Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace w/John Hill & Jesan Sorrells

0:00 Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and

0:04 this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books

0:07 podcast, episode number 193.

0:13 Before I open on the show today,

0:17 do my standard open on the show today, I want to say

0:21 something that's a little bit of an addendum. So normally on this

0:25 show, I don't get into the deep details of my personal life

0:29 or things that are sort of happening to me. Unlike most people

0:32 who are on YouTube or doing a podcast or

0:36 are spreading themselves around social media, my life is not

0:40 content. I'm a big believer in what Frank Sinatra

0:44 used to say. The audience gets the performance,

0:48 and that's all. I really owe you. I owe you the performance,

0:52 but I don't owe you myself. So

0:57 with that being said, I'm going to sort of break that rule.

1:01 Not sort of. I'm going to break that rule because for the last couple of

1:04 weeks, there's been no podcast episode.

1:08 Sure. We had our June 6th. Our June 6th D

1:12 Day episode that was a rerun from previous year.

1:16 And we also had an episode that was released earlier,

1:20 the Gulag Archipelago and the Life of

1:24 Ivan Dasinovich by Alexandra Solzhenitsyn. That

1:28 episode dovetails into some ideas that we're going to cover in this episode

1:31 and in Les Miserables, which is coming up next week.

1:35 The reason that there has not been an episode for the last couple of

1:39 weeks is because I had a death in my family.

1:44 And this individual who passed away

1:48 very suddenly from a. From a stroke

1:52 was. Is my younger sister,

1:57 Cristina Sorrells. Cristina hosted her own

2:01 podcast focused on the Lord of the Rings. She was a huge

2:04 Lord of the Rings fan. And if you have the opportunity to go

2:08 listen to that show, go check that out. I know it's still floating around somewhere

2:12 on the Internet. She was a creative person.

2:16 She enjoyed dance. She particularly Irish dance. She

2:20 enjoyed getting together and knitting clothes and putting costumes

2:24 together. She was very involved with her local community

2:27 and also involved in politics. Now, she and I may not have

2:31 agreed on certain political positions, but she was definitely as active

2:35 as I am, and she was fundamental in her beliefs.

2:40 Cristina, like I said, was my younger sister. I do have

2:44 another one who's a little bit younger than. Than. Than Cristina was.

2:47 And. And my older sister Sonia is also

2:51 floating around out there, not floating around out there living her life.

2:56 Now, the reason I'm kind of going into this is

2:59 because people have asked me, are you okay? And how are you dealing with

3:03 this? And Cristina was 44 when she passed away

3:07 a couple of weeks ago. And the answer to that question is

3:11 I don't know. And no, I'm not okay.

3:14 But I will be okay as we go forward.

3:19 I don't know if Cristina was a fan of this show or not, but I

3:22 do know that Cristina was a fan of reading and I do know

3:26 that she believed that reading was fundamental and is

3:29 fundamental to understanding our world and understanding how to

3:33 get along in our work. And so she

3:37 would think, this is weird, and she would probably laugh at me

3:41 and she would probably have something to say. But I'm going to dedicate this

3:45 episode, episode number 193, to the memory of my sister, Cristina

3:48 Sorels. And if you are a Christian

3:52 person or religious person, I welcome your prayers and your prayers for my family

3:56 and your prayers for her. If you're not that person, I welcome your thoughts and

3:59 your condolences as well. And I do ask that

4:03 you donate in her memory, if you would like, to the SPCA

4:07 or the Trevor Project. Those are two charities that

4:11 she would. That we as a family are asking that you.

4:14 That you donate to in her memory.

4:18 And so like to dedicate this episode, like I said, to my sister

4:21 Cristina. And now on with the show.

4:29 Opening up today from our book,

4:34 I'm going to kind of pick up a couple of pieces, a couple of

4:37 passages that I think will set the tone for

4:41 where we are going today. And,

4:46 well, we're going to pick it up here with

4:49 some, some, some, some men rowing,

4:54 rowing in the ocean. And I quote,

4:58 at noon that day, the galley was skimming the Sea of Pastum.

5:02 The wind was yet from the west, filling the sail to the master's content.

5:06 The watches had been established on the foredeck. The altar had been set and

5:10 sprinkled with salt and barley. And before the tribune had offered

5:13 solemn prayers to Jove and to Neptune and to all the

5:17 Oceanidais. And with vows poured the wine and burned

5:21 the incense. And now the better to study his men.

5:24 He was seated in the great cabin, a very martial figure.

5:29 The cabin, it should be stated, was the central compartment of the galley, in extent

5:32 quite 65 by 30ft and lighted by

5:36 three broad hatchways. A row of stanchions ran from end to end, supporting

5:40 the roof, and near the center the mass was visible, all bristling with the axes

5:44 and spears and javelins. To each hatchway there were double

5:47 stairs descending right and left with a pivotal arrangement at the top to allow the

5:50 lower ends to be hitched to the ceiling. And as these were now raised, the

5:54 compartment had the appearance of a skylighted hall.

5:57 The reader will understand readily that this was the heart of the ship, the home

6:00 of all aboard. Eating room, sleeping chamber, field of exercise, lounge and place off

6:04 duty, uses made possible by the laws which reduce life there

6:07 to minute details and a routine relentless as

6:12 death. Then they're going to move on and they're going to describe the

6:15 cabin and describe where this, the master of the

6:19 watch, is sitting. I'm going to skip through that paragraph and go to this.

6:23 The spectacle was simple enough of itself. Along the sides of the cabin,

6:27 fixed to the ship's timbers, were what at first appeared to be three rows of

6:30 benches. A closer view, however, showed them to be a succession of rising

6:33 banks, in each of which the second bench was behind and above the first one,

6:37 and the third above and behind the second. To accommodate the six

6:40 rowers on a side. The space devoted to them permitted 19 banks separated by intervals

6:44 of one yard, with the 20th bank divided so that what would have been its

6:47 upper seat or bench was directly above the lower seat of the first bank.

6:51 The arrangement gave each rower, when at work, ample room

6:55 if he timed his movements with those of his associates. The principle being that of

6:58 soldiers marching with cadence step in close order. The arrangement

7:02 also allowed multiplication of banks, limited only by the length of the

7:06 galley. As to the rowers,

7:09 those upon the first and second benches sat, while those upon the third, having longer

7:13 orders to work, were suffered to stand. The oars were loaded

7:17 with lead in the handles and near the point of balance hung to pliable

7:20 thongs, making possible the delicate touch called feathering, but at the same time increasing

7:24 the need of skill, since an eccentric wave might at any moment catch a

7:28 heedless fellow and hurl him from his seat. Each

7:31 oath hole, each ore hole was a vent through which the laborer

7:35 opposite it had his plenty of sweet air. Light

7:39 streamed down upon him from the grating which formed the floor

7:43 of the passage between the deck and the bulwark over his head. In some respects,

7:46 therefore, the condition of the men might have been much worse. Still, it must not

7:50 be imagined that there was any pleasantness in their lives.

7:53 Communication between them was not allowed. Day after

7:57 day they filled their places without speech. In hours of labor they could not see

8:00 each other's faces. Their short respites were given to sleep and the snatching of food.

8:05 They never laughed. No one ever heard one of them

8:08 sing. What is the use of tongues? When a sigh or a groan

8:12 will tell all will tell all. Men feel, while

8:15 perforce they think in silence.

8:18 Existence with the poor wretches was like a stream underground, sweeping

8:22 slowly, laboriously onto its outlet,

8:26 wherever that might chance to be.

8:30 Then I'm going to skip a paragraph here and go to this one.

8:34 In the labor of the rowers, there was not enough art to give occupation to

8:37 their minds, rude and simple as they were. The reach forward, the pole,

8:41 the feathering, the blade, the dip were all there was of it. Motions most perfect

8:44 when most automatic, even the care forced upon them by the sea

8:48 outside grew in time to be a thing instinctive rather than a thought.

8:52 So, as the result of long service, the poor wretches became

8:55 imbruted, patient, spiritless,

8:59 obedient creatures of vast muscle and exhausted

9:03 intellects who lived upon recollections generally few but

9:06 dear, and at last lowered into the semi conscious

9:10 alchemic state wherein misery turns to habit

9:14 and the soul takes on incredible

9:18 endurance.

9:25 In the last few generations, the people of the west have

9:29 experienced a profound transformation.

9:33 The material and social world that used to be held as a sacred place

9:37 descended in the space of 100 years, inogably or ignobly,

9:40 depending upon your pronunciation of the word, into a place of the merely

9:44 profane. The long story of the long 20th

9:48 century, from the killing fields of World War I to the tragedy of 9 11,

9:51 is a story of the seemingly random occurrence of numerous traumatic social,

9:56 economic, political, and cultural events. The

9:59 other dynamic is that the meaning behind those events was never

10:03 fully explained, not by politicians,

10:06 policymakers, philosophers, religious scholars, or even the materialist

10:10 scientists. Not to the people involved in them, and

10:13 really not to those people observing those traumatic

10:17 events. This lack of a definitive structure of place,

10:20 meaning, and significance, or even an attempt to explain the events themselves,

10:24 has moved Western humans from a location of centered spiritual

10:27 surety out to the edges of spiritual uncertainty and

10:31 psychological chaos. This transition was

10:35 documented in literary fiction of the 20th century, from Ernest Hemingway

10:39 and William Butler Yeats to Joan Didion and Edward Albee.

10:43 This was reflected in the movies and television shows that inundated Western man

10:47 during the 20th century. It even redounded down to the songs we

10:50 danced to and the advertising and marketing we

10:54 consumed. This lack of meaning,

10:58 however, has led to a wandering and here's a big word that we're going to

11:01 focus on today. Desacralization.

11:05 Desacralization project in the west during the 20th century led to a direct

11:09 led directly to an increase in the moral conundrums we find ourselves currently

11:12 mired in. I've said this on the show before. I believe that history

11:16 future historians will wonder why we fail to arrest such a

11:20 descent into the abyss. They will Wonder that we had

11:24 all of the technology, we had all of the stuff,

11:28 we had all of the artists screaming for meaning and

11:31 significance and yet we couldn't wrap our arms

11:35 around it. After all,

11:39 we are the most published ordinary people in the history of the

11:43 world. And they will use all of our

11:47 words and images and videos

11:50 to judge us. And I suspect they will find

11:54 us wanting. However,

11:59 however, not is all lost or all is not

12:02 lost. And not all is lost. Right. We in our

12:06 time, I think in the year of, dare I say, our Lord

12:09 2026, we in our time right now have the opportunity,

12:14 the vague outlines of which are buried in this book that we are covering today.

12:19 We have an opportunity to arrest some of this desacralization.

12:23 Of course we're not going to do it by going backward, we're only going to

12:25 do it by going forward. Now this book that we're

12:29 going to cover was once described as quote, the most

12:33 influential Christian book of the 19th century. And in

12:37 our time it stands, and I think my

12:40 guests will agree with this today as an anachronistic

12:44 throwback to an infinitely more romantic and I think an

12:48 infinitely more sacred time.

12:52 However, even though it's a throwback and even though it's anachronistic,

12:57 there is a line of a lesson, there's a thread that we can

13:00 pull from this and use it to weave into what we want to

13:04 build into the future. And it does offer us a map to

13:08 explore a potential path towards how to recycle

13:11 the western world. Today on

13:15 our show we are going to be reading, we're going to be

13:19 covering Ben Hur by

13:23 the great Lou Wallace

13:28 leaders. It will take time, probably

13:32 a long, long time to re sacralize the western world,

13:36 at least I think the remainder of this century. The current

13:39 one we're in right now, it's a hundred year long project.

13:43 So let's get after it

13:47 and back to discuss our book. By the way, this book has never been out

13:51 of print since it was originally published. Never been out of print, although you

13:54 can find open source versions of it everywhere. And the version that I

13:58 have is in basically an open source version of, of the book.

14:03 The person that we're going to have discussed this with us today is our

14:07 good friend who usually comes along with us on the science fiction episodes of

14:10 this show. So I was frankly surprised that he decided he wanted to read this

14:14 one with us. John Hill, AKA Small

14:17 Mountain. How you doing John? Man, I'm good.

14:23 I was also surprised at this book once

14:27 I realized what it was because I Just. I was

14:31 just thinking of chariots and cool things.

14:34 I didn't realize it was gonna have all this depth and.

14:38 Yeah, man. And as an aside, condolences to you and your family.

14:42 Yeah. I mean, that's a lot. So thanks for sharing and.

14:45 Yeah, we'll just keep pushing. So thank you.

14:49 Yeah. Now, okay. Because we're talking about this before. Before we hit the record, and

14:53 I just need to get one thing, one thing out of the thing here. Like,

14:56 I thought I read the wrong book, but the one that you just held up

14:59 is the same one that I have. Okay. Now, what's interesting about this

15:03 is, like, whenever I started to get into this book, right? It's. It.

15:07 It's written in a way

15:11 you have to enjoy reading. You have to

15:15 really just enjoy the words on the page, I would say, in the different

15:19 ways that people can have to tell a story. Right. Because,

15:22 you know, if reading a thing like Shakespeare or the Odyssey gives you tired head,

15:26 this is probably also going to give you tired head, right. Because of how it's

15:29 written. And so that took a little bit of, like, kind of getting used to

15:32 it. And so I was worried about the time. And so I was like, okay,

15:35 I might. I might hop over to the audio version of this just to make

15:37 sure that I can finish it. And I tried

15:41 to go and find an. And find an audio version of it, and I couldn't

15:44 find it. So then I'm looking around on Spotify and I'm trying to find the

15:47 chapter that I was in, and it was, like, skipping around a little bit. It

15:50 was such a weird thing. And so then I was like, am I on the

15:53 wrong one? And then I just chalked it up as like, okay, maybe Spotify doesn't

15:57 have their. Their stuff locked down the way that they should if they're going to

16:00 do audiobooks. And so then I was like, okay, we're just going to double down

16:02 and make sure that we finish the thing. But then I was looking over the

16:05 notes and. And the open source one, it's bucketed

16:09 differently as far as, like, books and chapters and these things. And

16:12 so I was nervous that I'd read like a. Like a shorter version of

16:16 it compared to what you had read, but our covers are

16:20 exactly the same. So now I'm not sure what to think. Yeah.

16:23 So this is a book that. And

16:27 I want to talk about Lou Wallace. I really do. I'm. I'm actually.

16:32 So, a couple of things. One, I'm actually fascinated by Lew

16:35 Wallace, the author, as a person.

16:39 His life Was he was the classic, like, 19th

16:42 century romantic guy, romantic figure.

16:46 And, and one of the things that kind of gets me to this

16:50 idea of desacralization versus. Versus

16:54 a sacred world. And I've developed. I've developed some ideas by

16:57 another book I was reading at the exact same time, which I'll talk about a

17:00 little bit here too, that has influenced how I think about

17:04 her. But he was a writer that was

17:07 so. No, no, no, let me

17:11 frame it this way. We are so

17:14 marinated deeply in a post Darwinian

17:18 worldview that we don't actually. We actually don't understand those romantic writers

17:22 anymore. And, and so,

17:25 and, and by the way, I'm not just reading Lou Wallace and Ben Hur.

17:30 I'm also in the process of reading Les Miserables, which will be coming in the

17:33 next episode. Victor Hugo, a deeply

17:36 socialist atheist writer, like all the way over there on the

17:39 other end of like Lew Wallace.

17:44 Two totally, completely opposite guys, right?

17:48 But both romantics in the 19th century in a way that

17:52 we don't. You have to. You have to take their. You have to take their

17:56 product at its word. And it resists

17:59 deconstruction because at a certain point, and

18:03 this is what romanticism is, at a certain point, you have to go past the

18:06 deconstruction to something else that can't be deconstructed.

18:10 And over the course of the 20th century, this is why I opened up with

18:13 this. We've done such a good job,

18:17 at least in our public institutions. And by public institutions, I mean higher education, the

18:20 media, most of Hollywood,

18:25 popular entertainment, even now in business and corporations. We've done

18:28 such a good job of saying that brute materialism is the thing that

18:32 matters. And this is a post Darwinian worldview. Brute materialism is the thing

18:36 that matters. Things, even in our language, our common language that we use, we evolve,

18:40 right? We are not sanctified. We. We

18:43 adapt. We don't grow. Right?

18:47 Even the way the sentences are written in Ben Hur would be. They

18:51 even sound like an anachronism coming out of my mouth. And that's because they're coming

18:54 out of a romantic sort of ideal

18:58 that I think is really

19:01 tough for us to wrap our arms around. We think those people were naive or

19:04 stupid, and they weren't. They just.

19:08 They weren't Darwinians. Well, there's a. There's an

19:12 interesting point there because, like, when I started to read the book, I was. I.

19:15 Because I did a little bit of research first, because just trying to get the

19:18 copy of the book is when I realized, like, oh, okay. This is going to

19:21 have a fair amount of religion inside of it. Okay, Interesting.

19:25 And it's. It's interesting because I did have a moment of, like, reading it,

19:29 and it was kind of like I was expecting it to be written in that

19:33 easy, approachable version, and it wasn't. And

19:37 so I had a moment of. I needed to decouple the. The

19:40 romantic side of writing and making art for these

19:44 things, because I was like, oh, this is going to be hard to read because

19:47 it's religious. No, that's not. That's not the actual thing.

19:51 Right. It was just written at a different time when most people that were

19:55 making it were making art for, I think. I think a

19:59 certain level of people. Right. And so it did take

20:03 me a little bit of time to decouple those

20:06 two things. And then I was like, oh, this is just Gladiator. Okay, cool.

20:10 Right. Like. And. And then it kind of fell into more kind of like a.

20:14 A theme that I'm very familiar with and have seen a thousand times and stuff

20:18 like that. So. But, yeah,

20:22 personally. And that's where we're gonna talk about this a little bit

20:25 later. But the film that was a Charlton Houston, the Charlton Heston film

20:29 from, like, the 1930s, the remake of it in 2016,

20:34 are two. It's. As I said before, we hit record. It is a. It

20:37 is a. It is. I can think of no

20:41 greater example of. Of cultural change

20:45 that you could see where the. Where the core content, as

20:48 we say now, is the same quote, unquote. Everybody's reading the

20:52 same words off the book, off the same page,

20:57 but the meaning, the significance behind them has

21:01 shifted because worldviews have shifted. And I'm not saying the worldview

21:04 shift is good or bad. I'm merely saying it is. We can argue about

21:08 whether it's good or bad, and we do a lot. That's what we do in

21:10 this country. We argue whether that meaning is good or bad. But

21:15 we don't. We sometimes fail to acknowledge. I think we fail to

21:18 acknowledge that the shift has actually occurred

21:22 because, again, I don't think we know what to do with that. We don't know

21:25 what to do with the meaning of that. And it feels as if we should

21:29 do something with it. And maybe we should. I don't know.

21:33 But I think it's important to acknowledge that the shift has actually occurred.

21:37 So I have a. I'm curious about this. Yeah.

21:40 So you said that we're going to talk about this one word a lot.

21:44 Desacralization. Yes. Okay. And I'M

21:49 I'm working my way to the point because like. Sure. I'm just curious.

21:52 Yeah. What does that mean? Like

21:56 what? Like, because I'm, I'm

22:00 assuming, right? And this goes back to like the good old days, right? People are

22:03 always thinking about the good old days, but if they weren't glorious for you, you're

22:06 just, you're just positive about the change, right?

22:10 So it's, it's funny because like, I noticed a big

22:14 difference, right? Just in like this book wouldn't do very well today if it was

22:17 released today, right. Especially not the way that it was written here and everything.

22:22 And so I'm curious,

22:28 why do you think it's important that we,

22:33 I guess, remain a sacred society? Is, is that the, is that the

22:36 thing? Is that, is that your. That's one idea.

22:40 I actually don't, I actually think, I think

22:44 we are going to always lean towards being a

22:47 sacred society because of the nature of you

22:51 human beings are. That's one assertion that

22:55 I make. But then I also, and I think

22:59 that we've gotten to.

23:03 We were just talking about elon Musk and SpaceX. Not to go into that,

23:07 you know, before we hit the record button. Not to go into that again. But

23:10 I think that there are,

23:16 I think we've hit the ceiling of what the brute

23:19 Darwinian materialist, scientific perspective can, can

23:23 get us. I think we've sort of hit a ceiling and I'll use a perfect

23:26 example of this, or not a perfect example, but a

23:30 example of this.

23:34 Many, many commentators, not just me,

23:37 have wondered why

23:41 things, and I don't mean cultural circumstances, but I mean like

23:45 technology hasn't gotten any quote, unquote better.

23:49 I actually just saw one of these articles flooded to me in my Facebook feed

23:52 the other day. Hasn't gotten any better in the last 30 years.

23:58 I see these articles all the time. Technology has not gotten better in

24:02 30 years, right? Why have things not gotten better now? The things

24:05 usually they, they, they start with technology in those articles and, and then

24:09 they eventually descended to culture because that's really what they want to talk about.

24:13 And the reason I think ties into this

24:16 idea of the sacred verse is the profane. But I

24:20 also think, or, and I also think that this

24:24 struggle is the struggle of the 20th century, right?

24:27 And it's been a long 20th century. I, I honestly think the 20th century started

24:31 probably in 1860, no, 1865,

24:35 and has dragged on to now. It's kind of like the long 19th, the long

24:39 19th, the long, the long 19th century, you know, which started in like

24:43 1776. Right. With the Declaration of Independence, and

24:46 then kept right on going all the way through World War I. Right. Long

24:50 period of a lot of change where people

24:54 fundamentally didn't understand what was happening. They just knew

24:58 the shift was moving. I think we're in that same period,

25:02 but I think we're. We're getting ready to exit it. And I

25:06 think the thing that will allow us to exit that is an idea

25:09 of the sacred. Now, where I get this idea from.

25:14 Let me bring up this book, because I was reading this book at the exact

25:16 same time, this book called the Sacred and the

25:20 Profane by a religious scholar named Mira Shea

25:24 Elieida. He was. Oh,

25:27 gosh. He was. Well, and I'll talk a little bit about him in a minute

25:30 here, but he was writing in

25:34 the 1950s about this phenomenon,

25:38 and he asserts that.

25:42 And by the way, he's a. He's a secular religious scholar. Let me be very

25:45 clear about this. The man was not a Christian. Let me be very clear about

25:47 this. Nor was he a Muslim, nor was he any of that. He was.

25:51 He was consumed by trying to figure out why all of

25:55 these religious traditions, all of them, even the paganistic religions, religious traditions,

25:59 all tended to create a human being that was

26:02 focused more on things that were sacred and outside of the materialism

26:06 that he was seeing in the 1950s. Because he's writing post World War

26:10 II, right? Post the atomic bomb, which at that point was

26:14 like, the biggest materialistic example of, like, boom, we can

26:17 put science to this problem and stop this human behavior ever that

26:21 anybody had ever seen up to that point. And so he's

26:25 writing, and he was. He. He was. He escaped from. Oh,

26:28 gosh, I believe he escaped from

26:32 Romania during World War II. So he was running away from the

26:35 Nazis. He had a whole lot of axes to grind in a whole lot of

26:39 different areas. He also wrote in, like, four different languages. It was kind of

26:42 amazing. Guy was like. He was. He was a. He

26:46 was what we would call a public intellectual. Back before they had the idea of

26:49 a public intellectual. He. He was just an intellectual. And so he wrote a lot

26:52 of books on the nature of religion, the nature of what myth means,

26:56 how myth ties into a sacred worldview.

27:00 And one of the points that he makes is that.

27:04 And it's right here in the introduction, and I want to read this, he says

27:08 this book basically will show the ways in which religious man attempts

27:12 to remain as long as possible in a sacred universe. Hence what

27:16 his total experience of life proves to be in comparison with the experience of the

27:19 man without religious feeling, of the man who lives or wishes to

27:23 live in a desacralized world. It should be said at

27:26 once that the completely profane world, the holy

27:30 desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the

27:34 history of the human spirit. Close

27:37 quote. So he's writing that in

27:40 1557. I

27:44 think he was exactly right. But I also think

27:48 that we always do chase that. And you're starting to

27:52 see signs of re sacralization popping up in

27:55 varying places, most notably in

27:59 the environmentalist movement. That's been happening since at least the

28:03 mid-90s all the way over

28:06 to what we're getting ready to see with AI. Like you're already

28:10 seeing AI churches popping up. That's already

28:14 starting to happen. Human beings want to live in a

28:17 sacred world. We just don't have the language to go

28:21 back to it. And I think Ben Hur to a certain degree

28:26 offers us a map for how to do that. And I think a

28:30 sacred world is better than a profane one

28:34 because I think it grounds us more. It also allows us to deal with things

28:37 that like psychology and behavioral science can't explain.

28:42 It also allows us to deal with things that are happening to us that

28:45 we can't explain. And I think we can do

28:49 that. No, I think we can do that. I think we will do that with

28:53 or without an appeal to Jesus. And I know the subtitle of

28:56 Ben Hur is A tale of the Corporation Christ. Hyper aware of that, but without

29:00 an appeal to Jesus. I think we're good. I think we've always made that appeal.

29:03 And by the way, Elada thought we may always made that appeal as well. He

29:06 believed it started way back in pagan societies. He goes all the way back to

29:09 Mesopotamia and talks about how we've basically been building

29:13 up our, our. The. The understanding of what is sacred as

29:17 human societies and as human civilizations. And he ties in the

29:20 pyramids, he ties in the worship of Greek gods, he ties in

29:24 math, all of it.

29:28 I think he's got a compelling argument.

29:36 Here's where I get stuck with this idea. Yeah,

29:42 because like I. And this is such a weird thing to kind of be talking

29:46 about here. I was not expecting to talk about this idea. I think that, I

29:49 think that people exist in one of two states. Right. You were either

29:55 younger, me loved very black or white scenarios and realized that

29:59 most of the time there was a lot of gray in the middle in this

30:02 situation. I don't think there's a lot of gray. I think that this is pretty,

30:05 pretty, pretty spot on.

30:09 You either think it's important or you don't.

30:13 Right. And so, you know, one of the things that I have to talk about

30:16 endlessly with people is like, don't try to sell PCs to people that

30:20 want Macs and vice versa. Right. Because you can spend your time trying to change

30:23 someone's heart and mind about what's important. Right? Right. But

30:27 we're not ever changing core philosophies about what's important in other people.

30:31 And so it's, it's in this thing of like. Okay,

30:35 so let me ask this question. Is, is a focus on

30:39 the environment and it being sacred read a bad thing in your,

30:42 in your perspective? No, I think it's a, I think

30:46 it's a misordered thing, but I

30:50 think so I think that we

30:54 are doing a repeat in,

30:58 in. Well, let's, let's start with even just the

31:01 thinking of the environment is sacred, right? Because it's not a thought. Actually,

31:05 the thought comes afterward. We know this from behavioral science. This is

31:09 where the science actually helps us. We know that the emotion

31:13 appears, then the, then the, the rationalization

31:17 comes. We know this from sales. I have an emotional

31:21 feeling and then less than 10

31:24 milliseconds later, I'm rationalizing that emotional feeling. And by the way, I'm doing this all

31:28 day about everything. Right? Yeah, we're doing this in the conversation that we're

31:32 having right now. Right. And

31:35 so when you say thinking of the environment is

31:39 important, I don't really think it's that. I think we're trying

31:43 to just like previous pre,

31:46 pre Christian, pre Judeo, pre

31:50 Greek cultures did. I think we're trying to reach back and find something

31:54 sacred in there we can connect with at an emotional level in the environment.

31:58 We're also trying to scale it up to a global feeling,

32:02 which is really hard, by the way. It's really hard to

32:06 scale that up to a global kind of thing. Right? So

32:10 there is some, there are some, there's some data that kind of supports what I'm

32:13 saying here. So we know that. Sorry, I have a

32:17 question. Yeah, so, yeah, go ahead.

32:22 This might be overshooting the point, but like, where does just simple

32:26 self preservation come into play, right? Because like, you know, there is the

32:30 thing of, like, okay, let's keep the planet here, right? And there's some people that

32:33 just want to work on the planet in the environment because they feel bad because

32:37 they want to leave something great. Then there are other, some, Then there are some

32:39 other people who were like, hey, like, you know, maybe we shouldn't be having this

32:42 impact at all. But there's just like, a lot of people that

32:46 they can also be like, wow, we need a place to live. Right.

32:52 Where does. Because I also think that there's a lot of people that are

32:56 uncomfortable with the topic of death. Oh, for sure. Massively

32:59 uncomfortable with the topic of death. Right. And it becomes easier to

33:03 think about parts of this whole thing because you get

33:07 to avoid the discomfort of death. Right.

33:11 So self preservation as the

33:14 motivating focus for these sacred things.

33:18 Right. Whether it's the environment or whether it's for the

33:22 family. Right. Family's got to be man, wife,

33:25 2.5 kids, three dogs. Right. And all this other, like, sure.

33:30 It's the thing that I hear. And

33:34 please correct me if I'm wrong. You're saying, okay, people are focusing on this bubble,

33:38 this bubble, this bubble, this bubble, this bubble. None of that matters because these bubbles

33:41 are all connected to the big bubble. So just care about the big bubble.

33:45 I'm not saying that none of those smaller bubbles matter. I

33:49 think all of those smaller bubbles are in search of the bigger bubble.

33:54 That's what I think. I think they're chasing the larger bubble, but they don't have

33:57 the. And. And Eliade was

34:01 very much consumed with language and. And meaning and forms

34:06 and as am I, right? I mean, for God's sakes, we're hosting a literature

34:09 podcast. So I think correct language then

34:13 orders things correctly. So if we're talking about things

34:16 correctly, not even to each other. Let's forget to forget to each

34:20 other for just a minute. Just for talking about things correctly to ourselves. Right?

34:24 Yeah. Which gets back to an idea that I've often had. I've said on this

34:28 show, maybe not with you, but I've said on this show with other guests.

34:32 One of the key questions that I've been asking people

34:35 for like 15 years now, whenever I get into them with training

34:39 and development stuff is. Or topics. Training and development topics is

34:43 how clearly do you think. And

34:47 you would be stunned. The number of people who raise the hand

34:52 to say they think clearly and the number of people in the room who

34:56 are confused by the question.

35:02 And so from there I go,

35:06 okay, maybe my sample size is too small, but let's

35:10 use this. Let's use this sample size.

35:15 If. If I ask 15 people in a room, how clearly do you think.

35:20 And two thirds of them don't understand the question,

35:26 John, would you think that there is something going on there? Would you

35:29 think there's a challenge there? Because I would. Because

35:33 then now in my brain, I Leapfrog from lily pad to lily

35:37 pad. I leapfrog from. Wait a minute. I

35:41 asked you in a training at 9 o' clock in the morning, how clearly do

35:43 you think, okay, maybe you didn't have enough caffeine. I'll, I'll grant you grace. Maybe

35:47 you didn't have enough caffeine. You didn't know you were going to run into the

35:50 buzz saw known as Haysan Sorels. Maybe you weren't prepared for that.

35:53 It's fine. I'll, I'll be nice. I'll back away. I'll, I'll

35:57 grant grace, right? Maybe I'll get you better later on in the day. Maybe at

36:01 5:30 you'll be clean, thinking clearer. Okay,

36:06 my question becomes, how muddy is your thinking on the

36:09 environment or family

36:13 or the material world or

36:18 the news? How muddy is your thinking on

36:21 things that I've spent a lot of time thinking about

36:25 and tried to put in correct order with correct language,

36:29 but you don't understand the question.

36:33 And so I look at the little bubbles as being,

36:38 for lack of a better term, ceilings that people have to break through. But

36:42 I don't know how to do that. I don't know what the tools are to

36:45 break people through. And by the way, I don't think it's my responsibility to do

36:48 that. I'm not taking all that on. I think that books do that.

36:52 That's why we're doing a book podcast and I encourage people to read these books

36:56 because books, as I said to another guest a couple episodes

36:59 ago, books smuggle ideas across time.

37:03 Oh, that's a great line. I couldn't believe

37:07 it just came off the top of my head. I just, literally just like. And

37:10 the guy was like, that's genius. I'm gonna write that down. Like,

37:13 yes, write it down. I'm a genius.

37:17 That's the thing you wrote down, I'm a genius.

37:22 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's right. And as soon as you're done, you're like, man, couldn't,

37:26 didn't want to forget that.

37:31 And I'm gonna mic drop and I'm out. You all have a good day.

37:36 So. So I think, I think books are the tool that allow us to break

37:40 through those ceilings. I think more people

37:43 in the 19th century, which was a book dominated century

37:48 because there was no tv, radio was, was nascent,

37:52 newspapers were everywhere, but everybody wasn't literate. We didn't have the

37:56 literacy levels that we have now. They were greater than they had been at any

37:59 other time previous to the 19th century, but they still were not at the level

38:02 that we have now. The technology

38:06 of distraction was not there. Although people

38:09 would tell you if you go back to the 19th century and you read what

38:12 people actually wrote, they would say that the public readings of Charles, that

38:15 Charles Dickens was doing say the exact same things about those public readings that

38:19 people say about people doing TikTok videos now.

38:23 Literally the exact same language. So there's always

38:27 a technology that's destroying something somewhere. And to that point, right, Like

38:31 God, what, what was it that I was reading they were talking about how.

38:35 Because one of my favorite things is like the generation before always

38:39 likes to crap on the generation after from a gatekeeping perspective and everything.

38:42 Yeah. And, and it's funny because like they used to.

38:46 What, what was it? I think it was books or maybe it was chess.

38:50 But they were trying to villainize that. Oh yeah. They were trying to say like,

38:53 you don't want your kids reading because that, because that means they're not going to

38:56 be out in the field or something like this. Like, and like just think about

39:00 that person. Like they think that they're doing the God's work,

39:03 right? Of like keeping kids dumb and in the fields and

39:07 unable to do anything else like this. Right. But this is, this is one of

39:11 my favorite topics. Cause like, because the thing that I have to help people do

39:14 is develop discernment around their own products,

39:18 ideas, services and to have that in awareness while they're

39:22 having sales conversations, right? So my favorite thing was whenever I'm

39:26 talking to a founder or a salesperson, it's like, who's this not for?

39:31 Right? Because if you tell me that it's for everybody, I know you're not on

39:34 the level. Like, and I know you just need time, right?

39:38 You're like the CrossFitter just started CrossFit and you think

39:42 that everyone should be doing CrossFit. Like, you know, you're not thinking about like,

39:46 you know, Kip style pull ups have really, really

39:49 crazy tensions on like ligaments and tendons and soft tissues. And people can get

39:53 really, really hurt flopping around on a bar because they're not conditioned for it. But

39:56 everyone should go to CrossFit. You don't know enough, right? It's the Dunning Kruger, right.

40:00 Stuff and everything. And so half the time, right,

40:04 there's going to be people, status quo thinkers. I don't want any change at all,

40:07 right? And they're, and they're, they're, they're spouting consistency because

40:11 the fear or status quo. And then there's,

40:15 okay, let's Go try something new. Let's go try something different. Like

40:20 how do we parse these two things? Like, I don't

40:24 know. That's the God's honest answer. Do you?

40:28 I don't know. I know that. What

40:32 I do know, though. I do. What I do know is that we tried

40:35 to use. We took, we took

40:39 the theories of Darwin and we,

40:43 we spread them through folks like writers,

40:47 right? Like the Huxleys,

40:51 that entire family, you know, spread them around, right.

40:54 H.G. wells spread them around through his science fiction.

40:59 Those are two, two big names that I could just name right there. Then you

41:02 had folks that spread them around or, or at least took the conclusions of

41:06 Darwin to what they thought was a logical conclusion. So

41:10 Kinsey, who did all the sex behavior studies, he was one.

41:14 Freud. Well, not Freud, sorry. Carl Jung was another one that took

41:18 some of this to its quote, unquote, logical conclusion.

41:22 I will also quote from another book.

41:27 Ideas have consequences, right? So the

41:31 idea that. That evolution has occurred

41:35 over a long period of time and that human beings.

41:39 Now, let me be very clear here. The idea that human beings are not

41:42 created in the image of a divine, transcendent God, but

41:46 instead the idea that human beings evolved

41:50 over the long course of millions of years from,

41:54 depending upon where you want to start, a fish in the

41:57 ocean that decided to get out and come to land

42:01 or from a, a

42:05 simian ape, right, that broke

42:08 off and evolved over the course of however many thousands of years. I think up

42:12 to 12,000 years now, 14,000 years. Now, whatever it is,

42:16 that idea, I'm not talking about the truth or the factual nature of the

42:20 idea. I'm not talking, I'm not debating any of that. I don't care. Well, I

42:22 won't say I don't care, but that's beyond the pale of this, this podcast and

42:26 beyond the pale of this conversation. I merely talk about the idea

42:29 itself having a consequence. Oh,

42:33 well, I did have this. And that idea, by the

42:36 way, that idea. Just, just let me close up here. That idea

42:40 then closes the door to guys like

42:44 Lou Wallace to writing Ben Hur. Well, it

42:47 closes the door gradually, and I don't know that that door closing is

42:51 a good thing. Now that's an idea. That's a debate I would

42:55 like to have. That's a conversation I'd like. Well, who gets to be in charge

42:57 of that, though, right? Because, like, because, because you and I, we're also having

43:01 this conversation. There's an audience for everything. Right? Right. So. Right. You

43:05 know, you can be, you can be the Lou Wallace who's like, oh man, publishers

43:08 don't want to write my book. And. Or you can be the Lou Wallace who

43:11 goes out and starts a publishing company because you're not going to let anybody stand

43:15 in your way. Right. There's always that shout to out shadow banned on social media.

43:18 Like, maybe your content just is garbage. Maybe you're not connected to the right audience

43:22 and different things like this. Right. There's always this, this idea that like,

43:26 we're being constrained, right. Like, well, Dostoyevsky

43:30 self published. Let me be very clear. Dostoyevsky self published his

43:34 books, I think all but the Brothers Karamazov, if I remember correctly. Oh,

43:37 interesting. I didn't know that. Yeah. So Dostoyevsky couldn't get

43:41 a publisher. I mean, like, and that's my kind

43:45 of big thing is that like, the big stuff isn't going to be seen in

43:48 the main threads and you have to go seek it out. Right? Like, sure, the

43:52 old, old, like martial arts thing, Right. The student who won't spend a

43:55 year in a horse dance is not a student. Right, right. You have to

43:59 want to go find your thing. Now, I did have this very

44:03 surreal moment in the book, Right. Because the thing that I did

44:07 appreciate a lot, that I never really had much

44:10 perspective on was just how much like Jewish

44:14 culture, yes. Was like, looked down

44:18 upon, just like, as lesser just for people who want to go do their thing

44:21 and have their faith and everything else like this, you know? And it was interesting

44:25 because I think he does a really good job of just talking

44:28 about how the Romans just don't get it.

44:32 Right. Like, like he does. He, he does a good job of talking about

44:37 that, like, lack of faith makes it so hard to

44:40 even understand. Right. But there was this part where he was talking about

44:44 how the Romans have all these gods and they just have the one. And how

44:47 the sheer idea of that causes a lot of like,

44:51 friction and pejorative, like instant. Well,

44:55 I'm just going to put this here. You're a snowflake, right? No, you're a

44:59 snowflake and everything else like this, right. This idea. And I was struck

45:03 by that at first of just like how, how long this

45:06 culture of people have just been like, shoved down.

45:10 Right. And also. Because I could then appreciate

45:14 that. I could also then appreciate this idea that like, the king of the Jews

45:17 is coming and stuff like this and what a rallying idea that had to have

45:21 been for all of these people who felt underrepresented, walked

45:25 on and different things like this, you know, but just the sheer

45:28 idea of like imagine having 15

45:32 gods and then going and talking to someone and having to do business and

45:35 having to build a relationship with someone who only has one, right? Like,

45:40 it's because the ideas have been planted through books and literature

45:43 and everything. It's so much easier for us to wrap our arms around,

45:47 right? Versus, if you've only ever seen it the

45:51 other way, it goes back to this other thing. It only seems like magic

45:55 because you're not smart enough to get it. So this

45:58 is I'm doing. I'm writing, currently writing the script for our shorts episode, which will

46:02 come out tomorrow kind of a little bit because of current events. I'm kind of

46:06 a little bit blocked up right now in my writing. But

46:10 I'll get it out and it'll get out there. Folks, I've got an idea. It's

46:13 the idea that John actually just said here. I think

46:16 that I'm glad you pointed this out about Judaism, because this

46:20 was one of the things that I already kind of knew was going to happen

46:23 coming into the book because of my understanding of theology and da, da,

46:27 da, da. All these kinds of things, right? But it's really hard

46:31 for a person who. And

46:35 it's interesting that this book has never been out of print. It's even in print

46:38 today.

46:41 And so we talk about it being hard to read

46:45 and talk about it being difficult to sort of wrap your arms around

46:51 the. The assumptions that average human

46:54 beings, because ideas have consequences. The assumptions

46:58 that average human beings in the west and

47:02 even globally. But let's stick to the West. The assumptions people have

47:05 about how reality, quote, unquote, should or ought

47:09 to work. For instance,

47:13 the idea that women should and

47:17 ought to have rights. Now, what those rights

47:20 mean, how far that goes, we're still negotiating all that.

47:25 The point is no one in the west

47:29 is disputing that women should or ought to have rights.

47:33 No one. Why is that? Well,

47:37 the reason that is is because. Hold your, hold

47:41 your phone here. The Christians who

47:44 came out of a Judaic understanding of women,

47:48 of what a woman's quote unquote place was,

47:52 which, by the way, descended from the root of

47:55 one God, rather than 1500 gods

47:59 determining what a woman's place was, which, by the way, weirdly enough, all those

48:03 gods determined that a woman's place was to be, as is often slammed about

48:07 Christians these days, barefoot and pregnant. Actually, that was more like the pagans.

48:10 They actually thought that. But okay, let's just leave that

48:14 aside. These kinds of

48:18 ideas over the course of 2000 years

48:22 have marinated to the point now, where

48:27 we have legitimate arguments, not about

48:31 should women have rights or should they not have rights. We have

48:35 legitimate arguments about what kinds of rights women should have. And we don't even

48:39 blink twice about it because ideas have

48:42 consequences. I'm not talking about do we believe that Jesus was

48:46 the Messiah or not. I'm not talking about any of that.

48:50 We don't even have to go there. We just have to go to the idea

48:53 that a guy named Jesus walked around,

48:57 said it would be nice to be. Is it would be a really good idea.

49:01 And I hate to do this, but to reduce everything down, to be reductionist for

49:05 a minute, said it would be really nice idea to be really good to the

49:08 widow, the foreigner and the weak.

49:12 And people took him seriously for 2000 years, people took him

49:16 seriously. What was said in pagan,

49:20 in the pagan reality. And by the way, the early Christians in the

49:24 first like 500 years of the church, this is what Augustine was yelling about in

49:28 City of God, which we've read on the podcast before. This is his whole argument

49:32 against the pagans in like 300 or whatever. When he wrote that

49:35 book, the pagans believed

49:40 that women didn't have rights. Not,

49:44 not that they, not that they like should. What kind of right should women. No,

49:46 no, no, there's none of that. You're just. And you see this by the way,

49:50 in Ben Hur, the way that, the way that Ben Hur's

49:54 sister and mother are treated.

49:58 We, we're shocked by that. Why? We don't ever ask why are

50:02 we shocked? Well, we're shocked because of 2000 years of Christianity. That's why

50:05 we're shocked. And for us to. An interesting idea. Yeah.

50:09 For us to not acknowledge that. And again, you don't have to believe in divinity.

50:13 You don't have to believe in resurrection. I'm not asking you to buy any of

50:15 that. There are certain

50:19 fruits that ideas produce.

50:24 And those fruits come from a tree which has

50:27 a seed and a root in the ground. A root coming from a seed in

50:31 the ground. The seeds matter. Ideas have consequences.

50:34 So if we want to re sacralize the world,

50:39 we have to look at the seeds of where people's not

50:43 only individual beliefs are, but where society's individual beliefs are. And by the way, we

50:46 have to question those. And I think the Internet to stand up for modern technology

50:50 for just a minute here. I think the area does an excellent job and I

50:54 talked about it in terms of a cul de sac. I'm going to go back

50:56 to this idea. It does an excellent job of Bringing people who have had these

50:59 thoughts before, coming from different roads into the same cul de

51:03 sac and then meeting in that spot which increasingly is happening

51:07 online and going, oh, wait, you thought that too?

51:11 Oh, I thought. I just thought that by myself. Yeah.

51:15 Oh, now we can make common cause.

51:19 And as I keep going back to, I think, re sacralize the world, this is

51:23 where the postmodern environmentalist movement, this is why

51:27 it's doing well, because all these people are getting together in the same cul de

51:30 sac. Yeah,

51:34 Like, I don't inherently see that as a bad thing, though. No, and, and I'm

51:38 not arguing that it's a bad thing either. I'm merely saying the, the.

51:41 The seating of it doesn't. You're not. We're not going in deep enough. We gotta

51:45 go in deeper. We got to go in deeper. And I don't know that people

51:48 have the horsepower sometimes

51:53 to go deeper. And I think that's fine, by the way. Like,

51:59 let me, Let me be religious here for just a moment. I think God gave

52:02 different gifts to different people, and I think that

52:06 gave different strengths and abilities to different people, because we need all

52:10 kinds, you know, every. I'm not, I'm not demanding that everybody have the intellectual

52:13 horsepower of Hasan. No, I'm not making that demand.

52:17 I'm merely saying we've got

52:21 to figure, we've got to acknowledge what the seeds are

52:25 so that we can have a common conversation moving forward rather than a fractural

52:28 one, a fractured one around things that don't matter.

52:33 Like, things that don't matter at all. Like politics. This is why I don't

52:37 have political conversations on this show, because politics are misordered. It's all

52:41 misordered in the hierarchy. Like, we want to talk about

52:44 politics. Politics is downstream from culture, which is

52:48 downstream from religion, smaller religion, which is

52:52 the sacred of the profane idea, which is downstream from

52:56 how you actually, actually think about being and meaning and significance.

53:00 We got to go all the way up to the headwaters. How do you think

53:04 about who you are? How do you think about your level of significance? How do

53:07 you think about your being? And if you've never thought about this before

53:13 because you didn't want to take a philosophy class in college because it seemed like

53:16 it was really boring, or maybe you didn't have a history of like, talking about

53:19 these ideas in your parents house, or maybe you just never. You just didn't think

53:22 you had horsepower because no one told you, or you looked at that book and

53:25 you were like, I don't want to deal with that, because Kierkegaard seems really complicated.

53:30 Why can't I read this as fast as my graphic novels? Oh, because you need

53:33 space to sit and think on these ideas like that. That's what I did for

53:36 a while. Right? Yeah, I would, I would, I would look over this

53:40 fence as I was training martial arts, right. And I'm like, oh,

53:43 watts and stuff. And. And then like, occasionally I'd pick

53:46 up a book and I would try to like, speed read through it. Like, I

53:49 read, like, for entertainment. And then I'm like, who's getting depth out of this thing?

53:54 Right. Wasn't even walking into the deep end, you know, kind of

53:58 situation, so. Right. That's an interesting thing. Right.

54:01 Like, I, I believe that people have different strengths.

54:05 And then one inch past the strength is a, is a challenge. Right. It becomes

54:09 limiting and a constraint. And, you know,

54:13 as long as you're really aware of what, what you're great at and whatnot and,

54:16 and not great at and also knowledgeable about and experienced about and not

54:19 knowledgeable about and not experienced about, I think life gets a lot easier. But

54:23 if you're just running around thinking that because you did it, it was

54:27 perfect, you know, and all this other stuff that people get, I think, trapped into.

54:31 Right. None of this is a topic worth

54:35 getting into, right? No, no. Well, and

54:38 you talk about. And I want to, I really want to focus on. I didn't

54:42 really want to focus on the Christian. Christian. The, the Jesus sort of aspects

54:46 have been her. I didn't really want to focus on that in this conversation. Not

54:49 because that's limiting, but because now this is my own

54:53 weakness. I go with the assumption that people have heard about Jesus and either to

54:57 your point, they either believe or they don't. I, I go with that assumption. Right.

55:00 Okay. And again, that's a limiting factor on me,

55:04 Right? Because maybe not everybody. Everybody has or maybe everybody hasn't or they've heard the

55:08 wrong thing. I don't know. Hey, I don't know.

55:12 I think what's far more interesting is, to your point, the,

55:16 the. The. And it's really the ethnic. This is what Paul the apostle

55:20 talks about in, in all the post Pentecost New Testament books in

55:24 the Bible, when he's using the word ethnos, which we substitute in modern

55:28 translations, we substitute race for that. But that's not what he meant. He didn't mean

55:31 the modern conception of, like, how we think about race. Not at

55:35 all. He was much more consumed. And people back in the day,

55:38 2,000 years ago, were Much more consumed with

55:42 the ethnic groups that people came from and how the

55:46 ethnos of those groups, which is different than race by the

55:49 way, influenced how people thought about

55:54 the sacred, how they thought about the world, how they thought, thought about

55:57 reality. The idea of

56:01 ethnos continued up until the beginning of the

56:04 Enlightenment, probably in the 16th or 17th

56:08 century. That's when that started to break down a little bit. And then as the

56:12 age of discovery opened up in the 17th, 18th and then into

56:15 the 19th century, that really started to break down. Voltaire

56:19 was one of the first ones. Actually, we just read Candide on this show.

56:23 Voltaire was one of the first sort of skeptical, they called him back in the

56:27 day, skeptical writers who sort of breaking down ethnos

56:31 and really trying to do the, the conversion to racial

56:34 groups. Right. Because now you're, you're taking Europeans

56:38 and that's a gigantic monolith word and it doesn't mean anything,

56:42 but you're taking Europeans from one place, putting them in the quote,

56:46 unquote, new world, interacting with all these people they've never met before.

56:50 And now. And they're also importing

56:55 Africans, again, a monolith term that doesn't mean anything

57:00 model, importing those folks to the New world in an

57:04 effort to find a passage to go meet again, a

57:07 monolith term, Asians, which included, by the way, China,

57:11 India, Japan, Korea, all of that. Right? Yeah. So

57:15 Voltaire and the thinkers of the Enlightenment were trying

57:19 to break these, the visible differences

57:23 that they could see because they weren't blind, nor were they dumb.

57:27 They were trying to make that term ethnos fit

57:31 with what they were seeing here and make those two things click

57:35 together because they were confused. This has been a long project, by the way. Well,

57:39 and like, to me, and this is a really cool thing because, like,

57:42 we get to go back to another book that we, we did together. Right. A

57:44 Stranger in a Strange Land has that one chapter about like Islam. Right.

57:48 And how, yes, the language around Islam colors

57:53 how you perceive Islam, if that is your mother tongue. And

57:57 that's like. And I think about that, like a lot. And I was thinking about

58:00 that as I was reading through this like, book because, like, in that moment of

58:03 like, you know. Well, well, well, yeah, like, you know, some people have

58:07 many gods, some people only have one. And like, I us appreciate that that's going

58:10 to be a little bit weird. Well, I can only appreciate that because of the

58:14 environment that I live in, you know, and so I,

58:18 like, I was, I was just kind of struck by that, like the Language has

58:20 a lot of impact on our perception of

58:24 whatever it is. Right, so exactly. The other thing they're talking

58:28 about was just like. And I had no idea, just, like, during this time,

58:31 like, how far, you know, Judaism had,

58:35 like, spread, you know, because they're talking about these different kinds of Jews and everything

58:39 else like this, you know, and, like, I. I just think that.

58:43 So that idea was. Was cutting through for me. Right. That it was more about,

58:47 like, what do you believe? And not, like,

58:51 where are you from? Kind of thing. Right? Yes,

58:54 yes, yes. Because in a time where the

58:58 Greeks were philosophic and Greek

59:02 philosophy was thought of as. Even

59:05 Paul kind of degrades this a little bit. And Paul, you know, Paul

59:09 was a highly educated Jew. Highly educated. He was actually trained

59:13 in the synagogues by Gamaliel, I believe is the

59:18 rabbi's name. And so the synagogue system that Paul

59:21 was educated under before he had his Road to Damascus moment

59:25 and, you know, became a huge evangelical person for

59:29 Jesus. The system that Paul came out of, a lot of people don't

59:32 know, this had been built out by the

59:36 Sanhedrin and by the Pharisees in

59:40 order to. This is interesting, preserve

59:43 literacy among the Jewish people.

59:47 And that was being built in tension against this

59:51 idea of the Temple, which the Sadducees were

59:55 building as a physical representation of God on earth. And they

59:58 wrapped Herod and the Herodians into that. And so that

1:00:02 tension was existing in Jewish. He doesn't get into any of this, but that tension

1:00:05 was existing in Jewish society at the time. And so Ben Hur

1:00:09 is clearly in this book. He is clearly a

1:00:13 product of the Temple system, or not. Temple system, sorry, of the synagogue system.

1:00:17 So the synagogue was the folks who were trying to go out and

1:00:20 basically give scrolls to people and explain to them, like, these are the first five

1:00:23 books of the Bible. This is what. Well, what we think of as the Bible,

1:00:26 the Pentateuch, this is what Moses is. And they were

1:00:29 writing this down. So I heard this from a Jewish theologian, a

1:00:33 podcast I listened to from a Jewish theologian, like, a couple of years

1:00:37 ago, did a whole year on that podcast, and he explained a whole bunch of

1:00:40 this stuff and a whole bunch of different things that I didn't know. But in

1:00:43 Judaism, that synagogue system is

1:00:46 what has maintained Judaism over the course of the last now

1:00:50 2000 years. Because the temple's gone. The temple disappeared in

1:00:54 67 A.D. because the Romans, like Masala,

1:00:58 finally decided they were just going to be done with these people and just. They

1:01:01 burned the Temple to the ground and scattered the Jews. And that's

1:01:05 where the Jewish Diaspora began. That was then.

1:01:09 The door was then closed on that in the 1940s, with the creation

1:01:13 of 1948, with the creation of the state of Israel.

1:01:18 This is what people don't understand about Judaism. The

1:01:22 tension between the synagogue system and the temple system was

1:01:25 a main tension when Jesus showed up. And so Jesus

1:01:29 was a product of. He was a product of the synagogue system,

1:01:33 not the temple system. That's why in

1:01:37 all four of the book. Well, except for John, but in four. All

1:01:41 four of the books of the. All three of the four books of New Testament,

1:01:45 when. When Jesus says, I will tear down the temple and I will rebuild it

1:01:49 in three days, the Sadducees got all

1:01:52 upset. This is why. And they were like, who are you?

1:01:56 You're gonna. The temple, it's been. Take. It took us like 40 years to build

1:01:59 this temple. How are you going to tear it down in three days and rebuild

1:02:01 it? Now, the disciples tied that to the

1:02:05 crucifixion in their eschatology and in

1:02:08 their theology much later on. We just accept that idea

1:02:12 as de rigueur now from 2,000 years later. But back in the day,

1:02:16 that was a revolutionary idea. That was hugely

1:02:20 revolutionary because that goes beyond just the widow and the

1:02:23 childless and the poor. That's saying that. Think

1:02:27 about what that's radically saying. It's not just that.

1:02:32 And there were a lot of people who were claiming they were the Messiah running

1:02:34 around during Jesus's time. There were a lot of folks claiming that, to your

1:02:38 point, messianic worldview was very hot among the

1:02:41 Jews. Very hot. But.

1:02:46 But Jesus said something radical or made it. Made an

1:02:49 illusion that people at that time definitely understood. And the illusion

1:02:53 was, and you get this in Ben Hur too, the illusion was

1:02:57 that the temple system of man that's

1:03:00 being built to be this glamorous thing. And by the way, this is reflected also

1:03:04 in the Book of

1:03:10 Kings. Yes, the first part of the Book of Kings, when David dies and

1:03:13 David wants to build a temple. And if you go through that first part of

1:03:16 that book, God is sort of silent on whether or not David

1:03:20 could build the temple. And it's one of those, like, shocking things that like most

1:03:23 people don't see in the text. And then his son Solomon goes off and builds

1:03:26 the temple after he's gone. But David, David is the

1:03:30 one that initiates the building project, not God.

1:03:35 So the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees were arguing about this during

1:03:39 Jesus's time. And Jesus was a

1:03:43 product of the Pharisee system. And by the way,

1:03:47 he was with the Pharisees for three years, and he told them, you have

1:03:50 everything except for mercy

1:03:54 and grace. You have everything else you need except for

1:03:58 mercy and grace. And that's. And by the mercy and grace extended

1:04:02 to people that we now think extending

1:04:05 their mercy and grace is a natural thing. The widow, the poor, the childless,

1:04:09 or the children. Right. The weak. Right. Well,

1:04:13 that was radical for his time. That was hugely radical. Now,

1:04:17 the Romans didn't think that was radical. The Romans were

1:04:21 like, you're just another weirdo in a backwater

1:04:25 running around with no job. Like, aren't you a Carpenter?

1:04:29 We have 1500 gods. We're Rome, for Pete's sake.

1:04:33 Which is why I opened up with the galley. The galley rowing

1:04:37 scene. Because that's Rome. We will press your body into

1:04:40 slavery because we can. Force of will.

1:04:44 To the previous conversation we were having before we hit record, ultimate force of will.

1:04:49 I don't. I mean, with the exception of the benefits of technology

1:04:52 over the last 2,000 years, we don't really see

1:04:56 states behaving like that. Or. Or we do, but it's less and less and less

1:05:00 tolerated over the course of time. I also think that's a Christian assumption.

1:05:03 Like the fact that we question whether or not America should be

1:05:08 bombing Iran for 40 days. We think that all comes out of

1:05:11 Vietnam. No, Our skepticism around

1:05:15 Vietnam. No. I mean, there was skepticism around World War II. There was skepticism around

1:05:18 World War I. There was skepticism around the Civil War. There was skepticism around

1:05:22 the Revolutionary War. Need I go back any further?

1:05:26 There's been skepticism. And that skepticism comes from

1:05:32 ideas having consequences that go all the way back 2,000 years.

1:05:36 And so when I. When I talk about making it sacred, I'm just saying just

1:05:39 acknowledge that it goes back 2000 years. Let's start with that. Let's just start with

1:05:43 that basic acknowledgment, and then we can move forward. Dude, it's so

1:05:46 funny because, like, I

1:05:50 was. I was in training during, like, 9 11, right? And so, you know that

1:05:54 that was my birthday. I think you and I have talked about this. And so,

1:05:56 yeah, I joined as a reservist, and I joined the military for all the wrong

1:05:59 reasons. Right? It's funny now because, like, I'll have parents and they'll come talk to

1:06:03 me, and they're like, hey, will you talk to my kid about joining the military?

1:06:05 I'm like, what do you think I'm going to tell them? First of all, I'm

1:06:08 not gonna talk him into it or out of it personally. But I remember

1:06:12 going in like the next day, right. And tensions are running

1:06:15 hot. Right. I mean, I mean, we're, we're, we're in job training for the

1:06:19 military. Right, Right. And everyone is so excited to go turn it into a

1:06:22 parking lot. Like that. That was the exact wordage

1:06:26 that was being used. Let's just nuke them all. Turn it

1:06:30 into a parking lot. And me, like, me being

1:06:34 me, like, I'm like, that doesn't make us any better

1:06:38 than them, you know, of course, which wasn't heard. And now I'm

1:06:41 the bad guy, you know, in the platoon and everything else like this, you know,

1:06:45 because, like, we're not even allowed to have this conversation or talk about it or

1:06:48 anything else like this. It was such like a weird moment, you know, and so

1:06:52 it's, it's weird because like, you know, the thing that is

1:06:56 like there is, you know,

1:06:59 like human life in and of itself is something like

1:07:03 worth protecting. Right? Not just right for our side or for

1:07:07 our beliefs. Like, like in general, like, I kind

1:07:10 of don't care what you believe. If you're not doing harm to another human being,

1:07:15 you're allowed to believe whatever you want. Right?

1:07:18 Yeah. And so, yeah. And this is,

1:07:24 this didn't come from nowhere. And it, and by the way, it would be an

1:07:27 absolute shame. And this is where this is the thing that,

1:07:30 like I said this before on the show, and then we'll go back to the

1:07:33 book because we've wandered way far afield, but it's. Okay, good. This is a good

1:07:36 conversation. The challenge that I had with the

1:07:39 Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II.

1:07:43 So the challenge of Nuremberg was not.

1:07:47 No, was how do you create. In

1:07:50 1946, 47, 48. How do you create

1:07:54 a post war order?

1:07:59 And M would, would, would, Would

1:08:02 appreciate this. How do you create a post war

1:08:06 order based on a. A desacralized

1:08:09 world? Because how can there be the sacred in the firebombing of

1:08:13 Dresden and the, the two nukes dropped at Hiroshima and

1:08:16 Nagasaki, we've now desacralized the whole

1:08:20 thing. We are now deeply in a profane world. How does

1:08:24 a profane world or people with a profane worldview, even though

1:08:28 they may mouth the words of the Bible,

1:08:32 how does, how do those people judge.

1:08:37 Judge German atrocities?

1:08:42 Nuremberg. Yeah. So

1:08:46 Hannah Arendt talked about this in her great book

1:08:50 Eichmann in Jerusalem about the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, a

1:08:53 book we've covered on this show. And

1:08:57 I mean, Eichmann was The person who signed off on all the orders

1:09:01 that transported the Jews to the concentration camps.

1:09:05 And he just made it more efficient. And

1:09:08 Hannah Arendt, who barely got out of Germany ahead of the

1:09:12 Nazis, was hired by the

1:09:16 New York Times, I believe it was, to go and cover

1:09:19 the trial, because the Mossad did what the Mossad is

1:09:23 going to do, and they went and snatched that guy up in Argentina in, like,

1:09:27 the 60s and put him on trial. And Hannah Aaron made

1:09:30 a point that the same problem that

1:09:34 the. The Jewish people who were only barely like half

1:09:38 a generation away from the Holocaust, so there were people around

1:09:42 who still had that in their historical memory. I mean, they'd lived through it. Yeah,

1:09:47 those people had trouble not

1:09:51 convicting Eichmann, but figuring out on what

1:09:54 basis to convict Eichmann. And so

1:09:58 the basis to convict him, Hannah Arendt pointed this

1:10:02 out, she thought would have had more power

1:10:06 if it appealed to something sacred rather

1:10:09 than something profane. And

1:10:13 she thought that the basis of convicting Eichmann on

1:10:17 the basis of a profane materialistic. And by profane,

1:10:21 I don't mean ugly. I just mean materialistic or

1:10:25 brutally. Yeah, not godly. Rudely focused in the world. Right. Rudely rooted in the world

1:10:29 was a reflection of what had happened, of the failures at

1:10:32 Nuremberg. Because. So let me. Yeah,

1:10:36 yeah, yeah, go ahead. I think. I think that what I'm hearing. Right.

1:10:39 And this is. This is interesting. Right. So let me work through this. Yeah, yeah.

1:10:43 Like, so they. People that had gone through that

1:10:47 had. Had had the question of, like, okay, do

1:10:51 we really have the right. Right. Or what gives us the right? You know, because

1:10:54 of all these other people that have been hurt and everything. And so the. Think.

1:11:05 So. Oh, did it become like a. Like a vanity metric? Right,

1:11:09 Because. Because just killing one person, we've. We've all done this thing. So look

1:11:13 at the sheer number of people that this person has killed. So. So we're not

1:11:17 gonna be outraged by the death anymore. We're just gonna be outraged by the amount

1:11:20 of death that this person has caused. That was

1:11:23 Stalin's critique of Nuremberg. Oh,

1:11:26 interesting. Stalin went there.

1:11:31 That's a. Interesting.

1:11:35 It's a hell of a critique. That's what it is.

1:11:39 Well, I mean, like, you kill one man, you're a murderer. You kill 30 million.

1:11:44 It's a rounding error. It's fine. That was Stalin's critique

1:11:49 of everything that he saw. Because if Stalin had gotten

1:11:52 to Hitler's bunker, which is a great what if to kind of run in

1:11:56 your head, what if Stalin had gotten to Hitler's bunker before the Americans did.

1:12:03 Well, I know what would have happened thinking about it.

1:12:07 Oh, Stalin would have pulled Salah, would have pulled Hitler right out of that

1:12:10 bunker. He would have, number one, put him in a cage,

1:12:14 taken him back directly to Moscow, dried him out from the

1:12:17 amphetamines, and then put him on trial

1:12:21 because Stalin wanted to yell at Hitler in the dock. Dock.

1:12:25 And he wanted to see Hitler in the dock. And then he wanted to hang

1:12:28 Hitler in Moscow. That's what the Russians would have done because there

1:12:32 were 60 million dead Russians to get

1:12:36 that guy. And Stalin, though, he didn't

1:12:40 care about the 60 million dead Russians. What Stalin cared about was

1:12:43 Stalin's ego. And he wanted to match his

1:12:47 ego because going back to the. The.

1:12:50 What was it? The. The ribbentrop, the tree that was signed with

1:12:54 ribbentrop that split Poland. He looked at Hitler's

1:12:57 actions as a political violation because he

1:13:01 was an atheist. He wasn't appealing to a God. There

1:13:05 was no God then, no God in Russia other than Stalin. So go

1:13:09 get that guy, dry him out, put him in the dock, and

1:13:12 let's have a fight. And that's what would have happened

1:13:16 if the Russians had gotten to the bunker and Hitler had been alive.

1:13:22 Now, that's interesting. Counterfactual to run. That's counterfactual history, because it didn't

1:13:26 happen that way. And that's not what. That's not what occurred. But, but, but if

1:13:30 that had happened, Nuremberg would have looked totally

1:13:33 different. So would Eichmann's trial later on. Gosh,

1:13:37 almost 20 years. Well, not even 20, 17, 15, 16 years

1:13:41 later in Jerusalem would have looked different.

1:13:45 Totally different. As it was, the Western

1:13:48 leaders tried to. To. To split the. Not split the baby, but they tried to

1:13:52 walk a line talking about numbers and

1:13:56 morality. Well, guess what? Eichmann's

1:14:00 defense was that he was doing a moral thing. And

1:14:03 this is where the idea of just following orders now comes in. I was just

1:14:07 following orders. I was trying to advance in the Nazi higher work. And this is

1:14:10 how you advance. There is no morality attached to this.

1:14:15 Yep. Which I say that

1:14:18 out loud, and it even. It irks me to say it out loud.

1:14:23 Like, I'm getting like. Like there's little things in my body right now. Like, I'm

1:14:26 having a physiological response to this because my spirit,

1:14:30 the. The thing that's inside of me that knows this is wrong is like, this

1:14:33 is terrible. This is a terrible thing. Like, I'm having

1:14:36 trouble even just saying this out loud, but it is the. It's the Truth of

1:14:40 the thing. Well,

1:14:44 and I don't. We,

1:14:48 I don't, I am, I don't say normally I'm deathly

1:14:52 afraid because I don't like to live in fear. I don't

1:14:56 trust. I'll frame it this way. I don't trust the human beings can't wind

1:14:59 up back at that cul de sac with better technology

1:15:04 and more ability to kill more people. I don't trust that

1:15:07 we're better. I don't, I don't trust that we're not evil from the beginning in

1:15:11 our hearts. I don't trust that we.

1:15:14 I don't trust that we. Yeah. I don't trust that we have to learn how

1:15:18 to be good because it's just so much easier to be bad. Oh

1:15:21 yeah, I like I'm with you on these things but we're

1:15:26 every person I know who, who, who, who lives in the south, right? And

1:15:30 if you're not, if you're not a church going person down here in the south,

1:15:33 right? Yeah, every person, right? Because, because we're, we have

1:15:37 this little book club. We don't tell all you guys, but all of the, all

1:15:40 the, all the atheists and the agnostics, right? When you guys, when you guys are

1:15:43 church. We don't go to church, but we do hang out and we, and we

1:15:46 share the cancellations. Right, but we just don't hang signs, right, with,

1:15:50 with, with, with recruitment totals on them and stuff that like, like. Yeah, no, it's

1:15:54 cool, whatever. Go have the meetings. Everybody should have a meeting.

1:15:58 Go ahead, go ahead, get together, sign. Oh, go ahead. Sorry,

1:16:02 but every person I know and myself included runs into the thing of

1:16:06 like, okay, okay, so like you're not religious, so

1:16:10 how could you have morals, right? The presumption that morals

1:16:14 are an alien

1:16:18 thing because you don't, you

1:16:21 know, go to church and have the belief that until you accept

1:16:25 Jesus into your heart, you don't, you're going to be damned. Right. And go to

1:16:29 hell. Right, like sure that you know, I don't think it

1:16:33 has to go that far. But, but, but that's a very

1:16:36 interesting thing of the idea of like, so like was that guilt? Like,

1:16:40 like they felt so bad that they had to make it about just like the

1:16:43 sheer. Because even from a volume driven perspective, like I would wager

1:16:47 those two bombs, I mean you gotta be somewhat,

1:16:50 you know, just from a body count perspective, right?

1:16:54 So I think that they couldn't,

1:17:00 I think they couldn't square the circle in the light. In light of what? Himmler.

1:17:04 Himmler's defense from the doc.

1:17:08 I think that in the case of Eichmann, they couldn't square the

1:17:11 circle with Eichmann's defense from the doc. Because while it's

1:17:15 not a robust defense, if

1:17:19 you're, if you're, if you are disconnected from the sacred

1:17:23 in a way where you can't explain why a human being

1:17:27 has value and then how 5 to how that

1:17:30 scales up. If you can't explain the why and how to

1:17:34 enemies, that means you can't

1:17:37 explain it to yourself. I agree with that. And

1:17:41 so Eliada in the Sacred of The profane in

1:17:44 1957 is noting that the

1:17:48 lack of ability to explain is the reason to write

1:17:52 the book. Because he's, he's thinking. It's just an issue of give you the

1:17:56 ability to explain. I'll give you the language. I live in

1:17:59 2026, as we've already talked about, with clear

1:18:02 thinking. I think the language is long gone.

1:18:06 I think the language is long gone. I think it's been forgotten. Like the opening

1:18:09 of Lord of the Rings. You know those got a great movie which

1:18:13 I just, just watched Fellowship of the Ring with my son. Right. You

1:18:17 know, things have been long forgotten because there are none now alive who remember them.

1:18:21 I don't think we have people around who remember that. I think we've, we've gotten

1:18:25 carbon copies of carbon carpet copies of carbon copies of carbon copies of that

1:18:29 language now. And to re. And this is why I said

1:18:32 to re. Sacralize. The west is going to be a hundred year long project

1:18:36 because we have to rediscover the language. And again,

1:18:40 language away from

1:18:44 religion, capital R. Religion. Right.

1:18:47 That's why I picked on the environmentalist movement or use the environmentalist

1:18:51 movement as an example because it's the easiest sort of one to use.

1:18:55 Right. But

1:18:58 I also see where we are beginning to

1:19:01 sacralize our technology

1:19:07 and we don't like to use those terms, but we do.

1:19:11 So for instance,

1:19:16 how many folks, when they wake up in the morning, the first thing they do

1:19:19 is turn on their phone.

1:19:23 Like the very first thing. Like even before you say good morning to your kids

1:19:26 or to your, your husband or your wife or whatever your situation is, your dog,

1:19:30 the phone goes on, or maybe the phone didn't even go off at night.

1:19:35 So the term worship is of course loaded with Christian assumptions.

1:19:39 But when you strip away all those, worship just means what you pay attention to

1:19:44 at the bottom of it. So even

1:19:49 folks like Elon Musk and others, Jonathan Haidt pointed this out in

1:19:53 his book on the Righteous Mind. And then later on in his social media

1:19:57 research on, like, what that's doing to teenage girls and sort of how that's how.

1:20:01 Well, all that's going. Both of

1:20:05 them make the point that we're already cyborgs.

1:20:09 We just don't have the thing embedded into ourselves, though. That is

1:20:13 the next step. The transhumanists would like to take that next step and go

1:20:16 directly to the embedding because we're already

1:20:20 doing the worship part. Well, I hear that as a person who.

1:20:24 Yes, okay. Pointing my full cards on the table, yes, his capital are

1:20:27 religious, and no, I'm not trying to convert John. I could be friends with people

1:20:31 of all different kinds. Okay, it's fine.

1:20:36 But as a person whose capital are religious, that scares

1:20:40 the heck out of me. That actually checks me. I'm not looking to check John.

1:20:44 John can check himself. I'm not looking to check. Check my lip. Y' all do

1:20:47 whatever it is you're going to do, but it checks me. It's like, oh, yeah,

1:20:49 how often am I looking at that thing? Rather than doing these other

1:20:53 things? How much of this do I need to shift? Where do I need to

1:20:56 shift My. My. My worship to my attention

1:21:00 to. So instead of. People ask me, how. How do you read all the

1:21:04 books you read? Well, I just don't watch Netflix or

1:21:08 I watch less. Yep. Like,

1:21:11 I'm in Kung Fu, Right. Because. Yeah, because. Because people will be like, dude, where

1:21:15 do you find the time? Well, okay, after work.

1:21:18 This is what I do. What do you do after work? Well, I sit on

1:21:22 the couch and I watch and I drink beer. Okay. I make. I make

1:21:26 other choices. Right, right, right. Not finding a

1:21:29 well of time that you don't have access to. I'm just using the. The

1:21:33 absolute well of time that we all have a little bit more intentionally than

1:21:37 you are. I often say this, and this is the

1:21:40 crack up line. Kim Kardashian and myself,

1:21:44 and I'll throw Lewis Hamilton in there. Lewis Hamilton

1:21:48 and the guy from Game of Thrones and

1:21:51 Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, we all have the same 24 hours. I

1:21:55 don't care how you think about any of those people. Not one of them is

1:21:59 getting an extra hour in the day. Not one.

1:22:03 Nobody that you know, not from the Pope of Rome to the

1:22:06 homeless guy on the street is getting one more extra hour in the day. It's

1:22:09 24 hours the same way for every single one of us. Now,

1:22:13 what Kim Kardashian does with her. Her 24 hours and what the homeless guy does

1:22:16 with his 24 hours are fundamentally different. I love the framing of that. Right.

1:22:20 Because, like, at this. At this stage, right, when you become someone

1:22:24 who just does things, right, and you put things out in the world and everything,

1:22:27 and they don't always see the time and the effort and all this stuff. Right.

1:22:30 Especially if you do things like books and things like that. Yeah, it's. You know,

1:22:34 but I love that framing that, like, let's look at all these people.

1:22:38 Not a single one of them is going to find another hour in

1:22:41 the day itself. What they spend, like,

1:22:45 such a beautiful way of talking about it, right? Because. Because this is like one

1:22:48 of the things that I talk about with everyone is there, like. And it's.

1:22:52 It's so wild because, like, I was this person, right? They're just stuck in.

1:22:56 I call it being stuck in the land of should. Right. Should I have to

1:22:59 work this hard? No, no. But don't want

1:23:03 more than you're willing to work, right? Like, if

1:23:07 you want. If you want an easy job and you want no stress, don't expect

1:23:11 great pay. Just not how it works. Well, and

1:23:15 I'm also worried about. Because I'll throw this in as well, because we're way off

1:23:18 our script. It's fine. Oh, yeah, we're way off.

1:23:22 But this is. This is why I love doing the show, because I get to

1:23:24 have organic conversations and it just goes.

1:23:28 I worry that the promises of our material

1:23:31 technologists of. We will deliver

1:23:35 you universal basic income because of all the robots and the AI, and we're going

1:23:38 to do that at some unidentified utopia in the future. And you will

1:23:42 never have to work. You will merely. As Dostoevsky wrote

1:23:46 about in Notes of the Underground, you will merely hang around

1:23:49 and have grapes falling into your mouth and only have to concern

1:23:53 yourself with the propagation of the species. Or as Nancy

1:23:56 Pelosi's. Because we've been able to. Income.

1:24:00 Yeah, because that's gonna work. Or as Nancy Pelosi said, with the passing of the.

1:24:04 Of the. The Affordable Health Care act back all those years ago

1:24:07 now, she was like, oh, well, people will have extra time to make art and,

1:24:11 like, do things.

1:24:17 And now they're saying you don't need. Who was it? There was some

1:24:21 there. Oh, the guy who makes the music. The music AI engine

1:24:24 thing. He was like, well, it takes a lot of time to learn how to

1:24:27 make music. So now you don't have to spend that time. You can go do

1:24:30 something else with it. Like, you idiots.

1:24:34 But again, if you have a sacred

1:24:37 understanding of the world, though, this then translates into a sacred understanding

1:24:41 of work. So work no longer is just

1:24:45 a thing I do, a rude thing that I do to make money so I

1:24:48 can sit on my couch and drink beer and I don't have to go do

1:24:50 kung fu because I just made enough money to sit on my.

1:24:54 My couch. Now work becomes elevated to something

1:24:57 else. So, like, entrepreneurs call that a calling, or we

1:25:01 talk about the drive or all that purpose, passion, drive meaning. Right.

1:25:05 Those words are great. And I think they only get you

1:25:09 halfway there, because for the 5,000

1:25:12 years, for the vast majority of the 5,000 years of human history, until about two

1:25:16 minutes ago, human beings actually

1:25:20 worked the land, which is where nature. Nature

1:25:23 worship, frankly. Intrinsically motivated. It was easy to be intrinsically

1:25:27 motivated. Plus, it was also easy to see that there were things bigger than you

1:25:30 that were in control that you were in control of. Oh,

1:25:34 dude. Yeah. So I don't. Right. So I don't.

1:25:38 Right, Right. Seasons. And like, I

1:25:41 raise chickens. I raise chickens and turkeys. Small

1:25:45 anecdote. The other day, I was feeding my chickens.

1:25:49 I was throwing out some scraps and whatever. I went and checked on them, and

1:25:52 it's a whole thing I got to do because of what we got set up

1:25:54 to protect it from predators, okay? So. But I go out

1:25:58 and I had three turkey pullets, three young turkeys. Now, turkeys and

1:26:02 turkey chickens are fundamentally different. Turkeys are actually dumber than

1:26:06 chickens. Most people don't know this. They're stupid. And it's hard

1:26:09 to keep them alive in general. But once they get to a certain level of

1:26:12 maturity, then they just take off like a rocket, and they go. And then they

1:26:15 don't care about you, so the dumbness stays. But then they have,

1:26:19 like, huge survival instincts. They're too big for hawks to take. They

1:26:22 fight other animals. It's kind of ridiculous. And then they go perch high up in

1:26:26 a tree, and they can get away from things. It's kind of amazing. But you

1:26:29 have to get them there first, right? So we had. We had five

1:26:32 turkey babies. Two died at

1:26:36 young. Just two died. Matter of fact, my son,

1:26:40 one died in his hands. He was like, well, and he's nine. He goes, well,

1:26:43 it had to decide whether to live or die.

1:26:48 Only your kid, right? Like this bumping.

1:26:52 No. I went, whoa, whoa, dude.

1:26:56 Whoa. Your wife is just mad. No, she was out of town. She was

1:26:59 out of town. She didn't. She didn't hear any of that. And I was like,

1:27:02 oh, dude. Oh. Game over. Go, go. And then he went and watched a

1:27:06 cartoon on Netflix. He's Like, I'm just gonna watch. There's

1:27:10 that moment of like, okay, did this ruin you? Did this ruin you? No, I

1:27:13 want to watch cartoons. Okay. Thank God. Okay, like. Like, go. Go do

1:27:17 the thing. He's gonna go watch Scooby Doo. It'll be fine. Yeah. Oh, my

1:27:20 gosh. He's 16 and he hates you when it. What I need you to remember

1:27:24 is that it's probably due to this and you didn't give him the right output.

1:27:27 I've already told this. I've already told my children, when you get to be 30,

1:27:30 I'll pay for your therapy. But it's at 30. I'm not gonna pay for it

1:27:33 right now. That's the real measure of. Are you

1:27:37 successful as a parent is like, how much therapy does your child need

1:27:40 in an adult state to function? Like, I don't want to have a

1:27:44 conversation with you about report cards or AB on a roll. No, like,

1:27:48 let's talk at 30, and let's talk at 30. You bring your kids

1:27:51 therapy bill. I'll bring my kids therapy bill. That's right. See, we'll see

1:27:55 how. We'll share the receipts. We'll see how this all goes.

1:28:00 Yes, but I went into a kid willing to go to

1:28:04 therapy. Means you're winning. Like, I'm just gonna go out there too, right? No, it's

1:28:07 fine. It's like, just holding it away from them and telling them that only. Only

1:28:11 sissies, like, talk about, oh, God, no. They never go, no.

1:28:15 Oh, God, no, no, no, no, no, no. Go ahead.

1:28:18 But you just gotta wait till you're 30. You gotta save it all up. Otherwise

1:28:21 you'll have nothing to talk about. You gotta justify the expense.

1:28:27 Like, you don't have enough at 16. You really don't. Like, you think you do,

1:28:30 but you really don't parent. You sound like. You sound like my mom whenever I

1:28:33 was a kid. Because, like, sometimes, like, Like, I'd be upset about something and she

1:28:36 like, you want something to cry about. Like, that's what you sound like. Right. Know,

1:28:39 Right? That's what my mother told me, actually.

1:28:43 Oh, yeah. I'll give you something to cry about. And you're like, oh, wait, no,

1:28:45 you up the ante. Oh, I don't want any of that. Yes, yes,

1:28:49 yes. So you want someone to talk to. Let me give you enough so you

1:28:52 need someone to talk to.

1:28:57 Oh, my gosh. So I went into the. I went

1:29:01 into the chicken bin, right? And one of the turkeys. For some reason, I'd

1:29:05 been in the chicken pen all night. The night before, my son was like, oh

1:29:08 yeah, it's fine. We checked on him. It was fine. Well, I walked into the

1:29:11 turkey pan or walked through the chicken pen and the turkey was, was dead.

1:29:17 No visible signs of an attack inside the pen. The

1:29:21 pen is predator proof. No predators getting in.

1:29:25 And clearly. And it was, you know, it hadn't. Rigor mortis hadn't yet set in,

1:29:28 so it had been dead only for a little while, but it was dead long

1:29:30 enough to where flies were starting to like, you know, begin to make homes.

1:29:34 And so I of course, picked it up and took it out and did the

1:29:37 whole thing, disposed of the body and all that. I'm saying all

1:29:40 that to say this. I have no idea why

1:29:44 that turkey died. And that was three days ago.

1:29:50 That's a small, tiny sliver of

1:29:53 what people experienced for the last. For 4,500 years

1:30:00 with the land and nature and crops and animals,

1:30:05 just animals randomly dying. And you have no. You don't know why.

1:30:09 A storm comes out of the sky, hail takes away a third of your crop,

1:30:13 and that's it. You ain't eating for the rest of the year. Or if you

1:30:16 are, you're eating at subsistence level. Human beings. And

1:30:19 Eliada makes this point in the Sacred and the Profane. And Lou

1:30:23 Wallace gets to this in Ben Hur. Because in the middle of the 19th century,

1:30:26 they're just beginning to get out of this. This. They're just

1:30:29 beginning to start having the kinds of things we consider to be just normal

1:30:33 things like the way we live now,

1:30:37 light years away from the way people lived over the course of the last

1:30:40 5,000 years. So it's easier for a human

1:30:44 to be close to the sacred because they have to be.

1:30:48 And as we've gotten further away from that, and I'm not the first person to

1:30:52 say this either, we've become less consumed with that. This is what

1:30:56 Eliota was talking about in that one paragraph that I read. We've

1:30:59 become more. That's why he says. That's why he says the desacralization process

1:31:04 is something that's relatively new in human history. And he's right.

1:31:08 So we have all these terms that we use for meaning and significance, but

1:31:12 we don't. They're grounded in different things. They're grounded in

1:31:15 industrialization, or they're grounded in Darwinian

1:31:19 evolutionary theory, or there are grounded in socialism, or they're grounded in

1:31:22 capitalism, or they're grounded in communism, or they're grounded in fascism, or they're

1:31:26 grounded in geography. Geography, or they're grounded in race, not

1:31:29 ethnos, race. Or they're grounded in economic condition

1:31:33 or class structure or Marxist theory or

1:31:37 critical theory or whatever they're grounded in. And those

1:31:40 things, I look at all those groundings and I go, you push on

1:31:44 those just a little bit. All of them, right, left, center,

1:31:48 whatever. You push on them just a little bit and they crack. And we can't

1:31:51 figure out why. We can't figure out why those things crack. And I

1:31:54 assert they crack because the thing

1:31:58 that, that grounds them is not grounded to

1:32:02 even at a very bare minimum, the land. Just a

1:32:05 bare minimum, the land. Right. So I have a. I have a thing that. I

1:32:09 do not think that I do, but we, we have a homestead. Right. And so

1:32:13 I've been able to meet a whole bunch of people who are doing homesteading all

1:32:16 across this country. And homesteading people,

1:32:20 I don't know what their politics are. It doesn't matter. Most of them, I think,

1:32:23 are libertarians, probably anarcho libertarians, probably way

1:32:27 over there. But we don't even get to that point because we're too busy talking

1:32:30 about, hey, how do you make sure your turkeys don't die? How do you make

1:32:34 sure you don't lose three of your five turkeys because you like to eat at

1:32:38 the end of the year? That's a

1:32:41 real, like, that's a real, in real life, grounding,

1:32:45 consideration. And

1:32:48 so, yeah, I'm not ashamed to admit, Yeah, I pray over my animals. Absolutely. Are

1:32:52 you kidding me? Because I can't. There's so many things around

1:32:56 my control. Yeah. I can feed them, I can optimize their conditions. I can do

1:33:00 all the sciency stuff and we do all the sciency stuff, but at a certain

1:33:03 point, the turkey's just going to die in a chicken coop. And I have no

1:33:06 idea how it happened.

1:33:11 And I have no way to solve that or predict for that. And this is,

1:33:14 again, this is something that people dealt with for 5,000 years. And how did they

1:33:18 deal with that uncertainty? Well, they dealt with that uncertainty by,

1:33:22 by working inside of the concept of a sacred

1:33:25 world. Starting with pagan worship. Right. Starting with worship

1:33:29 of the elements, starting with worship of weather, starting with worship of,

1:33:34 of nature and of circumstances, and then

1:33:38 gradually moving up the hierarchy to worship of divine beings

1:33:41 and all these other kinds of things. Now we're in a space where

1:33:46 we sort of said, to the higher that hierarchy. That's

1:33:50 interesting. But we could control for all these things now.

1:33:55 And to me, that feels a little arrogant. Well,

1:33:59 okay, man. Such a cool topic. Oh, my

1:34:02 gosh. Because I've shifted on this a lot. I used to

1:34:06 be the guy. I mean, after the

1:34:10 military, I was, it was so weird because

1:34:13 like, before the military, like I, I thought I was too good to weigh tables.

1:34:16 After the military, I'm not too good to do anything, right? But then I start

1:34:19 to figure some things out and I'm like, you know what? I really hate mowing

1:34:22 the yard. God, I really hate mowing the yard. Like, how much does it cost

1:34:25 for me to hire someone to like, mow the yard? I could find some kid

1:34:27 in the neighborhood, pay them 20 bucks, and then lo and behold, I have an

1:34:30 extra two hours, right, that I, that I get to use for whatever I want,

1:34:34 right? And so the thing I go back to is that turkey dies,

1:34:39 okay? Which is crazy, right? And a couple of years ago, you

1:34:42 and I did an episode where I was in the, in the mysterious Southwest, right?

1:34:46 I was, I was in a situation to where like, I mean, I'm driving around

1:34:49 through New Mexico and it's so big and open and you see this cloud and

1:34:52 like it's the only cloud in the sky. It's creating this like, shadow and everything

1:34:55 is so big and it's, it's, it's easy to be in awe of the

1:34:59 majestic of the land and every. I mean it's called the land of enchantment for,

1:35:02 for God's sakes, right? But here's,

1:35:06 here's where like it hits the road for me because I do think that there's

1:35:09 something around being busy and being productive. Now don't,

1:35:13 don't ask me to go toil and don't expect other people to go toil and

1:35:16 think that you're doing something good because just because it's your idea of a passion

1:35:19 and purpose, if you're doing it badly and looping people into it,

1:35:24 I think you're still on the wrong plane, okay?

1:35:27 But by that same token, if

1:35:31 every moment is spent under duress of like, are we going to have

1:35:35 turkeys? Is the crop going to come in the right way? Like, does my kid

1:35:38 have measles and everything? Like, if all of our bandwidth, right, I go back to

1:35:42 Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's really hard to think about, huh?

1:35:46 Am I really self actualized if all my effort has to be extended to keep

1:35:50 the lights on, right? And food on the table, right? So

1:35:55 I'm a believer in work. Like, like, I think, I think I'm a big

1:35:59 believer that work worth doing is worth sweating about. Like

1:36:03 thinking about toiling under. I think that that's meaningful, you know,

1:36:06 but if every

1:36:10 moment is allocated towards struggle, community, just trying to make it through, to try,

1:36:14 trying to make it through. Maybe a doctor

1:36:18 comes, right? Or a vet comes by and says, like, oh, what happened to your

1:36:21 turkey? Oh, I have no idea. Well, do you want me to take a look

1:36:23 at it? We might be able to keep it from happening. Don't have time, man.

1:36:25 Don't have time. It's God's will. It's just gonna happen again, right?

1:36:29 And maybe, maybe the doctor can cut up in this turkey and realize like,

1:36:33 oh, maybe they, maybe there's this element in your chicken

1:36:37 feed that is just really, really bad for turkey. I'm not saying that this is

1:36:39 a thing here, but if we don't ever have the, even the space to ask

1:36:43 the question because it's sacred,

1:36:47 then everybody has a lot more turkeys dying because

1:36:51 no one is, no one is doing the research on these turkeys because you

1:36:55 know what, like, why would you waste your time doing these things? It's in God's

1:36:58 hands. Like, just let God handle it. And then we're not asking these questions. We're

1:37:01 not seeing that germs have a, a much

1:37:05 bigger impact on morbidity rates than like the

1:37:08 reputation of the doctor and stuff like that. Because we have decided

1:37:12 to stay at such a low level of manual effort, there

1:37:16 is no room to ask any higher questions, right? So there is

1:37:19 no room for innovation. There is no room for

1:37:23 anything, right? How do you, how do you balance

1:37:26 these two ideas? Or do you so

1:37:33 these two ideas. I think the

1:37:37 I. Well, so I think that we have become

1:37:40 overbalanced in one direction over another. So you're right. I could call the

1:37:44 vet, which. Why would I do that? It's a

1:37:47 25 cent turkey. Like it's not worth it for me to go get a 500

1:37:50 an hour vet. But to your point, I could, I could absolutely go call

1:37:54 a vet. That'll cut up the turkey. That'll do a whole bunch of different things

1:37:57 on it, figure something out. Although that turkey is probably half eaten by now. Some

1:38:01 scavenger got it. So it fed somebody. There fit something already, so it's

1:38:05 fine. But like it. You're right. The vet would figure that out. And

1:38:09 you're correct. We've created systems and this is the prom. This was

1:38:12 the promise of industrialization that actually worked out. So the

1:38:16 promise of industrialization was you will have more

1:38:22 psychic time. This is the Henry Ford, Frederick Winslow Taylor

1:38:25 promise, right? We will optimize your productivity and your work inside of a

1:38:29 Factory box and you will have more time to be.

1:38:35 And actually, the way they framed it was in very materialistic terms. So

1:38:39 you'll have, you'll have, you know,

1:38:42 a white picket fence and a little yellow house. And to your point earlier,

1:38:46 2.5 children. That was the promise of industrialization.

1:38:50 And the promise really started in the 1920s in America and

1:38:54 really started in like right after World war. World War I. Well, just

1:38:58 before World War I. And then World War I kind of ground a little bit

1:39:00 that out of Europe. But they got, they got right back on board, particularly

1:39:04 in England. Got back on board. And by the 1950s, when

1:39:08 Eliada is writing the Sacred of the Profane, we were

1:39:12 so far away from the Ben Hurlou Wallace

1:39:15 sort of concept of what good could be, because good

1:39:19 had exploded in comparison to what it had been. So the people

1:39:23 that lived in the mid 20th century

1:39:26 remembered not just one turkey dying and it being kind of,

1:39:29 okay, it's 25 cents, it's not going to cost me anything. They remembered

1:39:33 whole swaths of turkey dying. Yeah. And having to deal with that, that was in

1:39:37 their historical memory in 2020, 26.

1:39:40 I talk about a turkey dying or the 16 some odd

1:39:44 chickens that I've got, and everybody goes, oh, well, you're clearly rich because you're

1:39:48 raising chickens.

1:39:52 Weird, right? Like, this is, this is the weird. That is kind of a unique

1:39:56 perspective, right? Yeah, right. That's interesting. And so, like, I

1:40:00 don't have to go to the store for eggs because, like,

1:40:04 I'm making them at my house. Oh, well, that means you're wealthy.

1:40:10 Okay, sure. Yeah, right. I, I sigh and I just gotta go.

1:40:14 Okay, sure, sure. Because you know what? The Industrial

1:40:17 revolution promises that you won't have to raise eggs.

1:40:21 Instead, eggs will be raised in some farm factory somewhere

1:40:25 with a bunch of chickens that never get to whose feet, never get to touch

1:40:28 the ground. And all they do is make eggs all day. Then we'll bleach them,

1:40:31 will ship them, they'll sit in a warehouse for however many days, and then they'll

1:40:35 sit on the, on the shelf underneath lighting for however many more days. And then

1:40:38 you'll get an egg and it'll be, and I use this in air quotes. Good

1:40:41 enough. And by the way, we'll put a thing on the box that says this

1:40:44 is nutritious or organic.

1:40:48 Right, right, right, right. And it's not just the eggs. It's everything in our food

1:40:51 system. Right. Which is where you get folks that then

1:40:55 turn to homesteading because they're like, what the Hell, but

1:40:58 the fact that they're able to turn to homesteading is seen as a sign of

1:41:02 a slough off, an after effect of this great wealth that

1:41:06 was produced through industrial revolution. And the technologists who are

1:41:09 promising us all kinds of wild promises with AI are looking at

1:41:13 industrial revolution and saying, oh well, the same thing will work out with the technology

1:41:16 from AI and robotics.

1:41:20 Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, wrong. But right

1:41:24 now the only working out they have

1:41:27 is not. You're going to have a, you're going to have a

1:41:31 house and 2.5 kids, for God's sakes. Fertility rates are down everywhere.

1:41:35 People aren't having kids. We have more

1:41:39 prosperity than ever before in the west and people are not having kids.

1:41:43 You would think that's another inverted sort of logic thing. You would think

1:41:47 that you have more free time, you have more available income, you have more wealth

1:41:50 because of the promises of the industrial revolution. You would have more children because you

1:41:54 don't have to worry about your turkeys and your chickens and your eggs. Somebody else

1:41:57 is worrying about that. But that's not what's happening. What's happening is

1:42:01 people are having fewer kids and things are inverting. Now, whether or not that's

1:42:05 a temporary thing we have yet to see, but things are inverting where

1:42:08 people are having fewer kids, fertility rates are down, and what are people doing with

1:42:12 their extra money and their extra time? And this is where I

1:42:16 get back to, is man's heart evil

1:42:20 or good? Which one is it?

1:42:23 Are we. And by the way, as entrepreneurs, we always say this in business,

1:42:27 we always say, oh, well, people are. We say this in sales. People are inherently

1:42:30 selfish. They only do what's. And we just sort of saw that off. Right? Yeah,

1:42:33 well, people aren't just inherently selfish when you're trying to sell them a widget. They're

1:42:37 inherently selfish about a whole lot of things. Oh

1:42:40 yeah, for sure. Like a whole lot of things.

1:42:44 And so I don't know, this is a long way

1:42:48 around to saying the answer to your question. I don't know what the mechanism is

1:42:53 to move people back to less

1:42:56 selfishness, but I know the mechanism isn't having a

1:43:00 love in with everybody. Like the boomers tried that.

1:43:05 That didn't work because the boomers all went off and became capitalists.

1:43:09 I also know that the answer isn't, yeah, I also know that the answer

1:43:13 isn't let's just bomb them all and have God sort them out. We tried that

1:43:16 for 20 years, that didn't work. I also know that

1:43:20 the answer isn't, let's just allow

1:43:24 people to come in in an unfettered manner or an unvetted manner,

1:43:28 and maybe, hopefully they'll all become Americans. I know that's not an answer

1:43:31 either. That hasn't worked either. Maybe if we just leave them to their

1:43:35 own devices and we let them, quote, unquote, rule themselves,

1:43:39 they'll magically discover how to be good to each other. But murder rates in

1:43:42 Chicago, Miami, New York City, Louisiana, San Francisco,

1:43:46 well, New Orleans. Need I go on prove that that's not

1:43:50 true either? The facts, the data, if we're going to be scientific and

1:43:53 materialistic on the ground, prove that, that those outcomes don't come

1:43:58 from just giving people the utopia that we think

1:44:02 they want. By the way, this was hopefully, I hope that people would have learned

1:44:05 this lesson from the French Revolution because it didn't work out there either. They

1:44:09 were going to create a utopia on Earth. They wind up with

1:44:13 Napoleon.

1:44:17 So these, all these things all come together

1:44:21 and if we want to, if we want to, if we want to

1:44:25 move away from Christ and God, okay, cool, let's move away from Christ and God.

1:44:29 The core question becomes can, how can we be materialistic?

1:44:33 Can we have more of our material needs provided for while being

1:44:36 disconnected from the source of those material needs being provided for and

1:44:40 yet still stay sacred?

1:44:44 That's the core question of the 21st century.

1:44:48 And I don't know what the answer to that is, but if

1:44:51 I look at history over the last 200 years, I don't think the answer is

1:44:55 a good one. Well, I mean, so I cut this a

1:44:59 little bit differently. Like, I'm with you for the mo or for the majority of

1:45:02 this. But like,

1:45:06 my big question is, because

1:45:09 in, in the, in the way that you're talking about, if we go back in

1:45:12 this direction, things get better. Is your, is your kind of a. Is. Is the

1:45:15 thing that I'm hearing from you? Okay, but sure, we can. Okay,

1:45:19 yeah, yeah, right. I think if we look at, I think if we look at

1:45:25 attempts where religious rhetoric

1:45:29 was used positively or negatively, there's just as much

1:45:33 negative output of, well, hey, our

1:45:36 religion is the right religion and everyone else is bad and wrong

1:45:40 stuff like this, right? So like, for me,

1:45:45 now we're past the tipping point, right? Like, like, you know, because, like, I think,

1:45:49 I think moderation is probably like the answer. Like, we're too far

1:45:52 connect. We're too far removed from like, core work. Most people don't have a job

1:45:56 that they have any passion or purpose about. They just Took a job because they

1:45:59 just went to school and just did this thing because that was the thing that

1:46:03 they were sold on. And so if you don't have any work that you care

1:46:06 about at all. Okay, great. I can, I understand

1:46:10 why clock punchers just want more money. I

1:46:13 get it, I do. Right?

1:46:17 But man, I just think about how many, how many,

1:46:21 I mean, how many other religions are we not

1:46:25 talking about because of the big R religion that's just like

1:46:29 steamrolled and said, we're right, you're wrong, therefore.

1:46:33 So I'm fine with having all of the other big R religions

1:46:37 battling in the public square. I'm fine with all of that. Matter of

1:46:40 fact, I believe that America fundamentally, this is why I don't

1:46:44 worry about things like, well,

1:46:48 I don't worry about Mayor mom dummy in

1:46:51 New York City, you know, having the Muslim call to prayer go out from the

1:46:55 top of the Empire State Building,

1:46:59 although the World Trade center would be too rich for words, but going out from

1:47:03 the World Trade center in the next, you

1:47:06 know, however many years of his administration. I'm not actually

1:47:10 worried about that. Although a lot of my fellow Christians are. I'm not worried about

1:47:13 that. I'm actually not worried about the

1:47:17 Hindus building ma, building temples and,

1:47:21 and, and building temple communities and, and doing things with other

1:47:24 Hindus in Dallas. I'm not worried about that.

1:47:28 I'm not worried about the potential for a Hindu

1:47:32 mayor being elected in Los Angeles, which

1:47:36 may indeed happen. I'm not worried about that.

1:47:40 I'm not worried about a Hindu governor of California. Not California,

1:47:44 sorry, Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy. I'm not worried about him being a

1:47:48 Hindu. I, I, that doesn't, that doesn't bother me because,

1:47:51 and the reason it doesn't bother me is not because of the

1:47:55 idea of the state shall make no church. That's embedded into

1:47:58 our Constitution, which, by the way, that's what it says, the state shall make no

1:48:02 church. I'm not worried about that.

1:48:06 I'm not worried about all these other temples and churches and synagogue. I'm not worried

1:48:09 about any of that. Have the Muslim called prayer go out in Dallas. Sure, go

1:48:13 ahead, go ahead. Because what I know

1:48:16 is I know something that the

1:48:20 Muslims don't know, and I also know something that the

1:48:24 Hindus don't know. And it's something very

1:48:28 specific about America. I wouldn't say this if I was in the uk. I wouldn't

1:48:31 say this if I were in Germany, and I wouldn't be confident saying it if

1:48:35 I were in Spain, because those countries have A different historical background with a

1:48:38 different historicity, historiosity attached to each one

1:48:42 of those. Those religions that I named.

1:48:46 But America,

1:48:53 I don't worry about it. And I don't worry about it because

1:48:57 of people, quite frankly, like you, John. People like you

1:49:01 are going to give the Muslims fits.

1:49:06 And the reason why you're going to give them fits is because of.

1:49:10 Is because of people. I think of the people who were in the new atheist

1:49:13 movement in the early 2000s, the Christopher Hitchens of the world and the Richard Dawkins

1:49:16 and those kinds of things. Folks. Folks who very loudly, because of our

1:49:20 freedom of speech, basically proclaimed all religions to be

1:49:24 dead and useless.

1:49:28 They specifically went off on a dragon against Christianity. But

1:49:31 now Dawkins, even, because Hitchens is passed

1:49:35 and Sam Harris is even on this thing about Islam now,

1:49:39 they're now turning their sights to Islam.

1:49:43 And Islam has no answer for that level of atheistic

1:49:47 skepticism. The only answer Islam has is

1:49:50 shut up or we kill you. By the way, they do that in Europe

1:49:54 a lot. If you make fun, if you do this, if you do that, you're

1:49:58 gone, you're done. This is something that does actually happen.

1:50:02 Salman Rushdie can actually testify to this. Someone tried to kill him

1:50:06 two years ago because he wrote some new books that basically

1:50:10 slams Islam.

1:50:13 Didn't work, and he lost an eye. But, I

1:50:17 mean, why is he doing this? Well, he's doing it because he is in

1:50:20 America. This is the thing. America is the

1:50:24 last, I think, pardon my use of

1:50:28 language here, the last, best hope for freedom of speech that

1:50:31 actually exposes the big R religions

1:50:35 to skepticism, to analysis,

1:50:39 to having their. Having their.

1:50:44 What do you call it? Their. Their superstructure pulled apart.

1:50:47 And the reason that I know America works this way

1:50:51 is because in America, we did this with Christianity.

1:50:55 We are way less of a Christian culture than we were

1:50:59 even in my mother's lifetime. And my mother's going to be 80 pretty soon here.

1:51:02 We are way less Christian than we were 80 years ago. Way less. And I'm

1:51:06 not just talking about. In our public pronouncements. I mean, privately,

1:51:10 you give us 80 years against. Is against Islam,

1:51:14 Hinduism. It'll take us two generations to pull that stuff

1:51:18 apart. So does that. Because of our skepticism and our agnosticism,

1:51:21 does that mean that,

1:51:25 like the thing, the thing that I'm thinking about as you're talking about

1:51:29 this, it's a fascinating concept. Like, I think about, like, bloatware, right?

1:51:33 Like, I think about, like. Like back in the day

1:51:36 when I sold phones, right? And Android was just coming Out. And

1:51:40 Samsung would always put their stupid version of Touch Whiz, right, Which is

1:51:43 their, their, their bettering version of, of

1:51:47 Android on their phones. And everybody hated it, right? And computers now come with

1:51:51 bloatware. All this stuff that like you don't even know that's on there, it's running

1:51:54 up, it's taking up systems space and everything else like that. So in your

1:51:57 opinion, if, if, if a thing like,

1:52:01 like Islam is going to get picked apart by our culture, does that

1:52:05 mean that the, that the faiths have too much bloat or

1:52:09 that our, that our culture is too,

1:52:12 too cynical? It could be both.

1:52:16 Could be both and it could be both.

1:52:20 And, and honestly, I think it probably is both and. But

1:52:24 the, the Pepsi challenge. Islam's never

1:52:27 really faced the Pepsi challenge from, from America. I mean, now,

1:52:31 now, now there will be people who will listen. Let me be very clear about

1:52:34 this. There are people who will listen and they will say, well, we've been bombing

1:52:37 them for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, okay?

1:52:41 Military engagement against people of a particular

1:52:44 religious belief or ideology is not the same

1:52:48 as cultural engagement with no bombs.

1:52:52 And it is fallacious for us to believe that those two things can even

1:52:55 be, can even be compared or be

1:52:59 analyzed. So does that, the, the thing

1:53:03 that you said there, I'm trying to parse and make sure that I understand. So

1:53:06 does that mean that we shouldn't have just been making every bad guy in an

1:53:09 Arab and a red and a red like bandana for the past, like

1:53:13 25 years of, you know, action movies? Is that, is that the core kind of

1:53:16 thing that you're trying to talk about here? Yeah, yeah, sure. That, that's, yes,

1:53:20 that's a, that's a very, it's reductious, but yes, it works. Yeah,

1:53:24 exactly. But the fact that we did that is not a bomb.

1:53:29 A movie's not a bomb. A movies can bomb. Don't get me wrong. Like

1:53:33 Ben Hur 2016 bombed. Yeah, movies can bomb. But

1:53:37 a movie in and of itself is not a bomb.

1:53:41 Not a bomb that destroys physical things.

1:53:44 It is. And this is where the ideas have consequences idea comes

1:53:48 back. Yeah, the ideas underneath that

1:53:51 movie are the bomb. So we argue about those

1:53:55 ideas in an American context from, again,

1:53:59 Christian assumptions about the sacredness of human beings.

1:54:03 We don't reference those because we've, we've dechristianized

1:54:07 America or actually, I hate to even use dechristanized,

1:54:11 desacralized America. So now we can have these

1:54:14 conversations in a space that's, that's more Profane.

1:54:18 Right. More materialistic, but in

1:54:21 Islam. And we saw this with the Charlie Hebdo killing. So I don't know if

1:54:25 you remember this, but this was, gosh, back in the mid-2000s, there was a cartoonist

1:54:29 named Charlie Hebdo who basically drew a bunch of cartoons that were

1:54:32 published, I believe it was in England or might have been

1:54:36 France, and that were anti Islamic. And this was during the height of

1:54:40 the Iraq war. And it was some satirical thing and

1:54:43 basically the guy got his head cut off in the street.

1:54:50 I think that, not. I think

1:54:53 the, the ways in which America

1:54:57 works. I'm not going to say they don't allow for that sort of

1:55:01 response from the fundamental radicals in Islam, which,

1:55:05 by the way, it is the fundamental radicals in Islam that engage in that behavior.

1:55:08 I'm not going to say that it doesn't allow for that. What I'm going to

1:55:11 say is the American sense of

1:55:15 that's not how you respond to this is going to kick in

1:55:19 and those people aren't ready for that response.

1:55:23 And this is where you're going to see, I think you're going to see the

1:55:26 good old boy Christians that meet on Sunday and the good old

1:55:30 boy atheists and agnostics that, that meet on Sunday but don't put out any signs.

1:55:34 Somehow they're going to find each other and go, no, no, that, that

1:55:38 can't happen. The culdesac again, that culdesac thing. That can't happen here.

1:55:42 One bad guy. One bad guy. That can't happen here.

1:55:45 You got to calm down. And by the way, you got to calm down.

1:55:49 We're gonna get your kids. Well, yeah, right, because like, because like, the crazy

1:55:53 is, the crazy thing is, is like, it's like, oh, yeah, you hate them too.

1:55:57 Yeah, yeah. We're not fans of this either. Okay, great. You know,

1:56:00 let's, let's, let's all come together. Come to the meeting at the church,

1:56:05 right? Yeah. And bring your kids. We're

1:56:09 gonna have a, we're gonna have a special little thing over here for the kids

1:56:11 at the church. So, so make sure that you bring them because we're all united

1:56:14 in this faith in, in this one drive against these, like, heathens, right.

1:56:18 You know that, you know that's how it's going to go because they've already got

1:56:20 the gathering places,

1:56:24 right. And, and, and, and those people are going to be like, inviting

1:56:28 people like me, right? While. While at the same time, like loathing

1:56:32 trans people, gay people, right? Like, like anyone who,

1:56:36 anyone who's too far from Their version of what is right.

1:56:39 They're. They're probably, like, demonizing and hating and probably

1:56:43 even trying to fund politicians that will push legislation that aligns with

1:56:47 these ideas, right? But since we're all united in this one fight,

1:56:54 and this is the thing that. So that uniting piece.

1:56:58 Once I figured out doing this podcast, I figured out a

1:57:02 lot of things, and I read. I read a lot of books, talk to a

1:57:05 lot of people on the show, have a lot of insights from it. And

1:57:10 this is. This is the secret.

1:57:14 And I don't mind saying it out loud, because people listen to the show all

1:57:17 over the world. They're not going to figure it out. This is the secret.

1:57:21 This is the secret for America. Now, what they have figured out is, okay,

1:57:24 if we just fragment these people through cyber

1:57:28 nonsense and the very online people, we could create fake bot accounts and do

1:57:32 spamming and trolling and all this other kind of stuff. We could separate these people

1:57:36 because the 20% of people who are online, they think represents all

1:57:39 330 million people in the country. Oh, yeah,

1:57:43 that's a. That's a mistake. And I don't care if your

1:57:47 bot farm is in the Philippines or your bot farm is in

1:57:50 India, or your bot farm is in Tehran, or your

1:57:54 bot farm is in Hamburg, Germany, or your bot farm is in

1:57:57 Nairobi, Kenya. By the way, I've named places where there are bot farms, farms

1:58:01 where people are. Various organizations are funneling money in

1:58:05 to create bots to gin up crap in the United States because they think

1:58:08 the fragmentation is the way. What they don't get

1:58:12 is the minority of people who are very. Online are the ones who are

1:58:16 fragmented. And all those people have to do is just

1:58:20 turn off the social media, just turn off the machine.

1:58:24 Then there's all of the people who are not on

1:58:27 those platforms and have no idea what's happening there.

1:58:31 And by the way, when their Muslim neighbor moves in,

1:58:35 go get the dolly and help their Muslim neighbor move in

1:58:40 and go help their Hindu neighbor move in and go help their atheist neighbor move

1:58:44 in and go help their Christian neighbor move in. Like the good.

1:58:47 The good people. Yeah, the people driven by fear.

1:58:51 No, right, like in the. In.

1:58:55 This is wild, man. Because, like, this is. This is a. I mean, I'm a

1:58:58 white guy living in Texas, you're a black guy living in Texas, right? So, like,

1:59:02 you know, there. There is that situation to where, right,

1:59:07 the community comes together. But, man, there's always going to be those people that don't

1:59:10 come together, right? Like, oh, yeah, there's always going to Be your Patrick Henry.

1:59:14 Go away and leave me alone. I'm going to go in the Appalachians. I don't

1:59:17 want to be bothered. People. People, yeah, absolutely. There's always going to be those people.

1:59:21 And by the way, I am guilty. I thought during COVID that all those

1:59:25 people. Up until Covid, I thought all those people had wiped out. I did. I

1:59:28 really thought that all of that had been oppressed and repressed and that we were

1:59:32 all sort of monoculture going along. And

1:59:35 what Covid really made me realize, I, you know, I made a

1:59:39 couple of bad assumptions in my life. Right. Was the range apparently

1:59:43 is still there. And on the one hand, the range is a

1:59:46 weakness. On the other hand, the range is a strength. And

1:59:50 which side of the knife, which angle of the blade you get hit by.

1:59:54 To your point earlier about gathering at the church, because they have all the buildings,

1:59:58 depending upon which angle of the blade you get hit on, it can either cut

2:00:01 you or it can cut somebody else. We're the best country in the world

2:00:05 to date because no other country is replicating this model. They don't want to

2:00:09 run. Nobody else wants to run this test. Not even the Canadians

2:00:13 want to run this test. And they could, but they don't want to run it.

2:00:18 And the. The Chinese and the Russians don't want to run this test. Oh, hell

2:00:21 no. We're running

2:00:25 this test here. We're running this. We're running this simulation

2:00:29 like. Like Multiple faiths, under 1. Can. Multiple faiths,

2:00:33 multiple ethnicities, multiple classes.

2:00:37 Can they.

2:00:40 Meaning all those folks I just named, can they actually

2:00:45 live together in a republic

2:00:50 smaller or larger, depending upon where you believe we are,

2:00:54 can they live in a Republic Relatively. Not

2:00:57 100%, because there's no absolute, but relatively peacefully.

2:01:01 Can that happen? Can it? Yes or no? Well,

2:01:05 that's been. That's been one of the grand sort of questions of running this

2:01:08 thing for the last 250 years. And so far.

2:01:12 Look, I said this the other day to a different group of people and they

2:01:14 all laughed at me, but I was like, no, I'm serious. Only one civil war.

2:01:18 And I said, only, Only one. We should have had multiple

2:01:21 civil wars. Are you kidding me? We should have had

2:01:25 multiple fragmentations and civil wars, and we should have. Have that. And the question

2:01:29 no one asks is why? Why is it that we have not

2:01:32 had that? Why have we had enough people who bought into the idea

2:01:37 that this could work? Why? I'm fascinated by the why of that.

2:01:41 Why did we decide that this is the thing? Why do people get up every

2:01:44 Day and do work. And to your point,

2:01:48 I go to work with people who are all over the map politically and ideologically.

2:01:52 Forget the other classes, just politically ideologies, allegic, all over the map.

2:01:55 I'm not. I don't. I have zero interest

2:01:59 in yelling at any of those people. Oh, same.

2:02:02 Yeah, not any of it, but because why. You made it

2:02:06 your mission, though, right? And so, so, so, you know,

2:02:10 a. A good client of mine, I've known them for a very. I mean, I've

2:02:13 known this. I've known this woman for 12 years, right? And she's. She's.

2:02:17 She's capital R, right? And

2:02:20 for the, Like, I. I have much respect for anyone who's capital R, but

2:02:24 that capital R is for them. They'll talk about it, right?

2:02:28 There's. There's an open invitation. But. And this is weird because it's

2:02:32 coming from the sales guy. Don't try to sell me on your capital R.

2:02:35 Right? Just don't. Yeah, like. Like, let it be known, right? But

2:02:39 this idea of your.

2:02:43 Your. Your goal. Goal is to go off and

2:02:46 convert other people. Like, Like, I always have this, like, this,

2:02:50 this concern, right? Because I work in sales and I think about belief and where

2:02:54 do people get motivation from and everything else like this. Like,

2:02:58 do you need to convert me so you feel better about your decisions?

2:03:02 Because that's not a me thing, right? And so

2:03:06 my. My whole big thing is, is like, I am in sales, right? I have

2:03:09 a job to do, right? And I do believe in planting the first flag and

2:03:13 raising. Raising your hand and saying what needs to be said, expressing yourself.

2:03:16 But when it's a no, it's a no. I also firmly believe

2:03:20 that, right? So, you know, just the other day, she's like, hey,

2:03:24 just got to put it out there again. Do you know that Christ is the

2:03:27 way and all things go through? I'm like. I'm like, I. I know you believe

2:03:30 that. Like, and I. And I respect that for you. I really do, but I

2:03:33 just don't think it's for me, you know? And she's like, well, I just. I

2:03:37 just really want to see you there. There. And I'm like,

2:03:41 okay, okay. Like, that's not. Yeah,

2:03:44 right. And so it's. It's that,

2:03:48 like, that push, you know? And this is. This is really, really

2:03:52 interesting. My. My daughter goes to a charter school, right? Not one of the big

2:03:54 isds. Sure. And so they're always underfunded. They're always in kind of like,

2:03:58 makeshift buildings and stuff like this. And so

2:04:02 for a choir Concert, right? Her choir director goes to a church,

2:04:06 and so he reaches out to the church like, hey, could we do this thing

2:04:08 at. At your space? Because it's really great big acoustics, blah, blah, blah. And the

2:04:12 church is like, yeah, of course. So we go in and it was

2:04:15 so funny because, like, I'm there for this performance of a high school

2:04:19 choir. And in the background, they've got these, you know, like, when you go to

2:04:23 like. Like a. Like an event or a trade show, and everyone's got their little

2:04:26 flags right now. And now they make it really easy, right? You can stand

2:04:30 on one side it and it. And it puts up and you just like, kick

2:04:32 the leg in. It's like. It's like the easiest version of a really bad tent,

2:04:36 you know? Yes. They have these things up there, and it's their

2:04:39 recruitment goals, right?

2:04:43 Talking about. Our goal is to. Is to guide X. And I

2:04:46 don't remember the numbers. I took a picture of it because I was so, like,

2:04:49 astounded of like. Of like. Our goal is to bring X number

2:04:53 of godless families to God, right? And there was

2:04:56 a number on it, like. And you and I both know the

2:05:00 power of goals and the power of a quality goal and everything else like this.

2:05:04 And so, like, of all the things you could be thinking about, this is the

2:05:07 thing you want to put top of mind in the back of your. Of your

2:05:10 sanctuary that everybody comes forward into. Not go help, not

2:05:14 give back. Not. Not even like, hey, fund this program so we can send

2:05:18 more people out and abroad, bring people here so we can work our

2:05:21 magic on them, dude. I was like. Like,

2:05:25 I had to take the picture and send it to everybody else in this club

2:05:28 that I'm in because I was like, oh, my God, can you believe this? And

2:05:32 now every one of my friends is just like, oh,

2:05:36 man, that's a little rough. That's a little rough now because I'm me and I've

2:05:39 got a broad network. I also sent it to some people who were capital R.

2:05:42 Like, what are your thoughts on this? Right? They were all just fine.

2:05:46 They were all just like, well, that's what they should be doing. That's what they

2:05:49 should. Like, I don't think that that's what you should be doing.

2:05:53 I think you should be going out and, like, doing your works in line

2:05:57 with your morals, values, philosophies, and thinking. But the minute your

2:06:01 agenda becomes about, you need to, like, sway other people to the

2:06:05 like. Like, I had a guy come knock on my door,

2:06:09 right? And I was like, hey, did you not see the sign? There's a no

2:06:12 soliciting sign. And he was like, he's like, it's like, I'm not selling anything. And

2:06:15 I was like, I didn't ask for this man. Right.

2:06:18 Didn't ask for you to come knock on my door. Didn't ask for any of

2:06:21 this thing at all. You were taking positive action to come knock on the door

2:06:24 of a stranger because you feel like this is important. Where

2:06:28 does that come from? Right, right. And that's where I think it

2:06:31 goes too far when you have a recruitment goal.

2:06:35 So I will say that. Well, I will say that

2:06:39 the, the other big Rs

2:06:44 haven't faced that kind of dynamic yet that you're talking about

2:06:48 what was like so that me, who doesn't have a problem asking hard questions.

2:06:52 No, no, no, no. Well, yes, that's part of it. Absolutely. That's the

2:06:56 American part. No, no, absolutely that. But the dynamic of

2:06:59 we will chase this number. So Islam

2:07:03 doesn't say we will chase a number. They say we will get

2:07:07 everybody eventually. Oh, yeah,

2:07:11 that's. That's bad as well. Like, I'm not. That's bad as well. Right, right, right,

2:07:14 right. What I'm saying. But what I'm saying is when you go from when you

2:07:17 hit when, when, when, when true Islam hits America,

2:07:22 the, the, the barrier they're going to run up against. Again, this is why I

2:07:25 don't worry about it. The barrier they're going to run up against is

2:07:29 folks like you that will be skeptical of the goal. No. Yeah.

2:07:34 Huh, huh. But then also they will run

2:07:38 into the consumerist culture where that

2:07:41 goal comes out of. And I don't know anything about this, this, this, this church

2:07:45 that you're talking about. I don't want to presume anything on them. Sure. However,

2:07:49 a banner like that is a signal to me

2:07:52 of consumerism as a position

2:07:56 versus something else is a position. Yeah.

2:08:00 And this is a war, an interesting war that's been going on in the, in

2:08:04 the American capital Sea Church for at least the last

2:08:07 30 years. This is an interesting war that's been going on for the last 30

2:08:10 years. And so

2:08:14 you have dynamics and, and

2:08:18 it's. I saw it most ball baldly when I moved to

2:08:21 the south because it's also, you have to divide it up by region. So in

2:08:25 the north, you wouldn't see that at all.

2:08:29 Oh yeah, I agree. Like, at all. But in the north,

2:08:33 Islam makes easier inroads because

2:08:37 weirdly enough, this is the dichotomy. You don't see things like that.

2:08:42 So it looks at it as an open field. Islam looks at

2:08:46 folks like you as an open field.

2:08:50 I'm gonna go to your house, gonna knock on your door, I'm gonna start. You

2:08:54 haven't really been solicited until you've been solicited by an imam. Like that's,

2:08:58 I've actually had that happen to me before. That's, it's kind of interesting

2:09:01 anyway, so, yeah, so you get, you get that, you get that experience,

2:09:05 right? Yeah. The Hindus haven't

2:09:09 really faced that either because there's cultural, and by the

2:09:13 way, this is in Hinduism and in Islam, there's cultural presuppositions that go along

2:09:16 with those religions that Christianity has long since abandoned

2:09:20 because Christianity, to your point, is a global evangelizing

2:09:24 religion to everybody. But it's been that way

2:09:28 from the root. Whereas Hinduism and Islam have

2:09:31 had to sort of, for lack of a better term, weld those pieces

2:09:35 onto the, onto the machine. And the welds

2:09:39 aren't that strong to begin with. So, so

2:09:43 there are those dynamics. And at the root of them, also

2:09:47 to your point earlier, is at the root of the, the thing that will dilute

2:09:50 those is the cynicism and the skepticism

2:09:54 that exists in people who just don't want any part of that.

2:09:58 Now, when people don't want any part of that. Well, one other point. When people

2:10:02 don't want any part of that, my concern is like the GK

2:10:05 Chesterton concern. Do people go and just believe in, we know people don't go

2:10:09 and believe in nothing. They, they put their attention, their

2:10:12 worship to something else. And are all those things going to be

2:10:16 strong enough to resist

2:10:20 other blandishments from other areas, other pitches from other areas.

2:10:24 And if we look at the young folks, the gen zers, the 18 to

2:10:28 34 year olds, there's a growing, you know,

2:10:31 growing atheism among all of them in that, in that particular

2:10:35 space. But among those who are, who do identify

2:10:39 as religious, interestingly enough, they're moving more and more towards,

2:10:44 and I say this to my, to my very,

2:10:48 my very well meaning Baptist brothers and sisters,

2:10:52 they are moving more and more towards more orthodox forms of Christianity,

2:10:56 which by the way, you tell that to a Baptist and they get all itchy

2:11:00 because it's got to be hard. It's got to be like ascetic. Correct?

2:11:04 Am I saying that right? AE yeah, yeah, you're right. Ascetic or.

2:11:08 It's the difference between, I'll put it in martial arts terms, it's the

2:11:11 difference between the karate dojo that's handing out black belts to

2:11:15 nine year olds and the karate dojo that's handing out black belts to 35 year

2:11:19 olds. Well, I mean,

2:11:24 and this is where we're at, by the way. This is part of that interseed

2:11:26 warfare piece. That's where we're at 100. So. Okay, I have a question for

2:11:30 you, right? And this might be a weird way to think about it because you

2:11:33 said something about like how Islam is more about like would when we take over

2:11:37 the world, when everyone believes as we believe. Right. Do you think,

2:11:41 because you also said this line that that's mostly about the fundamentalists,

2:11:46 the over the top people. Okay. Do you think

2:11:50 when we look at the bucket of Christianity versus the bucket of Islam,

2:11:53 do you think that there are more fanatics that hold

2:11:57 that idea in Islam than in Christianity?

2:12:00 Do you think that the percentage of fanatical. No,

2:12:04 you must believe whether they're aware of it or not because there

2:12:08 are some people out here who are just so awash with the idea that this

2:12:11 is godly and good. And so therefore, like, like it's

2:12:15 absurd to think that you wouldn't want to do these things. Like, like that's a.

2:12:18 Sure, that's, you know, another level of this. Right. Do you think that that

2:12:22 percentage not count because obviously Islam is, you

2:12:25 know, significantly huge. Do you think that that percentage is

2:12:29 more or less the same?

2:12:35 I think 20 years ago I would have said yes, it's more or less the

2:12:39 same. Now I don't think

2:12:42 so. And I don't think so because of things I see inside of the capital

2:12:46 C church. So what are you. So, so

2:12:50 you're not saying that they're the same, but you're not really saying what you are

2:12:52 saying. What are you saying? Right, so what I'm saying is without

2:12:58 knowing the deep interior of Islam,

2:13:02 right? I know some of the interior, but not the deep interior.

2:13:06 I can't say how many fanatics, percentage wise there might

2:13:10 be as a sample size. However, I can say that

2:13:14 the ones who get the most coverage are the fanatics.

2:13:18 Well, that goes for everybody, right? And that goes for everybody. TV time, right?

2:13:22 TV time, media time, whatever. Now I can compare media time

2:13:25 there versus media time for capital C, Christians.

2:13:29 And those two things don't even match up.

2:13:35 Okay, hold on a second, hold on a second. Okay,

2:13:39 so you're saying that. Okay, okay, hold on a

2:13:43 second. Because what I want you to pay attention to for just one

2:13:46 second. Guys like Kenneth Copeland have their

2:13:50 own broadcast networks. Yes, I was waiting for you to bring him up I was

2:13:54 waiting for you to bring up Kenneth Copeland. Go ahead. Are we, Are we really

2:13:57 holding that in a like, for, like, situation? Or are we saying, well, we see

2:14:01 a lot more about bad things on the news from. Is like, like,

2:14:04 is it. Are we holding that with some, some

2:14:08 discerning thoughts and opinions? So I will say this.

2:14:12 There is a show on HBO I was just told about

2:14:16 that satirizes Kenneth Copeland.

2:14:21 And I was told about it from a person who goes to church every Sunday

2:14:25 and is a Christian. Oh, interesting. And he thought it was hilarious.

2:14:29 Okay, there's no such show that satirizes an

2:14:33 imam in London because just like Salman

2:14:37 Rushdie, you would have a problem one.

2:14:45 But does absent or, or

2:14:48 does. Does proof of absence mean, like, like absence of proof. Right. Because, like,

2:14:52 just. Because we can't, like, I mean, because, like, look at Borat,

2:14:56 dude. I know. And right. And look

2:14:59 at Sasha and Sasha Bar Cohen can't even go back to that country. They've already

2:15:02 said they're going to, like, whack him if we find him. Okay. I mean, I

2:15:05 mean, fair, but, like, he also doesn't have to go back to that country.

2:15:09 Right? Sure. Yeah. You know, so it's like. Well, so. So I

2:15:13 will say this. I will say this. Hollywood. If we're going to use Hollywood,

2:15:16 as are not even Hollywood, the media, let's use the media broadly, not Hollywood

2:15:20 in particular. The media will always,

2:15:27 For lack of a better idea, they'll always hit low. They'll. They'll. They'll

2:15:31 hit below the belt. They always will. Yeah, here's a. They'll hit all pile

2:15:35 on. Yeah, right. And they'll hit below the belt. Where

2:15:38 there's, where there's the least pushback of

2:15:42 resistance. Oh, yeah. 100. The smaller.

2:15:46 The smaller the sample, the more of a demon we can make them because. Because

2:15:49 they're not going to stand up to it. Correct. So

2:15:55 you're not. So let me tie this to fanaticism, then.

2:15:59 The fanaticism that you see that gains the media

2:16:02 attention, particularly in a

2:16:05 European context, not an American context. Because again, I want to separate these two

2:16:09 contexts. Right. So earlier I was talking about the west broadly. Now I

2:16:13 want to talk about specifically America and specifically Europe. Okay. Okay. So

2:16:17 in Europe, you see a lot of media reports about the

2:16:20 results of fundamentalism, because right now

2:16:24 the European continent

2:16:28 is struggling with Islamic

2:16:31 integration, for integration, immigration from Islamic states.

2:16:35 And how do we turn these people, for lack of a better term,

2:16:39 into, you know, Englishmen,

2:16:42 Frenchmen, Germans, Spanish, how do we do that?

2:16:46 And if there's no history of how to do that, how to. How to integrate

2:16:50 the immigrant. Well, the less of a history there is, the more of a struggle

2:16:54 you're going to have. Agree. Yeah, that makes sense. Which is why

2:16:58 you'll see, like a buddy of mine, he. He traveled to London, he used to

2:17:01 work in Dubai, worked in Dubai for years, went to London all the time.

2:17:05 He no longer does that live in America, whatever. Went to. Went to London

2:17:09 a few years ago. And he was talking with me about it, this is probably

2:17:12 about late last year. And he said, dude, the number of

2:17:16 like, it's like exploded. It's like London is like little. It's like little Dubai

2:17:20 now. Like, he's like the number of like Alfred Romeos and

2:17:23 Mercedes and like the number of Muslims you see running around. He's like,

2:17:27 it's ridiculous. And he didn't mean ridiculous in like a bad way.

2:17:31 He made it in like, this is a good thing. That significant, because London's significant

2:17:34 shift. Right? And that's been. It's been like 15 years since he went back. So

2:17:38 in the course of 15 years, less than a generation, there's been a shift in

2:17:41 London. Okay.

2:17:45 The English are going to have a real problem with this because England has not

2:17:49 fully gotten its arms around what it means to be English since World War II.

2:17:53 This is one of those long trailing sort of results from that last

2:17:57 apocalyptic world war. And

2:18:01 the reason why they haven't gotten their arms around what it means to be

2:18:05 English is because of colonial,

2:18:08 because of the war, because of

2:18:13 Margaret Thatcher, because of all these kinds of things that have

2:18:16 happened. And they've had to integrate all this. And they don't. They don't know how

2:18:20 to then take that story and give that to new

2:18:24 immigrants coming in in a way that's effective and makes them feel as though they

2:18:27 are. And they've even said this out loud. They don't know how to do this.

2:18:29 What the challenge for England, and I'm just using them as an example, the

2:18:33 challenge for England is what makes England English,

2:18:36 what makes you English. They can't even figure that out. I mean, they've been struggling

2:18:40 to figure that out on their own continent for years, but even more sharply after

2:18:43 World War II. Okay.

2:18:47 In America, it's fundamentally different. Why is it fundamentally different in

2:18:50 America? We never asked that question. Well, the reason it's fundamentally different

2:18:54 from in America is because everyone here is from someplace else

2:18:59 with the exception of the native peoples who were here for 10,000 years before

2:19:02 anybody showed up. Yeah, most people don't Admit their home coordinates.

2:19:06 Right. Exactly. Like my.

2:19:12 If you trace back my genealogy, there's a slave ship somewhere in it.

2:19:16 Yeah. If you say. If you chase back your genealogy,

2:19:20 I'm sure there's somebody getting on a boat somewhere coming. Yep.

2:19:24 This is the dynamic of America that America has always

2:19:28 struggled with. What does it mean to be American? Who gets

2:19:32 to be an American? How do we define what an American is? We've

2:19:36 been struggling with this all the time. So

2:19:40 is the recipe, let's just go in and smush down indigenous peoples to the point

2:19:43 to where like, like when, when they're like a minor footnote

2:19:47 and everyone is here on bar borrowed things like, like then no

2:19:51 one has a home term or like, like a home team advantage because we just

2:19:54 removed all those people. Is that the, Is that the recipe? No,

2:19:59 I have no idea. This is what we're running.

2:20:03 I don't know. But these are the, these are the

2:20:07 dynamics on the ground. And so the reason

2:20:10 we struggle, not struggle with immigration

2:20:14 from south of the border is not because the immigration is

2:20:18 coming from south of the border. It's who gets

2:20:22 to be an American. It's who

2:20:25 gets to be an American. And so if you go and you look at the

2:20:28 ethnicity of a lot of the ICE agents currently working to

2:20:32 deport people, and we're not going to get into the policies, all that, but they're

2:20:35 just the act of actually happening. Most of those guys

2:20:39 have Hispanic and Latin American and, and Mexican last

2:20:43 names.

2:20:46 Now you could talk about the social injustice of all of that and internalized

2:20:50 racism and all these kinds of terms that we use to kind of color all

2:20:53 this at the bottom. The seed that I was talking about

2:20:57 like an hour ago now, or maybe an hour and a half, the seed of

2:21:00 that is at the end of the day, there

2:21:04 is no one way because we're all. Yeah, that's right.

2:21:08 That's interesting. And then you import, import. Then

2:21:12 people come over from countries where

2:21:16 the theocracy is the thing.

2:21:20 And it's been theocratic, not

2:21:23 to put the two fine a point on this, but it's been theocratic since Moses

2:21:27 was in short pants. And they come

2:21:30 here and they run up into all of this.

2:21:36 And so on the one hand, this can be looked at as weakness, which is

2:21:40 how a lot of it is looked at from other places, because it's just

2:21:44 seen as division, division, division, division, division. But

2:21:47 again, on side of every, on the other side of every weakness is a

2:21:51 strength. Y. This is where the idea that diversity is our greatest

2:21:54 strength, while mocked by people on the political right and

2:21:58 while embraced by people on the political left is actually a

2:22:02 truth of reality of this thing we're running

2:22:07 I think now to get

2:22:11 bring halls way back because we've wandered away so far from Ben Hur. Let me

2:22:14 say this for the book. Read the book Ben Hur. You will get into all

2:22:17 of this. This will, if you're a thinking person, this will, this will, this will

2:22:22 activate you. Yes, there's a great chariot race in there. There's.

2:22:26 There's a great galley slave ship crash, which is kind of amazing.

2:22:30 There's also the dynamic of the relationship between, which we didn't talk about all today

2:22:33 between Ben Hur and Masala, which is

2:22:37 huge. I mean, that's the whole driver of the book is the relationship between these

2:22:41 two guys and the manipulations that other

2:22:44 people want to do on them to serve

2:22:48 their own ends and also. Yeah, to serve. To serve. To

2:22:52 serve them, to serve themselves. And so everybody's manipulating everybody. It's

2:22:56 actually really quite postmodern book. Everybody's manipulating everybody else for their

2:22:59 own internal reasons. And then through all of

2:23:03 this and it only happens what, like four times, Jesus shows up four times.

2:23:08 Yeah. And it's, it's one of, it's what's called a. Oh, a

2:23:11 theophany. That's the, that's the religious term where, where God or a

2:23:15 divine being basically peeks through reality and puts his

2:23:18 thumb out and says, hey, I'm here, and then pulls back that the term is

2:23:21 called theophany. I believe that Carl Jung didn't

2:23:25 coin it. He actually picked that up from. I believe it

2:23:28 was Augustine or Aquinas, some of you

2:23:32 will correct me, it was one of those Catholic writers back in the early

2:23:36 church that coined that term. But it's this idea of a theophany where

2:23:39 like God appears, goes hey, I'm God, how about that? And then just

2:23:43 disappears from history again. So there's also that in Ben Hur.

2:23:47 That's just my quick pitch for Ben Hur. Go read the book. Even if you

2:23:50 don't believe anything, it's a great book. And you're hearing this sort of person who

2:23:54 just admitted to being atheistic and kind of having non meeting meetings on

2:23:57 Sundays. So like even he said it's a great book. So I mean, there you

2:24:01 go. The, the thing that I think is important for everyone to kind of think

2:24:04 about is like one of the things that I do try to put a lot

2:24:06 of thought and effort into is just our ability to change. Right? Because I think,

2:24:10 I think it's super easy to like

2:24:14 be against change because of fear more

2:24:18 than rhetoric or religion or anything else like this, right? And

2:24:21 so what I think that, what, what I think is very interesting is in that,

2:24:24 is in that first back and forth between Ben Hur and

2:24:28 Masala is like just the appreciation that he's a

2:24:32 different human, right? Because like as a human that has gone through things that is

2:24:36 fundamentally changed me, right? Like,

2:24:39 you know, big or small, like if you go to college even for

2:24:43 a semester and people around you don't, you're going to come back different. If you

2:24:46 go join the military, you're going to come back different. If you decide to spend

2:24:50 15 years training in a martial art, you're going to be different if you decide

2:24:52 to read. And so what I, what I really enjoyed

2:24:56 about that book before he starts making terrible decisions around his status and his

2:25:00 agendas and the limitations of other people was just like, ah, they spent

2:25:03 time away and doing their own paths. And that time away is going to kind

2:25:06 of forge you a little bit. It's going to make certain things.

2:25:12 You know, the concept of trade offs is like one of my least favorite,

2:25:15 one of my favorite philosophies to talk about with people, but it's the one that

2:25:19 gets misunderstood, misconstrued the most, right? But if

2:25:22 you can't see that there's another, another way for the market

2:25:26 marble to roll, you're probably a little too idealistic,

2:25:30 right? You're probably a little too excited about your own thing. And

2:25:34 whether that's religion or whether that's your business idea,

2:25:38 like you got to be discerning, right? Because if you're not discerning, we're

2:25:42 not going to be able to change anybody who is discerning, right? And this goes

2:25:45 for religion or business or anything else like that. And so you

2:25:49 gotta, you gotta know enough so that way you don't. And I think a of

2:25:52 lot like this, one of the things that I used to call this is like,

2:25:54 you can't come across as the feverish Alcoholite. You can't,

2:25:58 right? Because you're just going to get written off as, as just another one of

2:26:01 these dudes trying to, trying to be the Messiah, right? Like, you know, and everything

2:26:05 else like that. You got to be able to speak with distinction, you know. And

2:26:08 so that part of it I was like, I was like, oh, what a cool

2:26:11 way to just kind of talk about how people grow apart and their experiences have

2:26:14 a profound impact on them and everything. And then it starts doing like really

2:26:18 bad, stupid, questionable stuff for his status and his, and his wealth and everything.

2:26:22 And, and I mean, that's where I can't go with anybody, right?

2:26:26 But you know, I was with my daughter

2:26:30 a couple of this might have been last summer. We were walking around downtown

2:26:34 Fort Worth, right. And there was an event going on which always has

2:26:37 protesters of various types. And there were some people there with some

2:26:41 very, very, very vivid messages messaging around like abortion and stuff

2:26:45 like this. Right. And they were religious, right? And, and so my, my daughter

2:26:49 read it and it was, it was pure,

2:26:53 very hateful speech, right? And she, and she says this thing

2:26:56 and she's like, she's like, I can't believe that they're saying that. Right. And

2:27:00 it was super weird because like, I have to come out of my thing of

2:27:04 like, yeah, you know, I can't believe it either. But it's like, hey, I don't

2:27:07 believe that. But like, I think it's important that they have the space to be

2:27:11 to. Able, able to say that because I want the space to be able to

2:27:13 say the things that are important to me, you know. Yeah. And trying to impress

2:27:17 that upon, you know, a 13 year old that,

2:27:21 you know, we need to give people space for their beliefs

2:27:24 and their thoughts, even if they're not like ours, because you don't want

2:27:28 anyone coming around trying to like limit your space.

2:27:32 And that also that idea right there is, is

2:27:36 key to this whole experiment in America that we're running.

2:27:41 But we've gotten there over 250 years

2:27:45 of hard arguments. We didn't

2:27:49 wind up here because it was easy. We wound up here because

2:27:52 it was hard.

2:27:57 And we wound up here because the passionate people

2:28:01 pro ancon and the people in the middle

2:28:06 and the people who don't understand the question and the people who

2:28:09 aren't paying attention and the people for whom

2:28:15 the whole entire issue, whatever the, the issue capital I issue might be

2:28:19 of the moment, is just not interesting to them

2:28:22 because these other things over here are interesting. I think

2:28:26 of the term this. We live in this wildly

2:28:29 shambolic country.

2:28:33 Wildly shambolic. What does shambolic mean?

2:28:37 Sort of rambling and put together and cobbled together. Think the

2:28:41 image you should have is like Frankenstein controlled by like Pinocchio

2:28:45 screen. Pinocchio string. Correct A

2:28:48 diy. We're the BASF of company of countries.

2:28:52 We didn't make it. We didn't make getting together a country. We just made

2:28:56 getting it together as a country better.

2:29:03 This is.

2:29:10 To John's point.

2:29:14 I am so glad I can live in this country

2:29:20 not because of the Eagles or The flag or

2:29:24 any of that trash. Not because of.

2:29:29 Exclusively because of the Constitution or even the Declaration of

2:29:32 Independence. I'm glad, because

2:29:36 we. We. I'm living in a country where. And John's living in a country where

2:29:41 we're free to run the experiment. We're free to run

2:29:45 the experiment. And we've sort of put all of our.

2:29:51 You'll appreciate this as a poker player. We put all of our chips on that

2:29:54 thing. We're gonna run it all on that thing.

2:29:58 And the thing is going to be. There's wildly

2:30:01 inappropriate signs at a.

2:30:05 At a. At a rally around an

2:30:09 issue that creates a lot of

2:30:12 emotional upheaval.

2:30:16 And a man and his daughter are going to be able to walk past those

2:30:18 signs. And instead of the man and his daughter

2:30:22 being assaulted or being sucked in, they could

2:30:26 walk past that thing and go, okay, let's have a meaningful

2:30:29 conversation about this and figure this out. I'm not saying you can't

2:30:33 do that other places. I'm saying that for right now, for my money,

2:30:37 this is the best place to do that, period. Full stop.

2:30:42 And I'll take the Pepsi Challenge. I will. I will absolutely take the Pepsi Challenge

2:30:45 against any other place. I think this is the best.

2:30:49 That's why I'm. That's why I'm. That's why I'm not

2:30:53 proud. Glad to have been born in this country.

2:30:56 Because pride goes before a fall. Careful. Glad to have

2:31:00 been born in this country. And. Yeah, look, hey, people with. With my

2:31:04 skin tone did a lot of work for

2:31:07 free to be able to get us to here, but so, quite

2:31:11 frankly, did a lot of people with John's skin tone, they did a lot of

2:31:15 work to get us here. They did. Whether that work was easy or hard,

2:31:18 that's a different thing altogether. Whether that work was paid for or unpaid, that's a

2:31:22 different thing altogether. We did the work. And the work is not just in the

2:31:26 fields. The work is in the conversations, and the work is in the relationships,

2:31:30 and the work is in the communities and the work is in the neighborhoods. And.

2:31:33 And that is the kind of work that's going to take us

2:31:37 if we are so blessed, for the next 25 years

2:31:41 or maybe even for the next 50 years. And

2:31:45 I'm 47 this year. It'd be really interesting to

2:31:48 be alive in the year 2076.

2:31:52 I don't even want to contemplate that

2:31:57 for the 300th anniversary. What? You'd be 98.

2:32:01 I'll be 97. 96. Going

2:32:05 on 97. Maybe I'll still be

2:32:09 doing the podcast at that point. Because, like, why not episode

2:32:13 1763? We're with John Hill

2:32:17 yet again. Yet again.

2:32:23 I hope, I hope, I hope in that thing we're like in like the Futurama

2:32:27 and we're just like. Like our heads in the. On the shelf. Right.

2:32:31 Like that. Just want to get Tank. If, if,

2:32:35 if Future can be like Futurama in any one way. I

2:32:38 want, I want. I want disembodied heads that can still talk.

2:32:42 I'm gonna get Nixon on the show because I gotta talk to that guy.

2:32:48 Think of the guest you could get. Oh, my gosh. It'll be insane.

2:32:52 All right, well, we're. We gotta wrap up. We gotta close. This is a wildly

2:32:56 shambolic episode. We. We kind of went all around,

2:33:00 but pick up a copy of Ben Hur by Lou Wallace, by the way. Didn't

2:33:03 even get to talk about Lou Wallace. He was born

2:33:07 1827 and died in 1905. And he was a

2:33:10 lot of things. He was. He was a governor of New Mexico. Of New

2:33:14 Mexico, yeah. He was. He was involved in the American

2:33:18 Civil War. He was an ambassador to the Ottoman Empire

2:33:21 under Chester A. Arthur. The man lived a romantic

2:33:25 life. And all of that shows up. He did writing as a

2:33:29 way to relieve his stress and his anxiety.

2:33:33 Yep. By the way, that's a. That's a. That's a pitch for writers, too.

2:33:37 Writing can help you when you're just wildly all over the place.

2:33:40 And he was. I mean, but going all the way

2:33:44 back because you said that one of your first episodes was. Was

2:33:48 Marcus Aurelius. He wasn't ever intended to publish any of that

2:33:52 stuff. They were his journals. Yep. That he

2:33:56 wrote in for his own own solace for

2:34:00 writers, in my opinion. If you're going through anything, grab a journal and start getting

2:34:03 the ideas out of your head. Amen. Absolutely. I recommend

2:34:07 writing for Every leader as a pleasure house for your

2:34:11 soul. It's a gem. All right.

2:34:15 With that, well, once again, thank you, John. And with that,

2:34:19 well, we're out.