very first thing, right?

1295
01:20:00,580 –> 01:20:03,630
And I was at a conference and they were talking about that no one will

1296
01:20:03,630 –> 01:20:07,110
change until they understand why change is necessary,

1297
01:20:07,110 –> 01:20:10,710
okay? And so lots of people

1298
01:20:10,710 –> 01:20:13,670
go around and I’ve done this myself on some of the things that I’m very

1299
01:20:13,670 –> 01:20:17,510
touchy about, right? There’s certain areas to where I have less room to

1300
01:20:17,590 –> 01:20:21,350
give someone the benefit of the doubt that they’re, you know, well read and well

1301
01:20:21,350 –> 01:20:24,310
informed and everything else like this. And so what it comes down to for me,

1302
01:20:24,950 –> 01:20:28,620
this is going to sound so bad. I am a nerdy person.

1303
01:20:29,020 –> 01:20:32,060
I’m going to go read the books. I’m going to talk in a language

1304
01:20:32,620 –> 01:20:36,460
that most other people don’t

1305
01:20:36,460 –> 01:20:40,140
want to talk in, right? And this has been something that is, that has

1306
01:20:41,100 –> 01:20:44,500
shown up for me on social media, right? I’m a guy who posts about sales

1307
01:20:44,500 –> 01:20:48,060
stuff and I try to be subject matter expert in my lane and teach and

1308
01:20:48,060 –> 01:20:51,740
try to teach with some depth. And I’ll have people be like, man, you’re

1309
01:20:51,740 –> 01:20:54,220
trying way too hard. This is actually how I communicate.

1310
01:20:57,850 –> 01:21:01,410
Not, this is how I talk. This is how I communicate. This is my chosen

1311
01:21:01,410 –> 01:21:05,170
vernacular. This is, this is not something I’m piling on so that way I

1312
01:21:05,170 –> 01:21:08,490
can look cool on social media. I am this nerd, right?

1313
01:21:08,730 –> 01:21:11,530
And so what it comes down to is that

1314
01:21:12,410 –> 01:21:16,090
there’s going to be a whole lot of people that will never

1315
01:21:16,570 –> 01:21:20,360
be open to hearing anything contrary to their beliefs

1316
01:21:21,470 –> 01:21:25,190
because they don’t see me as being on the level to have anything to say,

1317
01:21:25,190 –> 01:21:28,710
right? So, and this is weird sales

1318
01:21:28,710 –> 01:21:32,550
perspective. If you don’t see me as a human being, I’m out the

1319
01:21:32,550 –> 01:21:35,990
door. I can go find someone else to talk to. I don’t have time to

1320
01:21:35,990 –> 01:21:39,790
sit here and be. Jump. Jump through someone’s

1321
01:21:39,790 –> 01:21:43,510
flaming hoops. The sales people are all these things and

1322
01:21:43,510 –> 01:21:45,910
everything. I don’t, I don’t do that. I just go find other people to go

1323
01:21:45,910 –> 01:21:49,450
talk to, right? So I’m not trying to bend people over to my

1324
01:21:49,450 –> 01:21:52,370
ideas. And the thing that I tell all the founders that I work with, if

1325
01:21:52,370 –> 01:21:55,770
they don’t align on the philosophy, the details in the proposal don’t fundamentally matter,

1326
01:21:56,570 –> 01:22:00,210
right? And, and I’m sure that you have on your lane met a lot of

1327
01:22:00,210 –> 01:22:03,570
people who are like, you know what? Leaders aren’t developed, they’re just born. We shouldn’t

1328
01:22:03,570 –> 01:22:06,810
have to teach them anything, right? And so in that mode, the

1329
01:22:06,810 –> 01:22:10,410
philosophy shuts down. Any room for bargaining, working

1330
01:22:10,410 –> 01:22:14,080
together, opportunity, or anything else like this. And as a

1331
01:22:14,080 –> 01:22:17,760
sales professional who tries to teach people and show people,

1332
01:22:18,080 –> 01:22:21,120
don’t fight with people in the streets about things that you’re never going to change

1333
01:22:21,120 –> 01:22:24,920
them on because it’s like going to Thanksgiving with your. With your one uncle who

1334
01:22:24,920 –> 01:22:27,560
just doesn’t agree with you about anything and has known you since you were in

1335
01:22:27,560 –> 01:22:31,320
diapers and can’t even stand to hear that you have anything contrary

1336
01:22:31,320 –> 01:22:34,760
to what he believes. Because his whole, his whole world view is that the world

1337
01:22:34,760 –> 01:22:38,520
revolves. We’re never like, don’t even have conversations with those

1338
01:22:38,520 –> 01:22:42,340
people. Right? Because until you’re willing to walk away from that person and

1339
01:22:42,340 –> 01:22:45,940
be like, hey, we’re not going to get anywhere, they’re going to treat

1340
01:22:45,940 –> 01:22:49,500
you just like they treat every sales professional on this. You just want to sell

1341
01:22:49,500 –> 01:22:53,260
me. You just want to win me over, right? So the sheer caliber of

1342
01:22:53,260 –> 01:22:56,100
being able to be like, hey, cool, you’re not going to listen to anything I

1343
01:22:56,100 –> 01:22:59,220
have to say, and that’s fine, Uncle, I’m going to go over here. See you

1344
01:22:59,220 –> 01:23:02,140
next Christmas. Well, I’m not trying to run you off. Like, I get it, you’re

1345
01:23:02,140 –> 01:23:04,060
not trying to run me out, but you’re not interested in having the same kind

1346
01:23:04,060 –> 01:23:07,790
of conversation position than I am, right? So there’s an I. There’s an

1347
01:23:07,790 –> 01:23:11,470
idea in, in the New Testament where Jesus sends out his

1348
01:23:11,470 –> 01:23:14,710
disciples. Not

1349
01:23:15,110 –> 01:23:18,350
again, not making this about religion. Just there’s an idea that triggered in my brain

1350
01:23:18,350 –> 01:23:22,070
when you said this where he sends them out. And it is

1351
01:23:22,070 –> 01:23:25,630
a salesman. It’s. Jesus loves salesmen. Actually,

1352
01:23:25,630 –> 01:23:29,230
interestingly enough, this is how, you know, he sends them out and he

1353
01:23:29,230 –> 01:23:32,950
says, go to the towns of the villages, tell them everything that I’m doing. Basically

1354
01:23:32,950 –> 01:23:36,520
sell me, right? And if they won’t accept, and this is the Hasan

1355
01:23:36,520 –> 01:23:39,960
Sorrell’s interpretation. So those of you who are more biblically accurate can slam me upside

1356
01:23:39,960 –> 01:23:43,800
the head later on. And it’s in Matthew, might be in Luke, it’s

1357
01:23:43,800 –> 01:23:47,360
fine, whatever. And we could argue about it in Luke. It’s fine. Actually won’t even

1358
01:23:47,360 –> 01:23:49,400
argue about it. You could argue about my interpretation of it. It’s fine. And you’re

1359
01:23:49,400 –> 01:23:52,840
gonna say I’m like being irreverent or whatever, and I’m not. Jesus likes the irreverent

1360
01:23:52,840 –> 01:23:56,560
too, so. Oh, he was irreverent in his own time with the

1361
01:23:56,560 –> 01:24:00,000
Pharisees. Just read the entire book of John, please. Give me a break. So

1362
01:24:00,800 –> 01:24:04,640
he says he sends out his, his disciples to all the villages.

1363
01:24:04,640 –> 01:24:07,520
And he says, you know, if they will take you in. And by the way,

1364
01:24:07,520 –> 01:24:09,920
with only a staff and a pair of their shoes, which back in the day

1365
01:24:09,920 –> 01:24:13,360
was, please, that’s all you had. Right?

1366
01:24:13,520 –> 01:24:16,640
And he said, if they, if they won’t accept what you have to say,

1367
01:24:17,120 –> 01:24:20,920
shake the dust from your sandals in the

1368
01:24:20,920 –> 01:24:24,440
town and go to the next town. Yeah. That is the

1369
01:24:24,440 –> 01:24:27,540
ultimate like, salesman move. To your point. Why are you

1370
01:24:28,020 –> 01:24:31,300
not. You know what, it’s fine. You have a good day.

1371
01:24:31,700 –> 01:24:35,540
I’m not for you, and that’s okay. Now here’s where it

1372
01:24:35,540 –> 01:24:39,180
goes sideways. As a, as a sales coach and sales consultant,

1373
01:24:39,180 –> 01:24:43,020
right. Is the people who were, who

1374
01:24:43,020 –> 01:24:45,380
were sold on the idea that they’re helping other people

1375
01:24:47,220 –> 01:24:50,540
love to lean into the fact that I’m helping, I’m helping, I’m help. No, you’re

1376
01:24:50,540 –> 01:24:53,970
selling. Right. And as the card carrying

1377
01:24:53,970 –> 01:24:57,770
professional, I can tell when there’s a difference between help and selling.

1378
01:24:58,090 –> 01:25:01,770
Right? And these

1379
01:25:01,770 –> 01:25:05,290
people have sold themselves. And I don’t even know where this comes from,

1380
01:25:05,530 –> 01:25:09,130
right? Because I like, I know all the Bible verses

1381
01:25:09,130 –> 01:25:12,210
just, just like you do of like, hey, take the plank out of your own

1382
01:25:12,210 –> 01:25:14,770
eye and all this other stuff that happens, right? I’m just like, hey, just go

1383
01:25:14,770 –> 01:25:17,420
walk your path and go do your thing. Don’t make it a salesman thing. And

1384
01:25:17,420 –> 01:25:20,060
then also like, hey, if they don’t want to be with us, don’t, don’t, don’t,

1385
01:25:20,060 –> 01:25:23,460
don’t try to force it. But we still had people who were going around

1386
01:25:23,700 –> 01:25:27,380
trying to make everyone else their project and everything else like this. And you know,

1387
01:25:27,380 –> 01:25:27,860
it’s,

1388
01:25:32,020 –> 01:25:35,340
I can’t, I can’t adequately talk about how

1389
01:25:35,340 –> 01:25:38,580
uncomfortable it is to not go to church. Living in Texas

1390
01:25:38,980 –> 01:25:42,700
and being in a customer facing role, it

1391
01:25:42,700 –> 01:25:46,140
is so prevalent. John, where do you go to church? Oh,

1392
01:25:47,020 –> 01:25:50,660
we’re between churches. I gotta make up a line because like, you

1393
01:25:50,660 –> 01:25:54,300
know, it’s not popular. You know, like I, I,

1394
01:25:54,460 –> 01:25:56,980
one of my, one of my stories that I share with everyone is the last

1395
01:25:56,980 –> 01:26:00,180
time I lied to a prospect and it was sitting at the bank and my

1396
01:26:00,180 –> 01:26:03,500
daughter was an infant. I’m talking to them about investing some of their money into

1397
01:26:03,500 –> 01:26:06,580
the thing, right? And they see a picture of my daughter and she’s an infant.

1398
01:26:06,580 –> 01:26:09,560
Right on. You know, because I mean, she, she was an infant during the time

1399
01:26:10,110 –> 01:26:13,830
and they were like, hey, beautiful daughter, thank you

1400
01:26:13,830 –> 01:26:15,990
so much, I appreciate it. And they’re like, how old is she? I was like,

1401
01:26:15,990 –> 01:26:18,670
she’s months and some change. I forget exactly how old she was. And they say,

1402
01:26:18,670 –> 01:26:22,390
well, you better get her in church before she’s three. And me

1403
01:26:22,390 –> 01:26:26,230
being me, I’m like, oh, why? Like, why do

1404
01:26:26,230 –> 01:26:29,990
you say that? Let’s. I’m. I’m genuinely curious. That sounds like

1405
01:26:29,990 –> 01:26:33,470
it’s coming from a place of distinction,

1406
01:26:34,110 –> 01:26:37,150
not preference. You know, it’s like, what do you mean by that? And like, well,

1407
01:26:37,530 –> 01:26:41,170
you want to raise the right way. Okay, does that mean that I’m not

1408
01:26:41,170 –> 01:26:43,690
capable of raising her the right way? Right? Because I’m me and I’m always thinking

1409
01:26:43,690 –> 01:26:46,570
about all the other questions and everything. And so then I’m like, but wait a

1410
01:26:46,570 –> 01:26:49,730
minute, hold on. We’re on the clock. Don’t, don’t, don’t go too far down this

1411
01:26:49,730 –> 01:26:52,810
path. You know what happens, right? So just dial it down, right?

1412
01:26:53,690 –> 01:26:57,450
Because I’m not against anyone else having their faith right? At all.

1413
01:26:57,530 –> 01:27:01,330
I want everybody to have equal room and opportunity to believe in whatever they want

1414
01:27:01,330 –> 01:27:05,010
to believe, which I think kind of makes me different than a lot of other

1415
01:27:05,010 –> 01:27:08,720
people who want everybody to believe what they believe, right? I’m on the

1416
01:27:08,720 –> 01:27:12,120
far side of that, right? If you want to, if you want to believe in,

1417
01:27:12,120 –> 01:27:15,480
in the Satan. The Satanist church, cool. I don’t have a problem with that,

1418
01:27:15,720 –> 01:27:18,840
Right? I just fundamentally don’t. And so.

1419
01:27:19,560 –> 01:27:22,920
But I also know that, like, hey, I, I want, I want, I want this

1420
01:27:22,920 –> 01:27:26,760
business, right? I want to help with these people. And honestly, this

1421
01:27:26,760 –> 01:27:29,440
thing shouldn’t be standing in the way. But I know that if I tell them,

1422
01:27:29,440 –> 01:27:32,680
I’m not going to talk about that with you, right? I know where I’m at,

1423
01:27:32,680 –> 01:27:36,040
right? So I’m trying to find all the salesy ways that I can get around

1424
01:27:36,040 –> 01:27:39,770
this situation without having to copy cause a kerfuffle, if

1425
01:27:39,770 –> 01:27:43,330
you will. And so they’re like, hey, you should go to. Hey, you know, and

1426
01:27:43,330 –> 01:27:46,930
like, will you go to church? I’m like, we’re, we’re between churches on a very

1427
01:27:46,930 –> 01:27:50,570
long, very long gap, you know, kind of thing. And they’re like, well, you should

1428
01:27:50,570 –> 01:27:54,330
come to our church. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Probably not going

1429
01:27:54,330 –> 01:27:57,970
well. Why not? Right? And so

1430
01:27:58,610 –> 01:28:01,570
the minute they leave, I have this moment of like, God, like,

1431
01:28:02,450 –> 01:28:06,200
you know, and then I was like, I’m not doing that again. I’m just

1432
01:28:06,520 –> 01:28:10,120
not. Can’t do it. That, that was, you know, oh,

1433
01:28:10,120 –> 01:28:13,560
like, I just felt gross, right? And then they

1434
01:28:13,560 –> 01:28:16,360
ghosted me and didn’t buy anything anyway, right? So then I was like, man, I

1435
01:28:16,360 –> 01:28:19,399
did all these things and I lied and like, and like, did all this obfuscation

1436
01:28:19,399 –> 01:28:23,000
and they still didn’t buy. I’m just gonna be myself. Right. And that was the

1437
01:28:23,000 –> 01:28:26,680
beginning of all of these things that I now teach people to do. And

1438
01:28:26,680 –> 01:28:30,530
fundamentally, if. Here’s what it comes down to. If I need to be in

1439
01:28:30,530 –> 01:28:33,650
church every Sunday for you to trust my ideas and opinions,

1440
01:28:34,290 –> 01:28:37,010
cool. Go find a sales coach who goes to your church.

1441
01:28:38,690 –> 01:28:42,490
I gotta say, I. When you, when

1442
01:28:42,490 –> 01:28:45,890
you talk about these kinds of things, we talk about this kind of way.

1443
01:28:46,130 –> 01:28:48,930
Yeah. I culturally came out of the Northeast

1444
01:28:49,890 –> 01:28:53,570
very different there, Very different up there. And it is almost.

1445
01:28:53,570 –> 01:28:57,420
It’s almost the exact opposite. But I see it as the same

1446
01:28:57,580 –> 01:28:58,300
kind of.

1447
01:29:02,460 –> 01:29:06,300
So what occurs in. In Texas or the south around

1448
01:29:07,820 –> 01:29:10,700
religious belief in churches. And where that is contained

1449
01:29:11,499 –> 01:29:15,220
to me is the exact. Is the obverse. It’s the other side

1450
01:29:15,220 –> 01:29:17,420
of the same coin of deception.

1451
01:29:18,860 –> 01:29:22,580
So when you go from the Northeast to

1452
01:29:22,580 –> 01:29:25,930
the south in the Northeast, you never hear, I’m going to make a very small

1453
01:29:25,930 –> 01:29:28,330
one, because this is something that jumped out to my wife when we first got

1454
01:29:28,330 –> 01:29:32,010
here. No one ever anywhere says, God bless

1455
01:29:32,010 –> 01:29:35,770
you, never. Not for anything, please. And

1456
01:29:35,770 –> 01:29:39,530
here, it’s the most passive aggressive, back of the back of the hand kind

1457
01:29:39,530 –> 01:29:43,250
of situation. Right? So you come from a place where no one says it,

1458
01:29:43,650 –> 01:29:46,770
and you come to a place where literally they’ll hand you the groceries at the

1459
01:29:46,770 –> 01:29:50,580
grocery store and say, God bless you. And it takes you a little while

1460
01:29:50,580 –> 01:29:54,380
to understand that people don’t mean it and that it’s a cultural

1461
01:29:54,540 –> 01:29:58,180
challenge Now. Well, here’s what’s interesting. Then you

1462
01:29:58,180 –> 01:30:01,940
take it is. And then you take that cultural coding, and

1463
01:30:01,940 –> 01:30:05,540
I still have clients in the Northeast, and you take that cultural coding back to

1464
01:30:05,540 –> 01:30:09,340
visit that. Those areas in the Northeast where

1465
01:30:09,340 –> 01:30:13,100
none of that cultural coding is there, and their cultural coding for all these other

1466
01:30:13,100 –> 01:30:16,780
things, and you just begin to see how

1467
01:30:16,780 –> 01:30:20,620
they’re both sharing the exact same. It’s the exact same thing. It’s the

1468
01:30:20,620 –> 01:30:24,260
exact same thing. And so I’ve had clients in the Northeast. I’ve had the

1469
01:30:24,260 –> 01:30:28,060
opposite experience. I’ve had clients in the Northeast who, if I mentioned

1470
01:30:28,060 –> 01:30:31,740
anything about church at all, what I do on Sundays, other

1471
01:30:31,740 –> 01:30:35,580
than football, which I don’t watch football because I don’t have time for that

1472
01:30:35,580 –> 01:30:39,140
nonsense. But if I talk about anything other than that,

1473
01:30:39,620 –> 01:30:42,910
nope, it’s immediate turnoff. Matter of fact, I’ve had clients actually tell me it’s immediate

1474
01:30:42,910 –> 01:30:46,750
turn off in the Northeast. It’s so like. And

1475
01:30:46,750 –> 01:30:50,310
so it’s so weird to me, because it’s fascinating. Do you see,

1476
01:30:50,470 –> 01:30:54,310
like, oh, yeah. So. So, because I was thinking about

1477
01:30:54,310 –> 01:30:57,270
this, right? As. As I was thinking about this conversation, I’m so excited to talk

1478
01:30:57,270 –> 01:31:01,070
to you about it because, you know, your question of, you know, the, the

1479
01:31:01,070 –> 01:31:03,030
main question you put in the script that we’ve not talked about yet, so I’m

1480
01:31:03,030 –> 01:31:06,390
not going to ruin it, is I started thinking about, like, okay, how. How different

1481
01:31:06,390 –> 01:31:09,500
can it be? And I. And I know that the. That the Northeast is not

1482
01:31:09,500 –> 01:31:13,060
nearly as religious as the. As Texas is, right? Not even

1483
01:31:13,060 –> 01:31:16,860
close. But, like, the church that I went to was

1484
01:31:16,860 –> 01:31:20,260
the church that I went to because everybody in that school went to it.

1485
01:31:20,340 –> 01:31:23,860
Right. All the people who lived in Perry Homes went to it. Right. And then

1486
01:31:23,860 –> 01:31:26,460
you go there and all the private school people go to it, and everyone is

1487
01:31:26,460 –> 01:31:29,940
rich and loaded and like, you know, everyone

1488
01:31:29,940 –> 01:31:33,780
has, man, it is. It’s rife with judgment, right?

1489
01:31:33,780 –> 01:31:37,500
And if you don’t have a guide or the right environment or everything,

1490
01:31:37,500 –> 01:31:41,060
because, like, I could see a spot to where a smaller church without all that

1491
01:31:41,060 –> 01:31:44,660
full press, Southern Baptists, we’re going to sell you on. On faith and everything

1492
01:31:44,660 –> 01:31:48,380
else like that that I would have, you know, probably had

1493
01:31:48,380 –> 01:31:51,540
some room to be like, okay, maybe I can go this way. Maybe I don’t

1494
01:31:51,540 –> 01:31:54,620
need it to be proved out and everything else like this. But whenever people are

1495
01:31:54,620 –> 01:31:57,860
telling me to jump without looking, no.

1496
01:31:58,260 –> 01:32:01,660
Right. And it’s kind of the same thing that kind of gave me some problems

1497
01:32:01,660 –> 01:32:05,380
in the military around the idea and especially after the military. Right.

1498
01:32:05,380 –> 01:32:08,860
Because the military kind of ruins you for. For following empty leadership.

1499
01:32:09,180 –> 01:32:12,740
Right? Because I have been in the situation to where

1500
01:32:12,740 –> 01:32:15,660
I’m. I might have to be called to go die for these things. And the

1501
01:32:15,660 –> 01:32:18,500
people that are calling me to do so have gone through the exact same training

1502
01:32:18,500 –> 01:32:22,300
that I have. Right. So then I come home and some sales leader

1503
01:32:22,300 –> 01:32:25,500
wants to make sales like war and trying to make it out to be like.

1504
01:32:25,500 –> 01:32:29,180
And it’s like, no, it does not work.

1505
01:32:29,800 –> 01:32:33,600
You know, and so I was thinking in

1506
01:32:33,600 –> 01:32:36,560
my head of, like, I was trying to kind of have some appreciation for just

1507
01:32:36,560 –> 01:32:40,040
how potentially polarizingly different it is up there

1508
01:32:40,520 –> 01:32:44,160
because, like, I’ve not walked that experience, but I do know what it’s like

1509
01:32:44,160 –> 01:32:47,880
to even going to a restaurant to get a job.

1510
01:32:48,120 –> 01:32:51,680
Hey, John, you. You go to church? No, I don’t. Okay, good. You can

1511
01:32:51,680 –> 01:32:55,200
absolutely work Sundays, right? I mean, it is woven

1512
01:32:55,200 –> 01:32:58,370
into so much of how things work.

1513
01:32:58,930 –> 01:33:00,930
It’s the, it’s the, it’s the.

1514
01:33:02,930 –> 01:33:06,570
My wife and I talk about it a lot. The,

1515
01:33:06,570 –> 01:33:09,570
The. The. The Stark differences in culture.

1516
01:33:10,050 –> 01:33:13,770
Yeah. And that is one of those. One of

1517
01:33:13,770 –> 01:33:17,570
those things that pops up. And it’s interesting how human

1518
01:33:17,570 –> 01:33:21,130
beings. And this is the core question, right. It’s interesting how human

1519
01:33:21,130 –> 01:33:24,770
beings sort of try to create high trust and social cohesion.

1520
01:33:25,080 –> 01:33:28,120
The tools that they use to do that. Right. Because

1521
01:33:28,600 –> 01:33:32,120
number one, it’s really hard to trust people who you don’t know.

1522
01:33:32,200 –> 01:33:35,960
Absolutely. Number two, it’s really hard to have faith in

1523
01:33:35,960 –> 01:33:39,640
people because you know yourself that you’re

1524
01:33:39,640 –> 01:33:43,480
not reliable. So your theory of mind, if

1525
01:33:43,480 –> 01:33:47,280
it even goes out this far, goes to other people not being reliable as

1526
01:33:47,280 –> 01:33:51,040
well. So the expectation is just, well, I’m not reliable. So

1527
01:33:51,040 –> 01:33:54,600
of course that guy’s not reliable or that woman’s not reliable, or that system or

1528
01:33:54,600 –> 01:33:58,300
that institution isn’t reliable. So course we have to put in all these structures

1529
01:33:58,300 –> 01:34:02,020
because if we don’t, then all these people will behave like me.

1530
01:34:03,060 –> 01:34:06,660
And that leads to all the guys. Wanting the floor

1531
01:34:06,660 –> 01:34:10,180
length dresses and. Yeah, absolutely. Right. That’s right.

1532
01:34:10,340 –> 01:34:14,100
Exactly. I don’t trust myself, so. And everyone must be just

1533
01:34:14,100 –> 01:34:17,900
like me. So therefore everyone must go through these rules that keep me from having

1534
01:34:17,900 –> 01:34:21,420
these thoughts. Yeah, I, I had a whole

1535
01:34:21,420 –> 01:34:25,140
conversation with somebody again in this. In the

1536
01:34:25,460 –> 01:34:28,740
one day. I’ll talk about it on the podcast. But in this whole bureaucratic mishmash

1537
01:34:28,740 –> 01:34:32,420
that I went through where I literally said to the person on the phone,

1538
01:34:33,460 –> 01:34:37,140
the, the policy you are following makes zero sense

1539
01:34:37,140 –> 01:34:40,980
in light of what I have just told you. And yet you are going

1540
01:34:41,300 –> 01:34:45,020
to continue to follow the policy. I need you

1541
01:34:45,020 –> 01:34:48,740
to think independently from the policy. And you would have

1542
01:34:48,740 –> 01:34:52,390
thought that I showed across to Dracula. Oh,

1543
01:34:52,390 –> 01:34:55,990
yeah, right. Because that’s a direct challenge

1544
01:34:56,150 –> 01:34:59,830
to those systems and structures that have

1545
01:34:59,830 –> 01:35:03,190
existed because I don’t trust myself.

1546
01:35:04,390 –> 01:35:08,190
I have low social cohesion with myself. So

1547
01:35:08,190 –> 01:35:11,430
of course this policy is the thing that’s going to protect me because,

1548
01:35:13,990 –> 01:35:17,800
you know, I can’t really write. I can’t really trust everybody. Anybody.

1549
01:35:17,800 –> 01:35:20,200
Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, it was one of those things that kind of jumped out

1550
01:35:20,200 –> 01:35:22,240
to me when I was in that interaction.

1551
01:35:24,960 –> 01:35:28,200
Are you telling me that the people who rub me the wrong way are just

1552
01:35:28,200 –> 01:35:31,760
in the middle of like a Dunning Kruger religious over

1553
01:35:31,840 –> 01:35:35,640
compensation kind of situation? Like, like they’re all just like CrossFit vegans

1554
01:35:35,640 –> 01:35:38,960
and way too excited about it. Yes. They’re all getting better at exercise.

1555
01:35:41,240 –> 01:35:44,440
And so healthy. Right, Interesting. Okay.

1556
01:35:44,760 –> 01:35:46,840
And like, it’s funny because

1557
01:35:48,920 –> 01:35:52,680
I. So in the things that I read, you know, there’s, there’s this kind

1558
01:35:52,680 –> 01:35:56,360
of like known change that happens, right? That like, lots of people

1559
01:35:56,600 –> 01:36:00,200
in their youth don’t really have much room for much of a spiritual lane, right?

1560
01:36:00,360 –> 01:36:03,680
A lot of people, when they’re still figuring out who they are, if there is

1561
01:36:03,680 –> 01:36:07,490
a spiritual lane, it comes from indoctrination of the family

1562
01:36:07,890 –> 01:36:11,010
into religion and stuff like this, you know, And I,

1563
01:36:12,130 –> 01:36:15,650
I don’t have a problem with someone who has strong faith, like, you know, I,

1564
01:36:16,610 –> 01:36:19,970
I love you, man. You’re one of my favorite people, because your faith is

1565
01:36:19,970 –> 01:36:23,810
yours and anyone can come ask you about it, but you’re not trying to

1566
01:36:23,810 –> 01:36:27,450
push it on other people, right? And I have a handful of other

1567
01:36:27,450 –> 01:36:31,290
people who are the people that I go ask these deeper questions with and

1568
01:36:31,290 –> 01:36:34,860
try to understand their perspective because I know that they can see that I’m, I

1569
01:36:34,860 –> 01:36:37,580
really am trying to understand. I’m not trying to pick it apart, but sometimes the

1570
01:36:37,580 –> 01:36:40,260
way that I ask questions makes it sound like I’m trying to pick it apart,

1571
01:36:40,500 –> 01:36:44,100
right? And that’s, that’s awareness and understanding that, you

1572
01:36:44,100 –> 01:36:46,940
know, the, the way we show up in a conversation is going to bring some

1573
01:36:46,940 –> 01:36:50,300
weight to it and stuff like this, you know. So, you know, part of the,

1574
01:36:50,300 –> 01:36:52,940
part of the earlier thing is like, I don’t, I don’t even go try to

1575
01:36:52,940 –> 01:36:56,540
talk to anybody about deeper topics unless they have shown

1576
01:36:56,540 –> 01:37:00,300
themselves to be thoughtful, intentional, well read, educated and stuff like this,

1577
01:37:00,300 –> 01:37:03,640
right? So, like, you and I can talk about things like religion and

1578
01:37:03,640 –> 01:37:07,360
censorship and government and race and all of these things, right? And like,

1579
01:37:07,360 –> 01:37:10,440
you’re one of the people on my short list. Whenever I see something, I’m like,

1580
01:37:10,440 –> 01:37:12,720
oh, I don’t know how I feel about that. I’m like, I’m gonna go ask

1581
01:37:12,720 –> 01:37:16,120
Kayson, right? Because he probably thinks differently than I do and has some

1582
01:37:16,120 –> 01:37:19,880
perspective. You know, it’s. Well, one of the. Who I can’t

1583
01:37:19,880 –> 01:37:22,720
talk to without like, well, you know,

1584
01:37:23,440 –> 01:37:27,170
come to church, come to church. Come to church. Like you,

1585
01:37:27,170 –> 01:37:30,930
in my, in my, in my opinion, if you’re carrying around this philosophy, right,

1586
01:37:31,090 –> 01:37:34,770
And I’m choosing the word philosophy for just, for very intentional

1587
01:37:34,770 –> 01:37:37,170
reasons for just a second, you should be able to explain it to other people.

1588
01:37:38,210 –> 01:37:41,330
And I demand the same people of their politics. Agreed.

1589
01:37:41,730 –> 01:37:45,010
So if you’re going to politics, religion,

1590
01:37:45,650 –> 01:37:49,130
these are the big two. The third one, of course, the third pillar, you know,

1591
01:37:49,130 –> 01:37:52,850
the third rail is, is, is sexual

1592
01:37:52,850 –> 01:37:56,580
behavior and morality around that. Those are the big

1593
01:37:56,580 –> 01:38:00,300
three rails, right? You can either be driven off

1594
01:38:00,300 –> 01:38:04,020
of or can shock you when you touch them. And

1595
01:38:04,340 –> 01:38:07,700
the thing is, and I told this to My oldest son, years and years ago.

1596
01:38:08,260 –> 01:38:11,700
No one knows everybody else’s story. Matter of fact,

1597
01:38:11,940 –> 01:38:15,700
most people don’t know their own story enough. You talked

1598
01:38:15,700 –> 01:38:19,140
about testimony. They don’t know their own story enough to be able to

1599
01:38:19,140 –> 01:38:22,750
articulate it to someone else. That’s number one. Number two,

1600
01:38:23,230 –> 01:38:26,150
we live in a society. And this is why I started off with the medication

1601
01:38:26,150 –> 01:38:29,750
piece and the anxiety piece and the depression piece and the

1602
01:38:29,750 –> 01:38:33,150
pharmaceutical piece. We live in a society and

1603
01:38:33,150 –> 01:38:36,829
culture, and I don’t know if we’re post capitalist, late capitalist,

1604
01:38:36,829 –> 01:38:40,590
whatever the hell, I don’t care. We

1605
01:38:40,590 –> 01:38:44,030
live in a society that has evolved to a point right now

1606
01:38:45,070 –> 01:38:48,900
where we have. This is one of the reasons why I do this podcast. We’ve

1607
01:38:48,900 –> 01:38:52,380
deconstructed everything down to the smallest possible

1608
01:38:52,540 –> 01:38:56,380
space. Matter of fact, we’re running out of things to deconstruct, and you can only

1609
01:38:56,380 –> 01:38:59,980
go so far with that on your social capital

1610
01:39:01,180 –> 01:39:04,980
before you wind up having a generation of people, which we do

1611
01:39:04,980 –> 01:39:08,420
have now in the millennials, a generation of people that is

1612
01:39:08,420 –> 01:39:12,060
struggling to create, to create and

1613
01:39:12,060 –> 01:39:15,460
do the things that human beings have always done historically throughout human

1614
01:39:15,460 –> 01:39:19,260
society, which is established traditions, be

1615
01:39:19,260 –> 01:39:22,980
in a community and have a home. And they are struggling

1616
01:39:22,980 –> 01:39:26,660
with building. At least this is what I’m seeing, and I’m reading your mileage may

1617
01:39:26,660 –> 01:39:30,340
vary, but they are struggling with how do we build this?

1618
01:39:30,340 –> 01:39:33,940
How do we put this back together? How, how, how, how, how? Now, fortunately,

1619
01:39:33,940 –> 01:39:37,380
there’s 85 million millennials, 20 million more than the baby

1620
01:39:37,380 –> 01:39:40,180
boomers who were a generation that was,

1621
01:39:40,740 –> 01:39:44,070
huh, very much in the thrall of deconstruction. They

1622
01:39:44,070 –> 01:39:47,390
deconstructed everything all the way down to their marriages and their families and traditions.

1623
01:39:47,630 –> 01:39:51,470
But you can’t. You can’t have a society in a

1624
01:39:51,470 –> 01:39:54,110
culture. And I think this is what Heinlein is getting to in Stranger in a

1625
01:39:54,110 –> 01:39:56,510
Strange Land. I think this is one of the deeper ideas in here that’s sort

1626
01:39:56,510 –> 01:40:00,190
of buried like gold in there or like a precious pearl. You can’t

1627
01:40:00,190 –> 01:40:03,950
deconstruct everything and build nothing. This drives me

1628
01:40:03,950 –> 01:40:07,230
absolutely crazy. Like, I’m tired of deconstructing.

1629
01:40:07,520 –> 01:40:11,360
I’m philosophically tired. I’m morally tired.

1630
01:40:12,800 –> 01:40:16,600
I’m psychologically tired. I don’t want to hear any more about problems and what

1631
01:40:16,600 –> 01:40:18,880
problems we’ve got, because I know what the problems are. You know what the problems

1632
01:40:18,880 –> 01:40:22,600
are, everybody. What. What are we going to construct that are actual solutions? And

1633
01:40:22,600 –> 01:40:26,440
what’s interesting is solutions are usually very simple. Matter of fact, they’re

1634
01:40:26,440 –> 01:40:30,280
so deceptively simple to Your point? As a salesperson, they’re so deceptively simple

1635
01:40:30,280 –> 01:40:32,560
that people have a problem being sold on them. Yeah.

1636
01:40:35,690 –> 01:40:39,290
And that’s what’s got. That’s the hook that’s got us all sort of twirling around.

1637
01:40:39,610 –> 01:40:42,970
You know, we don’t need pharmaceuticals. No.

1638
01:40:43,290 –> 01:40:46,730
Are there people who had genuine anxiety and depression who need to be

1639
01:40:46,890 –> 01:40:50,530
pharmaceutically medicated? For sure. Absolutely. There always

1640
01:40:50,530 –> 01:40:54,290
have been. And I don’t know that

1641
01:40:54,290 –> 01:40:58,090
you need to go to therapy. I was just reading this from an actor because

1642
01:40:58,090 –> 01:41:01,660
you signed a contract for Marvel Movies and it didn’t, like,

1643
01:41:01,820 –> 01:41:05,340
come to fruition. Like, you just need better

1644
01:41:05,340 –> 01:41:09,140
coping skills. You’re cut off from your traditions and your

1645
01:41:09,140 –> 01:41:11,540
family, from the people who could help you and put that into some sort of

1646
01:41:11,540 –> 01:41:15,300
frame of reference. So. And this

1647
01:41:15,300 –> 01:41:18,140
is not me making a judgment. This is me merely looking at what you’ve said

1648
01:41:18,380 –> 01:41:21,820
and looking at the society that we have and going, okay, two plus two

1649
01:41:22,060 –> 01:41:25,820
has to equal four at some point. What are we constructing? Because

1650
01:41:25,820 –> 01:41:28,300
a therapeutic thing clearly

1651
01:41:29,980 –> 01:41:33,540
has limited or not limited. Yes. Well, yeah. Has

1652
01:41:33,540 –> 01:41:37,380
limited value all the way to the end. There’s

1653
01:41:37,380 –> 01:41:41,140
always. There’s always a gap somewhere, right? There’s always a gap somewhere. And we’ve deconstructed

1654
01:41:41,140 –> 01:41:44,700
in that gap just fine. And it used to be. And when I use the

1655
01:41:44,700 –> 01:41:48,420
term religion in this context, I’m using it in a different way. It used to

1656
01:41:48,420 –> 01:41:51,660
be you had religion, which meant you had

1657
01:41:52,140 –> 01:41:55,680
the street, or you had the family,

1658
01:41:56,080 –> 01:41:59,840
or you had the neighborhood. We used to actually

1659
01:42:00,080 –> 01:42:03,560
have that. You had the community. You had even in

1660
01:42:03,560 –> 01:42:07,400
tenements in New York City. You had three generations of social capital going

1661
01:42:07,400 –> 01:42:10,400
back. This is why everybody could yell at the kids on the street when they’re

1662
01:42:10,400 –> 01:42:14,120
playing stickball out in the country. You had three to four generations of

1663
01:42:14,120 –> 01:42:17,760
social capital. This is why the father teaches the son.

1664
01:42:17,760 –> 01:42:21,410
There’s a great scene in John Adams where he’s teaching his son about manure.

1665
01:42:21,570 –> 01:42:24,610
And my son was like, looking at this, he’s like, oh, that’s disgusting. And he

1666
01:42:24,610 –> 01:42:27,730
knows a little bit about work, a little bit of farming. And he’s like, oh,

1667
01:42:27,730 –> 01:42:29,850
that’s terrible. Why would he smell the manure? And I’m like, well, because he’s trying

1668
01:42:29,850 –> 01:42:33,450
to show him something about tradition. He’s trying to show him something about a line

1669
01:42:33,450 –> 01:42:37,250
that goes back in his family all the way back to Charles the Second.

1670
01:42:37,730 –> 01:42:41,570
Like, who even talks like that now? And the weight of that. Don’t get

1671
01:42:41,570 –> 01:42:44,370
me wrong, the weight of that can be oppressive, for sure,

1672
01:42:45,340 –> 01:42:48,780
but the weight of that can also be, I think

1673
01:42:51,180 –> 01:42:53,100
it could be an anchor when times get hard,

1674
01:42:54,860 –> 01:42:58,700
when you are anxious and when you are depressed and when

1675
01:42:58,700 –> 01:43:02,420
you formalize and institutionalize that in a church structure, of course it’s going to

1676
01:43:02,420 –> 01:43:03,660
fail because

1677
01:43:06,780 –> 01:43:07,820
we’re capitalized

1678
01:43:10,540 –> 01:43:14,290
like we’re capitalists. So we’re going to want to blow that sucker out to its

1679
01:43:14,290 –> 01:43:17,610
furthest end. And that’s a real, that’s a, if you want to talk about the

1680
01:43:17,610 –> 01:43:20,970
real sin of America, it ain’t racism. That’s the real sin of America.

1681
01:43:21,530 –> 01:43:25,210
It’s wrapped up in the thing that is also

1682
01:43:25,210 –> 01:43:28,650
our real blessing. Two sides of the same coin.

1683
01:43:29,770 –> 01:43:32,610
And I’m saying this is a person who’s a capitalist. Like, I believe that people

1684
01:43:32,610 –> 01:43:35,450
should get paid what they’re worth, but I also believe that at a certain point

1685
01:43:35,450 –> 01:43:38,910
financialization has to end. It just has to stop.

1686
01:43:39,470 –> 01:43:42,510
Man, I have, I have very different perspectives here than you.

1687
01:43:43,150 –> 01:43:46,630
One. Yeah, I think, I think that everyone would

1688
01:43:46,630 –> 01:43:50,430
benefit through a round of therapy, right? And I say this as someone

1689
01:43:50,430 –> 01:43:53,590
who’s done therapy and I, and I, and I, I would say this line to

1690
01:43:53,590 –> 01:43:56,790
people before because I didn’t have anything against it, but I didn’t think I needed

1691
01:43:56,790 –> 01:44:00,630
it. Right? And then in the middle of the pandemic when my business is struggling

1692
01:44:00,630 –> 01:44:03,410
and I’m trying to figure it out and everything, and everything just feels like, like

1693
01:44:03,410 –> 01:44:07,210
falling apart and everything else like this. Now in, if

1694
01:44:07,210 –> 01:44:11,050
I, if I was a church going person, then sure, then, you

1695
01:44:11,050 –> 01:44:14,770
know, there’s room, there’s community, there’s, there’s, there’s ledges and stuff like

1696
01:44:14,770 –> 01:44:16,090
this. Right? But.

1697
01:44:19,290 –> 01:44:22,330
Qualified opinion, maybe not.

1698
01:44:22,650 –> 01:44:26,410
Okay. And I, you know, going

1699
01:44:26,410 –> 01:44:30,130
through the therapeutic experience was, was very interesting, right, Because I went through

1700
01:44:30,130 –> 01:44:33,780
the first time, didn’t match with someone that, that I was going to really

1701
01:44:33,780 –> 01:44:37,020
connect with and everything. And I was about to like write it off like I

1702
01:44:37,020 –> 01:44:39,820
was a 60 year old guy like in there and there’s kids on my yard.

1703
01:44:39,820 –> 01:44:42,980
Like I was about to be just like some, well, looks like I’m too good

1704
01:44:42,980 –> 01:44:46,780
for this. And then I was like, wait a minute, dummy. If anybody else

1705
01:44:46,780 –> 01:44:49,420
was, was coming to you. And they said that they had tried to talk with

1706
01:44:49,420 –> 01:44:53,140
one coach and then decided that like all coaches were garbage because the first

1707
01:44:53,140 –> 01:44:55,780
one was not good. Would you, would you let that written? No, I wouldn’t let

1708
01:44:55,780 –> 01:44:58,890
that ride. Okay, so maybe I should eat some of my own dog food and

1709
01:44:58,890 –> 01:45:02,130
go through the, through the onboarding process again. So I did that.

1710
01:45:02,530 –> 01:45:06,130
Matched up with a guy who was super Thoughtful, like,

1711
01:45:06,530 –> 01:45:09,810
and it was weird because he wanted to, he wanted to meet me where I

1712
01:45:09,810 –> 01:45:13,170
was, he wanted to get me helped the other person wanted to make it about

1713
01:45:13,170 –> 01:45:16,170
whatever they wanted to make it about. Right. And it was, is my mom, you

1714
01:45:16,170 –> 01:45:19,050
know, like, well, let’s talk about. I’m not here to talk about my mom. Right?

1715
01:45:19,050 –> 01:45:22,580
Like, like, and I’m sure we might get to there, but I

1716
01:45:22,580 –> 01:45:26,420
don’t. My, my, my current frustration and pain and anxiety is not

1717
01:45:26,420 –> 01:45:29,180
coming from my relationship with my mother. It’s coming from the fact that my business

1718
01:45:29,180 –> 01:45:32,820
is falling apart because we’re in this lockdown and

1719
01:45:32,820 –> 01:45:35,980
pandemic and I lost some relationships I can’t get anymore and all these things. And

1720
01:45:36,300 –> 01:45:38,980
you want to make it about my mom, you know, and so, like, it wasn’t

1721
01:45:38,980 –> 01:45:42,780
there. Now I’m talking a lot about the first person,

1722
01:45:42,780 –> 01:45:46,540
specifically because I think when you put, you know, people

1723
01:45:46,540 –> 01:45:49,960
from your church, the deacons, the pastor and everything else like this on this pedestal

1724
01:45:49,960 –> 01:45:53,280
of being able to give you a wider lane of advice than they actually have

1725
01:45:53,600 –> 01:45:57,400
credibility in, that’s where we end up in, in

1726
01:45:57,400 –> 01:45:59,920
troubled waters. Right? Because

1727
01:46:01,040 –> 01:46:04,000
I can, I can absolutely

1728
01:46:04,880 –> 01:46:08,200
see aversion to where you can, you can go to your pastor and you can

1729
01:46:08,200 –> 01:46:11,920
talk about a business situation and they keep it to the faith

1730
01:46:12,000 –> 01:46:14,240
and, and all of these things. Right. And I can also,

1731
01:46:16,170 –> 01:46:19,930
it, it would be impossible to not presume that this is happening in churches

1732
01:46:19,930 –> 01:46:23,730
all over Sundays and stuff like this to where people are struggling with business, struggling

1733
01:46:23,730 –> 01:46:26,890
in sales, struggling in the professional lane, and they turn to the church and they

1734
01:46:26,890 –> 01:46:30,650
get fed a bunch of advice that shouldn’t be given

1735
01:46:30,810 –> 01:46:33,570
because they don’t work in that lane, they don’t work in that space. And all

1736
01:46:33,570 –> 01:46:37,370
the advice is unqualified. Right. So I’m

1737
01:46:37,370 –> 01:46:40,010
not going to go like, I love my mom to death. I’m not going to

1738
01:46:40,010 –> 01:46:43,150
go ask her for advice on my business. If you’ve not ran a business, I

1739
01:46:43,150 –> 01:46:46,750
don’t trust your advice on it. Sorry, no one’s coming to save me if

1740
01:46:46,750 –> 01:46:50,550
you’re wrong. So I only take advice from people that work

1741
01:46:50,550 –> 01:46:54,310
in this lane that I’m, that I’m working in now. There’s not anything wrong with

1742
01:46:54,310 –> 01:46:58,070
that. But if you’re, if you’re under

1743
01:46:58,070 –> 01:47:01,790
the impression that this wide lane gives them room to give you business

1744
01:47:01,790 –> 01:47:05,470
advice on, on your business and the actual details of

1745
01:47:05,470 –> 01:47:08,750
that business when they’ve never ran a business and they, they run a church that

1746
01:47:08,750 –> 01:47:12,550
isn’t even taxed and the business formation is completely different. And like, yeah, it’s

1747
01:47:12,550 –> 01:47:16,390
a business insurer and like you can make it overlap, but it doesn’t

1748
01:47:16,390 –> 01:47:19,750
mean that it’s qualified advice. Right. So I think

1749
01:47:21,270 –> 01:47:24,750
everybody needs people to talk to who are able to

1750
01:47:24,750 –> 01:47:28,190
navigate a conversation and be aware of their own

1751
01:47:28,190 –> 01:47:31,950
biases and not push their biases in

1752
01:47:31,950 –> 01:47:35,190
the form of faith and think that it’s okay and

1753
01:47:35,350 –> 01:47:39,110
irreparably damage people’s lives, careers, businesses and stuff

1754
01:47:39,110 –> 01:47:42,230
like this because, you know, well, well, God said that it’s like out of our

1755
01:47:42,230 –> 01:47:45,590
hands. So, like, you don’t have to worry about this. That’s terrible advice

1756
01:47:46,070 –> 01:47:49,470
if you don’t understand, like, what part of the business you can take action on

1757
01:47:49,470 –> 01:47:53,310
and get into and make a positive impact on. So this gets us into

1758
01:47:53,310 –> 01:47:56,470
part three, right. Of the book where

1759
01:47:58,150 –> 01:48:01,830
he. This is, this is what, this is the one we

1760
01:48:01,830 –> 01:48:04,630
sort of, I mean, we haven’t really been dancing around it. We’ve kind of sort

1761
01:48:04,630 –> 01:48:08,350
of led a lot of threads into this, into this space because I

1762
01:48:08,350 –> 01:48:11,670
do think my

1763
01:48:11,910 –> 01:48:15,669
perspective and your mileage will vary. I think Heinlein was

1764
01:48:15,669 –> 01:48:19,430
actually using this book to make the kinds of, to do the kinds of

1765
01:48:19,430 –> 01:48:23,270
social commentary that you’re talking about. Right. And I think his, his

1766
01:48:23,270 –> 01:48:26,990
point of view is probably closer to yours than

1767
01:48:26,990 –> 01:48:30,650
to mine, which is fine. And when he

1768
01:48:30,650 –> 01:48:34,290
starts talking about marks. Yeah, I would say that it’s much more closer

1769
01:48:34,290 –> 01:48:37,770
to, to the semi professional salesperson’s lane

1770
01:48:37,930 –> 01:48:41,690
than your lane as a leadership development person. Just I, I don’t know,

1771
01:48:41,690 –> 01:48:44,730
like, I could be wrong, but I think it’s probably more gambler esque.

1772
01:48:45,769 –> 01:48:49,210
Yeah. Kind of a little bit there. And so, so we get into,

1773
01:48:49,370 –> 01:48:51,130
we get into part three and

1774
01:48:53,370 –> 01:48:56,350
part three starts in a

1775
01:48:56,910 –> 01:48:59,150
place that you would not expect.

1776
01:49:00,510 –> 01:49:03,390
And it’s a weird transition from part two to part three.

1777
01:49:05,310 –> 01:49:09,070
And you know, you opened up with the.

1778
01:49:10,510 –> 01:49:13,470
Well, a description of something going on in the spiral galaxy

1779
01:49:15,870 –> 01:49:19,070
I thought was very interesting. And the

1780
01:49:22,600 –> 01:49:25,720
of male the man from Mars

1781
01:49:26,520 –> 01:49:30,200
into a, into a

1782
01:49:30,200 –> 01:49:33,600
carnival. As a carnival sideshow. This is how we are

1783
01:49:33,600 –> 01:49:37,400
reintroduced to, to him. As a matter of fact. I want to pick this up

1784
01:49:37,400 –> 01:49:39,800
here. Let me, let me sort of bring this up.

1785
01:49:42,120 –> 01:49:45,720
Oh, where is it? Let me see. Yep.

1786
01:49:45,720 –> 01:49:49,460
Assume the fetal position. Yep. Building domes. Yeah, here we go.

1787
01:49:49,860 –> 01:49:53,420
20, 20, 25, 26. It was the

1788
01:49:53,420 –> 01:49:57,140
unusual carnival rides. Cotton candy. The same flat joints separating barks from dollars.

1789
01:49:58,420 –> 01:50:02,060
The sex lecture deferred to local opinion. Considering Darwin’s opinions.

1790
01:50:02,060 –> 01:50:05,860
The opposing show wore what local lawmen decreed. Fearless Fenton

1791
01:50:05,860 –> 01:50:09,540
did his death defying dive before the Last volley the 10

1792
01:50:09,540 –> 01:50:12,860
in one did not have a mentalist, it had a magician. It had no bearded

1793
01:50:12,860 –> 01:50:16,500
lady, it had a half man, half woman, no sword swallower, but a fire eater,

1794
01:50:16,970 –> 01:50:20,570
no tattooed man, but a tattooed lady who was also a snake charmer. And for

1795
01:50:20,570 –> 01:50:24,170
the blow off, she appeared absolutely nude, clothed only in the bare living flesh

1796
01:50:24,250 –> 01:50:27,810
and exotic designs. Any mark who found one square inch

1797
01:50:27,810 –> 01:50:31,290
untattooed below her neckline would win $20.

1798
01:50:32,569 –> 01:50:36,010
The prize went unclaimed. Ms.

1799
01:50:36,170 –> 01:50:39,850
Paiwanoski posed in bare living flesh, her own

1800
01:50:39,850 –> 01:50:42,580
and a 14 bottom that the

1801
01:50:42,580 –> 01:50:46,100
ministerial alliance could not

1802
01:50:46,180 –> 01:50:49,940
complain. As further promotion for the boa, she stood on a stool

1803
01:50:49,940 –> 01:50:53,380
in a canvas tank containing a dozen cobras. Besides,

1804
01:50:53,700 –> 01:50:57,420
the lighting was poor. So I

1805
01:50:57,420 –> 01:51:01,260
open there and then you

1806
01:51:01,260 –> 01:51:02,420
just go off to the races.

1807
01:51:09,710 –> 01:51:13,470
And. The thing that jumps out to

1808
01:51:13,470 –> 01:51:16,750
me about Section three is

1809
01:51:24,270 –> 01:51:27,550
the way that Heinlein begins to construct an eschatology

1810
01:51:29,310 –> 01:51:32,350
that a man from Mars can get behind.

1811
01:51:33,630 –> 01:51:37,430
So there’s the entire concept of Warner Brothers, which has been explored throughout

1812
01:51:37,430 –> 01:51:40,430
the book. Then there’s also

1813
01:51:41,310 –> 01:51:44,190
what Mr. Smith may or may not have done

1814
01:51:45,310 –> 01:51:49,030
to the head of the. The church of the new resident

1815
01:51:49,030 –> 01:51:51,310
rebel, the phosphorite Church of the New Revelation.

1816
01:51:53,709 –> 01:51:56,270
And, and that’s an interesting little sidebar

1817
01:51:58,510 –> 01:52:02,070
that he sort of jogged more troubling for his

1818
01:52:02,070 –> 01:52:04,670
conformist audience back in the 1950s and 1960s.

1819
01:52:09,550 –> 01:52:10,430
And then you have.

1820
01:52:13,870 –> 01:52:16,710
You have a question that he poses, which I think is the question we’ve been

1821
01:52:16,710 –> 01:52:20,470
struggling with this entire episode, you know, is. Is a belief in

1822
01:52:20,470 –> 01:52:24,110
a transcendent anything, whether it’s a transcendent politician or a

1823
01:52:24,110 –> 01:52:27,630
transcendent man or a transcendent God? Is that. Is that a belief for,

1824
01:52:27,790 –> 01:52:31,330
Is that a vain pursuit for the merely naive, or is that a

1825
01:52:31,330 –> 01:52:34,450
fanatical pursuit for the truly deceived? Right,

1826
01:52:35,090 –> 01:52:38,130
well, well worded, sir. Yeah. And

1827
01:52:39,090 –> 01:52:42,730
the people that he begins to gather around him, from the, The Muslim we

1828
01:52:42,730 –> 01:52:45,770
talked about earlier, all the way to the person who was the guy who run.

1829
01:52:45,770 –> 01:52:49,410
Who ran Jubal Harshaw’s security, who was initially skeptical and

1830
01:52:49,410 –> 01:52:53,210
stood in for, I think, in Highland’s brain, the conformist

1831
01:52:53,210 –> 01:52:56,530
everyman that Highland really was, like, really railing against.

1832
01:52:56,950 –> 01:53:00,590
50S. Yeah, 50s, dad. Yeah. Father knows

1833
01:53:00,590 –> 01:53:04,230
best, right? All the way to Jubal Harshaw and his cynicism

1834
01:53:04,790 –> 01:53:07,590
and skepticism, to

1835
01:53:08,230 –> 01:53:09,030
Jill and

1836
01:53:12,070 –> 01:53:15,910
her belief and to your point earlier, her love of

1837
01:53:15,910 –> 01:53:19,630
him. These people he begins to accrete around himself. The man

1838
01:53:19,630 –> 01:53:23,480
from Mars does in Part three. And it was at this part

1839
01:53:23,480 –> 01:53:26,880
that I did think, oh, yeah, he’s going to Start a church? Because why not?

1840
01:53:27,840 –> 01:53:31,160
That seemed to be the outgrowth. Well, but, But I think if this book were

1841
01:53:31,160 –> 01:53:34,960
written now, he would start a political party. Oh, I think so too.

1842
01:53:34,960 –> 01:53:38,640
I think. Yeah. Oh, my God. That’s where I’m going. Yeah,

1843
01:53:38,880 –> 01:53:42,560
for sure. Right. Like. Oh, hold

1844
01:53:42,560 –> 01:53:43,120
on a second.

1845
01:53:46,400 –> 01:53:49,760
He would accrete Elon Musk around him and then he would start a political party.

1846
01:53:50,240 –> 01:53:53,680
Yeah, you just would. Holy smokes. Yeah, right. Like.

1847
01:53:53,840 –> 01:53:57,640
Well, okay. And so I have a slightly different perspective here as

1848
01:53:57,640 –> 01:54:01,120
well. Right. Once again, being. Being a white guy in the south who, who

1849
01:54:01,280 –> 01:54:04,840
had a church phase and then decided it wasn’t for me, and then has. Has

1850
01:54:04,840 –> 01:54:08,480
had a thousand people since then try to convert me and take me to church.

1851
01:54:08,720 –> 01:54:12,440
Is that like when. When they’re. When

1852
01:54:12,440 –> 01:54:15,760
they’re talking to that one senator who’s part of the church and everything? Like, like,

1853
01:54:15,760 –> 01:54:19,490
that’s, that’s the tipping point point. Right. And so, you know,

1854
01:54:19,490 –> 01:54:23,250
what I love about it is at the beginning of this segment,

1855
01:54:23,250 –> 01:54:27,050
which you’re not really brought up yet, is

1856
01:54:27,050 –> 01:54:30,850
all the filtering that Jubal puts into place. So that way this man is not

1857
01:54:30,850 –> 01:54:34,050
overwhelmed with all the attention and

1858
01:54:34,690 –> 01:54:38,530
grifting and manipulation and everything else like this that he goes into.

1859
01:54:38,770 –> 01:54:42,370
Because the book, I think, does a really cool job of trying to showcase how

1860
01:54:42,370 –> 01:54:45,840
they were filtering things. But then I also. The thing about

1861
01:54:45,840 –> 01:54:49,520
Jubal that I, that I like a lot, and I don’t know if you see

1862
01:54:49,520 –> 01:54:52,920
this or not, but I see him as like this very libertarian

1863
01:54:53,320 –> 01:54:57,160
person. Oh, yeah, right. Because, like, he goes after Jill for like, for like

1864
01:54:57,160 –> 01:55:00,840
inadvertently bringing in her, you know, Christian values and beliefs and everything

1865
01:55:00,840 –> 01:55:04,600
else like this. And, you know, he, he sees that people want to keep. Ben

1866
01:55:04,600 –> 01:55:07,120
wants to keep him away from the church and everything. And he was like, he’s

1867
01:55:07,120 –> 01:55:09,290
got to be his own guy. He’s got to. To go figure these things out

1868
01:55:09,290 –> 01:55:13,010
and stuff like that. And so what I, what I thought was

1869
01:55:13,010 –> 01:55:15,890
especially real was the,

1870
01:55:17,170 –> 01:55:20,930
the. The ambassador from the church. Right. The senator who’s. Who’s holding power

1871
01:55:20,930 –> 01:55:24,530
and everything and how he’s trying to figure out a way so that way

1872
01:55:24,610 –> 01:55:27,770
he can come get this guy and take him to church and everything else. Like,

1873
01:55:27,770 –> 01:55:31,530
and he’s. And he’s realizing, like a salesperson realizes that the front door is not

1874
01:55:31,530 –> 01:55:34,840
the best way to get through. Through this thing through Jubal. So let’s try to

1875
01:55:34,840 –> 01:55:37,480
find a way in so that way I can. I can deal with my champion.

1876
01:55:37,480 –> 01:55:41,080
Right. And as a salesperson, champions are very, very well known label. Let’s go

1877
01:55:41,080 –> 01:55:44,640
directly to the source. So they start sending mail directly to him. And because Jubal

1878
01:55:44,640 –> 01:55:47,120
is being like, this person of, like, he’s gonna have to grow up and everything

1879
01:55:47,120 –> 01:55:50,960
else like this, he doesn’t keep him from it. Right. Whereas I think if we

1880
01:55:50,960 –> 01:55:53,680
look at that time and we look at the time whenever we were raised and

1881
01:55:53,680 –> 01:55:57,360
everything, like, there’s a reason why my brother was like, hey, don’t tell mom you’re

1882
01:55:57,360 –> 01:56:01,020
reading these books. I wasn’t allowed to watch the Simpsons. Like, like, my

1883
01:56:01,020 –> 01:56:03,540
family thought that that was, like, high.

1884
01:56:04,740 –> 01:56:08,340
Can’t. I can’t believe it. This is going to ruin society. Right. You know,

1885
01:56:08,420 –> 01:56:11,300
and there was one time that my brother was playing Dungeons and Dragons and I

1886
01:56:11,300 –> 01:56:13,940
was playing with him, and my mom came in, what are you guys doing Dungeons

1887
01:56:14,100 –> 01:56:17,500
now? I’m not in this house. You’re not. And so the. The

1888
01:56:17,500 –> 01:56:21,060
removal of things from. From people in.

1889
01:56:21,060 –> 01:56:24,820
In authority versus. We trust you enough to make

1890
01:56:24,820 –> 01:56:28,630
your own decisions. Right. And to me, I think.

1891
01:56:30,870 –> 01:56:34,310
How do I say this intentionally? I think that if more people

1892
01:56:34,790 –> 01:56:38,310
were, okay, here are your

1893
01:56:38,310 –> 01:56:41,430
options. I’m here to support you and pick whichever ones you want,

1894
01:56:42,230 –> 01:56:46,070
then we would have less of that band of I

1895
01:56:46,070 –> 01:56:49,590
must sell you, because then I’ll feel better for the decisions that I have made.

1896
01:56:49,910 –> 01:56:53,290
That, I think is very prevalent in the lane of, you know, that.

1897
01:56:53,450 –> 01:56:57,090
That salesperson Christianity thing that is very, very common here in the

1898
01:56:57,090 –> 01:57:00,250
South. I think.

1899
01:57:02,330 –> 01:57:05,370
Yeah. I see. So. So

1900
01:57:06,170 –> 01:57:09,850
the name you said right at the beginning there,

1901
01:57:10,090 –> 01:57:13,810
way back in the beginning of our episode, and I kind of left it

1902
01:57:13,810 –> 01:57:17,130
for a minute because I want to come back to it. You said, that’s very

1903
01:57:17,130 –> 01:57:20,130
important. And I’m going to say a bunch of other names that I associate with

1904
01:57:20,130 –> 01:57:23,840
it. Right. So you said Kenneth Copeland. You were

1905
01:57:23,920 –> 01:57:27,760
not the first person that I run into who

1906
01:57:27,760 –> 01:57:31,440
was. Who’s. Who looked at the influence

1907
01:57:31,440 –> 01:57:35,200
of. I’m gonna get in a whole lot of trouble here. But this is

1908
01:57:35,200 –> 01:57:37,840
gonna tell you where. Where I land on this. So here I go.

1909
01:57:38,960 –> 01:57:42,800
Who. You. You’re not the first person who

1910
01:57:42,800 –> 01:57:46,280
has told me that they watched

1911
01:57:46,280 –> 01:57:49,720
Relatives influenced by who they loved,

1912
01:57:50,120 –> 01:57:53,760
influenced by that religious flim flam man, that religious

1913
01:57:53,760 –> 01:57:57,400
matchstick man. And that

1914
01:57:57,400 –> 01:58:00,840
turned them away from a real relationship with

1915
01:58:00,840 –> 01:58:04,360
Jesus Christ. Yeah. And. And

1916
01:58:06,520 –> 01:58:10,280
Kenneth Copeland. In my brain, this will tell you where my eschatology is and my.

1917
01:58:10,280 –> 01:58:14,080
My pedic. My. My philosophy is when it comes to. To. To Christianity and to

1918
01:58:14,080 –> 01:58:16,870
religion, I lump him in with Joel Osteen

1919
01:58:18,070 –> 01:58:21,750
and Tony Robbins. Yep. And to a

1920
01:58:21,750 –> 01:58:25,430
certain degree, Hal Lindsay, who wrote the book the Late Great Planet Earth, which,

1921
01:58:25,510 –> 01:58:28,350
which kicked off a whole. You may not be familiar with that book, but it

1922
01:58:28,350 –> 01:58:31,630
kicked off a whole lot of ridiculousness in Christian eschatology and

1923
01:58:31,630 –> 01:58:35,270
dispensationalism. Pre millennialism, amillennialism, post millennialism.

1924
01:58:35,590 –> 01:58:38,710
Massive damage that that guy’s writing did

1925
01:58:39,430 –> 01:58:42,790
to American Christianity in the late 20th century.

1926
01:58:43,250 –> 01:58:46,570
And I even am beginning to, and I’ll publicly admit to this now and then

1927
01:58:46,570 –> 01:58:50,410
you can all scald me later. I have

1928
01:58:50,410 –> 01:58:54,130
a problem with Billy Graham. Oh, same. Yeah, he’s the

1929
01:58:54,130 –> 01:58:57,730
same. He’s the same. He’s a newer version of the same thing in my opinion.

1930
01:58:58,450 –> 01:59:02,250
And, and so, so the, the kinds

1931
01:59:02,250 –> 01:59:05,090
of people that came out of Billy Graham’s efforts

1932
01:59:07,810 –> 01:59:11,480
and 1960s to convert stadiums of people, you get a,

1933
01:59:11,480 –> 01:59:15,040
there’s a direct line there to Kenneth Copeland. Now

1934
01:59:15,120 –> 01:59:18,520
with all of that said, now I’ve mentioned who I have a problem with and

1935
01:59:18,520 –> 01:59:22,080
I’ve named names. I think in 2025

1936
01:59:24,160 –> 01:59:27,680
the names change and the

1937
01:59:27,680 –> 01:59:31,520
ideology shifted has, the ideological poll has shifted away from

1938
01:59:31,520 –> 01:59:35,320
religion to. Politics, I do agree with. But the flim flam men and

1939
01:59:35,320 –> 01:59:38,920
the matchstick men and the con man looking for the marks are the

1940
01:59:38,920 –> 01:59:42,560
same. Except the problem is, the

1941
01:59:42,560 –> 01:59:46,360
problem is the people who have substituted politics for religion think they’re too sophisticated

1942
01:59:46,360 –> 01:59:50,000
to get taken. That’s the problem. And that, that

1943
01:59:50,000 –> 01:59:52,520
goes back that like, dude,

1944
01:59:54,760 –> 01:59:57,480
I have so much to say on this topic and I’m so glad that you

1945
01:59:57,480 –> 02:00:00,880
said Tony Robbins in that thing because he’s, he’s the same. He’s,

1946
02:00:00,880 –> 02:00:04,550
he’s, he’s the exact same, right? And I even

1947
02:00:04,550 –> 02:00:08,150
think guys like Hormozi are very similar. Right? You’re,

1948
02:00:08,390 –> 02:00:12,230
you’re appealing to a group. You’re, you’re pushing nothing but try hard. And I did

1949
02:00:12,230 –> 02:00:15,070
it so you can do it and everything else like this. And then whenever, whenever

1950
02:00:15,070 –> 02:00:18,830
anyone has any struggles or problems, you didn’t

1951
02:00:18,830 –> 02:00:21,390
want it bad enough, you didn’t have enough faith, you didn’t try hard enough, you

1952
02:00:21,390 –> 02:00:24,430
didn’t, you didn’t push hard enough. Right? And it’s the same thing that like Grant

1953
02:00:24,430 –> 02:00:27,910
Cardone talks about and, and all the bad sales coaching and sales

1954
02:00:27,910 –> 02:00:31,560
leadership because it’s the easiest thing, it’s the easiest

1955
02:00:31,560 –> 02:00:35,200
angle in the book, right? You can let your family starve, right?

1956
02:00:35,360 –> 02:00:38,880
So let’s just pile on a bunch of guilt that you’re not enough of a

1957
02:00:38,880 –> 02:00:42,600
man to go do the end. And then people or you know, if, if

1958
02:00:42,600 –> 02:00:46,440
that, if, if that line works on you, you toe

1959
02:00:46,440 –> 02:00:49,360
the line. Right. You work the extra shift on the plant, you go join the

1960
02:00:49,360 –> 02:00:52,520
military, you sign up to go to the like. Like all of this. But it’s

1961
02:00:52,520 –> 02:00:56,370
the same manipulative leverage. Right. If you tried a little

1962
02:00:56,370 –> 02:01:00,210
bit harder, everything would be fine. And that’s fundamentally

1963
02:01:00,210 –> 02:01:03,130
not how it works. And this is where,

1964
02:01:04,330 –> 02:01:07,610
like, I think having

1965
02:01:07,610 –> 02:01:10,650
deeper understanding and better language and better labels

1966
02:01:11,370 –> 02:01:12,890
matter, because

1967
02:01:14,970 –> 02:01:18,490
I think that most of the people that are pushing things on faith have to

1968
02:01:18,490 –> 02:01:21,370
do so because they don’t have a deep enough education to have the real conversation

1969
02:01:21,370 –> 02:01:24,130
with the right labels and the right things. Right. So just like I have an

1970
02:01:24,130 –> 02:01:26,450
aversion to luck, but I’m okay with fortunate.

1971
02:01:27,810 –> 02:01:31,410
Right. Faith gets pushed by people who

1972
02:01:31,410 –> 02:01:35,130
don’t understand, like, how to give people, I think, room

1973
02:01:35,130 –> 02:01:38,850
and time to change. Well, faith divorced from any

1974
02:01:38,850 –> 02:01:41,250
sense of the transcendent. Right. This is where I have a problem with all the

1975
02:01:41,250 –> 02:01:44,490
prosperity gospel people that I just named all of them. I have a problem with

1976
02:01:44,490 –> 02:01:47,930
all of them because what you’re

1977
02:01:47,930 –> 02:01:51,720
pushing. And again, I’ve seen the real damage that does to people.

1978
02:01:51,800 –> 02:01:55,560
Oh, yeah. The thing that you’re pushing is divorced

1979
02:01:55,560 –> 02:01:59,120
from a sense of transcendence. So it’s interesting. This is the other thing you said

1980
02:01:59,120 –> 02:02:02,680
earlier that I want to revisit now. You know, you’re a poker player,

1981
02:02:03,160 –> 02:02:06,960
and so it’s. It’s not surprising to me that you don’t believe

1982
02:02:06,960 –> 02:02:09,880
in luck or that you don’t trust in luck or the luck is not a

1983
02:02:09,880 –> 02:02:13,600
word in your vocabulary. That doesn’t surprise me. Hold on. Because we need

1984
02:02:13,600 –> 02:02:16,970
to. We need to layer in some intentional boundaries here for just a second. Okay?

1985
02:02:16,970 –> 02:02:19,570
Okay, go ahead. Because I was gonna ask you about a different word, but go

1986
02:02:19,570 –> 02:02:23,170
ahead. Yeah. Have you. Have you heard of the book Games

1987
02:02:23,170 –> 02:02:26,410
People Play? Yes. Okay.

1988
02:02:28,090 –> 02:02:31,250
That book was a big book for me, right? In the idea of transactional analysis

1989
02:02:31,250 –> 02:02:34,810
and how people show up, we can kind of map back to, you know, very

1990
02:02:34,810 –> 02:02:38,090
consistent thinking and avatars and the roles that people play and everything.

1991
02:02:38,410 –> 02:02:42,130
And as a poker player, as a

1992
02:02:42,130 –> 02:02:45,750
strategist in general. Right. Because I approach everything from the

1993
02:02:45,750 –> 02:02:48,670
lens of strategy because I don’t want to be the guy who can’t

1994
02:02:49,790 –> 02:02:53,150
figure out a better way to crack the nut. Okay. So

1995
02:02:53,550 –> 02:02:57,310
I have been. I’ve been a gaming person my entire life, right? Playing

1996
02:02:57,310 –> 02:03:00,750
video games and then reading, like, Nintendo Power and learning about cheat codes and everything

1997
02:03:00,750 –> 02:03:04,310
else like this, but then also spending enough time with gaming that I kind of

1998
02:03:04,310 –> 02:03:07,350
have a gist of how gaming or how most games work. Right. And I can

1999
02:03:07,350 –> 02:03:11,070
Think about inherent strategy. That is easy for me because I play

2000
02:03:11,070 –> 02:03:14,110
a lot of these games. Right now, this is a very

2001
02:03:14,590 –> 02:03:18,270
unpopular conversation around my household because my wife

2002
02:03:19,150 –> 02:03:21,830
thinks that I’m just the luckiest person on the planet because every time we play

2003
02:03:21,830 –> 02:03:25,510
games together, I win more than I lose. Right? And then when she gets

2004
02:03:25,510 –> 02:03:28,110
mad and I’m like, this isn’t luck.

2005
02:03:29,070 –> 02:03:31,390
Right. Like, I have spent 20 years

2006
02:03:33,070 –> 02:03:36,190
thinking about ways and different things that I can do to

2007
02:03:37,070 –> 02:03:40,760
control my luck. Right. And I’ve also done the work to see

2008
02:03:40,760 –> 02:03:44,400
exactly how much everything I wanted to blame on

2009
02:03:44,400 –> 02:03:48,160
bad luck was actually not bad luck. I created it. I did it

2010
02:03:48,160 –> 02:03:51,760
myself. I built it. I built the reality of that stuff. Right. I

2011
02:03:51,760 –> 02:03:55,240
can’t do it. And then you can’t. Congratulations. You were. You were screwed from the

2012
02:03:55,240 –> 02:03:58,200
start because you didn’t think you could do it. Right? Right.

2013
02:03:58,760 –> 02:04:02,120
So when I, when. When I talk about this with my.

2014
02:04:02,360 –> 02:04:06,170
With my wife, we were getting really ramped up around this

2015
02:04:06,170 –> 02:04:09,970
idea of, like, luck and everything, you know, Because I think that anybody who

2016
02:04:09,970 –> 02:04:13,730
has a phone in an Internet connection can have the

2017
02:04:13,730 –> 02:04:17,130
same path of success that I have. You just have to make certain decisions. The

2018
02:04:17,130 –> 02:04:19,889
first one is that it’s worth it. Right. A lot of people don’t want to

2019
02:04:19,889 –> 02:04:23,090
make that decision, and that’s okay. Right. But

2020
02:04:23,810 –> 02:04:27,650
I’m not the luckiest person on the planet. If anything, most of

2021
02:04:27,650 –> 02:04:31,500
my history and experience shows just how unlucky I am and how much I have

2022
02:04:31,500 –> 02:04:34,780
to be disciplined enough to put in the effort to get to the places that

2023
02:04:34,780 –> 02:04:38,540
I’m going. Right? So I can. I can go be

2024
02:04:38,540 –> 02:04:42,300
the poker player who goes to the casino, sits down and doesn’t

2025
02:04:42,300 –> 02:04:46,020
pay attention to anything else at all, and blame the whole thing on luck. Or

2026
02:04:46,020 –> 02:04:49,700
I can be the poker player who goes to the casino and realizes

2027
02:04:49,700 –> 02:04:52,820
that better players are going to play at higher levels and tourists are going to

2028
02:04:52,820 –> 02:04:56,620
play at lower levels and learn signals of strategy to figure out which

2029
02:04:56,620 –> 02:04:58,800
games are going to be. Be easier to win in and which ones are going

2030
02:04:58,800 –> 02:05:02,240
to be harder to win in. And I can also study math and probabilities and

2031
02:05:02,240 –> 02:05:05,920
science and odds and everything else like this. So that way, while we’re

2032
02:05:05,920 –> 02:05:09,640
both playing a game that’s based upon luck, I am fundamentally functioning

2033
02:05:09,640 –> 02:05:12,880
at, like, three higher levels than the person who’s just like, well, I hope I

2034
02:05:12,880 –> 02:05:16,400
get aces. Cool. I don’t need aces to beat you. It’s going to be just

2035
02:05:16,400 –> 02:05:19,240
fine. And even if you do get aces and take a big pot of me,

2036
02:05:19,240 –> 02:05:22,920
if we sit here for Longer I’ll get it back. Because I have the

2037
02:05:22,920 –> 02:05:26,640
strategies, I have the knowledge, I have the experience to navigate this chaos in a

2038
02:05:26,640 –> 02:05:28,800
way that is going to make me a better.

2039
02:05:30,400 –> 02:05:34,200
A better mechanism in the moment. Okay. This is the same thing as martial arts

2040
02:05:34,200 –> 02:05:38,040
thinking. Are you frozen? Sorry.

2041
02:05:38,040 –> 02:05:41,200
Kind of gap for a second. But like martial arts. No, I’m not. Martial arts

2042
02:05:41,200 –> 02:05:45,000
is the same thing. Right. If someone says, hey, Jesan, when you get

2043
02:05:45,000 –> 02:05:47,720
in a fight, it’s just lucky that you end up winning. Do you believe that

2044
02:05:47,720 –> 02:05:50,880
to be true? No,

2045
02:05:52,080 –> 02:05:55,210
no, I believe in. I believe. I believe in preparation.

2046
02:05:55,770 –> 02:05:59,210
Exactly. That’s what I believe in as well. Right. And so when,

2047
02:05:59,370 –> 02:06:02,730
when, when as a poker player, I know that I can go study things that

2048
02:06:02,730 –> 02:06:05,250
lead to me winning more. And as a fighter, I know that I can go

2049
02:06:05,250 –> 02:06:08,970
study things and study the right things. Right. And actually spar. Not just do

2050
02:06:08,970 –> 02:06:12,010
forms, but actually spar and pressure test. And that leads me to being a better

2051
02:06:12,010 –> 02:06:15,650
mechanism in the moment. And as a sales coaching consultant, I can,

2052
02:06:15,650 –> 02:06:19,450
I can show people very quickly the difference between a conversation

2053
02:06:19,450 –> 02:06:22,650
that’s going to lead to more probabilities of no versus a conversation that will lead

2054
02:06:22,650 –> 02:06:26,500
to more probabilities of yes. But these are probabilities in and of

2055
02:06:26,500 –> 02:06:30,260
themselves. But a strategic person is always thinking about the probabilities and the levers that

2056
02:06:30,260 –> 02:06:33,980
they can use. So I’m

2057
02:06:33,980 –> 02:06:37,620
fortunate to have gotten to this place that I have. Right. I have met some

2058
02:06:37,620 –> 02:06:41,020
very cool people. I’ve had people pour into me. I’ve had. I’ve had opportunities to

2059
02:06:41,020 –> 02:06:44,620
do so. But at. At a certain page,

2060
02:06:44,780 –> 02:06:48,580
at a certain page, we have to agree that it’s no

2061
02:06:48,580 –> 02:06:51,880
longer luck. So

2062
02:06:52,040 –> 02:06:55,880
when. When I. The qu. The word. Because the word luck comes

2063
02:06:55,880 –> 02:06:59,120
loaded and I’m glad you sort of framed that out. The word I was going

2064
02:06:59,120 –> 02:07:02,600
to substitute for that because I do believe in this word is the word providence.

2065
02:07:02,600 –> 02:07:06,320
It’s an old school word. Okay, so what is your, what’s your definition of

2066
02:07:06,320 –> 02:07:08,600
that word? And, and providence is

2067
02:07:11,160 –> 02:07:14,800
the. All of the stuff. And you can

2068
02:07:14,800 –> 02:07:18,310
frame it out as percentages if you would like, but it’s all of the stuff

2069
02:07:18,550 –> 02:07:22,350
that you can’t control. So we can control everything that we can

2070
02:07:22,350 –> 02:07:25,990
control out to whatever instance we need to do that. Preparation,

2071
02:07:25,990 –> 02:07:29,750
of course, is better than no preparation. And at

2072
02:07:29,750 –> 02:07:33,510
a certain point, and we know this, and to bring this down to

2073
02:07:33,510 –> 02:07:37,190
martial arts thinking, at a certain point in the fight,

2074
02:07:38,310 –> 02:07:41,750
something has to work either for you or against you. Right?

2075
02:07:42,230 –> 02:07:45,150
Now, if you are prepared and you’ve put in the reps and you’ve put in

2076
02:07:45,150 –> 02:07:48,990
the drilling, the likelihood that you will see the thing that will

2077
02:07:48,990 –> 02:07:52,150
work out for you is increased versus

2078
02:07:53,030 –> 02:07:56,870
you not putting in the reps, not putting in the drilling, not doing the preparing.

2079
02:07:56,870 –> 02:07:59,750
The likelihood that you’re going to see that, zero. This is why

2080
02:08:00,790 –> 02:08:04,230
the guys who are. Who are very much like, I just see red and go,

2081
02:08:04,230 –> 02:08:07,950
bro, they want. To believe it’s real because they’ve never

2082
02:08:07,950 –> 02:08:10,150
been in that situation. And they hope that they’re enough.

2083
02:08:11,920 –> 02:08:15,680
Oh, okay, that’s fine. And we’ve talked about it. Right?

2084
02:08:15,840 –> 02:08:18,760
Right. And hope is. Hope is not a. Hope is not a strategy. It might

2085
02:08:18,760 –> 02:08:21,160
be, and I’ve said this often on this podcast, it might be a place in

2086
02:08:21,160 –> 02:08:24,560
Arkansas where Bill Clinton was born, but it’s not a strategy. Okay?

2087
02:08:24,800 –> 02:08:28,440
And so, but Providence. Providence is when

2088
02:08:28,440 –> 02:08:31,120
you’ve done all the preparation. This is how I define it. You’ve done all the

2089
02:08:31,120 –> 02:08:34,720
preparation. You’ve done the reps, you’ve put in the time, you’ve earned your

2090
02:08:34,720 –> 02:08:38,360
chip, and you’ve continued to build on that mountain to continue to earn your

2091
02:08:38,360 –> 02:08:40,550
chip every day. And

2092
02:08:43,590 –> 02:08:47,150
it accounts for all of those things that are outside that ship. Because for as

2093
02:08:47,150 –> 02:08:50,950
much control as we think we have, it’s still. I compare it to

2094
02:08:50,950 –> 02:08:54,470
an anthill, right? It’s an anthill compared to the mountain of reality.

2095
02:08:55,350 –> 02:08:59,150
And we cannot possibly. Gandalf has a great line

2096
02:08:59,150 –> 02:09:02,950
in Lord of the Rings, Right? Even the wisest cannot know all ends.

2097
02:09:03,270 –> 02:09:07,110
Absolutely. Yeah. For sure. And Providence has to cover the gap

2098
02:09:07,110 –> 02:09:10,760
between what the wise knows and the end. And that’s not an

2099
02:09:10,760 –> 02:09:14,440
excuse to not be. Not be unprepared. It’s not an excuse even

2100
02:09:14,440 –> 02:09:18,000
to, like, have no strategy. You better be prepared. You better have a strategy. I

2101
02:09:18,000 –> 02:09:21,080
mean, that’s exactly what all Lord of the Rings is about. Gandalf was prepared. Gandalf

2102
02:09:21,080 –> 02:09:24,840
has strategy, you know, but like. And again,

2103
02:09:24,840 –> 02:09:28,480
you know, I’m talking about, you know, Tolkien here, but I don’t

2104
02:09:28,480 –> 02:09:31,800
think. I don’t think Gandalf had any. No, I don’t think Gandalf didn’t have anything.

2105
02:09:31,800 –> 02:09:35,080
His plan for the ball, Rog, under the mountain. Like, he had nothing in his

2106
02:09:35,080 –> 02:09:38,500
plan for that. There was nothing. There was no plan. There’s certain things you don’t

2107
02:09:38,500 –> 02:09:42,180
plan for. And you know this from. Again, from fighting, from other places. There’s just

2108
02:09:42,180 –> 02:09:45,780
some things you just don’t. You just can’t. Right? So Providence has to cover that.

2109
02:09:46,100 –> 02:09:49,900
Now, Providence can work for you. And I think if you’ve been going in

2110
02:09:49,900 –> 02:09:53,740
a particular Direction over a particular course of time, doing all the work

2111
02:09:53,740 –> 02:09:56,140
that other people don’t see. When they show up at the end and just see

2112
02:09:56,140 –> 02:09:59,780
the goal, not the process. The people who don’t see the process

2113
02:09:59,780 –> 02:10:02,980
and just look at the goal and see you show up and it just works

2114
02:10:02,980 –> 02:10:06,220
out. They call that luck. Luck. Oh, for sure. They call that luck.

2115
02:10:06,300 –> 02:10:09,860
That’s. But it’s.

2116
02:10:09,860 –> 02:10:13,460
I. I think. Right. That’s the, Dare I say, the hand of a

2117
02:10:13,460 –> 02:10:16,940
certain kind of way

2118
02:10:17,660 –> 02:10:20,860
that it would not work for the person who. To go back to the fight

2119
02:10:20,860 –> 02:10:24,300
analogy for just a minute for the person who just sees red, bro. Like, it’s

2120
02:10:24,300 –> 02:10:27,820
just not gonna work for you. Well, and. And that, to me, I think, is.

2121
02:10:27,820 –> 02:10:31,600
Where it’s not on your. Is that. And I hate to make it about

2122
02:10:31,600 –> 02:10:35,400
sides, but it’s not. It’s not in your favor. No, you’re fine. Yeah. No, I’m

2123
02:10:35,400 –> 02:10:38,680
with you. Right. Like, go ahead. Sorry,

2124
02:10:39,080 –> 02:10:41,880
man. I think you said a bunch of very cool things in there, but I

2125
02:10:41,960 –> 02:10:44,600
also. Right. And you and I have talked about this. I don’t know if we’ve

2126
02:10:44,600 –> 02:10:47,200
talked about it on the show or not, but we both have kind of talked

2127
02:10:47,200 –> 02:10:50,200
about the reason why most people go into a martial arts school.

2128
02:10:50,760 –> 02:10:54,600
Right? Yeah. And it’s not for the. It’s not for the philosophy. It’s for,

2129
02:10:54,600 –> 02:10:56,880
I want to be tough, I want to be confident. I want to not be

2130
02:10:56,880 –> 02:11:00,550
scared anymore. Whatever. Whatever version of that is driving you into the

2131
02:11:00,550 –> 02:11:04,230
school. Okay. But. Right. I don’t think anybody actually

2132
02:11:04,230 –> 02:11:07,670
hits black belt, like a. Like a tier of mastery

2133
02:11:07,750 –> 02:11:10,950
without that flipping to the philosophical side of things.

2134
02:11:11,830 –> 02:11:12,870
Do you agree with that?

2135
02:11:16,630 –> 02:11:20,070
Oh, yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Yeah. Okay. I think that.

2136
02:11:21,030 –> 02:11:24,640
Yeah. So I. I can.

2137
02:11:24,960 –> 02:11:28,760
I can acknowledge where fortune was in my favor. Right. Because the

2138
02:11:28,760 –> 02:11:31,760
guy who told me to go to a kung fu school, right. And kung fu

2139
02:11:31,760 –> 02:11:35,520
is where all these weird military ideas I could. I

2140
02:11:35,520 –> 02:11:38,640
could wear without the military propaganda and the weight of war and all these other

2141
02:11:38,640 –> 02:11:42,360
things. Right. So, you know, it started in the military. I can. I can acknowledge

2142
02:11:42,360 –> 02:11:46,080
that now. I honed it in. In martial arts training right

2143
02:11:46,320 –> 02:11:49,320
after I’d made the swap of, like, I’m not here to be tough. I’m here

2144
02:11:49,320 –> 02:11:53,160
to be different. Right. And different is okay. And stuff

2145
02:11:53,160 –> 02:11:56,680
like this. So I do think that it’s very

2146
02:11:56,680 –> 02:12:00,520
easy for lots of people to never turn and face and be open

2147
02:12:00,520 –> 02:12:04,160
to the idea of a different philosophy. Right. And there are people

2148
02:12:04,160 –> 02:12:07,960
in my school who had been training longer

2149
02:12:07,960 –> 02:12:11,520
than me. Right. And I think that they would tell you that they’re.

2150
02:12:12,640 –> 02:12:16,480
That they’re better at it than I am. Right? But I think. I think

2151
02:12:16,480 –> 02:12:18,840
if you go and you talk to people that have been trained by both me

2152
02:12:18,840 –> 02:12:22,580
and them, I think that the people that have, like, learned from both of us

2153
02:12:22,580 –> 02:12:26,300
would tell you that I can educate and teach it better than they can.

2154
02:12:26,300 –> 02:12:29,780
Okay? Because I’m talking about the

2155
02:12:29,780 –> 02:12:33,580
philosophy. I’m talking about the fact that, like, hey, it’s okay not to fight. It’s

2156
02:12:33,580 –> 02:12:36,460
okay to, like, not get into a scrap. It’s okay to not close this deal.

2157
02:12:36,460 –> 02:12:39,740
Now. You need to have certain other things around you for this to be okay.

2158
02:12:40,140 –> 02:12:41,900
Right. But

2159
02:12:43,740 –> 02:12:45,900
this is where it all kind of comes back down to

2160
02:12:47,790 –> 02:12:51,390
how the lane is funneled, Right? Okay. Yeah. Like, I

2161
02:12:51,390 –> 02:12:55,230
live in Fort Worth, Texas, right? And for those who don’t

2162
02:12:55,230 –> 02:12:59,070
know, I live right outside of this little bitty subdivision called White Settlement,

2163
02:12:59,230 –> 02:13:01,470
okay? Now, I live.

2164
02:13:02,830 –> 02:13:06,590
I live in 2025, right? And that’s great because I have access

2165
02:13:06,590 –> 02:13:10,110
to the Internet. I have access to whatever news and media I can

2166
02:13:10,110 –> 02:13:13,550
educate myself enough to have value on, to go check consistently. But let’s go back

2167
02:13:13,820 –> 02:13:17,540
to 19, even call it 80, right? The

2168
02:13:17,540 –> 02:13:21,060
only source of news you get is what’s coming on the TV or what’s being

2169
02:13:21,060 –> 02:13:24,740
delivered in your newspaper mailbox that they’re willing to give to you

2170
02:13:24,740 –> 02:13:28,500
for free. Right? And if it’s. If they’re not

2171
02:13:28,500 –> 02:13:31,620
aware of their biases of like, well, no, we’re not going to talk about that

2172
02:13:31,620 –> 02:13:35,100
because I think this is right. Or let’s pretend that you’re just like one of

2173
02:13:35,100 –> 02:13:38,540
my sales coaches who, who told me one time, because he didn’t like a political

2174
02:13:38,540 –> 02:13:42,310
post, that salespeople don’t talk about politics when really, if I

2175
02:13:42,310 –> 02:13:46,150
was talking about his politics, it would have been really okay. Right?

2176
02:13:46,150 –> 02:13:49,510
So there’s all of these things, and sometimes it does come from a place of,

2177
02:13:49,510 –> 02:13:52,870
like, good natured intent. Hey, you really want to make it about that,

2178
02:13:53,350 –> 02:13:56,550
right? Hey, John, you sure you want a beard and long hair?

2179
02:13:57,030 –> 02:13:58,950
Some people might shorts say to you, right?

2180
02:14:01,830 –> 02:14:05,430
But if it’s, if it’s. If there’s no lane for

2181
02:14:05,430 –> 02:14:09,010
any other opportunity, I think that that’s where we screw the

2182
02:14:09,010 –> 02:14:12,370
pooch. Yeah, I would agree with that. Right? Yeah. Because

2183
02:14:12,610 –> 02:14:16,290
if, if, if there wasn’t suppression and all lanes

2184
02:14:16,290 –> 02:14:18,930
were open, then.

2185
02:14:20,770 –> 02:14:24,450
A. I think everyone’s a lot more comfortable in the lanes that they actually end

2186
02:14:24,450 –> 02:14:28,010
up being in. Right. Because I don’t have a

2187
02:14:28,010 –> 02:14:31,850
single problem arguing why I think the way that I think with anybody else on

2188
02:14:31,850 –> 02:14:35,180
the planet. And I’m not the one who gets hand shaky about it because I’m.

2189
02:14:35,180 –> 02:14:38,180
Because my world is being torn down around me and everything else like this. You’re

2190
02:14:38,180 –> 02:14:41,860
allowed to believe whatever you want, and I’m allowed to as well. But it’s whenever

2191
02:14:42,340 –> 02:14:45,940
there’s fear that you’re not going to pick my side. So we’re going to just

2192
02:14:45,940 –> 02:14:49,580
close off this lane. That’s where I have a problem. That’s where I think

2193
02:14:49,580 –> 02:14:52,900
that we get into it being all sideways. And so

2194
02:14:53,940 –> 02:14:56,300
I didn’t finish this thought earlier, but I kind of want to go back to

2195
02:14:56,300 –> 02:14:59,460
it. I do think that it’s very easy when you’re younger

2196
02:15:00,110 –> 02:15:03,310
and youthful to not have much room for any kind of

2197
02:15:03,870 –> 02:15:06,030
spiritual path. Right.

2198
02:15:09,550 –> 02:15:12,950
And where I’m at now. Right. Realizing that I practice

2199
02:15:12,950 –> 02:15:16,590
stoicism just the way. The way the most Christian men do their

2200
02:15:16,590 –> 02:15:20,390
daily devotional. Right. A little bit every day. And surrounding myself intentionally

2201
02:15:20,390 –> 02:15:23,310
with other people who feel like I can see that it’s the same thing. It’s

2202
02:15:23,310 –> 02:15:26,510
just mine doesn’t have a religious deity at the end of it. Who’s going to

2203
02:15:26,510 –> 02:15:29,140
save me, me at the end of it. So what it leads to me is

2204
02:15:29,140 –> 02:15:32,900
like, I need to. I like, since there is no like, end all,

2205
02:15:32,900 –> 02:15:36,260
be all place to wear like, like, that means I got to do the work

2206
02:15:36,260 –> 02:15:40,100
every day. Right. And what I find are the people with the

2207
02:15:40,100 –> 02:15:42,939
strongest face and the people who, who are not trying to sell me on their

2208
02:15:42,939 –> 02:15:46,620
faith are the people that are doing that work every day. Right. And it’s

2209
02:15:46,620 –> 02:15:50,300
not perfunctory, it’s not for show. It’s not for, you know, who can be the

2210
02:15:50,300 –> 02:15:53,630
biggest and best Christian in the congregation. And so stuff like this, it comes from

2211
02:15:53,630 –> 02:15:57,230
a place of just. This is important to me. Right. And

2212
02:15:57,230 –> 02:16:00,070
so if it’s important to you,

2213
02:16:00,550 –> 02:16:04,190
awesome. That’s great. Okay. If you’re using it to, to

2214
02:16:04,190 –> 02:16:07,870
manipulate for status or presence, whether you’re like the pastor and you’re going

2215
02:16:07,870 –> 02:16:11,710
around and thinking that you’re like the God’s gift to everything because you,

2216
02:16:11,710 –> 02:16:15,510
you have an answer, even though it might be unqualified. Right. Different

2217
02:16:15,510 –> 02:16:19,110
things like that. And it’s coming from a place of like, well, I’m going to

2218
02:16:19,110 –> 02:16:21,900
hold this away from you because I want to give you the answer that we

2219
02:16:21,900 –> 02:16:25,580
believe in. That’s where I got a jump ship. Right.

2220
02:16:25,580 –> 02:16:29,140
And that’s where you saw in the book the. The appeal

2221
02:16:29,140 –> 02:16:30,820
of. Of

2222
02:16:33,060 –> 02:16:36,579
Valentine’s Church, right. To others.

2223
02:16:36,900 –> 02:16:40,620
Right? Well, it’s not a Church, School. It’s a school. Yeah. And

2224
02:16:40,620 –> 02:16:44,420
it’s a discipline. And it’s a discipline. Right. They just run it like a

2225
02:16:44,420 –> 02:16:47,469
church. So that way the people will, will.

2226
02:16:48,029 –> 02:16:50,589
This is the coolest part of the, of this whole book. Reading it the second

2227
02:16:50,589 –> 02:16:53,509
time. If he hadn’t put it in the church format, if he hadn’t made it

2228
02:16:53,509 –> 02:16:56,629
look and feel and sound like a church, no one would go take the language

2229
02:16:56,629 –> 02:17:00,189
lessons that then expand the comprehension for them to

2230
02:17:00,189 –> 02:17:03,949
realize it’s all just love. So I would, I would love to see

2231
02:17:03,949 –> 02:17:06,989
that in a political party. But I think

2232
02:17:08,829 –> 02:17:12,230
like, here’s the problem, here’s what I think a political party is too much

2233
02:17:12,230 –> 02:17:15,430
focused on. So this is why you need both. Oh, gosh. Okay,

2234
02:17:15,750 –> 02:17:18,350
so we’ve been talking for a long time. I think that this is where you’re

2235
02:17:18,350 –> 02:17:21,630
going to say that this is why both lanes need to matter. Right. The politics.

2236
02:17:21,630 –> 02:17:25,390
Right. The political party as well as the spiritual lane and. Right. I fundamentally

2237
02:17:25,390 –> 02:17:29,070
agree with you. Right. Yeah. Church and state, we need both. We need

2238
02:17:29,070 –> 02:17:32,070
both. And they need to be separated in my personal opinion. Because

2239
02:17:33,110 –> 02:17:36,870
if, if, if

2240
02:17:36,870 –> 02:17:40,550
what we’re trying to say is that to live here you must be a God

2241
02:17:40,550 –> 02:17:44,130
fearing Christian and go to church every Sunday or else you don’t belong here.

2242
02:17:45,490 –> 02:17:49,330
If that’s what we’re trying to say. I don’t really think that that holds weight,

2243
02:17:51,570 –> 02:17:55,170
personally. I also, I, well, and I would, I would,

2244
02:17:55,330 –> 02:17:58,850
I would add to that. I don’t think it holds weight when we say,

2245
02:17:59,490 –> 02:18:03,250
as we are saying in a lot of places, you need to,

2246
02:18:05,490 –> 02:18:08,850
and I see this in workplaces, you need to

2247
02:18:09,970 –> 02:18:13,730
monitor yourself politically and say the right think things so you don’t

2248
02:18:13,730 –> 02:18:16,850
get sent to hr. That’s the mini

2249
02:18:16,850 –> 02:18:20,490
version of. Now, again, again, I have no problem.

2250
02:18:20,490 –> 02:18:24,330
I have no problem attached to like 15 other things though. Well, here’s

2251
02:18:24,330 –> 02:18:26,690
the thing, here’s the thing. I don’t think that.

2252
02:18:27,970 –> 02:18:31,370
No, let me frame it this way. Let’s look at Jubal. This is a good

2253
02:18:31,370 –> 02:18:34,450
way to get into this. So. Or to enter this. So Jubal,

2254
02:18:35,420 –> 02:18:38,300
the problems that a modern feminist

2255
02:18:39,180 –> 02:18:42,060
would, would have with Jubal

2256
02:18:43,340 –> 02:18:47,060
have absolutely nothing to do with

2257
02:18:47,060 –> 02:18:50,540
his religion because didn’t have one.

2258
02:18:50,940 –> 02:18:54,260
Yeah. They have everything to do with his cultural

2259
02:18:54,260 –> 02:18:58,060
orientation which comes from his politics. His,

2260
02:18:58,060 –> 02:19:01,199
to your point earlier, his libertarianism. Right.

2261
02:19:02,639 –> 02:19:06,319
So I have a question about that. Just real quick. So are you saying that

2262
02:19:07,119 –> 02:19:10,959
if, that if you don’t have religion, your cultural

2263
02:19:10,959 –> 02:19:13,999
values have to come from politics? Are you saying that that’s what happened in the

2264
02:19:13,999 –> 02:19:17,759
book. I’m saying that they will. Well, so, so, so I’m saying

2265
02:19:17,759 –> 02:19:21,279
that in the book, the replacement for the

2266
02:19:21,279 –> 02:19:24,999
politics was religion. And in reality, in

2267
02:19:24,999 –> 02:19:28,639
2025, the replacement for the religion has become politics

2268
02:19:29,519 –> 02:19:33,239
and political views. Because think about it. And by the way,

2269
02:19:33,239 –> 02:19:36,599
I’m going off of a very simple political philosophy. So the feminists all said back

2270
02:19:36,599 –> 02:19:39,439
in the 1970s that the personal was political.

2271
02:19:40,319 –> 02:19:42,719
Okay, well, you open up that door

2272
02:19:43,999 –> 02:19:47,639
with the atomization of the individual away from the

2273
02:19:47,639 –> 02:19:51,479
structures that we were talking about previously, like tradition and community and

2274
02:19:51,479 –> 02:19:55,239
family. What does the individual have to anchor

2275
02:19:55,239 –> 02:19:58,950
themselves to then? If the personal is political, and by the way,

2276
02:20:01,030 –> 02:20:04,790
if every decision that you make has a political consequence.

2277
02:20:05,910 –> 02:20:09,550
Let’s fast forward to our current era where the kind of shoes

2278
02:20:09,550 –> 02:20:13,270
I wear is a political signal when I’m dating and I’m not

2279
02:20:13,270 –> 02:20:16,790
dating, but I hear things, the kinds of shoes I’m wearing as a political

2280
02:20:16,790 –> 02:20:20,070
signal about whether or not I can even connect with somebody at an emotional level.

2281
02:20:21,030 –> 02:20:24,310
That to me indicates the full,

2282
02:20:25,150 –> 02:20:28,830
for lack of a better term, the fulfilling of

2283
02:20:29,390 –> 02:20:33,030
politics in a religious realm for a certain, for a certain

2284
02:20:33,030 –> 02:20:35,830
group of people. And by the way, I believe that group of people is actually

2285
02:20:35,830 –> 02:20:39,550
fairly large in this country. I don’t believe it’s tiny. I believe

2286
02:20:39,550 –> 02:20:43,310
that, that, that and, and, and whether or not,

2287
02:20:43,710 –> 02:20:46,670
whether or not we think that’s a good thing or a bad thing, that’s a

2288
02:20:46,670 –> 02:20:50,190
different kind of conversation. I just think it’s, I just think it’s actually

2289
02:20:50,270 –> 02:20:54,060
already. I think the filling, the fulfillment has occurred. We’ve reached the.

2290
02:20:54,060 –> 02:20:57,860
I think we’ve reached the high watermark of politics. Just like in the

2291
02:20:57,860 –> 02:21:01,020
1950s, we reached the high watermark of religion.

2292
02:21:01,580 –> 02:21:05,260
I think we’ve reached the high watermark of politics in this country.

2293
02:21:05,900 –> 02:21:09,460
And now people are. Well, and now people

2294
02:21:09,460 –> 02:21:12,700
are. And I think it’s going to happen in the younger generations, not the older

2295
02:21:12,700 –> 02:21:16,220
ones. And maybe this is just back to my original point,

2296
02:21:16,300 –> 02:21:19,820
way back at the beginning of this. I think people are going to.

2297
02:21:20,320 –> 02:21:23,720
No, maybe this is just a swing in the pendulum as it goes back and

2298
02:21:23,720 –> 02:21:27,560
forth in the natural evolution of the United States of America. But I do think

2299
02:21:27,560 –> 02:21:31,160
that after 250 years as the longest standing constitutional

2300
02:21:31,160 –> 02:21:32,720
republic on the face of the planet,

2301
02:21:34,960 –> 02:21:38,440
I think we have to become a mature country by hook or by crook. We

2302
02:21:38,440 –> 02:21:42,080
have to be, we have to figure it out. What does mature

2303
02:21:42,080 –> 02:21:45,880
country mean, in your opinion? I think it means

2304
02:21:45,880 –> 02:21:48,980
a lot of different things. But I think, I think at the

2305
02:21:49,860 –> 02:21:53,540
political and at the religious end, you have to have a religious,

2306
02:21:53,620 –> 02:21:56,580
for lack of a better term, eschatology. And this ties into some things we’re going

2307
02:21:56,580 –> 02:21:58,580
to talk about here at the end. So let’s go ahead and pull this in.

2308
02:21:58,740 –> 02:22:02,420
I think you have to have an eschatology that somehow deals with,

2309
02:22:02,420 –> 02:22:05,780
or not eschatology, sorry, a religious philosophy that

2310
02:22:05,780 –> 02:22:09,620
somehow deals with the cultural and social

2311
02:22:09,620 –> 02:22:12,580
mores that continue to be devil us

2312
02:22:13,460 –> 02:22:17,310
throughout history. So we don’t have. Explain the raise, just real

2313
02:22:17,310 –> 02:22:20,710
quick ideas, paths,

2314
02:22:20,870 –> 02:22:24,310
precedents. Right. So we don’t have the reason why we are

2315
02:22:24,390 –> 02:22:28,150
so one of the main reasons why we are so

2316
02:22:30,070 –> 02:22:33,790
we twist ourselves into knots about race. One of the reasons

2317
02:22:33,790 –> 02:22:37,070
why it doesn’t actually, actually have anything to do with the Civil War or even

2318
02:22:37,070 –> 02:22:40,390
the Civil rights movement. The preachers during

2319
02:22:41,470 –> 02:22:45,150
the time of slavery, all the way down through the

2320
02:22:45,150 –> 02:22:48,510
Civil rights movement had very little, not very little.

2321
02:22:48,990 –> 02:22:52,470
The mainline preachers had very little to say or very little to

2322
02:22:52,470 –> 02:22:56,310
write about slavery that would put

2323
02:22:56,310 –> 02:22:59,830
it in a, or run it against a biblical

2324
02:22:59,830 –> 02:23:03,670
context. This is why Martin Luther King Jr. If you look at

2325
02:23:03,670 –> 02:23:07,310
his speeches, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. By the

2326
02:23:07,310 –> 02:23:10,530
way, look at his speeches, he made biblical references.

2327
02:23:11,170 –> 02:23:14,690
Now part of the reason he did that was to align the,

2328
02:23:14,930 –> 02:23:17,250
the attaining of political rights

2329
02:23:18,690 –> 02:23:22,370
with people who understood to your point earlier, like you said,

2330
02:23:22,370 –> 02:23:25,810
who understood all the verses and knew where the things came from.

2331
02:23:25,970 –> 02:23:29,330
He was socially, he was socially clicking

2332
02:23:29,570 –> 02:23:33,090
in their heads. 40, 50, 60

2333
02:23:33,090 –> 02:23:36,900
years later. The social clicks in our heads are political, which is

2334
02:23:36,900 –> 02:23:40,700
why Black Lives Matter doesn’t have anything religious on their

2335
02:23:40,700 –> 02:23:44,300
website at all. Instead what they have are

2336
02:23:44,300 –> 02:23:47,900
cultural appeals, right, to people because

2337
02:23:47,900 –> 02:23:51,540
the culture now has shifted away from religious appeals to

2338
02:23:51,540 –> 02:23:54,900
political ones. Now again, we can argue if this is a good or bad. I’m

2339
02:23:54,900 –> 02:23:58,660
merely saying that it is happening along the course of time to

2340
02:23:58,660 –> 02:24:02,430
becoming a mature country. I think every, not. I think we know we can look

2341
02:24:02,430 –> 02:24:05,790
at the history of countries, particularly the history of Rome, Greece,

2342
02:24:05,790 –> 02:24:09,390
Egypt, England moving into the modern era. France

2343
02:24:09,710 –> 02:24:13,110
goes through these kinds of evolutions and eventually

2344
02:24:13,110 –> 02:24:16,430
winds up somewhere on the other side. Now

2345
02:24:17,709 –> 02:24:21,550
the fact of the matter is the United States of America.

2346
02:24:22,510 –> 02:24:26,270
Well, I think we could both agree it is

2347
02:24:26,270 –> 02:24:29,190
walking towards a transcendent miracle that we’ve only had one civil War.

2348
02:24:30,300 –> 02:24:34,140
That’s a transcendent miracle. Okay,

2349
02:24:34,860 –> 02:24:38,420
something, something’s working somewhere. I mean

2350
02:24:38,420 –> 02:24:42,060
it just the casual commentary

2351
02:24:42,220 –> 02:24:44,860
of like how many people have, have said,

2352
02:24:45,900 –> 02:24:49,740
man, have we ever been this divine? No, I mean, I mean, I mean

2353
02:24:49,740 –> 02:24:52,980
one time and we ended up killing a bunch of people about it and stuff.

2354
02:24:52,980 –> 02:24:56,750
Like this, you know, exactly. You know, hopefully it doesn’t have to

2355
02:24:56,750 –> 02:25:00,550
get to there. Right, right. Because you know, in like as a

2356
02:25:00,550 –> 02:25:04,070
guy who studies rhetoric and marketing and everything else like this, like there’s.

2357
02:25:05,830 –> 02:25:09,630
I. The pendulum thing that you talked about a

2358
02:25:09,630 –> 02:25:12,710
second ago though is like super fascinating because like I think of it as like

2359
02:25:12,950 –> 02:25:16,430
pendulum swings left, right. And then someone hits it this way and then it goes

2360
02:25:16,430 –> 02:25:19,990
this way back and forth. Right? Yeah. But to me it

2361
02:25:20,150 –> 02:25:23,220
like. And maybe, maybe this means I’m a conspiracy theorist.

2362
02:25:23,770 –> 02:25:27,090
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Right. And now you’re.

2363
02:25:27,090 –> 02:25:30,490
Congratulations. Now you’re back to my rabbit holes. Exactly. Careful,

2364
02:25:30,490 –> 02:25:34,130
careful. It’s like I was just having this conversation in a

2365
02:25:34,130 –> 02:25:37,810
completely different line with my accountability partner. Right. Because we were talking

2366
02:25:37,810 –> 02:25:41,530
about this concept of luck and different things and

2367
02:25:41,530 –> 02:25:44,170
you know, he changed the label to fortunate. And I was like, okay, like I

2368
02:25:44,170 –> 02:25:45,850
can, I can respect that, you know.

2369
02:25:51,540 –> 02:25:53,660
And by the way, I think it’s going to take us a while to get

2370
02:25:53,660 –> 02:25:57,260
there and like it always does. Nation states, like the first, the first big thing

2371
02:25:57,260 –> 02:26:01,020
is we’ve got to like figure out cohesively what is

2372
02:26:01,020 –> 02:26:04,140
it. And we’ve been trying to. We’ve been struggling with this 250 years. What does

2373
02:26:04,140 –> 02:26:07,780
it actually mean to be an American if you’re divorced from everything but your

2374
02:26:07,780 –> 02:26:11,300
founding documents? The document is thin. And by the way, I appreciate the

2375
02:26:11,300 –> 02:26:14,660
document. I like the document. I think the document is amazing and I think it’s

2376
02:26:14,660 –> 02:26:17,490
a miracle the document has lasted as long as it has lasted.

2377
02:26:18,360 –> 02:26:21,920
But the document, but the document in and of

2378
02:26:21,920 –> 02:26:25,760
itself, both politically left and

2379
02:26:25,760 –> 02:26:29,400
politically right has been stretched then.

2380
02:26:29,480 –> 02:26:33,320
Yeah. Yeah. Everyone feels like they’re radically clear on the original intent

2381
02:26:33,320 –> 02:26:36,960
of the founders. And I would wait that, that if, that if we could have

2382
02:26:36,960 –> 02:26:40,720
a Bill and Ted style phone booth and any

2383
02:26:40,720 –> 02:26:44,090
one of those guys set thought of it right now, they would be so

2384
02:26:44,090 –> 02:26:47,690
overwhelmed with the progress in innovation. Oh yeah. Like

2385
02:26:47,690 –> 02:26:51,450
this. That they would be so floored and they would. They.

2386
02:26:51,450 –> 02:26:54,610
And I, I would imagine that if we pulled all of them, the overwhelming

2387
02:26:54,770 –> 02:26:58,610
majority would be like, we should have changed some stuff.

2388
02:26:58,690 –> 02:27:01,650
Right. Like, like we didn’t think you guys were going to get this far. That’s

2389
02:27:01,650 –> 02:27:05,370
right. That’s right. Because. That’s right. We can only, we can only be

2390
02:27:05,370 –> 02:27:09,160
as innovative as like we’re able to see. Right. So they thinking

2391
02:27:09,160 –> 02:27:12,920
this far that like, like, you know, after my, after

2392
02:27:12,920 –> 02:27:16,440
my trip to the, to the, you know, southwest,

2393
02:27:17,800 –> 02:27:21,600
you know, don’t bleep me. You

2394
02:27:21,600 –> 02:27:25,120
know, I went to Roswell right We drove past there. Right. I went to the

2395
02:27:25,120 –> 02:27:28,920
museum of. Of. Of Nuclear History and everything else like

2396
02:27:28,920 –> 02:27:32,440
this. Like, you’re telling me those guys were thinking about that capability when they write

2397
02:27:32,440 –> 02:27:36,120
in that document? Absolutely not. Right. So the idea that, like,

2398
02:27:36,200 –> 02:27:39,880
well, we should remain is absolutely insane. Right. Like,

2399
02:27:39,960 –> 02:27:43,800
we wouldn’t let kindergartners write laws. Yes.

2400
02:27:43,800 –> 02:27:47,640
And there’s always pieces of that document we want to

2401
02:27:47,640 –> 02:27:51,160
keep. So, Right. Everybody all the way out.

2402
02:27:51,640 –> 02:27:55,480
Everybody wants. Everybody’s very passionate. I always mention this. Everybody’s very passionate about

2403
02:27:55,480 –> 02:27:59,160
the First Amendment, left, right and center. Everybody’s passionate about the First

2404
02:27:59,160 –> 02:28:02,970
Amendment. And that’s fine. Let’s be passionate

2405
02:28:02,970 –> 02:28:05,810
about the First Amendment. Matter of fact, you know what? I’ve been reading some things

2406
02:28:05,810 –> 02:28:09,610
in the last couple years about some folks wanting to call a Constitutional

2407
02:28:09,610 –> 02:28:13,250
Convention about the Second Amendment. I say, go ahead, pull that smoke

2408
02:28:13,250 –> 02:28:16,610
wagon. Go right on ahead. Call a Constitutional Convention about the Second

2409
02:28:16,610 –> 02:28:20,410
Amendment. Go right on ahead. Because, see, here’s the thing. Well, no, no, no,

2410
02:28:20,410 –> 02:28:24,010
no, it’ll work. It’s fine. No, actually, I think that would work. But

2411
02:28:24,010 –> 02:28:27,570
here’s the thing. When we all show up and we’re all rambunctious,

2412
02:28:28,120 –> 02:28:31,720
which we are, and when we’re all rambunctious and yelling at each other, one of

2413
02:28:31,720 –> 02:28:35,000
the things that’s going to be put forth by some delegate from some state that

2414
02:28:35,000 –> 02:28:38,840
someone will find to be offensive, but they

2415
02:28:38,840 –> 02:28:42,480
will have a right to be. There will be, hey, I will

2416
02:28:42,480 –> 02:28:45,800
raise you the 19th Amendment. How about that?

2417
02:28:49,480 –> 02:28:52,040
The 19th Amendment was the one that gave women the right to vote.

2418
02:28:53,080 –> 02:28:56,440
So let’s talk about amendments. Let’s actually have a conversation

2419
02:28:56,600 –> 02:29:00,360
about amendments. And the second you say that, by the way,

2420
02:29:00,840 –> 02:29:04,040
all of a sudden all the conversation flattens out.

2421
02:29:05,240 –> 02:29:09,080
Because here’s the thing. The strength of the document, even though it is thin

2422
02:29:09,080 –> 02:29:12,800
and stretched, I think you and I could both agree on that. The

2423
02:29:12,800 –> 02:29:16,440
strength of the Constitution and the

2424
02:29:16,440 –> 02:29:19,320
strength of the Declaration of Independence, the two founding documents,

2425
02:29:19,800 –> 02:29:23,520
lies not in the fact that it’s thin,

2426
02:29:23,840 –> 02:29:27,600
because it is. It lies in the fact that it appealed,

2427
02:29:29,360 –> 02:29:32,880
interestingly enough, to something that we have forgotten about.

2428
02:29:33,440 –> 02:29:36,960
It appealed to. And I make this kind of point on my July 4th

2429
02:29:36,960 –> 02:29:40,240
episodes where I always talk about the Declaration of Independence in the Constitution, always finding

2430
02:29:40,240 –> 02:29:43,200
new things in there. Right. Going back and look at the original writings. Go back

2431
02:29:43,200 –> 02:29:46,760
and look at what they originally said, you know, all these kinds of things. And

2432
02:29:46,760 –> 02:29:50,600
what you find there is a remarkable depth of understanding about human

2433
02:29:50,600 –> 02:29:54,340
nature and how that

2434
02:29:54,340 –> 02:29:57,820
is unchanging across time. Absolutely. Right

2435
02:29:57,820 –> 02:30:01,540
now, I I have not

2436
02:30:01,540 –> 02:30:04,860
done all the study on the background stuff that you have around it and everything

2437
02:30:04,860 –> 02:30:07,660
else like this. Right. But willing to take you at your word. But

2438
02:30:08,860 –> 02:30:12,420
man, the depth of human understanding is going to be limited to the weaponry in

2439
02:30:12,420 –> 02:30:16,260
the, of the time. Like so, like, like, while I, while I

2440
02:30:16,260 –> 02:30:18,780
know that they’re like, well, there’s going to be someone who takes advantage of this

2441
02:30:18,780 –> 02:30:22,550
and everything like this, I promise you. They weren’t thinking about tanks, they weren’t thinking

2442
02:30:22,550 –> 02:30:26,030
about drones. They weren’t thinking about all these things that everyone has so much access

2443
02:30:26,030 –> 02:30:29,710
to right now. No, they were not. But they also weren’t

2444
02:30:29,710 –> 02:30:32,350
thinking about us expanding the franchise to women and slaves.

2445
02:30:33,790 –> 02:30:36,550
I agree. All the more reason that like, we need to go back over the

2446
02:30:36,550 –> 02:30:39,990
whole document and like, okay, let’s acknowledge that some things have

2447
02:30:39,990 –> 02:30:42,910
changed. Right? And like, hey, let’s maybe weigh this out

2448
02:30:43,310 –> 02:30:46,820
intentionally with all this new, new knowledge that we have. Right?

2449
02:30:47,060 –> 02:30:50,820
Because like, it’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s

2450
02:30:50,820 –> 02:30:53,780
a very easy way to not have to argue about things you don’t want to

2451
02:30:53,780 –> 02:30:57,580
argue about as a politician is how I think about it. Well, and it’s, it’s

2452
02:30:57,580 –> 02:31:00,900
easy a way for you also become to our, to our, to the point that

2453
02:31:00,900 –> 02:31:04,100
we’re, I’m trying to get to here. It’s easy for

2454
02:31:04,580 –> 02:31:08,220
us to become matchstick men and flim flam men and make

2455
02:31:08,220 –> 02:31:12,020
appeals to that document. By the way, I do think the document

2456
02:31:12,020 –> 02:31:15,700
is going to. Both documents are going to struggle when we get

2457
02:31:15,700 –> 02:31:16,940
to ideas of

2458
02:31:19,420 –> 02:31:21,860
this one’s coming up around the corner. So everybody get ready. You heard it here

2459
02:31:21,860 –> 02:31:24,820
first. I think I know what you’re going to say. Oh yeah, you know, personhood

2460
02:31:24,820 –> 02:31:28,220
for humanoid robots. We talked about it with Philip K. Day. I think that is,

2461
02:31:28,220 –> 02:31:31,900
I think that is on the docket. I absolutely think that that is on the

2462
02:31:31,900 –> 02:31:35,220
docket. What timeline do you think that that is going to show that? So just

2463
02:31:35,220 –> 02:31:38,420
out of curiosity, I’ve been thinking about it since we talked about it. Yeah. So

2464
02:31:38,420 –> 02:31:42,160
I’m, I usually measure these things from the, from the, from the frame, from the

2465
02:31:42,160 –> 02:31:46,000
framing of my youngest child forward. Okay. Not my oldest child

2466
02:31:46,000 –> 02:31:49,240
forward because my oldest child forward will have agency, but

2467
02:31:49,800 –> 02:31:53,400
he. Agency, but the younger kid will

2468
02:31:53,400 –> 02:31:57,200
not. Because. No, no, I didn’t say the other kid won’t. I said that he

2469
02:31:57,200 –> 02:32:00,880
will have agents. He has agency to either stop or move

2470
02:32:00,880 –> 02:32:04,320
things forward underneath the current historical structure that he

2471
02:32:04,320 –> 02:32:08,170
understands because he’s imbued with that. Whereas my youngest child forward and you Always

2472
02:32:08,170 –> 02:32:11,250
see this. With the last child, the youngest child is going to,

2473
02:32:12,290 –> 02:32:16,050
just like the Terrans going to Mars, going to take that next logical step

2474
02:32:16,290 –> 02:32:19,890
because he’s under either completely different historical rubric with a completely different set of

2475
02:32:19,890 –> 02:32:23,290
historical understandings. Okay. Or I’ll frame it in a military

2476
02:32:23,290 –> 02:32:27,050
fashion. The oldest child is always the

2477
02:32:27,050 –> 02:32:30,890
general that fights the last war, and the youngest child

2478
02:32:30,890 –> 02:32:34,660
is always the rebel that’s. That’s pushing for the next over and can see the

2479
02:32:34,660 –> 02:32:38,380
next war. So you asked me my timeline. My youngest child is 8 years

2480
02:32:38,380 –> 02:32:42,060
old. I think that we will

2481
02:32:42,300 –> 02:32:45,940
start having this conversation by the time

2482
02:32:45,940 –> 02:32:49,540
he’s probably 30. So 22

2483
02:32:49,540 –> 02:32:53,020
years, maybe 25 at the outset, we’ll start having. Because.

2484
02:32:53,260 –> 02:32:56,900
Because what’s being laid right now is the foundation for this, for this

2485
02:32:56,900 –> 02:33:00,740
conversation. And part of the bricks that are being laid in the groundwork for

2486
02:33:00,740 –> 02:33:04,430
this conversation are the bricks around the manipulation

2487
02:33:04,430 –> 02:33:07,910
of biology. Can a man be a woman? Can a woman be a man? What

2488
02:33:07,910 –> 02:33:11,550
does that actually mean? That’s one of the big ones. But then the second

2489
02:33:11,550 –> 02:33:15,190
one is of course AI and LLMs. Then the

2490
02:33:15,190 –> 02:33:18,830
third big one is energy and data centers and who gets to own what energy

2491
02:33:18,910 –> 02:33:21,550
where, because you need a bunch of energy to power all this stuff.

2492
02:33:22,590 –> 02:33:26,430
And then the fourth great rail, which no one has talked about,

2493
02:33:26,670 –> 02:33:29,950
is the governmental social structure that’s going to allow.

2494
02:33:30,350 –> 02:33:33,230
Not allow. That’s going to ensure

2495
02:33:33,870 –> 02:33:37,390
security. Well, it’s going to ensure security for people who are

2496
02:33:37,390 –> 02:33:41,150
elderly. Because I thought you were going to go.

2497
02:33:41,310 –> 02:33:45,110
Huh? Because the Japanese, by the way, have already gone in this

2498
02:33:45,110 –> 02:33:48,870
direction. Because if there’s not enough fertility, because enough

2499
02:33:48,870 –> 02:33:52,430
babies weren’t made to take care of all the old people who are getting old,

2500
02:33:53,390 –> 02:33:55,990
you’re going to have a fertility crisis. I’m not the first person to point this

2501
02:33:55,990 –> 02:33:59,360
out. People other than Elon Musk have pointed it out as well. It’s

2502
02:33:59,360 –> 02:34:03,200
absolutely happening. So, I mean, forgive me if I’m not taking a

2503
02:34:03,200 –> 02:34:05,880
bunch of advice from that. It’s okay, it’s okay. You don’t have to. I’m saying

2504
02:34:05,880 –> 02:34:08,760
he’s. He’s been joined by a bunch of other people, both on the left and

2505
02:34:08,760 –> 02:34:12,480
right, who are noted in this. So if fertility is in the toilet, that means

2506
02:34:12,480 –> 02:34:16,240
taxation, because you always tax future workers, not past ones, taxation

2507
02:34:16,240 –> 02:34:19,480
will be in the toilet. So how do you cover the gap? I think those

2508
02:34:19,480 –> 02:34:22,080
are four big bricks. Biology,

2509
02:34:23,330 –> 02:34:27,090
AI, energy and money, particularly money tied to

2510
02:34:27,090 –> 02:34:30,890
governmental policy. You bring those. I just made a hand motion for those

2511
02:34:30,890 –> 02:34:34,330
of you who are listening. And you bring those Those fingers together like in gangs

2512
02:34:34,330 –> 02:34:37,130
in New York. You bring those gang, you bring those fingers together. Now you’ve got

2513
02:34:37,130 –> 02:34:40,370
a grip and comes a fist. And I think that fist will start to become

2514
02:34:40,370 –> 02:34:44,170
manifest by the time he’s in his early 30s. And I think he’ll

2515
02:34:44,170 –> 02:34:47,770
spend the back end of his adulthood, he’ll be part of the generation that will

2516
02:34:47,770 –> 02:34:51,530
spend the back end of their adulthood trying to negotiate what they

2517
02:34:51,530 –> 02:34:55,170
vaguely remember as the past with the new thing

2518
02:34:55,170 –> 02:34:58,930
that’s here now. Because where it’s really going, where the rubber is going to

2519
02:34:58,930 –> 02:35:02,770
really meet the road, is when that humanoid robot is walking around with

2520
02:35:02,770 –> 02:35:06,529
somebody all the time. And every year the robot becomes more and more

2521
02:35:06,529 –> 02:35:10,130
human looking and less and less machine looking.

2522
02:35:11,330 –> 02:35:15,090
But I would I. Okay. Oh my gosh. All right.

2523
02:35:15,090 –> 02:35:18,900
So many things. So many things. Okay, so. And by the way, we’ve been

2524
02:35:18,900 –> 02:35:22,540
going three hours, so at some point you have to call game to call the

2525
02:35:22,540 –> 02:35:24,780
game. Okay,

2526
02:35:27,980 –> 02:35:31,700
man, this is so fascinating because I feel like, I

2527
02:35:31,700 –> 02:35:32,940
feel like this crux is,

2528
02:35:36,300 –> 02:35:39,740
man, at some point, okay,

2529
02:35:40,300 –> 02:35:43,890
now I don’t love this idea. I really don’t. It kind of bothers me,

2530
02:35:44,280 –> 02:35:47,000
okay? But as a guy who’s read a lot of science fiction,

2531
02:35:47,880 –> 02:35:51,080
a lot of science fiction, right? And seeing ideas about where

2532
02:35:52,440 –> 02:35:56,240
Android thinking and robots and feelings and emotions and stuff like this could

2533
02:35:56,240 –> 02:35:57,320
go to, okay,

2534
02:35:59,959 –> 02:36:03,760
here’s, here’s the, here’s the view that I have, okay? In Hay San’s mind,

2535
02:36:03,760 –> 02:36:07,600
a robot, no matter how advanced or anything else like this, will never, ever,

2536
02:36:07,600 –> 02:36:11,450
ever, ever, ever have the rights of a human being. Right? And I can see

2537
02:36:11,450 –> 02:36:14,930
a lane where that, like, makes sense, okay? But I’m also

2538
02:36:15,650 –> 02:36:19,490
a guy who reads a lot of science fiction, right? So why

2539
02:36:19,490 –> 02:36:23,050
would we limit it so that way they can’t be part of it, right? If

2540
02:36:23,050 –> 02:36:26,530
they are taking care of our, of our elderly people, if we, if they, if

2541
02:36:26,530 –> 02:36:30,130
these things are happening, like, it would feel the

2542
02:36:30,130 –> 02:36:33,810
same to me that we’re trying to find rules and laws to

2543
02:36:33,810 –> 02:36:37,490
stipulate that we can’t do these things, which then just leads to them, like, overthrowing

2544
02:36:37,490 –> 02:36:39,690
us because, like, we kept them out of the party for too long and everything

2545
02:36:39,690 –> 02:36:43,330
else like this, right? As opposed to just like, just like we should have made

2546
02:36:43,330 –> 02:36:47,130
the Indians, like, or I’m sorry, Native Americans, more of our lane, as opposed

2547
02:36:47,130 –> 02:36:49,610
to being like, oh, hey, we can give them these blankets. This is going to

2548
02:36:49,610 –> 02:36:53,330
be totally fine, right? Like, yeah, we could. We had

2549
02:36:53,330 –> 02:36:56,810
an opportunity to do it differently, right? And the thing that I

2550
02:36:56,970 –> 02:37:00,490
am fascinated by all the time, is how many times

2551
02:37:00,490 –> 02:37:04,210
the, the, the popular majority wants to put a

2552
02:37:04,210 –> 02:37:07,810
smaller group off to the side and label them as dumb, lesser ignorant,

2553
02:37:07,810 –> 02:37:11,530
stupid, or anything else like this. And part of it is through due control.

2554
02:37:11,770 –> 02:37:14,730
Right now, most of the people, it’s coming from fear. Right, Understandably.

2555
02:37:15,370 –> 02:37:18,450
But those people who are going to be manipulators are going to pull those strings

2556
02:37:18,450 –> 02:37:22,130
and looking for the way that the pendulum is swinging. They’re going to go

2557
02:37:22,130 –> 02:37:25,930
for whatever they go for. And I will. We are,

2558
02:37:25,930 –> 02:37:29,330
we do have to wrap up. I’m now getting a bunch of text messages from

2559
02:37:29,330 –> 02:37:32,510
my wife. So I have to go to more

2560
02:37:32,910 –> 02:37:35,790
material things. Yes, I will say this.

2561
02:37:37,150 –> 02:37:40,670
Human nature. That’s my two word response.

2562
02:37:41,230 –> 02:37:44,750
Human nature will. Will out. The same human

2563
02:37:44,750 –> 02:37:48,270
nature that both could

2564
02:37:48,270 –> 02:37:52,110
not conceive of the tank or the franchise being

2565
02:37:52,510 –> 02:37:56,350
expanded to slaves and women is the same human nature

2566
02:37:57,350 –> 02:38:01,030
that in a world where the franchise has been expanded, will

2567
02:38:01,030 –> 02:38:04,790
seek to expand the franchise further. It’s the exact same human nature.

2568
02:38:05,590 –> 02:38:09,030
Remember how I said, do you think. We’Re served by that, though?

2569
02:38:10,230 –> 02:38:13,910
To me? And it’s so funny because

2570
02:38:13,910 –> 02:38:17,270
whenever I talk about certain political things, I realize that I have

2571
02:38:17,670 –> 02:38:21,470
no positive answer. And so it’s not

2572
02:38:21,470 –> 02:38:25,310
like, am I right or you’re right? Sure. The reality that I would want to

2573
02:38:25,310 –> 02:38:29,110
build cannot be built because humans are humans and

2574
02:38:29,110 –> 02:38:32,910
we have memories and, well, how bad was it? Right? And then we do

2575
02:38:32,910 –> 02:38:35,750
the same thing again to like a different, like, segment of people, right? We just,

2576
02:38:35,750 –> 02:38:39,230
we’re just really good at doing it. Right. And so

2577
02:38:40,430 –> 02:38:44,030
to me, where I look at where all of that goes through is control,

2578
02:38:45,230 –> 02:38:48,750
limiting, limiting access to information, limiting access to education,

2579
02:38:48,830 –> 02:38:52,360
limiting access to, you know, these stories, right? Because,

2580
02:38:53,000 –> 02:38:56,240
you know, like, you can read this book in

2581
02:38:56,240 –> 02:39:00,000
Oklahoma now, would never even be allowed. Probably wouldn’t

2582
02:39:00,000 –> 02:39:03,800
even be in the student library, right? So we’re shutting off people from

2583
02:39:03,960 –> 02:39:07,600
ideas that have depth and are in or are

2584
02:39:07,600 –> 02:39:11,200
worth a tussle to try to coin Jubal Harshaw here,

2585
02:39:11,200 –> 02:39:15,000
right? Like it’s worth grokking. It’s worth

2586
02:39:15,000 –> 02:39:18,780
figuring it out and sitting with it and really figuring out, do

2587
02:39:18,780 –> 02:39:22,260
I even understand this enough to hate it or do I hate it because other

2588
02:39:22,260 –> 02:39:24,860
people that I follow tell me to hate it and they. And it just makes

2589
02:39:24,860 –> 02:39:26,900
it easy because then I don’t have to think about it for myself.

2590
02:39:30,100 –> 02:39:33,860
So I think I’m going to do the classic theological thing

2591
02:39:33,860 –> 02:39:37,700
and I’m gonna punt. Well, you just have to believe, right?

2592
02:39:37,700 –> 02:39:40,100
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I’m not gonna put in that direction. That’s

2593
02:39:40,100 –> 02:39:43,620
not where the football’s going. No, no, not in that direction. No, no. Believe in

2594
02:39:43,620 –> 02:39:46,890
nothing or believe in everything. Whatever, whatever you want. I don’t know. I’m not going,

2595
02:39:46,970 –> 02:39:50,210
I’m not going through those uprights. No, no, no, no, no, no. I’m going through

2596
02:39:50,210 –> 02:39:53,930
a different set of uprights. I heard. Okay, cool. Okay, let’s go.

2597
02:39:54,090 –> 02:39:57,690
The theological punting is this. I don’t have to

2598
02:39:57,690 –> 02:40:01,529
know the answer to that, to how it, to your question of

2599
02:40:01,529 –> 02:40:04,410
how, who does it serve or how will it be served? I don’t have to

2600
02:40:04,410 –> 02:40:08,210
know the answer to the question. All I have to know, all I have

2601
02:40:08,210 –> 02:40:11,840
to recognize, I think in my, in my humble thought

2602
02:40:11,840 –> 02:40:15,120
process, all I have to recognize is the

2603
02:40:15,120 –> 02:40:18,960
patterns of behavior and the, the

2604
02:40:18,960 –> 02:40:22,280
bricks that are being laid out towards a particular end.

2605
02:40:22,680 –> 02:40:26,000
And then I have to bring, and this is where wisdom comes in. I have

2606
02:40:26,000 –> 02:40:28,760
to bring in my understanding of human nature

2607
02:40:31,400 –> 02:40:35,120
and make those two things click together. While also, and

2608
02:40:35,120 –> 02:40:37,720
there’s two other things we have not brought up today, but I’m going to close

2609
02:40:37,720 –> 02:40:41,440
on this while also acknowledging that there is

2610
02:40:41,440 –> 02:40:44,840
free will and conscious consciousness among

2611
02:40:45,160 –> 02:40:47,960
human beings that we do not fully understand.

2612
02:40:49,080 –> 02:40:52,760
And it operates in ways completely different than mine. And we. Correct.

2613
02:40:52,839 –> 02:40:56,280
I love, I love how much time we spent talking about that. Right. Because

2614
02:40:57,880 –> 02:41:01,240
it, you know, I have these ideas, have these perspectives.

2615
02:41:01,480 –> 02:41:03,750
It’s a result of the path that I’ve walked on, the experiences that I’ve had

2616
02:41:03,900 –> 02:41:07,540
had. Right. And I don’t begrudge anyone else for believing or not believing the things

2617
02:41:07,540 –> 02:41:10,980
that I do. But the thing that I love so much about these conversations with

2618
02:41:10,980 –> 02:41:14,540
you is because you bring enough of the context

2619
02:41:14,620 –> 02:41:15,820
to where it’s like,

2620
02:41:19,340 –> 02:41:23,140
how do I say this? I know you have, this is not bottle fed

2621
02:41:23,140 –> 02:41:26,980
information. You’re not, you’ve not been indoctrinated. And then you’re like, well, here’s why

2622
02:41:26,980 –> 02:41:30,780
I, and it’s just this, you’ve never. Right. You’ve sat with your ideas.

2623
02:41:30,780 –> 02:41:34,460
Right. I, I think you wear them rather intentionally. Right. And

2624
02:41:34,460 –> 02:41:37,900
when you’re, when you’re in the situation to where you’re the minority and you

2625
02:41:37,900 –> 02:41:41,740
adopt the thinking of the majority, it’s always an intentional reason. Right.

2626
02:41:41,900 –> 02:41:45,540
But it’s, it’s whenever the majority is trying to make it so that way

2627
02:41:45,540 –> 02:41:48,940
it’s hard to hear any other thinking other than what they like.

2628
02:41:49,339 –> 02:41:53,180
That’s where I take issue. Right, right. Right. And if

2629
02:41:53,180 –> 02:41:56,980
I had been born in a different time, I would

2630
02:41:56,980 –> 02:42:00,220
have been a different person. And that seems Like a glib statement to make,

2631
02:42:00,770 –> 02:42:04,410
but it’s absolutely true. But it’s absolutely the truth, Right? Yeah. And so the

2632
02:42:04,410 –> 02:42:08,090
people who will be born, my grandchildren, right. I was

2633
02:42:08,090 –> 02:42:11,770
joking with. With my wife about this in a different kind of context a

2634
02:42:11,770 –> 02:42:15,170
while ago, and I just said, you know, our grandchildren are going to say things

2635
02:42:15,170 –> 02:42:18,850
to us that we will not understand. We have to be prepared for that.

2636
02:42:19,010 –> 02:42:22,530
We have to be prepared for the idea that they are going to come

2637
02:42:22,530 –> 02:42:25,650
from a worldview

2638
02:42:26,440 –> 02:42:30,040
that will be as separated from our formative worldview

2639
02:42:30,200 –> 02:42:33,880
as we were from our parents. Formative worldview. Yep. And

2640
02:42:33,880 –> 02:42:37,640
we’re gonna say they don’t get it, right? Exactly. They’re gonna

2641
02:42:37,640 –> 02:42:40,960
think, well, word us out of touch, right? And. And if we look at every

2642
02:42:40,960 –> 02:42:44,760
generational pattern, like, including the one that we were complaining about earlier, right, with

2643
02:42:44,760 –> 02:42:48,040
all the boomers and I mean, it’s the same thing, right? Same thing. And

2644
02:42:48,600 –> 02:42:51,870
let’s not make it a stupid generational thing, and let’s just acknowledge that it’s

2645
02:42:52,100 –> 02:42:55,900
progress, that we’re. That we’re advancing, we’re getting better, and that means that

2646
02:42:55,900 –> 02:42:59,740
we have to kind of slow down and re. Reassess our situation, the rules and

2647
02:42:59,740 –> 02:43:03,380
our standards and our culture and stuff like that. But I think it’s

2648
02:43:03,380 –> 02:43:07,060
super easy to try to hold on to William tradition

2649
02:43:07,380 –> 02:43:10,900
because it’s easier than change, right?

2650
02:43:11,140 –> 02:43:14,940
And so I not. Not to lean too much in the political kind of

2651
02:43:14,940 –> 02:43:18,200
realm or whatever, because I try to stay out of it. I think. I think

2652
02:43:18,200 –> 02:43:21,960
that one lane has a very tight message that is very easy

2653
02:43:21,960 –> 02:43:25,680
for everyone to understand, right? Small government, less taxes, have

2654
02:43:25,680 –> 02:43:28,040
more freedom, you know, and everything else like that.

2655
02:43:29,400 –> 02:43:32,160
And I think it’s easy to fall into that. Can’t tell me what to do.

2656
02:43:32,160 –> 02:43:35,720
Absolutely. Right. And so then we. We start, you know, and then

2657
02:43:35,880 –> 02:43:39,680
we don’t continue to inform ourselves, right? We don’t continue to go learn. We

2658
02:43:39,680 –> 02:43:42,920
see something that we like and we. And we. We learn 20% of it. And

2659
02:43:42,920 –> 02:43:45,610
then we enable the device done in Kruger effect and run around like we’re, you

2660
02:43:45,610 –> 02:43:49,330
know, crossfit, you know, vegans and everything, you know, and it’s like,

2661
02:43:49,330 –> 02:43:52,130
oh, okay, cool. Yeah, you should stop eating meat. How long have you been vegan?

2662
02:43:52,130 –> 02:43:55,090
30 minutes. But it’s the coolest thing ever, you know, it’s like, cool, come back

2663
02:43:55,090 –> 02:43:58,090
and talk to me after like 90 days, because I don’t even think you know

2664
02:43:58,090 –> 02:44:01,810
what you’re getting into, right? And it’s just easy, right? Like,

2665
02:44:01,810 –> 02:44:05,530
and when you. When you understand the levers of rhetoric and persuasion

2666
02:44:05,610 –> 02:44:09,290
in psychology. There

2667
02:44:09,290 –> 02:44:12,790
are people who just, just want ease, right?

2668
02:44:12,790 –> 02:44:16,510
Oh, yeah, get that and bottle feed ease to people that are looking

2669
02:44:16,510 –> 02:44:20,350
for it because they’re, they’re struggling. They have something else. Like hope

2670
02:44:20,350 –> 02:44:24,070
is a, hope is a tasty medicine that goes down pretty rough.

2671
02:44:24,710 –> 02:44:28,550
Yep. I’m gonna let that be the last

2672
02:44:29,350 –> 02:44:32,990
word with that, that I, I

2673
02:44:32,990 –> 02:44:36,390
promise you all that we would and we would pose a bunch of

2674
02:44:36,390 –> 02:44:40,150
unanswerable questions and at least have a compelling conversation.

2675
02:44:40,710 –> 02:44:44,550
And it’s been, it’s been over three hours and I want to thank John

2676
02:44:46,390 –> 02:44:49,750
for joining me today, for challenging us,

2677
02:44:50,150 –> 02:44:53,949
for challenging me, for allowing himself to be challenged not

2678
02:44:53,949 –> 02:44:57,710
only by Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and the ideas that

2679
02:44:57,710 –> 02:45:01,550
are in it, but also by the ideas that come out of

2680
02:45:01,550 –> 02:45:04,400
it as it moves forward

2681
02:45:05,520 –> 02:45:09,360
in history and in time. So with

2682
02:45:09,360 –> 02:45:12,960
that, well, we’re

2683
02:45:12,960 –> 02:45:13,280
out.