Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein w/ John Hill and Jesan Sorrells
Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this
is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,
episode number
161.
Yes, we are rolling on and on. We are
almost three quarters of the way fully through
2025 and well,
we're in the middle of our Sci Fi Month, so
let's go ahead and get this started. From the most important book
in the Torah, or what the Gentiles term the Old
Testament, comes this interesting story that acts as
a chapter break in the much longer story of
the seemingly, or must have seemed to him,
interminable exile of a man named Moses.
And I quote, Moses agreed to stay with the man who gave
his daughter Zipporah to Moses in marriage.
Zipporah gave birth to a son and Moses named him
Gershom, saying quote, I have
become a foreigner in a foreign land.
Close quote Exodus 2:21
22 KJ V
or in other translations the text reads I have become a
stranger in a strange land.
Our book today is probably the best attempt
by any human being that I've read to date
to attempt to construct how a non human mind, a stranger in
essence, would operate in what to them and
to their perception of reality would seem like a very
strange land. Meaning earth. Indeed,
there is an idea in philosophy and in
psychology called theory of mind, and it states I got this from
Wikipedia, the following in psychology and
philosophy, theory of mind, often abbreviated T o m,
refers to the capacity to understand other individuals by ascribing mental
states to them. A theory of mind includes the understanding that
others beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions and thoughts may be different
from one's own. Possessing a functional theory of mind is crucial for
success in everyday human social interactions. People utilize a theory of
mind when analyzing, judging, and inferring other
people's behaviors.
But what does a theory of mind mean when the mind theorizing about
other people is as unlike a human mind as an
ant's mind is unlike an elephant's mind?
And what does all this theorizing and empathizing mean when we throw
into the mix the mysteries of Mars, predicting an
impregnable human future, and of course, whatever might
or might not have happened at Roswell
all those many years ago, as was
postulated on that great 1990 show of which I was a big
fan, the X Files.
Today, on this episode of the podcast, we will be
exploring probably what are some unanswerable questions
by exploring insights provided for us from a book
that the Library of Congress named as One of the 88 quote
unquote books that shaped America Stranger
in a Strange Land by Robert
Heinlein Leaders, there are
more things floating around in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in
whatever your current philosophy might
be. And of
course, we will be joined today on our show
by our co host, rejoining us from episode number
159 where we discussed Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep? Back comfortably and safely
from vacationing in an undisclosed
location deep in the heart of the American west, which we had to believe several
times because he was a ruffian and couldn't control himself.
Episode 159 John Hill,
aka Small Mountain how you doing, John?
Thank you for protecting me from myself and weeping out
any bad attempts to kind of share where I was. We are back in
the saddle. I know everyone is very confused when I do take a vacation. Believe
me, it was kind of confusing for me as well. But we're back in the
saddle and I am so excited to talk about this book
with you because for anyone who's listening to this,
this was my idea, by the way. Right? I don't know. I don't know if
you're going to bring that up or not, but I'm the one who floated this
book to you and I can't wait to hear
what your thoughts are on it. So this book,
for lack of a better term, I won't say struck me dumb,
but I could definitely see where 30 years ago, if
I had read this when I was 15 or 16, and then some
somewhat more impressionable years, particularly with my
viewing of the X Files. I'm going to bring that up here
extensively. And something else on the show, which I almost
never get into my literal
encyclopedic knowledge of conspiracy theories of
all kinds. You laugh, but there
are. There are. Well, there are.
When I talk about conspiracy theories, I'm one of those people
that tells other people that are getting into conspiracy theories now to
don't do it. Don't, don't do it. It's. It's. It's a
rabbit hole. And if you go down it, there's
never an end. I'm like, I'm like. I'm like, what's his name?
Not Lithgow. Who was the father in A National
Treasure? Who yells at Nick Cage?
Was it John Voight or something? John Voight. Yes, it was John Voight. John Voight
was the actor. He was. He had a great line as the dad. He's like,
there's never. You're never gonna find a treasure because then there's gonna be another clue
and there's gonna be another clue and then there's gonna be another clue and there's
gonna be another clue and this is gonna be another clue and there's gonna. Be
another clue and you never gonna get to the end of it. And he's like
all frustrated, yelling and then he runs out of the room. He was right.
Maybe not that movie, but that's.
If I'd read this book with the way I was
deeply influenced by conspiracy theories and not for like a little bitty
tiny bit of time. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All
of my teenage years and a good chunk of my twenties were, were, were
phenomenal around what may be
going on on the underside of the world. That is not, quote, unquote, common
knowledge. And so
that's why I brought up theory of mind. This is why I brought up X
Files. This is why I brought up what may or may not
have happened at Roswell, by the way. A conspiracy theory that began with
absolutely no help from the Internet. We'll talk about that here today.
So this book would have literally probably struck me
dumb if I had read it earlier now, having been
through all that and having come
out somewhat
scarred on the other side.
The most, huh, ever in history. Well, I'm like Jay
Z. What scars will scab. What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do
to me? It's fine.
I look at Heinlein, I looked at this, this piece of writing a little bit,
a little bit differently, but I still have that.
There's still that 15 to 18 year old Haysan in there that's
still yelling at me that I'm a punk. And so it's fine.
So we're going to explore Heinlein, we're going to explore the theories, we're going to
explore the ideas, we're going to explore the big themes from this.
I would encourage people to go back and listen to episode number 160, which is
our intro episode where we talk about Heinlein's background, we talk about who
he was, how he came to write this book.
Something that's fascinating that I would like to bring up here. And I don't know,
John, if you know this, but he was a person
who he, he claimed, he alleged that
he finished writing this book in, in 1950,
which I kind of actually believe. And then he withheld the, the
manuscript for 10 years from publication. He made a
decision to censor, for lack of a better term, himself, because he
didn't think society was ready for his ideas. And
so I Look at it. And I have to
put it in the context of that, of that writing, where he
goes in the book. And then of course, there's things that.
And we'll talk about many of these things today on the show, but there's things
that have popped out of the ether that
he had no bead on, like zero beat on whatsoever.
And yeah, so we'll talk about all of that.
As usual, I will point out that this book is viciously protected
by copyright. So we will not read directly from the
book. We'll summarize sort of some overarching themes
from the book so people can get a flavor of this. By the way,
can I add a. Little color to this? Yeah, go ahead. Add a little color
while I'm turning towards the first part. Yes, go ahead. Now, because
I didn't realize this. Are you reading the unabridged version or are you reading
the mass market original version that was originally published?
I am reading. Let me see, let me look at the copyright. I am
reading the original version, not the mass market version.
Okay, what's the date? Let's see. I have
1961. And then renew
1989 by his wife Virginia, and then
assigned 2003 to the Robert A. And Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust
by Penguin Random House. So
what, what is fascinating to me about this whole thing, okay. I have a lot
of history around Heinlein in this book, specifically because I was
11 when I read this book, right? Okay. I had gone to my brother.
My brother was five years older than me and a half brother. And so his,
his dad had all this pulpy science fiction, right? So the Burrows,
the Chronicles of Mars. Right. And you know, very
wide but very pulpy science fiction fantasy stuff. And so
I'm reading a lot and I'm in fourth or fifth grade and I go to
my brother and I was like, hey, do you have any books I can read?
I'm tired of Judy Bloom and Beverly Cleary and stuff. And he was like,
yeah, okay. And he goes over and he starts like looking at his
shelf and he pulls some books off of it and he's like, don't
tell mom, okay? You know, I'm not gonna tell mom and everything else like this,
right? And so in those books were,
I mean, books that were not really, I mean, 11 year
old. I mean, there's, there's, there's so much going on in this book. Right.
But this was in, this was in 90, right.
So I had never read the full unabridged version of this. Right. The version
that I read was the, was the version that is kind of
talked about in this book and it was always very weird because this
wasn't my first Heinlein book. Right, Heinlein. Heinlein. Heinlein. I don't know
exactly the right way to say it. We're just gonna go along with it. Rah.
Is how I think about them in my. So my path
to here was like Number of the Beast was the first thing by his that
I had read and just because the title sounded cool and it's about multi
dimensions and time travel and all this very interesting stuff, but the themes were the
same. And so like this was actually my third, third or fourth book
by his that I had read and it wasn't my favorite, right? Because
I was already getting used to this kind of Sorkin esque dialogue
that happens between high line characters and that wasn't
really very prevalent in the. The, the other version of it. So
fast forward to reading this book. Right?
I go pick it up off the shelf. Now the, the reason why me and
my wife are together is actually because of this book. Because the first night we
hung out after meeting up and going and having a drink together, we get,
you know, back to her place, we're hanging out just as friends and all this
other stuff, nothing crazy happened. And I see this exact book
on her shelf and I was like, oh, I can have different kinds of
conversations with this person and stuff like that. And that's what led to the relationship,
right? So she is a fan of his stuff as well. And so
she'd read this one and it was her favorite book and was always very confusing
to me. Why? Right? Because to me it always felt the, the
stunted of. Of all the material that I'd read.
So fast forward to this. I'm reading it again. It's been a very long time,
right, since I'd read it because it wasn't one of my favorites. And I'm going
through this book and I'm like, oh my God, like this is completely
different, you know. So I plowed through the book last week, right? I read most
of it over the weekend. I think I read about 300 pages between Saturday and
Sunday and I'm like floored. But I'm also
realizing because I'd read the foreword by his wife about the path of this book
and how publishers were asking him to take it down and to make it smaller
and everything else like this. So my point, my point of view on it was
that he knew that it was going to be polarizing and probably people weren't going
to be ready for it. And so I think he took
some meat out of it. And I think they were still concerned about how big,
like, how much it would sell, right? And of course they're going to talk about
it as, like, they try to censor it and stuff like this, but, like, it's
a business, right? And you can't take too big of a flyer, right? You got
to put out something that sells. And when we look at the impact that this
book had during that time, I think there's a lot of room to be like,
hey, the publishers had some good perspective on chopping
this thing down into something that would sell and actually have a
chance to, like, impact. But holy crap, I finished the
book and then I went sleuthing to try to go figure out, like, what are
the differences between this book and, like, as a writer,
oh, man. Like, he didn't just go through and, like, chop out huge chunks. He
went and he rewrote the whole thing, right? So, like, you
have to go page by page to see the differences, but everything that comes out
of it is the depth that makes the book so good. In my personal.
Because now after reading it the second time, I'm like, huh, how did I short
sight this book about? You know, because it's talking about philosophy and, you know,
religion and great wealth and appreciating and, like, all these things that,
like, I now have, I guess, connection to.
And I'm like, God, like, why was I. And then I. I actually had to
go Googling and researching, and then I found this guy who kind of talked about
the differences between the original version and the unabridged version. And then, like, there it
is, right? That depth, that nuance, all of that stuff. And
here's the thing, some people don't like it, but if you're. If you're a fan
of his writing, you're probably not going to like
the shortened up version. And that was a whole interesting
kind of like, moment yesterday after finishing the book and then being like, okay, cool,
I want to go see what I missed. And I hadn't missed anything. But
the depth of it was not present at all. Very
fascinating for me as a guy who loves this author, likes this book a
lot, coming to it now after a person who thinks and studies these
things that I pay attention to. Well. And Heinlein came
to, I think, writing this book in
a way that was reflective
of sort of an
overarching ethos that he held as a human being. And his
overarching Ethos was.
Mid. Not mid, early, early 20th century progressive. He was an early
20th century progressive and everything that goes along with that.
So, you know, one of the things that we've
explored or one of the themes that we've explored on this podcast heavily
is when you read fiction looking for leadership lessons from the
early 20th century. And I'm talking about the Dos
Passos and the Fitzgeralds and the Hemingways and the Faulkners
and the, the, you know, the folks in that realm, and then
everybody that kind of comes off of them, black,
white, female, doesn't matter what genre,
because they were all sort of aping the same kind of thing because of what
happened at the end of World War I. Right. And they're trying to redefine World
War I. So Heinlein was born in what, 1907.
And so being born in 1907, he would
have, I mean, he tried to get into the military
and, and then did serve in the military. He missed World War
II by literally that much. And so
these. He had two different strains in his two parallel
tracks in his head that most
moderns don't understand. Like we, we in the modern era,
on the other side of the progressive era and on the other side of the
fall of the Berlin Wall. Politically and culturally, in America,
we think that anybody who has served in a war, for good or ill, we
think that anybody who has served in a war must be reflexively conservative.
We just think that. And part of that, it comes out of our Vietnam experience,
where the people who went and served in that war
may have been more reflexively conservative than those who were at Woodstock.
Okay, and that's, and by the way, that's, that's. This is just
sort of the nature of culture and how the culture, like, flows through a nation
state. Right? But if you look at the progressives
from the early 20th century, I give those people a lot
of grace. And normally I'm not a person to do that, but I give those
people a lot of grace politically because here's the thing. They didn't know
the things we know about Marxism. They didn't
know the things that we know about Soviet Communism. They didn't know the
things that we know now about the purges in China. They
didn't read the writings of Mao and Lenin until later
on. There was actual embargoes on information
getting out of the Soviet Union that would have
caused people to be less, shall we say,
supportive of even watered down
versions of that, like Upton Sinclair. If Upton Sinclair had had access to the
information that Walter Durante had access to. He probably wouldn't have been
as progressive and as progressively
socialist in his writings as he was now. With that being said,
George Orwell, who was a European, 1984,
Animal Farm, had access to all that information because Europe's right there.
He had access to all of it. And Orwell was still
a card carrying socialist. He believed you could
slice that cake very thin and get something off of there
that didn't have the gulags and the purges and the famine and the non and
the pogroms and the nonsense and the detention camps and the concentration camps. He
believed you could throw away all of that and you could still have something that
would move the world. And so when he writes 1984, when he writes
Animal Farm, those are polemics against Stalin,
okay? He's the first political writer against Stalin
in a major genre of any kind post World War II.
Now Heinlein, on the other hand. Let's talk about
science fiction. Science fiction at the time when Heinlein even took
it up wasn't. I mean, you had H.G. wells and
that was really about it. And you talk about Edgar Rice Burroughs and
Pulpit and that was. It was considered to be kids stuff, right? Like comic books,
right? It was considered to be kids stuff. And so what Heinlein, along with Arthur
C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov did. Oh yeah, was they
all those guys. And I would throw Ray Bradbury in there, although he's not thrown
in there, but I would throw Ray Bradbury in there. And only because he, he
wrote in multiple different gen. Rose had refused to define himself. God bless him. I
love that man for that. He refused to be pigeonholed. He's like, no, I'm just
a typist, it's fine, just whatever. Love that.
But. But those guys
took a genre that was considered to be stuff to your point that
you would find on a kid's shelf and made it something that adults
could appreciate. And Heinlein, look, Heinlein was going to put
in his progressivism, he was going to put in his ideas about politics, he was
going to put his ideas about philosophy, he's going to put in his ideas about
the potential human future, but he was also
going to bring over that, that military quote unquote, discipline
into his writing. And I see, I see strains of that. Not
even strange of that. That's all over the place in Stranger in a Strange Land.
Like you talk about him rewriting certain sections. The only way you can do that
is if. Is if you have a. Not rigid, but you
have the discipline that comes from. And you know what I'm talking about here. The
discipline that comes from having marched around and wrote in
ROTC for 10,000 years and then thinking that that was the thing you were
going to go do, you know? So I look at
Heinlein as a rich
repository of this kind of, that kind of
the merging of those two tracks of thinking, the military track, of the
progressive track, in a way that we really not
can't get to. It will take a while for us to come out of this
cultural moment to get to somebody like that again, because we're just
too bifurcated right now. We're just, we're just too bifurcated on our thought process.
So I, I love that,
right? Because, like, it's been a long time since I've really kind of like, steeped
in a bunch of hindland and everything else like this, right? And getting, getting back
used to Jabal Harshaw as a character and how he, how
he, you know, goes around and stuff. Like, this was
interesting, right? You know, like, by the way, as I'm, I'm the son
of a lawyer, everything that Jabal did, and I've been Sarah,
my lawyers my entire life. Is this on the podcast for a while now.
That's exactly what lawyers do, exactly how they behave. He nailed it
perfectly. I mean, I mean, like,
now I do think that, I think it's easy to
read this book and see Jubbal as, like, this, you know,
out of touch, out of date Persona, and he treats women badly. And, you
know, and like, I, I, I saw some reviews of people just like, pending this,
like, badly and everything, but then get to the end of it, right? Where he
kind of like, shares some of the stuff of, you know, like,
I really appreciated that, that one conversation where I think he calls in Anne and
he's like, have I ever been rude to you? And, and she was like, no.
Right? And, and to me, that was such, like, a moment of like, there
is, there is, and I hate this. I
do not like this. But all the people that I rail against
who are going to treat people as disposable or specifically
salespeople, and you don't want it enough, so we're just going to write you off
and everything. They, if they run enough volume, they will filter out
and be left with people who are motivated by the way
that they're motivating them. Right? And relationships, I think, are
the same thing, right? Some people want a stronger presence and then
other people don't. Right? And so I was kind of going through it and then
I was kind of like, oh God. Like, you know, and then. But wait
a minute. Some. That's what some people are looking for, right?
And. And like, I need to kind of remember that whenever, whenever I get a
little judgmental and heavy handed with it and stuff like that, because it's just not
for me. And that's okay. Right, right, exactly.
Let's do this. Let me summarize part one so people have sort of an idea
of what it is. Yeah, sorry. We got super centric because it's
good. It's good. Yeah. There's so much in this.
There's a lot. Yeah, there is. I can only read maybe
a few pieces here. So I'm going to read
just the opening of part one that I have his immaculate origin, and then I'll
talk a little bit about what part one is. And by the way, the book
is structured really interesting to me in an interesting way to me.
There's a part one, a part two, part three, part four, and a part five.
And it's, you know, it's a well over five at least. The version I have
is over 500 pages. And so these pages are.
I mean, these sections are chunks like you have to follow through a narrative structure
in this. And then he very cleverly ties the narrative structure from one
section into the next section and sort of lets bleed and go.
Lets them. Lets each section bleed into the next
so it doesn't feel as if it's bifurcated.
And he sort of is. Is. He's writing in
the mode that weirdly enough, Tolkien and
probably C.S. lewis were also writing in the format. Just
shows up different. Right? It just shows up different. It's the same stuff that we
were seeing in the, in the Philip K. Dick book. Right. Of all this. Like
this, like the thing that struck me was that was how. How wide
the locus is in the beginning and then how he kind of zooms in and
then all of a sudden it goes from. Right. Because like the first two times,
three times maybe, I think it's kind of like, okay, like, whoa, right, we're blown
back out to space and like all these things. The third planet of okay, okay,
okay. And then I do think he does a great job of just gradually
shortening this. And then all of a sudden you're back in there and it's not
a jarring effect. And the thing that I appreciate is that it's
not the, it's not the prologue of the chapter in italics. Right, right.
And so then they don't have to put any like, thought or effort or craft
into how they're gonna. Right? It's. It's lazy writing. It's lazy
world building. Right? And as a guy who reads a lot of science fiction fantasy,
I just like when people figure out a way to weave it in as
opposed to here's three pages of exposition because we're lazy. And you're just supposed to
appreciate it because this is part of how, like not be, better be.
Sorry. Soapbox, deep breath. Don't be. Don't
be a lazy writer in any genre. Well, well.
So it's really hard. And I know this as a
facilitator who spends. I used to spend a lot of my life,
not so much now as I did in the past,
but when you are speaking extemporaneously or even
from notes and you are speaking live to a group, like I just did this
last, this weekend, right? When you are speaking live to a group
or you are speaking extemporaneously
from notes that you have written, but you're not bounded
by that. The hardest thing to do is to do transitions.
That is the hardest thing to do because you not only have to transition yourself,
you have to transition the audience. Which is why on this show
we take a pause and then we do our transition. I love that. Kind of
like this
for part one. His Maculate Origin Once
upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine.
Michael Smith. The first human expedition to Mars was
selected on the theory that the greatest danger to man was man himself.
At that time. Eight Terran years after the founding of the first human colony on
Luna, an interplanetary trip made by humans had to be made in free
fall orbits from Terra to Mars. 258 Terran
days the same for return plus 455 days
waiting at Mars while the planets crawled back into position for the return
orbit. Only by refueling at a space station could the
envoy make the trip. Once at Mars, she might return if she did not
crash. If water could be found to fill her reaction tanks, if a thousand things
did not go wrong. Eight humans crowded together for almost
three Terran years had better get along much better than humans usually did. And
all male crew was vetoed as unhealthy and unstable for married
couples was considered optimum if necessary specialties could be found in
such combination. This is your opening
and it's interesting because this
entire piece, this entire first part is about
the finding of. And it totally
blows you away. When you get like 25 pages in, you realize, oh, this is
what he's doing. A man
is found on Mars by an expedition that goes to
find out what happened to the previous expedition, the one that he initially sets up.
And from that previous expedition, a child was born, but a child that
was raised in a Martian environment, not in
a human environment. In essence, a. Then this is
why I quoted from the Old Testament, a stranger, right,
but was raised in a strange land, but not strange
to him, strange to the human beings coming to
see him. And
the first kind of sort of thing, the first beat, maybe the first thing
that, that I picked up from this book, particularly in reading the first part
of it. It took me a little while to sort of conceptualize where I wanted
to go and talking about this because I was so
not enamored. I was so
intrigued is the word. By the idea that.
By an idea that was actually planted by Ray Bradbury in Martian Chronicles, even
though Martian Chronicles was written after Stranger to Stranger to Strange Land. And we are
going to cover Martian Chronicles, by the way, on the podcast here. So
stay tuned for that if you need a co host. I think
I know a guy. Oh, well, I might not get invited back after asking you
to read this one. I've got. I've got. I've got a guy. I've got a
guy. But yeah, but I think
this book acts as a sequel to Martian
Chronicles because the clever thing that Ray Bradbury does at Martian Chronicles
is he makes a claim that I think Heinlein takes to its logical
conclusion. Even though Heinlein wrote Martian Chronicles,
sorry, Stranger in a Strange Land, probably right around the same time Martian Chronicles was
coming out. They were probably written in parallel, so there's no way they would have
known what each other were, what each other was writing. But it just says that
there's other things in the Zeitgeist other than just when it comes to creativity. There's
other things in the Zeitgeist floating around. Ideas don't just come to one person.
So there's an idea in Martian Chronicles, and it's probably the most intriguing idea that
Ray Bradbury ever came up with. And it is the idea that
Mars changes you more than you change it.
And Heinlein takes that to
its logical conclusion with a child unto us, a child is
born anyway.
And don't worry, that's going to pop up later on. And.
And that's why he. Because Heinlein was also clever and snarky.
That's why he calls it his immaculate origin. Not Immaculate Origin, his
immaculate Origin. So the. The mission goes back to Or a
return mission is made to Mars after the first mission, quote unquote, fails.
The child is found all, all grown up. But having grown up
in low Martian gravity and having grown up around, well,
Martian people, if people is really the term that you want to
use, and he is then. And even he and she.
And gender doesn't really. Doesn't really stick either.
But that person, that entity is brought back to, to Earth
and then from there we kick off into the action.
By the way, he's held in quarantine in a hospital
initially. That creates some problems. And
people are not allowed, human people are not allowed to have interaction
with him with the exception of a nurse named Jill.
That's going to be important later on as well.
One of the things that struck me in the very first section though, beyond just
those things, is I,
I so,
so this book has made me. It's not made me. Has brought me to the
point where I need to admit something. On the show and I talked about conspiracy
theories and things like that, I want to believe.
I want to believe that all the conspiracy theories are true. I absolutely,
desperately want to believe that they are all true. And by the way, true meaning
factual and meaning non falsifiable
against reality. I want to believe that there are
shadowy cabals running things, doing weird stuff. I
absolutely want to believe that. I want to believe that
there are people in power doing weird things and hiding weird things from us.
Because from my perception of reality for many years,
there are. You get to a certain point on explanations of things and it's either
incompetence and stupidity or its
competency and venal evil.
Those seem to be our only two choices. Now, there is a third option. There
is a third option there. And the third option is, and it is a Minority
Report to frame from another book title by Philip K.
Dick, the Minority Report. There is that there are good people
who have stumbled into bad things.
Now, because I filter
most things in the world through the way I
look at the world. And one of the things that influences my worldview. I said
this before with John. One of those things that influences my worldview is my
religion and how I interpret that in the world, both for how I walk through
as an individual, but also how other systems and processes work and how I should
relate to those systems and what I should do.
I do believe that there is good in the world, but I also believe in
the existence of evil. I absolutely believe in the existence of evil.
Now, how we define evil, what label we put on it, who gets
to define it? By the way, this also comes up in part two of
Stranger to Strange Land. I loved Jubal Hershel
Harshaw's sort of having to go through his nonsense with, with
all of that. That was great. I'm glad Heinlein had the courage
and the guts to actually write that down because he thought, I could tell you
for a fact, that's what he thought was going to get him in trouble. I
mean, I think it's much more the religion stuff that happens. Oh, yeah, it was
the religious stuff. It was. But see, the first. He writes the first part of
that and then in part four and five, he takes that to
its logical conclusion and he thought that was what was going to get him in
trouble. We'll talk about this later on. But what he didn't understand
was religion was. And yes, I do
mean Christianity in America was, was hitting its
high water mark in the 1950s, 1960s and
1970s. That was the high watermark of religiosity in America. And
everything has been. And I know secular atheists and
people who come from a more pagan background, people come from other religious traditions. Don't
believe me. I'm deep in the Christian religion. Let me tell you,
the water is going out of the tub. The water
is going out of the tub. We are well on our way to
being, I think it will happen in my generation, in my time, to being as
irreligious Christianity irreligious
as most of Europe. Whether this is a good thing or bad thing, we can
argue about whether this will free us, like Sam Harris, from our
superstition or not, is we could argue about that. And we will, by the way,
we'll argue about that. But it is, as a matter
of factual act actually happening. And
that's what Heinlein couldn't have predicted. But that's going a little bit
ahead of ourselves to pull it back. The question I have for John,
because this is a huge question for me in the first part of this, with
all my conspiracy theory mindset, belief in evil, da da, da, da, da, all this.
Okay, what if. I'm going to ask
you a Ray Bradbury question? Oh, God, am I sitting
down? Sit down. Here's a Ray Bradbury question.
What if the world's out there, are really populated by the leftover
signals of our fever dreams? What if people are going to show up?
People, what if aliens
are going to show up? Not like an Independence Day and
blast us out of the sky, but instead are going to show up and give
us every, every Edenic thing we could
possibly ever want in exchange for our slavery.
That scares me more. That scares me more. That
scares me more. Because we'll
just say yes because we're looking for God.
Okay. I think, I think that statement is, is very,
very important to the, to
the conversation. Right. Because,
oh, man, there's a lot. I'll let you chew on that for a little bit.
No, I, I. So I wrote notes about this book because I, I
had so much to talk about it with you. And there, and there's this line
in here that I wrote. Where is it?
And I didn't put the page number on this, but it says, ben, the foulest
sinner of all is the hypocrite who makes a racket out of religion.
And I read that line and I was like, oh, my. Like I was in
the middle of the flow seat. I've got headphones on. I'm ignoring my family. I'm
trying to finish this book so we can talk about it, everything. And I was
like, oh, my God, where's my phone? Right? So I'm putting this thing in here
because, man, I.
Oh.
I think that the, I think that the effort to tell people
don't even bother thinking about it is a much bigger problem
than, than the idea that, like
that, that it might be there. Right. Because, you know,
whenever
I can see as, as I was reading this book, I can, I could
see how much like, of this I have picked up along,
along the years. Right? The skepticism, the. Yeah.
The pushback against authority and always being concerned and everything else like
this. Right. Because like, I'm reading this book and I was like, oh, this is,
this is. Well, I've read a lot of Highline. Right. Like, I mean, I just
had. So, you know, his idea, like one of his, his
very most popular ideas in all of his books is that, like, if you've not
served in the military, you shouldn't vote right now, he doesn't really talk
about all of that stuff here because it's very contained in the lanes that he's
trying to like, push on and polarize and everything. But, like, you know, he's, he's
a very interesting author. Right. And
I know, I know this is, this is not going to be a super
popular opinion. So I hope anyone who hears this and takes issue with it
is listening intentionally and closely. I think a lot of people
are looking for God as an escape
hatch because they're really scared of death.
Oh, I'd agree with that. I think. Well, and actually, actually I would even go
a step further. I think they're scared of living. I would, I would
agree with, with that whole thing, right, because we talked about this.
We, we talked about this. I think on the last thing, right, I saw this
bumper sticker and it was like, hey, if you're living like there is no Jesus,
I hope you're right. And, and we had this conversation because philosophically for me,
I'm like, do we, do you guys really want the don't have anything better to
do crowd? Because to me, that kind of goes against the idea of the
philosophy behind the whole thing, right?
And that, that to me means. So at the
high, at the high water mark of the 20th century of religion, we were.
Christianity was taking everybody. Everybody. Oh, yeah, I know, I know.
But now what you're seeing as the
wave goes out is you're seeing. Well, I'll
give you a statistic. So among younger millennials and gen
zers, the ones who do attend church, which church attendance is
ridiculously down in the basement with all of them. But the ones
who do attend church, they are not attending mainline Protestant churches.
They're not attending the kinds of churches that
Heinlein saddle rises with the foster rights.
They're not attending those kinds of churches. They're tending. They're attending Eastern
Orthodox, traditional Roman Catholic, the return of the
Latin mass, the return of traditional Protestantism. The
kinds of warfare that people who are not involved with that
world don't pay attention to that's going on right now
is kind of unbelievable. And Heinlein could not have predicted any of that
at all. He would have been totally blind to that would have been totally blind
to that. And so what you're seeing is a return not to,
not, not, not a because. Because younger
millennials and older zoomers and younger zoomers,
too, have already been through the,
the hedonistic pagan stuff of Brave New World.
And they've gotten to the end of, from their perspective, they've gotten to the end
of that. And now they're asking the meaning question, but they're asking
the meaning question without having ever had a
religious sort of underpinning, right? And so if you're asking
the meaning question, but with no religious underpinning and everything else philosophically does
not, does not serve or does not fulfill.
Where are you going to go? Where are you going to go to? The hardest
thing possible, you're going to go to, you're not going to go to the megachurch
with 800 people every Sunday. You're going to go to the
smaller church in your town with maybe 100 people every Sunday and get
baptized. And I'm hearing stuff like this happening
all of the time. And again, not in the media centers, not on the east
coast, not on the west coast, not even, weirdly enough, the place where we live.
I'm hearing about this happening in the massive center of the country,
and it. It gives me a chill because.
Well, for a whole variety of reasons. But one of the things that
we've never successfully done in America ever in a
Christian tradition is we have never.
And Jonathan Edwards was probably. I was talking with a friend of mine who's a
pastor a little bit, not about this, but about something related to this
and it relate. But it relates here. He said that Jonathan Edwards was probably
who was ahead of the Second Great Awakening, back in the 18th century,
just before the Civil War. Jonathan Edwards was probably the best preacher that
America's ever produced that came out of an American tradition that wasn't trying
to do something that came out of Europe. He wasn't trying to replicate a European
religious tradition here. But he. He
got a disease at the age of like, 45 or 46, something like that,
and he died within 48 hours. Oh, wow. Right.
Like, he hadn't even hit, like, his peak. And back in the day,
you started hitting your peak as a pastor when you were in your 50s, because
you were old enough to have known something and live some life. Right? Okay. Well,
once Jonathan Edwards was struck down, for lack of a better term,
you had a bunch of people fall back into that
space. And this is where you get the strains of
Mormonism. This is where you get nlds.
This is where you get sort of the more cultish kind of
things. This is also where the Baptist Church really begins to sort of
take off and really begins to arc out from rest of mainline
Protestantism. The Presbyterians crack up. The
Episcopalians are trying to hold everything together. So all these sects in
America start jostling for believers.
The mid 20th century was the high point of that jostling.
Now we're on the downhill slide of that jostling. And what's happening is,
again, for those people who aren't paying attention to any of this because you're in
a business context or it's just not something that you care about or you're doing
something else on Sundays, like maybe during the New York Times crossword puzzle or whatever,
okay, fine. I'm just here to tell you this is starting.
The concentration of this is beginning, and I don't know
where this winds up. I don't know. I don't know where it winds up at.
But I do know that when people don't believe in anything, they don't just go
to believing in nothing. They're going to backfill that eschatology with something.
And Heinlein do this too, by the way. That's why he wrote about, that's why
he wrote about this. But anyway, sorry, go ahead. I.
Okay, so we live in the south, right? And yeah,
exactly. My, my, my Bible phase was very much a Southern
Baptist kind of mode, right. And I went to, we said you. Were
11 in 1990. Yeah. So you were at the back end.
Yeah. You were at the back end of the Seeker Sensitive movement. You were at
the back end of like Rick Warren and big mega churches and all that kind
of stuff. Yes. And so this is really important because my grandmother was,
was very much a big Bible person, right? And so
whenever I went to her and I, and I told her that I wanted a
Bible, she got very excited, right. And I'm, my parents are divorced.
I'm trying to figure it out and someone invited me to go to church, right?
And I'm like, okay, cool, I'll go to church. And, and
my grandmother's like a Kenneth Copeland fan, right. You know, she's into it, right. And
so every day growing up in South Fort Worth, right, I'm driving past
that gated off compound, it is his out there in the middle of the
boondocks with like razor wire along the top of it. And
there's always these events and my grandmother's going to it and I'm reading this book
and, you know, kind of doesn't feel like
it all makes a lot of sense, you know, in living here in the south
with these mega churches, right? In these, these huge things and the guys with the
planes and, you know, all this other stuff, it does make it very
easy for me to reinforce the negative view that I have. Right. But
that being said, I, I, I go out of my way
to spend time with people who have a spiritual path that is
true to them and does not involve me being a project to
them. Right. Because whenever people, you know, kind of get a
glimpse of like, how I think and, you know, approach different things and stuff like
this. There's a lot of people who are like, john, you want to come church
me? No, thank you. Let's not do that. Right, right. And
it's not, it's not anything. That's just not for me at this
stage, you know, so going
through this book and, you know, being this, you know, progressive person
and you know, trying to think about the future of things as opposed to trying
to hold on to the past of things. It's been very interesting
going through this because I'm not seeing the stuff that you're seeing and
hearing about. I'm just seeing this full court press of, you know,
let's talk about potentially the, the laws of Oklahoma's
Oklahoma school teachers, right, that are moving from certain states, having to go
through a very fundamentalist, religious kind of
vetting to see if you can even teach. So that way they can teach
what, what, what they want to be taught as opposed to different things
like that. So like I can see, I look. At all those things, I look
at all those things, I see them as rear guard actions because, well,
I mean, the water is moving in a different direction already. I think, I like,
I think that they are as well. But like. Okay, let's just, okay,
let's fast forward a little bit, right? If you're, if you're a top tier
teacher who doesn't believe in all of that stuff, are you ever going to go
teach in Oklahoma? No. You're not even going to try? Right. But
I would, but I would assert that a top tier teacher.
I'll frame it this way. If I could look at a top tier teacher's TikTok
algorithm. I don't think Oklahoma even pops up on their
radar. No, I know. Right. And so, and so essentially,
in my not so well informed opinion,
it's like walling off Japan. Sure.
Right. So on a long enough timeline, right, it won't be next week, it won't
be next semester or anything else like this, but a long enough timeline, right. If,
if there are, if there are no progressive ideals coming into the teachers that are
teaching the people, right. What happens to those people,
right? There's, there's eventually going to be this big kind of gap, right,
of not everyone thinks and feels the same way.
Right. So go ahead. Perhaps, I would say
perhaps. And I think Heinlein was anticipating this and this is why
he set up the Foster. Right. Sort of ideal.
My thought is. And this
gets in the aliens piece, right? So my thought is if there
is anything out there that is more advanced than us,
that thing will already know, just like Valentin
Michael Smith did, what's in our hearts and minds, whether
we're walled off from each other or not, and will seek to
provide all of that to every possible individual.
And of course we'll have the means materially to do so.
And now we've got everybody going in this direction Regardless of
whether they're walled off or not. And the people who will really be,
well, the people who will. Who will be, shall
we say, her son and Angra at the party
are going to be people who are going to look at that and go, oh,
that ain't it on both sides, by the way. One side of the wall
or the other side of the wall. And we'll go, that.
That ain't it. And my concern has always been, or my
fear has always been a chill just even bringing this up now. My
fear has always been that there aren't enough people on either side of the wall
who are critically thinking it's going to be a really tiny
teapot. That's my. That scares the hell
out of me. Actually, to be quite blunt, because
that's always my biggest concern, right? Because, like, I don't think that we're
served by, like, the old stuff that, like, my family would talk about when I
was a kid. You know, we don't talk about these things, Right. I don't even
tell Mike who I voted for. I don't think that's ultimately helping. Right.
I think that that leads to these little dead
zones of, you know, understanding other people and asking
questions. Right? And then it evolves down to, please help me understand how you could
even vote for someone else. Well, when you say it like that, you don't have
the language to get it right. And the part that I think
Heinlein does the most amazing job of framing this
up is whenever he has that stinky
character who is Arabic, right. And has
his map of the world based upon a different language that is not English.
And they fundamentally do. I think one of.
If they didn't, if they didn't do this part in the book, no one would
have read the book, in my personal opinion. But him framing that, that idea that
the language create the labels that we use, and if you're not using the same
language, you don't have a conception or understanding of what these things are. Are.
Is. I think, like, I have goosebumps talking to you about
it right now. Because the, the art and the elegance.
Because what I took away from the book is
fundamentally so different than yours, right? Because the thing that I took away is like,
hey, love is the thing that ultimately matters, right? And it's
not whose lane is right and which labels are right. And, and we're okay. Because
that's my biggest frustration whenever I talk with a.
A very Christian, focused Christian who thinks, well,
my lane is the only lane. Everyone else is going to Hell, because all.
Okay, so like, what about this, Lane? Oh, yeah, they're going to hell too. Okay,
so they don't go because they don't go to your church.
There's, there's, there's, there's nothing of value in any
of these beliefs. Absolutely. Right, right. And those people in
my experience have the least actual knowledge and understanding of the
history around these things. And, and it leads to
wanting to put the Bible in the book on this
pedestal of this is all absolutely correct and truthful and
valid. And so that way you can go around and be like, well, yours is
garbage because mine has to be true. Right. So it creates this gap of dissonance.
But this is a strain that has been, it's either been a minority strain or
a majority strain in the American republic going all the way back to the founding.
You know, my wife and I were watching John Adams last night. Great,
great, you know, show. You recommend it?
Oh, I highly recommend it. Okay, for sure.
Yeah. It's the, I watched it myself probably
10 or 12 years ago maybe. And
now, you know, we're home, you know, we homeschool our kids. And so
my wife was like, hey, you know, what's a good thing that, that we could
watch with, you know, my 8 year old that won't like, you
know, be some stupid cartoon. And I was like, well, we were
going kind of going through the movie list last night and we were maybe going
to do Buried My Heart Wounded Nino's like, that's going to be too much for
him. I was like, John Adams is probably good
spot to start because he already sort of understands a little bit
about the American Revolution. He already sort of understands a little bit about
intersections between people inside of the American
Revolution. He doesn't understand the depth of relationships and all of that because he's eight
and everything doesn't have to go to an eight year old. You can drip things
out. It's fine folks. You don't have to like,
anyway, whenever I'm not, I'm not
radicalizing my child right away. It's gradual
process. Not a, not an immediate one. I have patience, I got a long time.
So. So he understands some of the dynamics, understands
some of the things or whatever. And so we could sit down and we could
watch this. Plus like it's got old timey sounding language. There's not a lot of
curtain, there's not any cursing. And the worst thing in there
is that, you know, Benjamin Franklin smokes a pipe or no, John
Adams smokes a pipe. And Benjamin Franklin's Benjamin Franklin. Okay,
so he liked it because of, you know, the visuals and all
of that. But he also was starting to pick up on some of the language,
particularly when they started writing the Declaration of Independence. And
he's quoting back to the show, the
Declaration of Independence. I was like, okay, good. That's in there. That's good.
The point that I'm making is that
in that show, the strain
of religious osity that they show, that was in
Boston at the time, which 200
and what, almost 50 some odd years later, you can't find a strain of religiosity
in Boston to save your life. That
strain was huge in driving the founding.
It was massively gigantic because those people were what, three,
maybe four generations away from the Puritans. Something like
that. Something like that. And so their conception of the
world was very much driven by
not only God saved the King, which they said
completely unironically, by the way, but also
was driven by we need
something else. We need to. As a lawyer
buddy of mine said, we need to close the loop on the
Magna Carta. Right. Which is really what they were doing. They were closing the loop
on the Magna Carta. Does the King have a divine right to rule
or not? What does divine mean?
How do we set up Gods on earth? And it's interesting how they're setting up
Thomas Jefferson too. I'm noticing some things about him that I didn't notice before. How
they set up his. Him as. Him as a character. That was very interesting.
But my point is this. There is that strain that has been in the American
founding ever since the beginning. And then there's cussedness that
just comes off of that. That's irreligious. Like Thomas Jefferson
did. He made his own. And we'll close this in a minute. But Thomas
Jefferson created his own Bible. Most people don't know this, where he cut out all
the parts that he found to be objectionable and just left, like, left like the
red, the red lines from Jesus.
Like, we've been making up our own thing ever since we got here. Yeah.
And that was part of the promise, quote unquote. The way that it was
framed in an American context. That you would be able to come here.
Yes. There would already be people here. But you, please, you can wipe those people
out. Let's not talk about that. Would you be able to come here?
Oh, yeah, let's not talk about that. Oh, and they were fine with it, by
the way. They were like, no, we, we have, we have the guns, we have
the Bible. We have the. Right. What. What's. What's the problem? Like, why is there
an issue? People must be savages. Yeah. Like, come on, what do we do? Well.
Well. And what's interesting is you go to, like, the American Southwest, and the Spanish
talked about. The Spanish talked about the Indians the exact same thing. So
it wasn't just. It wasn't just an English Puritan thing. It was the whole
European conception of the world thing. Right. I mean,
we kind of like how we. We have a. We have a recurring
theme. We do loving to short sight. Anyone else who is not
in Europe blink of an eye at the same technological level that we
are, right? Because. Because we get here, right, and we're on
boats with muskets and everything, and we're like, yeah, but you guys are the simpletons,
so we just deserve to take all this away from you. Like, which, by the
way, we've explored in science fiction. That's the whole point of War of the
Worlds. Absolutely. Yeah. That's the whole point of that book. Is
that someone else or. Or Independence Day. Right. For those of you. The original
Independence Day, like, something comes from the outside and is like, hey, guess what? We're
gonna colonize you and take your. Take your air and your water, because
you're. You don't have the weapons to defend yourself. So
this. This dynamic plays out, you know, in multiple ways across
the American continent. And I just think we're in.
No, not. I think my concern is if my
conspiracy theories are right and we're in a lot of
trouble. And our. And one of the things
that's sort of an undercurrent in this book that's not really talked about is the
failures of elites to understand exactly what. What
Valentin Michael Smith was.
They failed to understand exactly what he was, from the Secretary
General all the way to the guy who was running the Church of
the Fosser. Right? All of the elites, the pre. All of them. Anytime
they had any interaction with him, they had absolutely zero understanding of what they were
dealing with. And I think that's a hell of a lot more common than we
give it credit for. Oh, well, like, I mean, we're saying the same thing. We're
just talking, like. I'm talking about the broader civilization thing, and you're.
And you're talking about the specific. But that's absolutely true. Right? Like.
And to me, that goes back to, like, the language and the map and the
labels and everything else like this. Like, I had a version of this, and
it's so funny that this happened to this, like, I don't like the word luck
really bothers me, right? And whenever someone is like, oh, John,
you only are here because you got lucky, right? Bothers me right?
Now, I also, I don't have a, I don't have
a problem with the word fortunate. I am fortunate to be here,
okay? But luck to me, in my reality,
in my definition of that word, means that like, you
know, these are all just coin flips up to this thing, right?
My, my whole job, the reason I get hired to do the work
that I do is about finding ways to put the coin
flips into our favor, right? As a sales consultant and a sales trainer
and, you know, a conversationalist, I teach people how to
have the kinds of conversations so that way they can be heard and be seen
for who they are. So that way they don't get treated like a salesperson and
can just get rejected out to half court, right? And a lot of times that
just comes down to not being expectant but being
enabling as the other person in the conversation. Like,
I, it's, it's weird because like, as a, as a
big, dumb, tall white guy, right? I get to go through
life with, with a lot of privilege, right? A lot of people are not going
to mess with me like they would If I was 5, 7. They won't talk
back to me like I would if I was a woman or a person of
color. I, you know, I get, I get a whole lot of leeway and then
I put on my role as a salesperson and I
don't get the same leeway, right? I get rejected, I get
cursed at, I get called everything but my name in some of these situations,
right? Just because of the, of the label that I wear. And that label is
tied to a lot of stigma, right? In convention of what selling actually
is, right? So these people who were like, oh, John, you just want to sell
me. Let's not jump ahead. I don't even know if you're tall enough to ride
this ride, okay? That's just how it works in my head,
right? And for all those people who are, who were
looking to hold that up so that way they don't have to spend. Okay,
cool. Like, much like, I'm sure you know
when you're talking to someone who does not put you in the right bucket, I
know when someone is not putting me in the right bucket as a professional person,
right? And so when we're, when I'm going through this book
and I'm seeing all these people intentionally kind of you
know, not intentionally. They think that they're making reasonable
adjustments to this person. Right.
It's because they're moving too fast and not giving anyone the benefit of the doubt.
They're not taking the time to go figure out, okay, what does the man from
Mars label actually mean? What does that mean? In practice, it's just easier
to be, oh, you're stupid. You don't get it. So I'm going to run all
over you, and you're not going to get any of these things. Right? The other
part, I think that the book, I think, does a great
job of is, like, pulling these lanes of,
you know, the. The actual reality not being anything close to
what people perceive it to be. And he does a really good job of
hauling it out, Right? You know, he talks about the part about being really
rich and, like, great wealth and how it's a job in and
of itself. And, like, if you're not. If you don't want that job, don't. Don't
even aspire for it, because it'll. It'll eat you. Right? And I was. And I
was like, yep, that's true. And I got to talk about this with all my
clients, because everyone thinks that they got to be the next Uber or else it
doesn't make sense to start, which is just the dumbest thing I've ever heard. But
it's fine. Let's talk about building something you're actually happy to work in as
opposed to this thing that, like, is sucking the soul out of your butt. Okay,
but we'll talk about that another time. And
from that perspective, the. The Arabic, right? How Jubal
reasons these people out so that way they see the gaps in their
own understanding, right? You know, they do it about wealth. They do it at the
end whenever Ben Caxton goes to the nest and then comes back and he's like,
they're not wrong. You're the idiot. Like, it is so
well crafted. And if you have. If you have any
room to want to think
about other things, right? Think about the other perspective. Because
you sent me the script of this thing, right? And you. And you. And you
had this. This kind of Hasan question in there, right? And I. I know what
you're doing. Right? I get it. I get it. You're trying, right? You're trying to
push that button. And. And I was. I was ready for that question,
right? Because I. I fundamentally. I go back to that. To
that Arabic conversation, right? If we
lived in a culture to where there wasn't a press
for religion, okay? And If. Because when I hear
you talk about how it's trending downward, right. I perceive
you to see that as a negative thing. Okay. Which, and I can understand why
that's fine. I'm not, I'm not here to argue that. But what I think is
the only reason it was that high was because there wasn't room for people to
be themselves and to be like, hey, I don't see value in that. So I'm
going to go off on my own. I'm going to go educate. Am I going
to inform myself? I'm going to go read these other books as opposed
to just listening to the guy in the front of the pulpit tell me that
it's not worth my time. Right? Like, and that's
where that line that I, that I put out to you is. Is so
interesting to me. But I also love how he talks about. And I forget the
page of this book, but he talks about how so much religion is around this,
like, huge leap of faith, right? And they put it up there.
And I could remember going to people like, like, as a kid, right? I'm going
through my. Through my Bible phase. I'm. I'm going. I'm going to disciple now in
church camp, I gave up and gave my testimony because someone told me on
that I'm not a real Christian if I don't do this thing and everything else
like this. And then I'm going and asking, like, how do we
know? How do we know? How do we know? And it was just faith and
faith and faith and faith and faith. And it was just like, cool. Can't go
with you, right? Like, I just. I just can't, you know?
And I think the idea that,
like, language provides a different scaffolding, a different way to think about
labels and interpretations of them and stuff like this. Because if it really is
just about love, right? Is any lane that pushes
love ultimately that bad? I mean, isn't it better than,
like, not believing anything at all and pushing people away? Because
there are so many of the used car sales people pushing that
method of like, hey, you know, the, the foster rights.
I. Dude, I've been in those conversations, right? Well, hey, you're a sinner. You can
still come to church with us. Okay, cool. How excited am I supposed to be
now? So
it's. It's interesting. So I'm. Let. Let me do this. Let's.
Let's transition to the second part because I want to talk about Jubal. Yeah.
Critical to understand all of this.
And I have a. I have a I have another thought underneath, because
I. I don't just read one book at a time. I read like five books
at a time. Same. And I also have. Well, and I also
read books in different genres. So currently I am reading a bunch of books
in the Jewish tradition around the Old Testament. Okay,
okay. And Judaism may have something for
you or an answer to a question that you actually have,
at least, as I understand it from my extremely limited
understanding of what exactly is going on in that faith tradition,
which informs, not necessarily American
Christianity, but which informs Christianity, period,
which I think is also something that Heinlein misses. This is why he leaps to
Islam, which is fascinating to me. And he
didn't leap backward to Judaism. That's incredibly
fascinating to me. And I'm going to tell you why. I think he does it.
Like, Like, I mean, my perspective is, is that he's doing
it to piss people off. Right. I think if he, yeah, if he
made it Judaism, it would be close enough that a lot of people be like,
yeah, we can believe the same things, but. But when we take like in, you
know, it wasn't like in like the 80s and 90s where, like, hey, let's just
put a guy in the Cape, right? And I'm. And I'm forgetting what the actual
technical term is, but let's put someone in Middle Eastern garb and make him the
bad guy, right? Like, sure, yeah. Like, like we're not in that part of the
culture. But I think, I think that
if the, if he hadn't made it Arabic in something so big
and so known and so much of, like, oh, against us, we can't ever be
on the same page. I, I don't think anybody would have. Would have taken the
note. I think he made it Arabic because in
1950, no one knew and no one knew,
very few people in America knew exactly what
was in the Quran. Because
during that period of time in the Middle east, if you go back and look
at it, they were just coming out of Cologne, British colonialism, which is why
the character in here, you know, sort of is framed in British context.
The other thing that had happened, which was a big geopolitical event,
was the Nuremberg Trials. And so you weren't going to go
and beat up on the Jews because from your cultural
perspective, in 1950, they had already been beat up on
enough. I mean, the state of the modern nation, state of Israel wasn't established till
1948. So the time that
Heinlein is researching and writing and putting together his thoughts for this book,
the modern nation State of Israel is beginning to rise. The Nuremberg
Trials are happening. We are actually finding out.
Not actually we. The world is having to deal with,
particularly the secular nation state world is having to deal with
what they let Hitler get away with. Lot of
dynamics there. And so I wonder if
he picked Islam
because it was the. It was the least offensive option out of
the three. That's what you find a point in. In a time
when least offensive meant nobody knew enough to go
and check him or go and correct him. Right. And
he could be sort of the. And I'm not from a malicious standpoint, but
he could sort of be the. The person who kind of defines this as an
exotic other, which Edward Said would come along a lot
later and talk about the othering of the Orientals,
which, to Highland's credit, he doesn't use that term here in the book, but
that was something that was floating around in the 50s and 60s in. In America.
I mean, the Shah of Iran was running things in Iran from 19 or.
Yeah, with Shah was running things in Iran from the 1950s to the 1970s.
I mean, Iran was a modern. If you look at pictures from that time,
Iran was a modern Persian nation state. You had people walking
around, you know, women walking around ungarbed. You know, at the
same time, in Turkey, the. I can't remember the general,
but he had banned all fundamentalism, period, full stop. He said, we're going to
be. We're going to be a. We're going to be a modern
nation state. And so he took all those people that we currently
associate with fundamentalist Islam and he basically locked them up in
gulags and told them to shut up. Which is
like, absolutely the best way to quell any kind of like. Oh, yeah,
it didn't turn out to be a problem at all. No, it's fine. No, that
didn't. That didn't have any ramifications in the latter part of the 20th
century at all. Yeah, not at all. No, no. And the
Saudis at that time. Well, I mean, the Saudi royal family,
by the way, side note, Saudi Arabia is an entire country
named after one family. So
anyway, the Saudi. Just a side note, just something. Yeah, well.
Well, there they were at a time where the
number one rule, and it still is the number one rule in the Saudi royal
family is we control the oil. The oil never stops
flowing. That's the number one rule. After that, you could do whatever you want. After
that, you can start up madrasas, you could be fundamentalists, you could be
Wahhabi, whatever you want. But the oil never stops
flowing and we control the oil. That's why they kicked Osama bin Laden out of
their country and sent him to Afghanistan because they couldn't handle that dude anymore.
Anyway, that was all going to happen 20
years, you know, ahead. Which is why, again, I look at this book
through, you know, the lens of all the historical stuff that happened after
Heinlein wrote it. And so to your point, I get what you're saying,
but I think at that time it was, it was considered an exotic religion
that would have been a religion of modernity moving forward and.
Like, you know, heard. Yes, right. It
is so unknown that he can kind of drop his flags.
Right. And there's not going to be a whole lot of people over him and
everything else like this. But I've read a lot of, a lot of this
guy. Yeah. I don't think he's pulling punches in the name of
will. These people have been beat up enough. So let's find someone else to beat
up on. Right. Like, I, I don't like, like, I don't see him.
I do, I do think after, I mean, I've read a lot of Heinlein that
if he thought that, that the, that, that,
that the Judaism lens would have been better, he would have gone with it. Whether
or not he thought that they'd been beat up enough or not. I think he
was very intentional in the analogy. Okay,
well, let's look at, let's look at Jubal because I want to, I want to
switch to this. And so we pick up in part two
of Stranger in a Strange Land. Part two is called
his preposterous heritage. And the vast majority of part two
is consumed with, and I love it, how he turns the term preposterous. The
preposterous nature of exactly how Valentine Michael
Smith comes into his. Well, comes into his
inheritance, comes into dealing with human beings,
comes into moving from being unable to
walk in, in the different gravity
well of Earth all the way to being able to swim
and transport, transpose and
transport himself out of his body from the bottom of a swimming pool while
there are black helicopters. Remember I said I'm a conspiracy theory guy.
While there are black helicopters flying overhead.
I'm just going to read this little tiny piece here. While Mrs. Douglas
was speaking freely on a subject she knew little about. God, I loved that sentence
so much. Jubal E. Harshaw, LLB, MD,
ScD, Bonvauvant Gourmet Sybarite,
popular author, extraordinary and neo pessimist philosopher,
was sitting by his pool at his home in the Poconos, scratching the
gray thatch on his chest and watching his three secretaries splash in the pool.
They were all amazingly beautiful. They were also amazingly good secretaries.
In Harshaw's opinion, the principle of least action required that
utility and beauty be combined. Hold
on one second. My wife is calling. I'm gonna pause. 3Rd.
All right, let's pick up here from the break.
All right. So. So, yeah, we read that little piece there about
Jubal, and that's a great opening
to what's going to be happening, what's happening in the rest of part
two, where we go into the full
depth and breadth of Jubal Harshaw from the
nature of who he is as a lawyer and as a
barrister of the law and understanding the law and of course, as a
manipulator of the law, as any good lawyer actually
is, all the way to his understanding of
religion and his understanding of. Exactly. Or no, his beginning.
The beginning of his understanding of what exactly?
Valentin Michael Smith, the. The man
from Mars. Right. What exactly is that going to.
To mean? We also learned more about the man from Mars and how
his brain works and how he is
engaging with. With humans in this. In
this new world, right, that he has now been dropped into
unceremoniously.
And the things that occur to me in this section
really focus around. And I love how
part two is called his preposterous heritage, because the beginning
of it was preposterous. Well, not the beginning of it. The beginning of it and
the end of it all the way to the end is preposterous. It has touches
of Elmer Gantry. If you ever read that book
I was reading or I was listening to music this weekend while I was
chainsawing tree limbs on my property, because that's what I do
to relax. And, you know, I was listening to everything from David
Bowie and Space Oddity all the way to Neil
diamond and Brother Love's traveling salvation show,
which is. Which is a. A beat that harkens back
to those. Those proto Kenneth Copeland
preachers roamed the south, saving
everybody, right, Laying on hands and. And delivering the
Holy Spirit, such as it were.
Now, I. I am a person who can only live in the time
that I'm in. I can only live in 2025. I can't live in 1950
or 1855 or 1965. And I came along and
was born after all of that was all over. I was born
in the backwash of cynicism and skepticism. I was
born in that time. I came of age in that time. And not just
cynicism, skepticism around religion, but cynicism and skepticism around institutions
all over the place, including particularly political institutions,
which Jubal spends a lot of his time running up against.
So I will say this, as a character, most of the things that I found
him doing in the book I found to be amusing, but not particularly
surprising because we live in a deeply cynical, a deeply
cynical time that can spot that Noel
no, that is so good
at spotting hypocrisy with ironic
detachment that we don't
recognize sincerity
and we don't trust sincerity. By the way, this is what Valentin
Michael Smith ultimately has to overcome, and this is why he uses church to do
it. But some interesting things that occurred to me. So I have friends in a
lot of different areas, and some of my friends are psychologists and therapists, and.
They. Pointed out to me something that's very interesting. Political
identity is now being shaped by ninth grade,
and I believe I've said that before on the show. And I look at this
as political identity replacing religious identity.
Now, the problem with that, of course, is that political identity is usually based on
a party or a person or a movement. And those things
always ultimately fail, particularly
or shift. Usually they
shift, but particularly when you're young and you're a true believer, you see that shift
as a failure. And this is where you get purity tests. You get ideological
purity tests, which currently there is a party in our country
that is, is, is should have had a revolution but didn't
and is going to have to go through a whole bunch of ideological purity tests
to get back to something resembling a center.
And it's going to be, it's going to be quite, it's going to be quite
nonsensical, I think, over the next 25 years.
And they have no one but themselves to blame, by the way, this political party
in America. But you also see
a weird intersection in our time, speaking of being in our time.
And I have kids that are younger and I've talked about them on the podcast
before. We have, in our time, a state where
human beings use number one, we're the most in America. We're the,
we are the country with the highest rate of diagnosed mental health
maladies out of any country on the planet. We have, we have it by a
country mile. We also have pharmaceutical companies that advertise on our
televisions, which I have a problem with, and advertise every solution
and every pill with every side effect for these mental health maladies.
We're probably the culture that uses the most therapeutic language on the
planet, and yet we have the highest rate of
anxiety and depression out of any other country on the planet. Now, I'm not
making up these statistics. These are things. I'm not making up these facts. These are
things that you can go and find out on Google if you want to.
So we live in a time where social cohesion has
begun to fall apart. And maybe I'm being impacted because the last
couple of weeks I had an amazing social experiment, an amazing
anthropological experiment with a corporate entity
where low trust social cohesion were the name of the lack of social
cohesion were the name of the game. And so maybe I'm being influenced by that
in my looking at this book, but I wonder
in our time, how we can interact with
people. This is why I brought up theory of mind. And so this is a
question maybe for John. And in our time, how can we interact with
somebody? How can we interact with other people when we don't even
have. We don't even have a fully? Even in the best of times,
we struggle with theory of mind and we are not currently
psychologically or philosophically in the best of mind. So
how do we. How can we interact with each other?
How can we interact with each other? We don't even seek to understand each other's
minds. How do we do that? Or. Or is it
going to take someone coming from the outside for us to actually figure
out that, oh my gosh, that person has a. Has a mind,
and oh my gosh, their mind might not work like mine. And oh my gosh,
that's actually something that I might want to be curious about rather
than just stay up. That's uninteresting to me. And I'm going to,
you know, wall myself off on Blue sky or Twitter or
LA or Oklahoma because I just don't need to deal with those people. People.
Yeah. Yeah. How do we. This is, I mean, this is a
question of our time. I know you see it. This is the driving question
of our era. How do we. How do we handle that? How do we use
Heinlein to handle that? Well.
Beautiful question. Like, and I think you worded it very deeply and
intentionally, and I appreciate it. And I think that the hard. I
think the first thing is, like, don't expect to get the
benefit of the doubt. Right. And this is, I'm curious
to your thoughts on this because we were kind of talking about it before and
this is essentially kind of the gist of my, of the book that I have
been working on for a while. So I might be seeing this vein Because I've
been working on it for a while.
No one wants to be changed. First of all, was the very first thing, right?
And I was at a conference and they were talking about that no one will
change until they understand why change is necessary,
okay? And so lots of people
go around and I've done this myself on some of the things that I'm very
touchy about, right? There's certain areas to where I have less room to
give someone the benefit of the doubt that they're, you know, well read and well
informed and everything else like this. And so what it comes down to for me,
this is going to sound so bad. I am a nerdy person.
I'm going to go read the books. I'm going to talk in a language
that most other people don't
want to talk in, right? And this has been something that is, that has
shown up for me on social media, right? I'm a guy who posts about sales
stuff and I try to be subject matter expert in my lane and teach and
try to teach with some depth. And I'll have people be like, man, you're
trying way too hard. This is actually how I communicate.
Not, this is how I talk. This is how I communicate. This is my chosen
vernacular. This is, this is not something I'm piling on so that way I
can look cool on social media. I am this nerd, right?
And so what it comes down to is that
there's going to be a whole lot of people that will never
be open to hearing anything contrary to their beliefs
because they don't see me as being on the level to have anything to say,
right? So, and this is weird sales
perspective. If you don't see me as a human being, I'm out the
door. I can go find someone else to talk to. I don't have time to
sit here and be. Jump. Jump through someone's
flaming hoops. The sales people are all these things and
everything. I don't, I don't do that. I just go find other people to go
talk to, right? So I'm not trying to bend people over to my
ideas. And the thing that I tell all the founders that I work with, if
they don't align on the philosophy, the details in the proposal don't fundamentally matter,
right? And, and I'm sure that you have on your lane met a lot of
people who are like, you know what? Leaders aren't developed, they're just born. We shouldn't
have to teach them anything, right? And so in that mode, the
philosophy shuts down. Any room for bargaining, working
together, opportunity, or anything else like this. And as a
sales professional who tries to teach people and show people,
don't fight with people in the streets about things that you're never going to change
them on because it's like going to Thanksgiving with your. With your one uncle who
just doesn't agree with you about anything and has known you since you were in
diapers and can't even stand to hear that you have anything contrary
to what he believes. Because his whole, his whole world view is that the world
revolves. We're never like, don't even have conversations with those
people. Right? Because until you're willing to walk away from that person and
be like, hey, we're not going to get anywhere, they're going to treat
you just like they treat every sales professional on this. You just want to sell
me. You just want to win me over, right? So the sheer caliber of
being able to be like, hey, cool, you're not going to listen to anything I
have to say, and that's fine, Uncle, I'm going to go over here. See you
next Christmas. Well, I'm not trying to run you off. Like, I get it, you're
not trying to run me out, but you're not interested in having the same kind
of conversation position than I am, right? So there's an I. There's an
idea in, in the New Testament where Jesus sends out his
disciples. Not
again, not making this about religion. Just there's an idea that triggered in my brain
when you said this where he sends them out. And it is
a salesman. It's. Jesus loves salesmen. Actually,
interestingly enough, this is how, you know, he sends them out and he
says, go to the towns of the villages, tell them everything that I'm doing. Basically
sell me, right? And if they won't accept, and this is the Hasan
Sorrell's interpretation. So those of you who are more biblically accurate can slam me upside
the head later on. And it's in Matthew, might be in Luke, it's
fine, whatever. And we could argue about it in Luke. It's fine. Actually won't even
argue about it. You could argue about my interpretation of it. It's fine. And you're
gonna say I'm like being irreverent or whatever, and I'm not. Jesus likes the irreverent
too, so. Oh, he was irreverent in his own time with the
Pharisees. Just read the entire book of John, please. Give me a break. So
he says he sends out his, his disciples to all the villages.
And he says, you know, if they will take you in. And by the way,
with only a staff and a pair of their shoes, which back in the day
was, please, that's all you had. Right?
And he said, if they, if they won't accept what you have to say,
shake the dust from your sandals in the
town and go to the next town. Yeah. That is the
ultimate like, salesman move. To your point. Why are you
not. You know what, it's fine. You have a good day.
I'm not for you, and that's okay. Now here's where it
goes sideways. As a, as a sales coach and sales consultant,
right. Is the people who were, who
were sold on the idea that they're helping other people
love to lean into the fact that I'm helping, I'm helping, I'm help. No, you're
selling. Right. And as the card carrying
professional, I can tell when there's a difference between help and selling.
Right? And these
people have sold themselves. And I don't even know where this comes from,
right? Because I like, I know all the Bible verses
just, just like you do of like, hey, take the plank out of your own
eye and all this other stuff that happens, right? I'm just like, hey, just go
walk your path and go do your thing. Don't make it a salesman thing. And
then also like, hey, if they don't want to be with us, don't, don't, don't,
don't try to force it. But we still had people who were going around
trying to make everyone else their project and everything else like this. And you know,
it's,
I can't, I can't adequately talk about how
uncomfortable it is to not go to church. Living in Texas
and being in a customer facing role, it
is so prevalent. John, where do you go to church? Oh,
we're between churches. I gotta make up a line because like, you
know, it's not popular. You know, like I, I,
one of my, one of my stories that I share with everyone is the last
time I lied to a prospect and it was sitting at the bank and my
daughter was an infant. I'm talking to them about investing some of their money into
the thing, right? And they see a picture of my daughter and she's an infant.
Right on. You know, because I mean, she, she was an infant during the time
and they were like, hey, beautiful daughter, thank you
so much, I appreciate it. And they're like, how old is she? I was like,
she's months and some change. I forget exactly how old she was. And they say,
well, you better get her in church before she's three. And me
being me, I'm like, oh, why? Like, why do
you say that? Let's. I'm. I'm genuinely curious. That sounds like
it's coming from a place of distinction,
not preference. You know, it's like, what do you mean by that? And like, well,
you want to raise the right way. Okay, does that mean that I'm not
capable of raising her the right way? Right? Because I'm me and I'm always thinking
about all the other questions and everything. And so then I'm like, but wait a
minute, hold on. We're on the clock. Don't, don't, don't go too far down this
path. You know what happens, right? So just dial it down, right?
Because I'm not against anyone else having their faith right? At all.
I want everybody to have equal room and opportunity to believe in whatever they want
to believe, which I think kind of makes me different than a lot of other
people who want everybody to believe what they believe, right? I'm on the
far side of that, right? If you want to, if you want to believe in,
in the Satan. The Satanist church, cool. I don't have a problem with that,
Right? I just fundamentally don't. And so.
But I also know that, like, hey, I, I want, I want, I want this
business, right? I want to help with these people. And honestly, this
thing shouldn't be standing in the way. But I know that if I tell them,
I'm not going to talk about that with you, right? I know where I'm at,
right? So I'm trying to find all the salesy ways that I can get around
this situation without having to copy cause a kerfuffle, if
you will. And so they're like, hey, you should go to. Hey, you know, and
like, will you go to church? I'm like, we're, we're between churches on a very
long, very long gap, you know, kind of thing. And they're like, well, you should
come to our church. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Probably not going
well. Why not? Right? And so
the minute they leave, I have this moment of like, God, like,
you know, and then I was like, I'm not doing that again. I'm just
not. Can't do it. That, that was, you know, oh,
like, I just felt gross, right? And then they
ghosted me and didn't buy anything anyway, right? So then I was like, man, I
did all these things and I lied and like, and like, did all this obfuscation
and they still didn't buy. I'm just gonna be myself. Right. And that was the
beginning of all of these things that I now teach people to do. And
fundamentally, if. Here's what it comes down to. If I need to be in
church every Sunday for you to trust my ideas and opinions,
cool. Go find a sales coach who goes to your church.
I gotta say, I. When you, when
you talk about these kinds of things, we talk about this kind of way.
Yeah. I culturally came out of the Northeast
very different there, Very different up there. And it is almost.
It's almost the exact opposite. But I see it as the same
kind of.
So what occurs in. In Texas or the south around
religious belief in churches. And where that is contained
to me is the exact. Is the obverse. It's the other side
of the same coin of deception.
So when you go from the Northeast to
the south in the Northeast, you never hear, I'm going to make a very small
one, because this is something that jumped out to my wife when we first got
here. No one ever anywhere says, God bless
you, never. Not for anything, please. And
here, it's the most passive aggressive, back of the back of the hand kind
of situation. Right? So you come from a place where no one says it,
and you come to a place where literally they'll hand you the groceries at the
grocery store and say, God bless you. And it takes you a little while
to understand that people don't mean it and that it's a cultural
challenge Now. Well, here's what's interesting. Then you
take it is. And then you take that cultural coding, and
I still have clients in the Northeast, and you take that cultural coding back to
visit that. Those areas in the Northeast where
none of that cultural coding is there, and their cultural coding for all these other
things, and you just begin to see how
they're both sharing the exact same. It's the exact same thing. It's the
exact same thing. And so I've had clients in the Northeast. I've had the
opposite experience. I've had clients in the Northeast who, if I mentioned
anything about church at all, what I do on Sundays, other
than football, which I don't watch football because I don't have time for that
nonsense. But if I talk about anything other than that,
nope, it's immediate turnoff. Matter of fact, I've had clients actually tell me it's immediate
turn off in the Northeast. It's so like. And
so it's so weird to me, because it's fascinating. Do you see,
like, oh, yeah. So. So, because I was thinking about
this, right? As. As I was thinking about this conversation, I'm so excited to talk
to you about it because, you know, your question of, you know, the, the
main question you put in the script that we've not talked about yet, so I'm
not going to ruin it, is I started thinking about, like, okay, how. How different
can it be? And I. And I know that the. That the Northeast is not
nearly as religious as the. As Texas is, right? Not even
close. But, like, the church that I went to was
the church that I went to because everybody in that school went to it.
Right. All the people who lived in Perry Homes went to it. Right. And then
you go there and all the private school people go to it, and everyone is
rich and loaded and like, you know, everyone
has, man, it is. It's rife with judgment, right?
And if you don't have a guide or the right environment or everything,
because, like, I could see a spot to where a smaller church without all that
full press, Southern Baptists, we're going to sell you on. On faith and everything
else like that that I would have, you know, probably had
some room to be like, okay, maybe I can go this way. Maybe I don't
need it to be proved out and everything else like this. But whenever people are
telling me to jump without looking, no.
Right. And it's kind of the same thing that kind of gave me some problems
in the military around the idea and especially after the military. Right.
Because the military kind of ruins you for. For following empty leadership.
Right? Because I have been in the situation to where
I'm. I might have to be called to go die for these things. And the
people that are calling me to do so have gone through the exact same training
that I have. Right. So then I come home and some sales leader
wants to make sales like war and trying to make it out to be like.
And it's like, no, it does not work.
You know, and so I was thinking in
my head of, like, I was trying to kind of have some appreciation for just
how potentially polarizingly different it is up there
because, like, I've not walked that experience, but I do know what it's like
to even going to a restaurant to get a job.
Hey, John, you. You go to church? No, I don't. Okay, good. You can
absolutely work Sundays, right? I mean, it is woven
into so much of how things work.
It's the, it's the, it's the.
My wife and I talk about it a lot. The,
The. The. The Stark differences in culture.
Yeah. And that is one of those. One of
those things that pops up. And it's interesting how human
beings. And this is the core question, right. It's interesting how human
beings sort of try to create high trust and social cohesion.
The tools that they use to do that. Right. Because
number one, it's really hard to trust people who you don't know.
Absolutely. Number two, it's really hard to have faith in
people because you know yourself that you're
not reliable. So your theory of mind, if
it even goes out this far, goes to other people not being reliable as
well. So the expectation is just, well, I'm not reliable. So
of course that guy's not reliable or that woman's not reliable, or that system or
that institution isn't reliable. So course we have to put in all these structures
because if we don't, then all these people will behave like me.
And that leads to all the guys. Wanting the floor
length dresses and. Yeah, absolutely. Right. That's right.
Exactly. I don't trust myself, so. And everyone must be just
like me. So therefore everyone must go through these rules that keep me from having
these thoughts. Yeah, I, I had a whole
conversation with somebody again in this. In the
one day. I'll talk about it on the podcast. But in this whole bureaucratic mishmash
that I went through where I literally said to the person on the phone,
the, the policy you are following makes zero sense
in light of what I have just told you. And yet you are going
to continue to follow the policy. I need you
to think independently from the policy. And you would have
thought that I showed across to Dracula. Oh,
yeah, right. Because that's a direct challenge
to those systems and structures that have
existed because I don't trust myself.
I have low social cohesion with myself. So
of course this policy is the thing that's going to protect me because,
you know, I can't really write. I can't really trust everybody. Anybody.
Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, it was one of those things that kind of jumped out
to me when I was in that interaction.
Are you telling me that the people who rub me the wrong way are just
in the middle of like a Dunning Kruger religious over
compensation kind of situation? Like, like they're all just like CrossFit vegans
and way too excited about it. Yes. They're all getting better at exercise.
And so healthy. Right, Interesting. Okay.
And like, it's funny because
I. So in the things that I read, you know, there's, there's this kind
of like known change that happens, right? That like, lots of people
in their youth don't really have much room for much of a spiritual lane, right?
A lot of people, when they're still figuring out who they are, if there is
a spiritual lane, it comes from indoctrination of the family
into religion and stuff like this, you know, And I,
I don't have a problem with someone who has strong faith, like, you know, I,
I love you, man. You're one of my favorite people, because your faith is
yours and anyone can come ask you about it, but you're not trying to
push it on other people, right? And I have a handful of other
people who are the people that I go ask these deeper questions with and
try to understand their perspective because I know that they can see that I'm, I
really am trying to understand. I'm not trying to pick it apart, but sometimes the
way that I ask questions makes it sound like I'm trying to pick it apart,
right? And that's, that's awareness and understanding that, you
know, the, the way we show up in a conversation is going to bring some
weight to it and stuff like this, you know. So, you know, part of the,
part of the earlier thing is like, I don't, I don't even go try to
talk to anybody about deeper topics unless they have shown
themselves to be thoughtful, intentional, well read, educated and stuff like this,
right? So, like, you and I can talk about things like religion and
censorship and government and race and all of these things, right? And like,
you're one of the people on my short list. Whenever I see something, I'm like,
oh, I don't know how I feel about that. I'm like, I'm gonna go ask
Kayson, right? Because he probably thinks differently than I do and has some
perspective. You know, it's. Well, one of the. Who I can't
talk to without like, well, you know,
come to church, come to church. Come to church. Like you,
in my, in my, in my opinion, if you're carrying around this philosophy, right,
And I'm choosing the word philosophy for just, for very intentional
reasons for just a second, you should be able to explain it to other people.
And I demand the same people of their politics. Agreed.
So if you're going to politics, religion,
these are the big two. The third one, of course, the third pillar, you know,
the third rail is, is, is sexual
behavior and morality around that. Those are the big
three rails, right? You can either be driven off
of or can shock you when you touch them. And
the thing is, and I told this to My oldest son, years and years ago.
No one knows everybody else's story. Matter of fact,
most people don't know their own story enough. You talked
about testimony. They don't know their own story enough to be able to
articulate it to someone else. That's number one. Number two,
we live in a society. And this is why I started off with the medication
piece and the anxiety piece and the depression piece and the
pharmaceutical piece. We live in a society and
culture, and I don't know if we're post capitalist, late capitalist,
whatever the hell, I don't care. We
live in a society that has evolved to a point right now
where we have. This is one of the reasons why I do this podcast. We've
deconstructed everything down to the smallest possible
space. Matter of fact, we're running out of things to deconstruct, and you can only
go so far with that on your social capital
before you wind up having a generation of people, which we do
have now in the millennials, a generation of people that is
struggling to create, to create and
do the things that human beings have always done historically throughout human
society, which is established traditions, be
in a community and have a home. And they are struggling
with building. At least this is what I'm seeing, and I'm reading your mileage may
vary, but they are struggling with how do we build this?
How do we put this back together? How, how, how, how, how? Now, fortunately,
there's 85 million millennials, 20 million more than the baby
boomers who were a generation that was,
huh, very much in the thrall of deconstruction. They
deconstructed everything all the way down to their marriages and their families and traditions.
But you can't. You can't have a society in a
culture. And I think this is what Heinlein is getting to in Stranger in a
Strange Land. I think this is one of the deeper ideas in here that's sort
of buried like gold in there or like a precious pearl. You can't
deconstruct everything and build nothing. This drives me
absolutely crazy. Like, I'm tired of deconstructing.
I'm philosophically tired. I'm morally tired.
I'm psychologically tired. I don't want to hear any more about problems and what
problems we've got, because I know what the problems are. You know what the problems
are, everybody. What. What are we going to construct that are actual solutions? And
what's interesting is solutions are usually very simple. Matter of fact, they're
so deceptively simple to Your point? As a salesperson, they're so deceptively simple
that people have a problem being sold on them. Yeah.
And that's what's got. That's the hook that's got us all sort of twirling around.
You know, we don't need pharmaceuticals. No.
Are there people who had genuine anxiety and depression who need to be
pharmaceutically medicated? For sure. Absolutely. There always
have been. And I don't know that
you need to go to therapy. I was just reading this from an actor because
you signed a contract for Marvel Movies and it didn't, like,
come to fruition. Like, you just need better
coping skills. You're cut off from your traditions and your
family, from the people who could help you and put that into some sort of
frame of reference. So. And this
is not me making a judgment. This is me merely looking at what you've said
and looking at the society that we have and going, okay, two plus two
has to equal four at some point. What are we constructing? Because
a therapeutic thing clearly
has limited or not limited. Yes. Well, yeah. Has
limited value all the way to the end. There's
always. There's always a gap somewhere, right? There's always a gap somewhere. And we've deconstructed
in that gap just fine. And it used to be. And when I use the
term religion in this context, I'm using it in a different way. It used to
be you had religion, which meant you had
the street, or you had the family,
or you had the neighborhood. We used to actually
have that. You had the community. You had even in
tenements in New York City. You had three generations of social capital going
back. This is why everybody could yell at the kids on the street when they're
playing stickball out in the country. You had three to four generations of
social capital. This is why the father teaches the son.
There's a great scene in John Adams where he's teaching his son about manure.
And my son was like, looking at this, he's like, oh, that's disgusting. And he
knows a little bit about work, a little bit of farming. And he's like, oh,
that's terrible. Why would he smell the manure? And I'm like, well, because he's trying
to show him something about tradition. He's trying to show him something about a line
that goes back in his family all the way back to Charles the Second.
Like, who even talks like that now? And the weight of that. Don't get
me wrong, the weight of that can be oppressive, for sure,
but the weight of that can also be, I think
it could be an anchor when times get hard,
when you are anxious and when you are depressed and when
you formalize and institutionalize that in a church structure, of course it's going to
fail because
we're capitalized
like we're capitalists. So we're going to want to blow that sucker out to its
furthest end. And that's a real, that's a, if you want to talk about the
real sin of America, it ain't racism. That's the real sin of America.
It's wrapped up in the thing that is also
our real blessing. Two sides of the same coin.
And I'm saying this is a person who's a capitalist. Like, I believe that people
should get paid what they're worth, but I also believe that at a certain point
financialization has to end. It just has to stop.
Man, I have, I have very different perspectives here than you.
One. Yeah, I think, I think that everyone would
benefit through a round of therapy, right? And I say this as someone
who's done therapy and I, and I, and I, I would say this line to
people before because I didn't have anything against it, but I didn't think I needed
it. Right? And then in the middle of the pandemic when my business is struggling
and I'm trying to figure it out and everything, and everything just feels like, like
falling apart and everything else like this. Now in, if
I, if I was a church going person, then sure, then, you
know, there's room, there's community, there's, there's, there's ledges and stuff like
this. Right? But.
Qualified opinion, maybe not.
Okay. And I, you know, going
through the therapeutic experience was, was very interesting, right, Because I went through
the first time, didn't match with someone that, that I was going to really
connect with and everything. And I was about to like write it off like I
was a 60 year old guy like in there and there's kids on my yard.
Like I was about to be just like some, well, looks like I'm too good
for this. And then I was like, wait a minute, dummy. If anybody else
was, was coming to you. And they said that they had tried to talk with
one coach and then decided that like all coaches were garbage because the first
one was not good. Would you, would you let that written? No, I wouldn't let
that ride. Okay, so maybe I should eat some of my own dog food and
go through the, through the onboarding process again. So I did that.
Matched up with a guy who was super Thoughtful, like,
and it was weird because he wanted to, he wanted to meet me where I
was, he wanted to get me helped the other person wanted to make it about
whatever they wanted to make it about. Right. And it was, is my mom, you
know, like, well, let's talk about. I'm not here to talk about my mom. Right?
Like, like, and I'm sure we might get to there, but I
don't. My, my, my current frustration and pain and anxiety is not
coming from my relationship with my mother. It's coming from the fact that my business
is falling apart because we're in this lockdown and
pandemic and I lost some relationships I can't get anymore and all these things. And
you want to make it about my mom, you know, and so, like, it wasn't
there. Now I'm talking a lot about the first person,
specifically because I think when you put, you know, people
from your church, the deacons, the pastor and everything else like this on this pedestal
of being able to give you a wider lane of advice than they actually have
credibility in, that's where we end up in, in
troubled waters. Right? Because
I can, I can absolutely
see aversion to where you can, you can go to your pastor and you can
talk about a business situation and they keep it to the faith
and, and all of these things. Right. And I can also,
it, it would be impossible to not presume that this is happening in churches
all over Sundays and stuff like this to where people are struggling with business, struggling
in sales, struggling in the professional lane, and they turn to the church and they
get fed a bunch of advice that shouldn't be given
because they don't work in that lane, they don't work in that space. And all
the advice is unqualified. Right. So I'm
not going to go like, I love my mom to death. I'm not going to
go ask her for advice on my business. If you've not ran a business, I
don't trust your advice on it. Sorry, no one's coming to save me if
you're wrong. So I only take advice from people that work
in this lane that I'm, that I'm working in now. There's not anything wrong with
that. But if you're, if you're under
the impression that this wide lane gives them room to give you business
advice on, on your business and the actual details of
that business when they've never ran a business and they, they run a church that
isn't even taxed and the business formation is completely different. And like, yeah, it's
a business insurer and like you can make it overlap, but it doesn't
mean that it's qualified advice. Right. So I think
everybody needs people to talk to who are able to
navigate a conversation and be aware of their own
biases and not push their biases in
the form of faith and think that it's okay and
irreparably damage people's lives, careers, businesses and stuff
like this because, you know, well, well, God said that it's like out of our
hands. So, like, you don't have to worry about this. That's terrible advice
if you don't understand, like, what part of the business you can take action on
and get into and make a positive impact on. So this gets us into
part three, right. Of the book where
he. This is, this is what, this is the one we
sort of, I mean, we haven't really been dancing around it. We've kind of sort
of led a lot of threads into this, into this space because I
do think my
perspective and your mileage will vary. I think Heinlein was
actually using this book to make the kinds of, to do the kinds of
social commentary that you're talking about. Right. And I think his, his
point of view is probably closer to yours than
to mine, which is fine. And when he
starts talking about marks. Yeah, I would say that it's much more closer
to, to the semi professional salesperson's lane
than your lane as a leadership development person. Just I, I don't know,
like, I could be wrong, but I think it's probably more gambler esque.
Yeah. Kind of a little bit there. And so, so we get into,
we get into part three and
part three starts in a
place that you would not expect.
And it's a weird transition from part two to part three.
And you know, you opened up with the.
Well, a description of something going on in the spiral galaxy
I thought was very interesting. And the
of male the man from Mars
into a, into a
carnival. As a carnival sideshow. This is how we are
reintroduced to, to him. As a matter of fact. I want to pick this up
here. Let me, let me sort of bring this up.
Oh, where is it? Let me see. Yep.
Assume the fetal position. Yep. Building domes. Yeah, here we go.
20, 20, 25, 26. It was the
unusual carnival rides. Cotton candy. The same flat joints separating barks from dollars.
The sex lecture deferred to local opinion. Considering Darwin's opinions.
The opposing show wore what local lawmen decreed. Fearless Fenton
did his death defying dive before the Last volley the 10
in one did not have a mentalist, it had a magician. It had no bearded
lady, it had a half man, half woman, no sword swallower, but a fire eater,
no tattooed man, but a tattooed lady who was also a snake charmer. And for
the blow off, she appeared absolutely nude, clothed only in the bare living flesh
and exotic designs. Any mark who found one square inch
untattooed below her neckline would win $20.
The prize went unclaimed. Ms.
Paiwanoski posed in bare living flesh, her own
and a 14 bottom that the
ministerial alliance could not
complain. As further promotion for the boa, she stood on a stool
in a canvas tank containing a dozen cobras. Besides,
the lighting was poor. So I
open there and then you
just go off to the races.
And. The thing that jumps out to
me about Section three is
the way that Heinlein begins to construct an eschatology
that a man from Mars can get behind.
So there's the entire concept of Warner Brothers, which has been explored throughout
the book. Then there's also
what Mr. Smith may or may not have done
to the head of the. The church of the new resident
rebel, the phosphorite Church of the New Revelation.
And, and that's an interesting little sidebar
that he sort of jogged more troubling for his
conformist audience back in the 1950s and 1960s.
And then you have.
You have a question that he poses, which I think is the question we've been
struggling with this entire episode, you know, is. Is a belief in
a transcendent anything, whether it's a transcendent politician or a
transcendent man or a transcendent God? Is that. Is that a belief for,
Is that a vain pursuit for the merely naive, or is that a
fanatical pursuit for the truly deceived? Right,
well, well worded, sir. Yeah. And
the people that he begins to gather around him, from the, The Muslim we
talked about earlier, all the way to the person who was the guy who run.
Who ran Jubal Harshaw's security, who was initially skeptical and
stood in for, I think, in Highland's brain, the conformist
everyman that Highland really was, like, really railing against.
50S. Yeah, 50s, dad. Yeah. Father knows
best, right? All the way to Jubal Harshaw and his cynicism
and skepticism, to
Jill and
her belief and to your point earlier, her love of
him. These people he begins to accrete around himself. The man
from Mars does in Part three. And it was at this part
that I did think, oh, yeah, he's going to Start a church? Because why not?
That seemed to be the outgrowth. Well, but, But I think if this book were
written now, he would start a political party. Oh, I think so too.
I think. Yeah. Oh, my God. That's where I'm going. Yeah,
for sure. Right. Like. Oh, hold
on a second.
He would accrete Elon Musk around him and then he would start a political party.
Yeah, you just would. Holy smokes. Yeah, right. Like.
Well, okay. And so I have a slightly different perspective here as
well. Right. Once again, being. Being a white guy in the south who, who
had a church phase and then decided it wasn't for me, and then has. Has
had a thousand people since then try to convert me and take me to church.
Is that like when. When they're. When
they're talking to that one senator who's part of the church and everything? Like, like,
that's, that's the tipping point point. Right. And so, you know,
what I love about it is at the beginning of this segment,
which you're not really brought up yet, is
all the filtering that Jubal puts into place. So that way this man is not
overwhelmed with all the attention and
grifting and manipulation and everything else like this that he goes into.
Because the book, I think, does a really cool job of trying to showcase how
they were filtering things. But then I also. The thing about
Jubal that I, that I like a lot, and I don't know if you see
this or not, but I see him as like this very libertarian
person. Oh, yeah, right. Because, like, he goes after Jill for like, for like
inadvertently bringing in her, you know, Christian values and beliefs and everything
else like this. And, you know, he, he sees that people want to keep. Ben
wants to keep him away from the church and everything. And he was like, he's
got to be his own guy. He's got to. To go figure these things out
and stuff like that. And so what I, what I thought was
especially real was the,
the. The ambassador from the church. Right. The senator who's. Who's holding power
and everything and how he's trying to figure out a way so that way
he can come get this guy and take him to church and everything else. Like,
and he's. And he's realizing, like a salesperson realizes that the front door is not
the best way to get through. Through this thing through Jubal. So let's try to
find a way in so that way I can. I can deal with my champion.
Right. And as a salesperson, champions are very, very well known label. Let's go
directly to the source. So they start sending mail directly to him. And because Jubal
is being like, this person of, like, he's gonna have to grow up and everything
else like this, he doesn't keep him from it. Right. Whereas I think if we
look at that time and we look at the time whenever we were raised and
everything, like, there's a reason why my brother was like, hey, don't tell mom you're
reading these books. I wasn't allowed to watch the Simpsons. Like, like, my
family thought that that was, like, high.
Can't. I can't believe it. This is going to ruin society. Right. You know,
and there was one time that my brother was playing Dungeons and Dragons and I
was playing with him, and my mom came in, what are you guys doing Dungeons
now? I'm not in this house. You're not. And so the. The
removal of things from. From people in.
In authority versus. We trust you enough to make
your own decisions. Right. And to me, I think.
How do I say this intentionally? I think that if more people
were, okay, here are your
options. I'm here to support you and pick whichever ones you want,
then we would have less of that band of I
must sell you, because then I'll feel better for the decisions that I have made.
That, I think is very prevalent in the lane of, you know, that.
That salesperson Christianity thing that is very, very common here in the
South. I think.
Yeah. I see. So. So
the name you said right at the beginning there,
way back in the beginning of our episode, and I kind of left it
for a minute because I want to come back to it. You said, that's very
important. And I'm going to say a bunch of other names that I associate with
it. Right. So you said Kenneth Copeland. You were
not the first person that I run into who
was. Who's. Who looked at the influence
of. I'm gonna get in a whole lot of trouble here. But this is
gonna tell you where. Where I land on this. So here I go.
Who. You. You're not the first person who
has told me that they watched
Relatives influenced by who they loved,
influenced by that religious flim flam man, that religious
matchstick man. And that
turned them away from a real relationship with
Jesus Christ. Yeah. And. And
Kenneth Copeland. In my brain, this will tell you where my eschatology is and my.
My pedic. My. My philosophy is when it comes to. To. To Christianity and to
religion, I lump him in with Joel Osteen
and Tony Robbins. Yep. And to a
certain degree, Hal Lindsay, who wrote the book the Late Great Planet Earth, which,
which kicked off a whole. You may not be familiar with that book, but it
kicked off a whole lot of ridiculousness in Christian eschatology and
dispensationalism. Pre millennialism, amillennialism, post millennialism.
Massive damage that that guy's writing did
to American Christianity in the late 20th century.
And I even am beginning to, and I'll publicly admit to this now and then
you can all scald me later. I have
a problem with Billy Graham. Oh, same. Yeah, he's the
same. He's the same. He's a newer version of the same thing in my opinion.
And, and so, so the, the kinds
of people that came out of Billy Graham's efforts
and 1960s to convert stadiums of people, you get a,
there's a direct line there to Kenneth Copeland. Now
with all of that said, now I've mentioned who I have a problem with and
I've named names. I think in 2025
the names change and the
ideology shifted has, the ideological poll has shifted away from
religion to. Politics, I do agree with. But the flim flam men and
the matchstick men and the con man looking for the marks are the
same. Except the problem is, the
problem is the people who have substituted politics for religion think they're too sophisticated
to get taken. That's the problem. And that, that
goes back that like, dude,
I have so much to say on this topic and I'm so glad that you
said Tony Robbins in that thing because he's, he's the same. He's,
he's, he's the exact same, right? And I even
think guys like Hormozi are very similar. Right? You're,
you're appealing to a group. You're, you're pushing nothing but try hard. And I did
it so you can do it and everything else like this. And then whenever, whenever
anyone has any struggles or problems, you didn't
want it bad enough, you didn't have enough faith, you didn't try hard enough, you
didn't, you didn't push hard enough. Right? And it's the same thing that like Grant
Cardone talks about and, and all the bad sales coaching and sales
leadership because it's the easiest thing, it's the easiest
angle in the book, right? You can let your family starve, right?
So let's just pile on a bunch of guilt that you're not enough of a
man to go do the end. And then people or you know, if, if
that, if, if that line works on you, you toe
the line. Right. You work the extra shift on the plant, you go join the
military, you sign up to go to the like. Like all of this. But it's
the same manipulative leverage. Right. If you tried a little
bit harder, everything would be fine. And that's fundamentally
not how it works. And this is where,
like, I think having
deeper understanding and better language and better labels
matter, because
I think that most of the people that are pushing things on faith have to
do so because they don't have a deep enough education to have the real conversation
with the right labels and the right things. Right. So just like I have an
aversion to luck, but I'm okay with fortunate.
Right. Faith gets pushed by people who
don't understand, like, how to give people, I think, room
and time to change. Well, faith divorced from any
sense of the transcendent. Right. This is where I have a problem with all the
prosperity gospel people that I just named all of them. I have a problem with
all of them because what you're
pushing. And again, I've seen the real damage that does to people.
Oh, yeah. The thing that you're pushing is divorced
from a sense of transcendence. So it's interesting. This is the other thing you said
earlier that I want to revisit now. You know, you're a poker player,
and so it's. It's not surprising to me that you don't believe
in luck or that you don't trust in luck or the luck is not a
word in your vocabulary. That doesn't surprise me. Hold on. Because we need
to. We need to layer in some intentional boundaries here for just a second. Okay?
Okay, go ahead. Because I was gonna ask you about a different word, but go
ahead. Yeah. Have you. Have you heard of the book Games
People Play? Yes. Okay.
That book was a big book for me, right? In the idea of transactional analysis
and how people show up, we can kind of map back to, you know, very
consistent thinking and avatars and the roles that people play and everything.
And as a poker player, as a
strategist in general. Right. Because I approach everything from the
lens of strategy because I don't want to be the guy who can't
figure out a better way to crack the nut. Okay. So
I have been. I've been a gaming person my entire life, right? Playing
video games and then reading, like, Nintendo Power and learning about cheat codes and everything
else like this, but then also spending enough time with gaming that I kind of
have a gist of how gaming or how most games work. Right. And I can
Think about inherent strategy. That is easy for me because I play
a lot of these games. Right now, this is a very
unpopular conversation around my household because my wife
thinks that I'm just the luckiest person on the planet because every time we play
games together, I win more than I lose. Right? And then when she gets
mad and I'm like, this isn't luck.
Right. Like, I have spent 20 years
thinking about ways and different things that I can do to
control my luck. Right. And I've also done the work to see
exactly how much everything I wanted to blame on
bad luck was actually not bad luck. I created it. I did it
myself. I built it. I built the reality of that stuff. Right. I
can't do it. And then you can't. Congratulations. You were. You were screwed from the
start because you didn't think you could do it. Right? Right.
So when I, when. When I talk about this with my.
With my wife, we were getting really ramped up around this
idea of, like, luck and everything, you know, Because I think that anybody who
has a phone in an Internet connection can have the
same path of success that I have. You just have to make certain decisions. The
first one is that it's worth it. Right. A lot of people don't want to
make that decision, and that's okay. Right. But
I'm not the luckiest person on the planet. If anything, most of
my history and experience shows just how unlucky I am and how much I have
to be disciplined enough to put in the effort to get to the places that
I'm going. Right? So I can. I can go be
the poker player who goes to the casino, sits down and doesn't
pay attention to anything else at all, and blame the whole thing on luck. Or
I can be the poker player who goes to the casino and realizes
that better players are going to play at higher levels and tourists are going to
play at lower levels and learn signals of strategy to figure out which
games are going to be. Be easier to win in and which ones are going
to be harder to win in. And I can also study math and probabilities and
science and odds and everything else like this. So that way, while we're
both playing a game that's based upon luck, I am fundamentally functioning
at, like, three higher levels than the person who's just like, well, I hope I
get aces. Cool. I don't need aces to beat you. It's going to be just
fine. And even if you do get aces and take a big pot of me,
if we sit here for Longer I'll get it back. Because I have the
strategies, I have the knowledge, I have the experience to navigate this chaos in a
way that is going to make me a better.
A better mechanism in the moment. Okay. This is the same thing as martial arts
thinking. Are you frozen? Sorry.
Kind of gap for a second. But like martial arts. No, I'm not. Martial arts
is the same thing. Right. If someone says, hey, Jesan, when you get
in a fight, it's just lucky that you end up winning. Do you believe that
to be true? No,
no, I believe in. I believe. I believe in preparation.
Exactly. That's what I believe in as well. Right. And so when,
when, when as a poker player, I know that I can go study things that
lead to me winning more. And as a fighter, I know that I can go
study things and study the right things. Right. And actually spar. Not just do
forms, but actually spar and pressure test. And that leads me to being a better
mechanism in the moment. And as a sales coaching consultant, I can,
I can show people very quickly the difference between a conversation
that's going to lead to more probabilities of no versus a conversation that will lead
to more probabilities of yes. But these are probabilities in and of
themselves. But a strategic person is always thinking about the probabilities and the levers that
they can use. So I'm
fortunate to have gotten to this place that I have. Right. I have met some
very cool people. I've had people pour into me. I've had. I've had opportunities to
do so. But at. At a certain page,
at a certain page, we have to agree that it's no
longer luck. So
when. When I. The qu. The word. Because the word luck comes
loaded and I'm glad you sort of framed that out. The word I was going
to substitute for that because I do believe in this word is the word providence.
It's an old school word. Okay, so what is your, what's your definition of
that word? And, and providence is
the. All of the stuff. And you can
frame it out as percentages if you would like, but it's all of the stuff
that you can't control. So we can control everything that we can
control out to whatever instance we need to do that. Preparation,
of course, is better than no preparation. And at
a certain point, and we know this, and to bring this down to
martial arts thinking, at a certain point in the fight,
something has to work either for you or against you. Right?
Now, if you are prepared and you've put in the reps and you've put in
the drilling, the likelihood that you will see the thing that will
work out for you is increased versus
you not putting in the reps, not putting in the drilling, not doing the preparing.
The likelihood that you're going to see that, zero. This is why
the guys who are. Who are very much like, I just see red and go,
bro, they want. To believe it's real because they've never
been in that situation. And they hope that they're enough.
Oh, okay, that's fine. And we've talked about it. Right?
Right. And hope is. Hope is not a. Hope is not a strategy. It might
be, and I've said this often on this podcast, it might be a place in
Arkansas where Bill Clinton was born, but it's not a strategy. Okay?
And so, but Providence. Providence is when
you've done all the preparation. This is how I define it. You've done all the
preparation. You've done the reps, you've put in the time, you've earned your
chip, and you've continued to build on that mountain to continue to earn your
chip every day. And
it accounts for all of those things that are outside that ship. Because for as
much control as we think we have, it's still. I compare it to
an anthill, right? It's an anthill compared to the mountain of reality.
And we cannot possibly. Gandalf has a great line
in Lord of the Rings, Right? Even the wisest cannot know all ends.
Absolutely. Yeah. For sure. And Providence has to cover the gap
between what the wise knows and the end. And that's not an
excuse to not be. Not be unprepared. It's not an excuse even
to, like, have no strategy. You better be prepared. You better have a strategy. I
mean, that's exactly what all Lord of the Rings is about. Gandalf was prepared. Gandalf
has strategy, you know, but like. And again,
you know, I'm talking about, you know, Tolkien here, but I don't
think. I don't think Gandalf had any. No, I don't think Gandalf didn't have anything.
His plan for the ball, Rog, under the mountain. Like, he had nothing in his
plan for that. There was nothing. There was no plan. There's certain things you don't
plan for. And you know this from. Again, from fighting, from other places. There's just
some things you just don't. You just can't. Right? So Providence has to cover that.
Now, Providence can work for you. And I think if you've been going in
a particular Direction over a particular course of time, doing all the work
that other people don't see. When they show up at the end and just see
the goal, not the process. The people who don't see the process
and just look at the goal and see you show up and it just works
out. They call that luck. Luck. Oh, for sure. They call that luck.
That's. But it's.
I. I think. Right. That's the, Dare I say, the hand of a
certain kind of way
that it would not work for the person who. To go back to the fight
analogy for just a minute for the person who just sees red, bro. Like, it's
just not gonna work for you. Well, and. And that, to me, I think, is.
Where it's not on your. Is that. And I hate to make it about
sides, but it's not. It's not in your favor. No, you're fine. Yeah. No, I'm
with you. Right. Like, go ahead. Sorry,
man. I think you said a bunch of very cool things in there, but I
also. Right. And you and I have talked about this. I don't know if we've
talked about it on the show or not, but we both have kind of talked
about the reason why most people go into a martial arts school.
Right? Yeah. And it's not for the. It's not for the philosophy. It's for,
I want to be tough, I want to be confident. I want to not be
scared anymore. Whatever. Whatever version of that is driving you into the
school. Okay. But. Right. I don't think anybody actually
hits black belt, like a. Like a tier of mastery
without that flipping to the philosophical side of things.
Do you agree with that?
Oh, yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Yeah. Okay. I think that.
Yeah. So I. I can.
I can acknowledge where fortune was in my favor. Right. Because the
guy who told me to go to a kung fu school, right. And kung fu
is where all these weird military ideas I could. I
could wear without the military propaganda and the weight of war and all these other
things. Right. So, you know, it started in the military. I can. I can acknowledge
that now. I honed it in. In martial arts training right
after I'd made the swap of, like, I'm not here to be tough. I'm here
to be different. Right. And different is okay. And stuff
like this. So I do think that it's very
easy for lots of people to never turn and face and be open
to the idea of a different philosophy. Right. And there are people
in my school who had been training longer
than me. Right. And I think that they would tell you that they're.
That they're better at it than I am. Right? But I think. I think
if you go and you talk to people that have been trained by both me
and them, I think that the people that have, like, learned from both of us
would tell you that I can educate and teach it better than they can.
Okay? Because I'm talking about the
philosophy. I'm talking about the fact that, like, hey, it's okay not to fight. It's
okay to, like, not get into a scrap. It's okay to not close this deal.
Now. You need to have certain other things around you for this to be okay.
Right. But
this is where it all kind of comes back down to
how the lane is funneled, Right? Okay. Yeah. Like, I
live in Fort Worth, Texas, right? And for those who don't
know, I live right outside of this little bitty subdivision called White Settlement,
okay? Now, I live.
I live in 2025, right? And that's great because I have access
to the Internet. I have access to whatever news and media I can
educate myself enough to have value on, to go check consistently. But let's go back
to 19, even call it 80, right? The
only source of news you get is what's coming on the TV or what's being
delivered in your newspaper mailbox that they're willing to give to you
for free. Right? And if it's. If they're not
aware of their biases of like, well, no, we're not going to talk about that
because I think this is right. Or let's pretend that you're just like one of
my sales coaches who, who told me one time, because he didn't like a political
post, that salespeople don't talk about politics when really, if I
was talking about his politics, it would have been really okay. Right?
So there's all of these things, and sometimes it does come from a place of,
like, good natured intent. Hey, you really want to make it about that,
right? Hey, John, you sure you want a beard and long hair?
Some people might shorts say to you, right?
But if it's, if it's. If there's no lane for
any other opportunity, I think that that's where we screw the
pooch. Yeah, I would agree with that. Right? Yeah. Because
if, if, if there wasn't suppression and all lanes
were open, then.
A. I think everyone's a lot more comfortable in the lanes that they actually end
up being in. Right. Because I don't have a
single problem arguing why I think the way that I think with anybody else on
the planet. And I'm not the one who gets hand shaky about it because I'm.
Because my world is being torn down around me and everything else like this. You're
allowed to believe whatever you want, and I'm allowed to as well. But it's whenever
there's fear that you're not going to pick my side. So we're going to just
close off this lane. That's where I have a problem. That's where I think
that we get into it being all sideways. And so
I didn't finish this thought earlier, but I kind of want to go back to
it. I do think that it's very easy when you're younger
and youthful to not have much room for any kind of
spiritual path. Right.
And where I'm at now. Right. Realizing that I practice
stoicism just the way. The way the most Christian men do their
daily devotional. Right. A little bit every day. And surrounding myself intentionally
with other people who feel like I can see that it's the same thing. It's
just mine doesn't have a religious deity at the end of it. Who's going to
save me, me at the end of it. So what it leads to me is
like, I need to. I like, since there is no like, end all,
be all place to wear like, like, that means I got to do the work
every day. Right. And what I find are the people with the
strongest face and the people who, who are not trying to sell me on their
faith are the people that are doing that work every day. Right. And it's
not perfunctory, it's not for show. It's not for, you know, who can be the
biggest and best Christian in the congregation. And so stuff like this, it comes from
a place of just. This is important to me. Right. And
so if it's important to you,
awesome. That's great. Okay. If you're using it to, to
manipulate for status or presence, whether you're like the pastor and you're going
around and thinking that you're like the God's gift to everything because you,
you have an answer, even though it might be unqualified. Right. Different
things like that. And it's coming from a place of like, well, I'm going to
hold this away from you because I want to give you the answer that we
believe in. That's where I got a jump ship. Right.
And that's where you saw in the book the. The appeal
of. Of
Valentine's Church, right. To others.
Right? Well, it's not a Church, School. It's a school. Yeah. And
it's a discipline. And it's a discipline. Right. They just run it like a
church. So that way the people will, will.
This is the coolest part of the, of this whole book. Reading it the second
time. If he hadn't put it in the church format, if he hadn't made it
look and feel and sound like a church, no one would go take the language
lessons that then expand the comprehension for them to
realize it's all just love. So I would, I would love to see
that in a political party. But I think
like, here's the problem, here's what I think a political party is too much
focused on. So this is why you need both. Oh, gosh. Okay,
so we've been talking for a long time. I think that this is where you're
going to say that this is why both lanes need to matter. Right. The politics.
Right. The political party as well as the spiritual lane and. Right. I fundamentally
agree with you. Right. Yeah. Church and state, we need both. We need
both. And they need to be separated in my personal opinion. Because
if, if, if
what we're trying to say is that to live here you must be a God
fearing Christian and go to church every Sunday or else you don't belong here.
If that's what we're trying to say. I don't really think that that holds weight,
personally. I also, I, well, and I would, I would,
I would add to that. I don't think it holds weight when we say,
as we are saying in a lot of places, you need to,
and I see this in workplaces, you need to
monitor yourself politically and say the right think things so you don't
get sent to hr. That's the mini
version of. Now, again, again, I have no problem.
I have no problem attached to like 15 other things though. Well, here's
the thing, here's the thing. I don't think that.
No, let me frame it this way. Let's look at Jubal. This is a good
way to get into this. So. Or to enter this. So Jubal,
the problems that a modern feminist
would, would have with Jubal
have absolutely nothing to do with
his religion because didn't have one.
Yeah. They have everything to do with his cultural
orientation which comes from his politics. His,
to your point earlier, his libertarianism. Right.
So I have a question about that. Just real quick. So are you saying that
if, that if you don't have religion, your cultural
values have to come from politics? Are you saying that that's what happened in the
book. I'm saying that they will. Well, so, so, so I'm saying
that in the book, the replacement for the
politics was religion. And in reality, in
2025, the replacement for the religion has become politics
and political views. Because think about it. And by the way,
I'm going off of a very simple political philosophy. So the feminists all said back
in the 1970s that the personal was political.
Okay, well, you open up that door
with the atomization of the individual away from the
structures that we were talking about previously, like tradition and community and
family. What does the individual have to anchor
themselves to then? If the personal is political, and by the way,
if every decision that you make has a political consequence.
Let's fast forward to our current era where the kind of shoes
I wear is a political signal when I'm dating and I'm not
dating, but I hear things, the kinds of shoes I'm wearing as a political
signal about whether or not I can even connect with somebody at an emotional level.
That to me indicates the full,
for lack of a better term, the fulfilling of
politics in a religious realm for a certain, for a certain
group of people. And by the way, I believe that group of people is actually
fairly large in this country. I don't believe it's tiny. I believe
that, that, that and, and, and whether or not,
whether or not we think that's a good thing or a bad thing, that's a
different kind of conversation. I just think it's, I just think it's actually
already. I think the filling, the fulfillment has occurred. We've reached the.
I think we've reached the high watermark of politics. Just like in the
1950s, we reached the high watermark of religion.
I think we've reached the high watermark of politics in this country.
And now people are. Well, and now people
are. And I think it's going to happen in the younger generations, not the older
ones. And maybe this is just back to my original point,
way back at the beginning of this. I think people are going to.
No, maybe this is just a swing in the pendulum as it goes back and
forth in the natural evolution of the United States of America. But I do think
that after 250 years as the longest standing constitutional
republic on the face of the planet,
I think we have to become a mature country by hook or by crook. We
have to be, we have to figure it out. What does mature
country mean, in your opinion? I think it means
a lot of different things. But I think, I think at the
political and at the religious end, you have to have a religious,
for lack of a better term, eschatology. And this ties into some things we're going
to talk about here at the end. So let's go ahead and pull this in.
I think you have to have an eschatology that somehow deals with,
or not eschatology, sorry, a religious philosophy that
somehow deals with the cultural and social
mores that continue to be devil us
throughout history. So we don't have. Explain the raise, just real
quick ideas, paths,
precedents. Right. So we don't have the reason why we are
so one of the main reasons why we are so
we twist ourselves into knots about race. One of the reasons
why it doesn't actually, actually have anything to do with the Civil War or even
the Civil rights movement. The preachers during
the time of slavery, all the way down through the
Civil rights movement had very little, not very little.
The mainline preachers had very little to say or very little to
write about slavery that would put
it in a, or run it against a biblical
context. This is why Martin Luther King Jr. If you look at
his speeches, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. By the
way, look at his speeches, he made biblical references.
Now part of the reason he did that was to align the,
the attaining of political rights
with people who understood to your point earlier, like you said,
who understood all the verses and knew where the things came from.
He was socially, he was socially clicking
in their heads. 40, 50, 60
years later. The social clicks in our heads are political, which is
why Black Lives Matter doesn't have anything religious on their
website at all. Instead what they have are
cultural appeals, right, to people because
the culture now has shifted away from religious appeals to
political ones. Now again, we can argue if this is a good or bad. I'm
merely saying that it is happening along the course of time to
becoming a mature country. I think every, not. I think we know we can look
at the history of countries, particularly the history of Rome, Greece,
Egypt, England moving into the modern era. France
goes through these kinds of evolutions and eventually
winds up somewhere on the other side. Now
the fact of the matter is the United States of America.
Well, I think we could both agree it is
walking towards a transcendent miracle that we've only had one civil War.
That's a transcendent miracle. Okay,
something, something's working somewhere. I mean
it just the casual commentary
of like how many people have, have said,
man, have we ever been this divine? No, I mean, I mean, I mean
one time and we ended up killing a bunch of people about it and stuff.
Like this, you know, exactly. You know, hopefully it doesn't have to
get to there. Right, right. Because you know, in like as a
guy who studies rhetoric and marketing and everything else like this, like there's.
I. The pendulum thing that you talked about a
second ago though is like super fascinating because like I think of it as like
pendulum swings left, right. And then someone hits it this way and then it goes
this way back and forth. Right? Yeah. But to me it
like. And maybe, maybe this means I'm a conspiracy theorist.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Right. And now you're.
Congratulations. Now you're back to my rabbit holes. Exactly. Careful,
careful. It's like I was just having this conversation in a
completely different line with my accountability partner. Right. Because we were talking
about this concept of luck and different things and
you know, he changed the label to fortunate. And I was like, okay, like I
can, I can respect that, you know.
And by the way, I think it's going to take us a while to get
there and like it always does. Nation states, like the first, the first big thing
is we've got to like figure out cohesively what is
it. And we've been trying to. We've been struggling with this 250 years. What does
it actually mean to be an American if you're divorced from everything but your
founding documents? The document is thin. And by the way, I appreciate the
document. I like the document. I think the document is amazing and I think it's
a miracle the document has lasted as long as it has lasted.
But the document, but the document in and of
itself, both politically left and
politically right has been stretched then.
Yeah. Yeah. Everyone feels like they're radically clear on the original intent
of the founders. And I would wait that, that if, that if we could have
a Bill and Ted style phone booth and any
one of those guys set thought of it right now, they would be so
overwhelmed with the progress in innovation. Oh yeah. Like
this. That they would be so floored and they would. They.
And I, I would imagine that if we pulled all of them, the overwhelming
majority would be like, we should have changed some stuff.
Right. Like, like we didn't think you guys were going to get this far. That's
right. That's right. Because. That's right. We can only, we can only be
as innovative as like we're able to see. Right. So they thinking
this far that like, like, you know, after my, after
my trip to the, to the, you know, southwest,
you know, don't bleep me. You
know, I went to Roswell right We drove past there. Right. I went to the
museum of. Of. Of Nuclear History and everything else like
this. Like, you're telling me those guys were thinking about that capability when they write
in that document? Absolutely not. Right. So the idea that, like,
well, we should remain is absolutely insane. Right. Like,
we wouldn't let kindergartners write laws. Yes.
And there's always pieces of that document we want to
keep. So, Right. Everybody all the way out.
Everybody wants. Everybody's very passionate. I always mention this. Everybody's very passionate about
the First Amendment, left, right and center. Everybody's passionate about the First
Amendment. And that's fine. Let's be passionate
about the First Amendment. Matter of fact, you know what? I've been reading some things
in the last couple years about some folks wanting to call a Constitutional
Convention about the Second Amendment. I say, go ahead, pull that smoke
wagon. Go right on ahead. Call a Constitutional Convention about the Second
Amendment. Go right on ahead. Because, see, here's the thing. Well, no, no, no,
no, it'll work. It's fine. No, actually, I think that would work. But
here's the thing. When we all show up and we're all rambunctious,
which we are, and when we're all rambunctious and yelling at each other, one of
the things that's going to be put forth by some delegate from some state that
someone will find to be offensive, but they
will have a right to be. There will be, hey, I will
raise you the 19th Amendment. How about that?
The 19th Amendment was the one that gave women the right to vote.
So let's talk about amendments. Let's actually have a conversation
about amendments. And the second you say that, by the way,
all of a sudden all the conversation flattens out.
Because here's the thing. The strength of the document, even though it is thin
and stretched, I think you and I could both agree on that. The
strength of the Constitution and the
strength of the Declaration of Independence, the two founding documents,
lies not in the fact that it's thin,
because it is. It lies in the fact that it appealed,
interestingly enough, to something that we have forgotten about.
It appealed to. And I make this kind of point on my July 4th
episodes where I always talk about the Declaration of Independence in the Constitution, always finding
new things in there. Right. Going back and look at the original writings. Go back
and look at what they originally said, you know, all these kinds of things. And
what you find there is a remarkable depth of understanding about human
nature and how that
is unchanging across time. Absolutely. Right
now, I I have not
done all the study on the background stuff that you have around it and everything
else like this. Right. But willing to take you at your word. But
man, the depth of human understanding is going to be limited to the weaponry in
the, of the time. Like so, like, like, while I, while I
know that they're like, well, there's going to be someone who takes advantage of this
and everything like this, I promise you. They weren't thinking about tanks, they weren't thinking
about drones. They weren't thinking about all these things that everyone has so much access
to right now. No, they were not. But they also weren't
thinking about us expanding the franchise to women and slaves.
I agree. All the more reason that like, we need to go back over the
whole document and like, okay, let's acknowledge that some things have
changed. Right? And like, hey, let's maybe weigh this out
intentionally with all this new, new knowledge that we have. Right?
Because like, it's, it's, it's a, it's
a very easy way to not have to argue about things you don't want to
argue about as a politician is how I think about it. Well, and it's, it's
easy a way for you also become to our, to our, to the point that
we're, I'm trying to get to here. It's easy for
us to become matchstick men and flim flam men and make
appeals to that document. By the way, I do think the document
is going to. Both documents are going to struggle when we get
to ideas of
this one's coming up around the corner. So everybody get ready. You heard it here
first. I think I know what you're going to say. Oh yeah, you know, personhood
for humanoid robots. We talked about it with Philip K. Day. I think that is,
I think that is on the docket. I absolutely think that that is on the
docket. What timeline do you think that that is going to show that? So just
out of curiosity, I've been thinking about it since we talked about it. Yeah. So
I'm, I usually measure these things from the, from the, from the frame, from the
framing of my youngest child forward. Okay. Not my oldest child
forward because my oldest child forward will have agency, but
he. Agency, but the younger kid will
not. Because. No, no, I didn't say the other kid won't. I said that he
will have agents. He has agency to either stop or move
things forward underneath the current historical structure that he
understands because he's imbued with that. Whereas my youngest child forward and you Always
see this. With the last child, the youngest child is going to,
just like the Terrans going to Mars, going to take that next logical step
because he's under either completely different historical rubric with a completely different set of
historical understandings. Okay. Or I'll frame it in a military
fashion. The oldest child is always the
general that fights the last war, and the youngest child
is always the rebel that's. That's pushing for the next over and can see the
next war. So you asked me my timeline. My youngest child is 8 years
old. I think that we will
start having this conversation by the time
he's probably 30. So 22
years, maybe 25 at the outset, we'll start having. Because.
Because what's being laid right now is the foundation for this, for this
conversation. And part of the bricks that are being laid in the groundwork for
this conversation are the bricks around the manipulation
of biology. Can a man be a woman? Can a woman be a man? What
does that actually mean? That's one of the big ones. But then the second
one is of course AI and LLMs. Then the
third big one is energy and data centers and who gets to own what energy
where, because you need a bunch of energy to power all this stuff.
And then the fourth great rail, which no one has talked about,
is the governmental social structure that's going to allow.
Not allow. That's going to ensure
security. Well, it's going to ensure security for people who are
elderly. Because I thought you were going to go.
Huh? Because the Japanese, by the way, have already gone in this
direction. Because if there's not enough fertility, because enough
babies weren't made to take care of all the old people who are getting old,
you're going to have a fertility crisis. I'm not the first person to point this
out. People other than Elon Musk have pointed it out as well. It's
absolutely happening. So, I mean, forgive me if I'm not taking a
bunch of advice from that. It's okay, it's okay. You don't have to. I'm saying
he's. He's been joined by a bunch of other people, both on the left and
right, who are noted in this. So if fertility is in the toilet, that means
taxation, because you always tax future workers, not past ones, taxation
will be in the toilet. So how do you cover the gap? I think those
are four big bricks. Biology,
AI, energy and money, particularly money tied to
governmental policy. You bring those. I just made a hand motion for those
of you who are listening. And you bring those Those fingers together like in gangs
in New York. You bring those gang, you bring those fingers together. Now you've got
a grip and comes a fist. And I think that fist will start to become
manifest by the time he's in his early 30s. And I think he'll
spend the back end of his adulthood, he'll be part of the generation that will
spend the back end of their adulthood trying to negotiate what they
vaguely remember as the past with the new thing
that's here now. Because where it's really going, where the rubber is going to
really meet the road, is when that humanoid robot is walking around with
somebody all the time. And every year the robot becomes more and more
human looking and less and less machine looking.
But I would I. Okay. Oh my gosh. All right.
So many things. So many things. Okay, so. And by the way, we've been
going three hours, so at some point you have to call game to call the
game. Okay,
man, this is so fascinating because I feel like, I
feel like this crux is,
man, at some point, okay,
now I don't love this idea. I really don't. It kind of bothers me,
okay? But as a guy who's read a lot of science fiction,
a lot of science fiction, right? And seeing ideas about where
Android thinking and robots and feelings and emotions and stuff like this could
go to, okay,
here's, here's the, here's the view that I have, okay? In Hay San's mind,
a robot, no matter how advanced or anything else like this, will never, ever,
ever, ever, ever have the rights of a human being. Right? And I can see
a lane where that, like, makes sense, okay? But I'm also
a guy who reads a lot of science fiction, right? So why
would we limit it so that way they can't be part of it, right? If
they are taking care of our, of our elderly people, if we, if they, if
these things are happening, like, it would feel the
same to me that we're trying to find rules and laws to
stipulate that we can't do these things, which then just leads to them, like, overthrowing
us because, like, we kept them out of the party for too long and everything
else like this, right? As opposed to just like, just like we should have made
the Indians, like, or I'm sorry, Native Americans, more of our lane, as opposed
to being like, oh, hey, we can give them these blankets. This is going to
be totally fine, right? Like, yeah, we could. We had
an opportunity to do it differently, right? And the thing that I
am fascinated by all the time, is how many times
the, the, the popular majority wants to put a
smaller group off to the side and label them as dumb, lesser ignorant,
stupid, or anything else like this. And part of it is through due control.
Right now, most of the people, it's coming from fear. Right, Understandably.
But those people who are going to be manipulators are going to pull those strings
and looking for the way that the pendulum is swinging. They're going to go
for whatever they go for. And I will. We are,
we do have to wrap up. I'm now getting a bunch of text messages from
my wife. So I have to go to more
material things. Yes, I will say this.
Human nature. That's my two word response.
Human nature will. Will out. The same human
nature that both could
not conceive of the tank or the franchise being
expanded to slaves and women is the same human nature
that in a world where the franchise has been expanded, will
seek to expand the franchise further. It's the exact same human nature.
Remember how I said, do you think. We'Re served by that, though?
To me? And it's so funny because
whenever I talk about certain political things, I realize that I have
no positive answer. And so it's not
like, am I right or you're right? Sure. The reality that I would want to
build cannot be built because humans are humans and
we have memories and, well, how bad was it? Right? And then we do
the same thing again to like a different, like, segment of people, right? We just,
we're just really good at doing it. Right. And so
to me, where I look at where all of that goes through is control,
limiting, limiting access to information, limiting access to education,
limiting access to, you know, these stories, right? Because,
you know, like, you can read this book in
Oklahoma now, would never even be allowed. Probably wouldn't
even be in the student library, right? So we're shutting off people from
ideas that have depth and are in or are
worth a tussle to try to coin Jubal Harshaw here,
right? Like it's worth grokking. It's worth
figuring it out and sitting with it and really figuring out, do
I even understand this enough to hate it or do I hate it because other
people that I follow tell me to hate it and they. And it just makes
it easy because then I don't have to think about it for myself.
So I think I'm going to do the classic theological thing
and I'm gonna punt. Well, you just have to believe, right?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not gonna put in that direction. That's
not where the football's going. No, no, not in that direction. No, no. Believe in
nothing or believe in everything. Whatever, whatever you want. I don't know. I'm not going,
I'm not going through those uprights. No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm going through
a different set of uprights. I heard. Okay, cool. Okay, let's go.
The theological punting is this. I don't have to
know the answer to that, to how it, to your question of
how, who does it serve or how will it be served? I don't have to
know the answer to the question. All I have to know, all I have
to recognize, I think in my, in my humble thought
process, all I have to recognize is the
patterns of behavior and the, the
bricks that are being laid out towards a particular end.
And then I have to bring, and this is where wisdom comes in. I have
to bring in my understanding of human nature
and make those two things click together. While also, and
there's two other things we have not brought up today, but I'm going to close
on this while also acknowledging that there is
free will and conscious consciousness among
human beings that we do not fully understand.
And it operates in ways completely different than mine. And we. Correct.
I love, I love how much time we spent talking about that. Right. Because
it, you know, I have these ideas, have these perspectives.
It's a result of the path that I've walked on, the experiences that I've had
had. Right. And I don't begrudge anyone else for believing or not believing the things
that I do. But the thing that I love so much about these conversations with
you is because you bring enough of the context
to where it's like,
how do I say this? I know you have, this is not bottle fed
information. You're not, you've not been indoctrinated. And then you're like, well, here's why
I, and it's just this, you've never. Right. You've sat with your ideas.
Right. I, I think you wear them rather intentionally. Right. And
when you're, when you're in the situation to where you're the minority and you
adopt the thinking of the majority, it's always an intentional reason. Right.
But it's, it's whenever the majority is trying to make it so that way
it's hard to hear any other thinking other than what they like.
That's where I take issue. Right, right. Right. And if
I had been born in a different time, I would
have been a different person. And that seems Like a glib statement to make,
but it's absolutely true. But it's absolutely the truth, Right? Yeah. And so the
people who will be born, my grandchildren, right. I was
joking with. With my wife about this in a different kind of context a
while ago, and I just said, you know, our grandchildren are going to say things
to us that we will not understand. We have to be prepared for that.
We have to be prepared for the idea that they are going to come
from a worldview
that will be as separated from our formative worldview
as we were from our parents. Formative worldview. Yep. And
we're gonna say they don't get it, right? Exactly. They're gonna
think, well, word us out of touch, right? And. And if we look at every
generational pattern, like, including the one that we were complaining about earlier, right, with
all the boomers and I mean, it's the same thing, right? Same thing. And
let's not make it a stupid generational thing, and let's just acknowledge that it's
progress, that we're. That we're advancing, we're getting better, and that means that
we have to kind of slow down and re. Reassess our situation, the rules and
our standards and our culture and stuff like that. But I think it's
super easy to try to hold on to William tradition
because it's easier than change, right?
And so I not. Not to lean too much in the political kind of
realm or whatever, because I try to stay out of it. I think. I think
that one lane has a very tight message that is very easy
for everyone to understand, right? Small government, less taxes, have
more freedom, you know, and everything else like that.
And I think it's easy to fall into that. Can't tell me what to do.
Absolutely. Right. And so then we. We start, you know, and then
we don't continue to inform ourselves, right? We don't continue to go learn. We
see something that we like and we. And we. We learn 20% of it. And
then we enable the device done in Kruger effect and run around like we're, you
know, crossfit, you know, vegans and everything, you know, and it's like,
oh, okay, cool. Yeah, you should stop eating meat. How long have you been vegan?
30 minutes. But it's the coolest thing ever, you know, it's like, cool, come back
and talk to me after like 90 days, because I don't even think you know
what you're getting into, right? And it's just easy, right? Like,
and when you. When you understand the levers of rhetoric and persuasion
in psychology. There
are people who just, just want ease, right?
Oh, yeah, get that and bottle feed ease to people that are looking
for it because they're, they're struggling. They have something else. Like hope
is a, hope is a tasty medicine that goes down pretty rough.
Yep. I'm gonna let that be the last
word with that, that I, I
promise you all that we would and we would pose a bunch of
unanswerable questions and at least have a compelling conversation.
And it's been, it's been over three hours and I want to thank John
for joining me today, for challenging us,
for challenging me, for allowing himself to be challenged not
only by Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and the ideas that
are in it, but also by the ideas that come out of
it as it moves forward
in history and in time. So with
that, well, we're
out.
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