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

0:01 Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 161. Yes, we are rolling on and on. We are almost three quarters of the way fully through 2025 and well, we're in the middle of our Sci Fi Month, so let's go ahead and get this started. From the most important book in the Torah, or what the Gentiles term the Old Testament, comes this interesting story that acts as a chapter break in the much longer story of the seemingly, or must have seemed to him, interminable exile of a man named Moses.

0:53 And I quote, Moses agreed to stay with the man who gave his daughter Zipporah to Moses in marriage. Zipporah gave birth to a son and Moses named him Gershom, saying quote, I have become a foreigner in a foreign land. Close quote Exodus 2:21 22 KJ V or in other translations the text reads I have become a stranger in a strange land. Our book today is probably the best attempt by any human being that I've read to date to attempt to construct how a non human mind, a stranger in essence, would operate in what to them and to their perception of reality would seem like a very strange land.

1:48 Meaning earth. Indeed, there is an idea in philosophy and in psychology called theory of mind, and it states I got this from Wikipedia, the following in psychology and philosophy, theory of mind, often abbreviated T o m, refers to the capacity to understand other individuals by ascribing mental states to them. A theory of mind includes the understanding that others beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions and thoughts may be different from one's own. Possessing a functional theory of mind is crucial for success in everyday human social interactions.

2:24 People utilize a theory of mind when analyzing, judging, and inferring other people's behaviors.

2:33 But what does a theory of mind mean when the mind theorizing about other people is as unlike a human mind as an ant's mind is unlike an elephant's mind? And what does all this theorizing and empathizing mean when we throw into the mix the mysteries of Mars, predicting an impregnable human future, and of course, whatever might or might not have happened at Roswell all those many years ago, as was postulated on that great 1990 show of which I was a big fan, the X Files.

3:12 Today, on this episode of the podcast, we will be exploring probably what are some unanswerable questions by exploring insights provided for us from a book that the Library of Congress named as One of the 88 quote unquote books that shaped America Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein Leaders, there are more things floating around in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in whatever your current philosophy might be. And of course, we will be joined today on our show by our co host, rejoining us from episode number 159 where we discussed Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

4:02 Back comfortably and safely from vacationing in an undisclosed location deep in the heart of the American west, which we had to believe several times because he was a ruffian and couldn't control himself. Episode 159 John Hill, aka Small Mountain how you doing, John? Thank you for protecting me from myself and weeping out

4:28 any bad attempts to kind of share where I was. We are back in the saddle. I know everyone is very confused when I do take a vacation. Believe me, it was kind of confusing for me as well. But we're back in the saddle and I am so excited to talk about this book with you because for anyone who's listening to this, this was my idea, by the way. Right? I don't know. I don't know if you're going to bring that up or not, but I'm the one who floated this book to you and I can't wait to hear what your thoughts are on it.

4:57 So this book,

5:01 for lack of a better term, I won't say struck me dumb, but I could definitely see where 30 years ago, if I had read this when I was 15 or 16, and then some somewhat more impressionable years, particularly with my viewing of the X Files. I'm going to bring that up here extensively. And something else on the show, which I almost never get into my literal encyclopedic knowledge of conspiracy theories of all kinds. You laugh, but there are. There are. Well, there are. When I talk about conspiracy theories, I'm one of those people that tells other people that are getting into conspiracy theories now to don't do it.

5:46 Don't, don't do it. It's. It's. It's a rabbit hole. And if you go down it, there's never an end. I'm like, I'm like. I'm like, what's his name? Not Lithgow. Who was the father in A National Treasure? Who yells at Nick Cage? Was it John Voight or something? John Voight. Yes, it was John Voight. John Voight was the actor. He was. He had a great line as the dad. He's like, there's never. You're never gonna find a treasure because then there's gonna be another clue and there's gonna be another clue and then there's gonna be another clue and there's gonna be another clue and this is gonna be another clue and there's gonna.

6:18 Be another clue and you never gonna get to the end of it. And he's like all frustrated, yelling and then he runs out of the room. He was right. Maybe not that movie, but that's. If I'd read this book with the way I was deeply influenced by conspiracy theories and not for like a little bitty tiny bit of time. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All of my teenage years and a good chunk of my twenties were, were, were phenomenal around what may be going on on the underside of the world. That is not, quote, unquote, common knowledge.

6:55 And so that's why I brought up theory of mind. This is why I brought up X Files. This is why I brought up what may or may not have happened at Roswell, by the way. A conspiracy theory that began with absolutely no help from the Internet. We'll talk about that here today. So this book would have literally probably struck me dumb if I had read it earlier now, having been through all that and having come out somewhat scarred on the other side. The most, huh, ever in history. Well, I'm like Jay Z. What scars will scab.

7:35 What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do to me? It's fine.

7:41 I look at Heinlein, I looked at this, this piece of writing a little bit, a little bit differently, but I still have that. There's still that 15 to 18 year old Haysan in there that's still yelling at me that I'm a punk. And so it's fine. So we're going to explore Heinlein, we're going to explore the theories, we're going to explore the ideas, we're going to explore the big themes from this. I would encourage people to go back and listen to episode number 160, which is our intro episode where we talk about Heinlein's background, we talk about who he was, how he came to write this book.

8:14 Something that's fascinating that I would like to bring up here. And I don't know, John, if you know this, but he was a person who he, he claimed, he alleged that he finished writing this book in, in 1950, which I kind of actually believe. And then he withheld the, the manuscript for 10 years from publication. He made a decision to censor, for lack of a better term, himself, because he didn't think society was ready for his ideas. And so I Look at it. And I have to put it in the context of that, of that writing, where he goes in the book.

8:51 And then of course, there's things that. And we'll talk about many of these things today on the show, but there's things that have popped out of the ether that he had no bead on, like zero beat on whatsoever.

9:08 And yeah, so we'll talk about all of that. As usual, I will point out that this book is viciously protected by copyright. So we will not read directly from the book. We'll summarize sort of some overarching themes from the book so people can get a flavor of this. By the way, can I add a. Little color to this? Yeah, go ahead. Add a little color while I'm turning towards the first part. Yes, go ahead. Now, because I didn't realize this. Are you reading the unabridged version or are you reading the mass market original version that was originally published?

9:42 I am reading. Let me see, let me look at the copyright. I am reading the original version, not the mass market version. Okay, what's the date? Let's see. I have 1961. And then renew 1989 by his wife Virginia, and then assigned 2003 to the Robert A. And Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust by Penguin Random House. So what, what is fascinating to me about this whole thing, okay. I have a lot of history around Heinlein in this book, specifically because I was 11 when I read this book, right? Okay. I had gone to my brother.

10:19 My brother was five years older than me and a half brother. And so his, his dad had all this pulpy science fiction, right? So the Burrows, the Chronicles of Mars. Right. And you know, very wide but very pulpy science fiction fantasy stuff. And so I'm reading a lot and I'm in fourth or fifth grade and I go to my brother and I was like, hey, do you have any books I can read? I'm tired of Judy Bloom and Beverly Cleary and stuff. And he was like, yeah, okay. And he goes over and he starts like looking at his shelf and he pulls some books off of it and he's like, don't tell mom, okay?

10:51 You know, I'm not gonna tell mom and everything else like this, right? And so in those books were, I mean, books that were not really, I mean, 11 year old. I mean, there's, there's, there's so much going on in this book. Right. But this was in, this was in 90, right. So I had never read the full unabridged version of this. Right. The version that I read was the, was the version that is kind of talked about in this book and it was always very weird because this wasn't my first Heinlein book. Right, Heinlein.

11:23 Heinlein. Heinlein. I don't know exactly the right way to say it. We're just gonna go along with it. Rah. Is how I think about them in my. So my path to here was like Number of the Beast was the first thing by his that I had read and just because the title sounded cool and it's about multi dimensions and time travel and all this very interesting stuff, but the themes were the same. And so like this was actually my third, third or fourth book by his that I had read and it wasn't my favorite, right?

11:48 Because I was already getting used to this kind of Sorkin esque dialogue that happens between high line characters and that wasn't really very prevalent in the. The, the other version of it. So

12:03 fast forward to reading this book. Right?

12:08 I go pick it up off the shelf. Now the, the reason why me and my wife are together is actually because of this book. Because the first night we hung out after meeting up and going and having a drink together, we get, you know, back to her place, we're hanging out just as friends and all this other stuff, nothing crazy happened. And I see this exact book on her shelf and I was like, oh, I can have different kinds of conversations with this person and stuff like that. And that's what led to the relationship, right?

12:32 So she is a fan of his stuff as well. And so she'd read this one and it was her favorite book and was always very confusing to me. Why? Right? Because to me it always felt the, the stunted of. Of all the material that I'd read. So fast forward to this. I'm reading it again. It's been a very long time, right, since I'd read it because it wasn't one of my favorites. And I'm going through this book and I'm like, oh my God, like this is completely different, you know. So I plowed through the book last week, right?

12:58 I read most of it over the weekend. I think I read about 300 pages between Saturday and Sunday and I'm like floored. But I'm also realizing because I'd read the foreword by his wife about the path of this book and how publishers were asking him to take it down and to make it smaller and everything else like this. So my point, my point of view on it was that he knew that it was going to be polarizing and probably people weren't going to be ready for it. And so I think he took some meat out of it.

13:25 And I think they were still concerned about how big, like, how much it would sell, right? And of course they're going to talk about it as, like, they try to censor it and stuff like this, but, like, it's a business, right? And you can't take too big of a flyer, right? You got to put out something that sells. And when we look at the impact that this book had during that time, I think there's a lot of room to be like, hey, the publishers had some good perspective on chopping this thing down into something that would sell and actually have a chance to, like, impact.

13:51 But holy crap, I finished the book and then I went sleuthing to try to go figure out, like, what are the differences between this book and, like, as a writer, oh, man. Like, he didn't just go through and, like, chop out huge chunks. He went and he rewrote the whole thing, right? So, like, you have to go page by page to see the differences, but everything that comes out of it is the depth that makes the book so good. In my personal. Because now after reading it the second time, I'm like, huh, how did I short sight this book about?

14:20 You know, because it's talking about philosophy and, you know, religion and great wealth and appreciating and, like, all these things that, like, I now have, I guess, connection to. And I'm like, God, like, why was I. And then I. I actually had to go Googling and researching, and then I found this guy who kind of talked about the differences between the original version and the unabridged version. And then, like, there it is, right? That depth, that nuance, all of that stuff. And here's the thing, some people don't like it, but if you're.

14:48 If you're a fan of his writing, you're probably not going to like the shortened up version. And that was a whole interesting kind of like, moment yesterday after finishing the book and then being like, okay, cool, I want to go see what I missed. And I hadn't missed anything. But the depth of it was not present at all. Very fascinating for me as a guy who loves this author, likes this book a lot, coming to it now after a person who thinks and studies these things that I pay attention to. Well. And Heinlein came to, I think, writing this book in a way that was reflective of sort of an overarching ethos that he held as a human being.

15:32 And his overarching Ethos was.

15:37 Mid. Not mid, early, early 20th century progressive. He was an early 20th century progressive and everything that goes along with that. So, you know, one of the things that we've explored or one of the themes that we've explored on this podcast heavily is when you read fiction looking for leadership lessons from the early 20th century. And I'm talking about the Dos Passos and the Fitzgeralds and the Hemingways and the Faulkners and the, the, you know, the folks in that realm, and then everybody that kind of comes off of them, black, white, female, doesn't matter what genre, because they were all sort of aping the same kind of thing because of what happened at the end of World War I. Right.

16:19 And they're trying to redefine World War I. So Heinlein was born in what, 1907. And so being born in 1907, he would have, I mean, he tried to get into the military and, and then did serve in the military. He missed World War II by literally that much. And so these. He had two different strains in his two parallel tracks in his head that most moderns don't understand. Like we, we in the modern era, on the other side of the progressive era and on the other side of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Politically and culturally, in America, we think that anybody who has served in a war, for good or ill, we think that anybody who has served in a war must be reflexively conservative.

17:04 We just think that. And part of that, it comes out of our Vietnam experience, where the people who went and served in that war may have been more reflexively conservative than those who were at Woodstock. Okay, and that's, and by the way, that's, that's. This is just sort of the nature of culture and how the culture, like, flows through a nation state. Right? But if you look at the progressives from the early 20th century, I give those people a lot of grace. And normally I'm not a person to do that, but I give those people a lot of grace politically because here's the thing.

17:38 They didn't know the things we know about Marxism. They didn't know the things that we know about Soviet Communism. They didn't know the things that we know now about the purges in China. They didn't read the writings of Mao and Lenin until later on. There was actual embargoes on information getting out of the Soviet Union that would have caused people to be less, shall we say, supportive of even watered down versions of that, like Upton Sinclair. If Upton Sinclair had had access to the information that Walter Durante had access to.

18:14 He probably wouldn't have been as progressive and as progressively socialist in his writings as he was now. With that being said, George Orwell, who was a European, 1984, Animal Farm, had access to all that information because Europe's right there. He had access to all of it. And Orwell was still a card carrying socialist. He believed you could slice that cake very thin and get something off of there that didn't have the gulags and the purges and the famine and the non and the pogroms and the nonsense and the detention camps and the concentration camps.

18:50 He believed you could throw away all of that and you could still have something that would move the world. And so when he writes 1984, when he writes Animal Farm, those are polemics against Stalin, okay? He's the first political writer against Stalin in a major genre of any kind post World War II. Now Heinlein, on the other hand. Let's talk about science fiction. Science fiction at the time when Heinlein even took it up wasn't. I mean, you had H.G. wells and that was really about it. And you talk about Edgar Rice Burroughs and Pulpit and that was.

19:25 It was considered to be kids stuff, right? Like comic books, right? It was considered to be kids stuff. And so what Heinlein, along with Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov did. Oh yeah, was they all those guys. And I would throw Ray Bradbury in there, although he's not thrown in there, but I would throw Ray Bradbury in there. And only because he, he wrote in multiple different gen. Rose had refused to define himself. God bless him. I love that man for that. He refused to be pigeonholed. He's like, no, I'm just a typist, it's fine, just whatever.

19:50 Love that. But. But those guys took a genre that was considered to be stuff to your point that you would find on a kid's shelf and made it something that adults could appreciate. And Heinlein, look, Heinlein was going to put in his progressivism, he was going to put in his ideas about politics, he was going to put his ideas about philosophy, he's going to put in his ideas about the potential human future, but he was also going to bring over that, that military quote unquote, discipline into his writing.

20:21 And I see, I see strains of that. Not even strange of that. That's all over the place in Stranger in a Strange Land. Like you talk about him rewriting certain sections. The only way you can do that is if. Is if you have a. Not rigid, but you have the discipline that comes from. And you know what I'm talking about here. The discipline that comes from having marched around and wrote in ROTC for 10,000 years and then thinking that that was the thing you were going to go do, you know? So I look at Heinlein as a rich

20:52 repository of this kind of, that kind of the merging of those two tracks of thinking, the military track, of the progressive track, in a way that we really not can't get to. It will take a while for us to come out of this cultural moment to get to somebody like that again, because we're just too bifurcated right now. We're just, we're just too bifurcated on our thought process. So I, I love that, right? Because, like, it's been a long time since I've really kind of like, steeped in a bunch of hindland and everything else like this, right?

21:24 And getting, getting back used to Jabal Harshaw as a character and how he, how he, you know, goes around and stuff. Like, this was

21:35 interesting, right? You know, like, by the way, as I'm, I'm the son of a lawyer, everything that Jabal did, and I've been Sarah, my lawyers my entire life. Is this on the podcast for a while now. That's exactly what lawyers do, exactly how they behave. He nailed it perfectly. I mean, I mean, like, now I do think that, I think it's easy to read this book and see Jubbal as, like, this, you know, out of touch, out of date Persona, and he treats women badly. And, you know, and like, I, I, I saw some reviews of people just like, pending this, like, badly and everything, but then get to the end of it, right?

22:12 Where he kind of like, shares some of the stuff of, you know, like, I really appreciated that, that one conversation where I think he calls in Anne and he's like, have I ever been rude to you? And, and she was like, no. Right? And, and to me, that was such, like, a moment of like, there is, there is, and I hate this. I do not like this. But all the people that I rail against who are going to treat people as disposable or specifically salespeople, and you don't want it enough, so we're just going to write you off and everything.

22:42 They, if they run enough volume, they will filter out and be left with people who are motivated by the way that they're motivating them. Right? And relationships, I think, are the same thing, right? Some people want a stronger presence and then other people don't. Right? And so I was kind of going through it and then I was kind of like, oh God. Like, you know, and then. But wait a minute. Some. That's what some people are looking for, right? And. And like, I need to kind of remember that whenever, whenever I get a little judgmental and heavy handed with it and stuff like that, because it's just not for me.

23:15 And that's okay. Right, right, exactly. Let's do this. Let me summarize part one so people have sort of an idea of what it is. Yeah, sorry. We got super centric because it's good. It's good. Yeah. There's so much in this. There's a lot. Yeah, there is. I can only read maybe a few pieces here. So I'm going to read just the opening of part one that I have his immaculate origin, and then I'll talk a little bit about what part one is. And by the way, the book is structured really interesting to me in an interesting way to me.

23:48 There's a part one, a part two, part three, part four, and a part five. And it's, you know, it's a well over five at least. The version I have is over 500 pages. And so these pages are. I mean, these sections are chunks like you have to follow through a narrative structure in this. And then he very cleverly ties the narrative structure from one section into the next section and sort of lets bleed and go. Lets them. Lets each section bleed into the next so it doesn't feel as if it's bifurcated.

24:19 And he sort of is. Is. He's writing in the mode that weirdly enough, Tolkien and probably C.S. lewis were also writing in the format. Just shows up different. Right? It just shows up different. It's the same stuff that we were seeing in the, in the Philip K. Dick book. Right. Of all this. Like this, like the thing that struck me was that was how. How wide the locus is in the beginning and then how he kind of zooms in and then all of a sudden it goes from. Right. Because like the first two times, three times maybe, I think it's kind of like, okay, like, whoa, right, we're blown back out to space and like all these things.

24:52 The third planet of okay, okay, okay. And then I do think he does a great job of just gradually shortening this. And then all of a sudden you're back in there and it's not a jarring effect. And the thing that I appreciate is that it's not the, it's not the prologue of the chapter in italics. Right, right. And so then they don't have to put any like, thought or effort or craft into how they're gonna. Right? It's. It's lazy writing. It's lazy world building. Right? And as a guy who reads a lot of science fiction fantasy, I just like when people figure out a way to weave it in as opposed to here's three pages of exposition because we're lazy.

25:24 And you're just supposed to appreciate it because this is part of how, like not be, better be. Sorry. Soapbox, deep breath. Don't be. Don't be a lazy writer in any genre. Well, well. So it's really hard. And I know this as a facilitator who spends. I used to spend a lot of my life, not so much now as I did in the past, but when you are speaking extemporaneously or even from notes and you are speaking live to a group, like I just did this last, this weekend, right? When you are speaking live to a group or you are speaking extemporaneously from notes that you have written, but you're not bounded by that.

26:08 The hardest thing to do is to do transitions. That is the hardest thing to do because you not only have to transition yourself, you have to transition the audience. Which is why on this show we take a pause and then we do our transition. I love that. Kind of like this

26:29 for part one. His Maculate Origin Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine. Michael Smith. The first human expedition to Mars was selected on the theory that the greatest danger to man was man himself. At that time. Eight Terran years after the founding of the first human colony on Luna, an interplanetary trip made by humans had to be made in free fall orbits from Terra to Mars. 258 Terran days the same for return plus 455 days waiting at Mars while the planets crawled back into position for the return orbit.

27:03 Only by refueling at a space station could the envoy make the trip. Once at Mars, she might return if she did not crash. If water could be found to fill her reaction tanks, if a thousand things did not go wrong. Eight humans crowded together for almost three Terran years had better get along much better than humans usually did. And all male crew was vetoed as unhealthy and unstable for married couples was considered optimum if necessary specialties could be found in such combination. This is your opening and it's interesting because this entire piece, this entire first part is about the finding of.

27:42 And it totally blows you away. When you get like 25 pages in, you realize, oh, this is what he's doing. A man is found on Mars by an expedition that goes to find out what happened to the previous expedition, the one that he initially sets up. And from that previous expedition, a child was born, but a child that was raised in a Martian environment, not in a human environment. In essence, a. Then this is why I quoted from the Old Testament, a stranger, right, but was raised in a strange land, but not strange to him, strange to the human beings coming to see him.

28:23 And

28:26 the first kind of sort of thing, the first beat, maybe the first thing that, that I picked up from this book, particularly in reading the first part of it. It took me a little while to sort of conceptualize where I wanted to go and talking about this because I was so not enamored. I was so

28:45 intrigued is the word. By the idea that.

28:50 By an idea that was actually planted by Ray Bradbury in Martian Chronicles, even though Martian Chronicles was written after Stranger to Stranger to Strange Land. And we are going to cover Martian Chronicles, by the way, on the podcast here. So stay tuned for that if you need a co host. I think I know a guy. Oh, well, I might not get invited back after asking you to read this one. I've got. I've got. I've got a guy. I've got a guy. But yeah, but I think this book acts as a sequel to Martian Chronicles because the clever thing that Ray Bradbury does at Martian Chronicles is he makes a claim that I think Heinlein takes to its logical conclusion.

29:28 Even though Heinlein wrote Martian Chronicles, sorry, Stranger in a Strange Land, probably right around the same time Martian Chronicles was coming out. They were probably written in parallel, so there's no way they would have known what each other were, what each other was writing. But it just says that there's other things in the Zeitgeist other than just when it comes to creativity. There's other things in the Zeitgeist floating around. Ideas don't just come to one person.

29:51 So there's an idea in Martian Chronicles, and it's probably the most intriguing idea that Ray Bradbury ever came up with. And it is the idea that Mars changes you more than you change it.

30:03 And Heinlein takes that to its logical conclusion with a child unto us, a child is born anyway. And don't worry, that's going to pop up later on. And. And that's why he. Because Heinlein was also clever and snarky. That's why he calls it his immaculate origin. Not Immaculate Origin, his immaculate Origin. So the. The mission goes back to Or a return mission is made to Mars after the first mission, quote unquote, fails. The child is found all, all grown up. But having grown up in low Martian gravity and having grown up around, well, Martian people, if people is really the term that you want to use, and he is then.

30:49 And even he and she. And gender doesn't really. Doesn't really stick either. But that person, that entity is brought back to, to Earth and then from there we kick off into the action. By the way, he's held in quarantine in a hospital initially. That creates some problems. And people are not allowed, human people are not allowed to have interaction with him with the exception of a nurse named Jill. That's going to be important later on as well.

31:23 One of the things that struck me in the very first section though, beyond just those things, is I,

31:31 I so, so this book has made me. It's not made me. Has brought me to the point where I need to admit something. On the show and I talked about conspiracy theories and things like that, I want to believe. I want to believe that all the conspiracy theories are true. I absolutely, desperately want to believe that they are all true. And by the way, true meaning factual and meaning non falsifiable against reality. I want to believe that there are shadowy cabals running things, doing weird stuff. I absolutely want to believe that.

32:05 I want to believe that there are people in power doing weird things and hiding weird things from us. Because from my perception of reality for many years, there are. You get to a certain point on explanations of things and it's either incompetence and stupidity or its competency and venal evil.

32:27 Those seem to be our only two choices. Now, there is a third option. There is a third option there. And the third option is, and it is a Minority Report to frame from another book title by Philip K. Dick, the Minority Report. There is that there are good people who have stumbled into bad things. Now, because I filter most things in the world through the way I look at the world. And one of the things that influences my worldview. I said this before with John. One of those things that influences my worldview is my religion and how I interpret that in the world, both for how I walk through as an individual, but also how other systems and processes work and how I should relate to those systems and what I should do.

33:11 I do believe that there is good in the world, but I also believe in the existence of evil. I absolutely believe in the existence of evil. Now, how we define evil, what label we put on it, who gets to define it? By the way, this also comes up in part two of Stranger to Strange Land. I loved Jubal Hershel Harshaw's sort of having to go through his nonsense with, with all of that. That was great. I'm glad Heinlein had the courage and the guts to actually write that down because he thought, I could tell you for a fact, that's what he thought was going to get him in trouble.

33:44 I mean, I think it's much more the religion stuff that happens. Oh, yeah, it was the religious stuff. It was. But see, the first. He writes the first part of that and then in part four and five, he takes that to its logical conclusion and he thought that was what was going to get him in trouble. We'll talk about this later on. But what he didn't understand was religion was. And yes, I do mean Christianity in America was, was hitting its high water mark in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. That was the high watermark of religiosity in America.

34:15 And everything has been. And I know secular atheists and people who come from a more pagan background, people come from other religious traditions. Don't believe me. I'm deep in the Christian religion. Let me tell you, the water is going out of the tub. The water is going out of the tub. We are well on our way to being, I think it will happen in my generation, in my time, to being as irreligious Christianity irreligious as most of Europe. Whether this is a good thing or bad thing, we can argue about whether this will free us, like Sam Harris, from our superstition or not, is we could argue about that.

34:50 And we will, by the way, we'll argue about that. But it is, as a matter of factual act actually happening. And that's what Heinlein couldn't have predicted. But that's going a little bit ahead of ourselves to pull it back. The question I have for John, because this is a huge question for me in the first part of this, with all my conspiracy theory mindset, belief in evil, da da, da, da, da, all this. Okay, what if. I'm going to ask you a Ray Bradbury question? Oh, God, am I sitting down? Sit down.

35:21 Here's a Ray Bradbury question. What if the world's out there, are really populated by the leftover signals of our fever dreams? What if people are going to show up? People, what if aliens

35:36 are going to show up? Not like an Independence Day and blast us out of the sky, but instead are going to show up and give us every, every Edenic thing we could possibly ever want in exchange for our slavery.

35:52 That scares me more. That scares me more. That scares me more. Because we'll just say yes because we're looking for God.

36:05 Okay. I think, I think that statement is, is very, very important to the, to the conversation. Right. Because,

36:18 oh, man, there's a lot. I'll let you chew on that for a little bit. No, I, I. So I wrote notes about this book because I, I had so much to talk about it with you. And there, and there's this line in here that I wrote. Where is it? And I didn't put the page number on this, but it says, ben, the foulest sinner of all is the hypocrite who makes a racket out of religion.

36:41 And I read that line and I was like, oh, my. Like I was in the middle of the flow seat. I've got headphones on. I'm ignoring my family. I'm trying to finish this book so we can talk about it, everything. And I was like, oh, my God, where's my phone? Right? So I'm putting this thing in here because, man, I.

36:56 Oh.

37:00 I think that the, I think that the effort to tell people don't even bother thinking about it is a much bigger problem than, than the idea that, like that, that it might be there. Right. Because, you know, whenever

37:19 I can see as, as I was reading this book, I can, I could see how much like, of this I have picked up along, along the years. Right? The skepticism, the. Yeah. The pushback against authority and always being concerned and everything else like this. Right. Because like, I'm reading this book and I was like, oh, this is, this is. Well, I've read a lot of Highline. Right. Like, I mean, I just had. So, you know, his idea, like one of his, his very most popular ideas in all of his books is that, like, if you've not served in the military, you shouldn't vote right now, he doesn't really talk about all of that stuff here because it's very contained in the lanes that he's trying to like, push on and polarize and everything.

37:55 But, like, you know, he's, he's a very interesting author. Right. And I know, I know this is, this is not going to be a super popular opinion. So I hope anyone who hears this and takes issue with it is listening intentionally and closely. I think a lot of people are looking for God as an escape hatch because they're really scared of death. Oh, I'd agree with that. I think. Well, and actually, actually I would even go a step further. I think they're scared of living. I would, I would agree with, with that whole thing, right, because we talked about this.

38:30 We, we talked about this. I think on the last thing, right, I saw this bumper sticker and it was like, hey, if you're living like there is no Jesus, I hope you're right. And, and we had this conversation because philosophically for me, I'm like, do we, do you guys really want the don't have anything better to do crowd? Because to me, that kind of goes against the idea of the philosophy behind the whole thing, right? And that, that to me means. So at the high, at the high water mark of the 20th century of religion, we were.

38:59 Christianity was taking everybody. Everybody. Oh, yeah, I know, I know. But now what you're seeing as the wave goes out is you're seeing. Well, I'll give you a statistic. So among younger millennials and gen zers, the ones who do attend church, which church attendance is ridiculously down in the basement with all of them. But the ones who do attend church, they are not attending mainline Protestant churches. They're not attending the kinds of churches that Heinlein saddle rises with the foster rights.

39:34 They're not attending those kinds of churches. They're tending. They're attending Eastern Orthodox, traditional Roman Catholic, the return of the Latin mass, the return of traditional Protestantism. The kinds of warfare that people who are not involved with that world don't pay attention to that's going on right now is kind of unbelievable. And Heinlein could not have predicted any of that at all. He would have been totally blind to that would have been totally blind to that. And so what you're seeing is a return not to, not, not, not a because.

40:07 Because younger millennials and older zoomers and younger zoomers, too, have already been through the, the hedonistic pagan stuff of Brave New World. And they've gotten to the end of, from their perspective, they've gotten to the end of that. And now they're asking the meaning question, but they're asking the meaning question without having ever had a religious sort of underpinning, right? And so if you're asking the meaning question, but with no religious underpinning and everything else philosophically does not, does not serve or does not fulfill.

40:43 Where are you going to go? Where are you going to go to? The hardest thing possible, you're going to go to, you're not going to go to the megachurch with 800 people every Sunday. You're going to go to the smaller church in your town with maybe 100 people every Sunday and get baptized. And I'm hearing stuff like this happening all of the time. And again, not in the media centers, not on the east coast, not on the west coast, not even, weirdly enough, the place where we live. I'm hearing about this happening in the massive center of the country, and it.

41:10 It gives me a chill because. Well, for a whole variety of reasons. But one of the things that we've never successfully done in America ever in a Christian tradition is we have never.

41:27 And Jonathan Edwards was probably. I was talking with a friend of mine who's a pastor a little bit, not about this, but about something related to this and it relate. But it relates here. He said that Jonathan Edwards was probably who was ahead of the Second Great Awakening, back in the 18th century, just before the Civil War. Jonathan Edwards was probably the best preacher that America's ever produced that came out of an American tradition that wasn't trying to do something that came out of Europe.

41:51 He wasn't trying to replicate a European religious tradition here. But he. He got a disease at the age of like, 45 or 46, something like that, and he died within 48 hours. Oh, wow. Right. Like, he hadn't even hit, like, his peak. And back in the day, you started hitting your peak as a pastor when you were in your 50s, because you were old enough to have known something and live some life. Right? Okay. Well, once Jonathan Edwards was struck down, for lack of a better term, you had a bunch of people fall back into that space.

42:23 And this is where you get the strains of Mormonism. This is where you get nlds. This is where you get sort of the more cultish kind of things. This is also where the Baptist Church really begins to sort of take off and really begins to arc out from rest of mainline Protestantism. The Presbyterians crack up. The Episcopalians are trying to hold everything together. So all these sects in America start jostling for believers. The mid 20th century was the high point of that jostling. Now we're on the downhill slide of that jostling.

42:57 And what's happening is, again, for those people who aren't paying attention to any of this because you're in a business context or it's just not something that you care about or you're doing something else on Sundays, like maybe during the New York Times crossword puzzle or whatever, okay, fine. I'm just here to tell you this is starting. The concentration of this is beginning, and I don't know where this winds up. I don't know. I don't know where it winds up at. But I do know that when people don't believe in anything, they don't just go to believing in nothing.

43:23 They're going to backfill that eschatology with something. And Heinlein do this too, by the way. That's why he wrote about, that's why he wrote about this. But anyway, sorry, go ahead. I.

43:37 Okay, so we live in the south, right? And yeah, exactly. My, my, my Bible phase was very much a Southern Baptist kind of mode, right. And I went to, we said you. Were 11 in 1990. Yeah. So you were at the back end. Yeah. You were at the back end of the Seeker Sensitive movement. You were at the back end of like Rick Warren and big mega churches and all that kind of stuff. Yes. And so this is really important because my grandmother was, was very much a big Bible person, right? And so whenever I went to her and I, and I told her that I wanted a Bible, she got very excited, right.

44:09 And I'm, my parents are divorced. I'm trying to figure it out and someone invited me to go to church, right? And I'm like, okay, cool, I'll go to church. And, and my grandmother's like a Kenneth Copeland fan, right. You know, she's into it, right. And so every day growing up in South Fort Worth, right, I'm driving past that gated off compound, it is his out there in the middle of the boondocks with like razor wire along the top of it. And there's always these events and my grandmother's going to it and I'm reading this book and, you know, kind of doesn't feel like it all makes a lot of sense, you know, in living here in the south with these mega churches, right?

44:43 In these, these huge things and the guys with the planes and, you know, all this other stuff, it does make it very easy for me to reinforce the negative view that I have. Right. But that being said, I, I, I go out of my way to spend time with people who have a spiritual path that is true to them and does not involve me being a project to them. Right. Because whenever people, you know, kind of get a glimpse of like, how I think and, you know, approach different things and stuff like this. There's a lot of people who are like, john, you want to come church me?

45:14 No, thank you. Let's not do that. Right, right. And it's not, it's not anything. That's just not for me at this stage, you know, so going through this book and, you know, being this, you know, progressive person and you know, trying to think about the future of things as opposed to trying to hold on to the past of things. It's been very interesting going through this because I'm not seeing the stuff that you're seeing and hearing about. I'm just seeing this full court press of, you know, let's talk about potentially the, the laws of Oklahoma's Oklahoma school teachers, right, that are moving from certain states, having to go through a very fundamentalist, religious kind of

45:55 vetting to see if you can even teach. So that way they can teach what, what, what they want to be taught as opposed to different things like that. So like I can see, I look. At all those things, I look at all those things, I see them as rear guard actions because, well, I mean, the water is moving in a different direction already. I think, I like, I think that they are as well. But like. Okay, let's just, okay, let's fast forward a little bit, right? If you're, if you're a top tier teacher who doesn't believe in all of that stuff, are you ever going to go teach in Oklahoma?

46:25 No. You're not even going to try? Right. But I would, but I would assert that a top tier teacher. I'll frame it this way. If I could look at a top tier teacher's TikTok algorithm. I don't think Oklahoma even pops up on their radar. No, I know. Right. And so, and so essentially, in my not so well informed opinion, it's like walling off Japan. Sure. Right. So on a long enough timeline, right, it won't be next week, it won't be next semester or anything else like this, but a long enough timeline, right.

46:57 If, if there are, if there are no progressive ideals coming into the teachers that are teaching the people, right. What happens to those people, right? There's, there's eventually going to be this big kind of gap, right, of not everyone thinks and feels the same way. Right. So go ahead. Perhaps, I would say perhaps. And I think Heinlein was anticipating this and this is why he set up the Foster. Right. Sort of ideal. My thought is. And this

47:29 gets in the aliens piece, right? So my thought is if there is anything out there that is more advanced than us, that thing will already know, just like Valentin Michael Smith did, what's in our hearts and minds, whether we're walled off from each other or not, and will seek to provide all of that to every possible individual. And of course we'll have the means materially to do so. And now we've got everybody going in this direction Regardless of whether they're walled off or not. And the people who will really be, well, the people who will.

48:08 Who will be, shall we say, her son and Angra at the party are going to be people who are going to look at that and go, oh, that ain't it on both sides, by the way. One side of the wall or the other side of the wall. And we'll go, that. That ain't it. And my concern has always been, or my fear has always been a chill just even bringing this up now. My fear has always been that there aren't enough people on either side of the wall who are critically thinking it's going to be a really tiny teapot. That's my.

48:42 That scares the hell out of me. Actually, to be quite blunt, because that's always my biggest concern, right? Because, like, I don't think that we're served by, like, the old stuff that, like, my family would talk about when I was a kid. You know, we don't talk about these things, Right. I don't even tell Mike who I voted for. I don't think that's ultimately helping. Right. I think that that leads to these little dead zones of, you know, understanding other people and asking questions. Right? And then it evolves down to, please help me understand how you could even vote for someone else.

49:15 Well, when you say it like that, you don't have the language to get it right. And the part that I think Heinlein does the most amazing job of framing this up is whenever he has that stinky character who is Arabic, right. And has his map of the world based upon a different language that is not English. And they fundamentally do. I think one of. If they didn't, if they didn't do this part in the book, no one would have read the book, in my personal opinion. But him framing that, that idea that the language create the labels that we use, and if you're not using the same language, you don't have a conception or understanding of what these things are.

49:52 Are. Is. I think, like, I have goosebumps talking to you about it right now. Because the, the art and the elegance. Because what I took away from the book is fundamentally so different than yours, right? Because the thing that I took away is like, hey, love is the thing that ultimately matters, right? And it's not whose lane is right and which labels are right. And, and we're okay. Because that's my biggest frustration whenever I talk with a. A very Christian, focused Christian who thinks, well, my lane is the only lane.

50:23 Everyone else is going to Hell, because all. Okay, so like, what about this, Lane? Oh, yeah, they're going to hell too. Okay, so they don't go because they don't go to your church. There's, there's, there's, there's nothing of value in any of these beliefs. Absolutely. Right, right. And those people in my experience have the least actual knowledge and understanding of the history around these things. And, and it leads to wanting to put the Bible in the book on this pedestal of this is all absolutely correct and truthful and valid.

50:54 And so that way you can go around and be like, well, yours is garbage because mine has to be true. Right. So it creates this gap of dissonance. But this is a strain that has been, it's either been a minority strain or a majority strain in the American republic going all the way back to the founding. You know, my wife and I were watching John Adams last night. Great, great, you know, show. You recommend it? Oh, I highly recommend it. Okay, for sure. Yeah. It's the, I watched it myself probably

51:29 10 or 12 years ago maybe. And now, you know, we're home, you know, we homeschool our kids. And so my wife was like, hey, you know, what's a good thing that, that we could watch with, you know, my 8 year old that won't like, you know, be some stupid cartoon. And I was like, well, we were going kind of going through the movie list last night and we were maybe going to do Buried My Heart Wounded Nino's like, that's going to be too much for him. I was like, John Adams is probably good spot to start because he already sort of understands a little bit about the American Revolution.

52:00 He already sort of understands a little bit about intersections between people inside of the American Revolution. He doesn't understand the depth of relationships and all of that because he's eight and everything doesn't have to go to an eight year old. You can drip things out. It's fine folks. You don't have to like, anyway, whenever I'm not, I'm not radicalizing my child right away. It's gradual process. Not a, not an immediate one. I have patience, I got a long time. So. So he understands some of the dynamics, understands some of the things or whatever.

52:34 And so we could sit down and we could watch this. Plus like it's got old timey sounding language. There's not a lot of curtain, there's not any cursing. And the worst thing in there is that, you know, Benjamin Franklin smokes a pipe or no, John Adams smokes a pipe. And Benjamin Franklin's Benjamin Franklin. Okay, so he liked it because of, you know, the visuals and all of that. But he also was starting to pick up on some of the language, particularly when they started writing the Declaration of Independence.

53:01 And he's quoting back to the show, the Declaration of Independence. I was like, okay, good. That's in there. That's good. The point that I'm making is that in that show, the strain of religious osity that they show, that was in Boston at the time, which 200 and what, almost 50 some odd years later, you can't find a strain of religiosity in Boston to save your life. That strain was huge in driving the founding. It was massively gigantic because those people were what, three, maybe four generations away from the Puritans.

53:41 Something like that. Something like that. And so their conception of the world was very much driven by not only God saved the King, which they said completely unironically, by the way, but also was driven by we need something else. We need to. As a lawyer buddy of mine said, we need to close the loop on the Magna Carta. Right. Which is really what they were doing. They were closing the loop on the Magna Carta. Does the King have a divine right to rule or not? What does divine mean? How do we set up Gods on earth?

54:20 And it's interesting how they're setting up Thomas Jefferson too. I'm noticing some things about him that I didn't notice before. How they set up his. Him as. Him as a character. That was very interesting. But my point is this. There is that strain that has been in the American founding ever since the beginning. And then there's cussedness that just comes off of that. That's irreligious. Like Thomas Jefferson did. He made his own. And we'll close this in a minute. But Thomas Jefferson created his own Bible.

54:46 Most people don't know this, where he cut out all the parts that he found to be objectionable and just left, like, left like the red, the red lines from Jesus. Like, we've been making up our own thing ever since we got here. Yeah. And that was part of the promise, quote unquote. The way that it was framed in an American context. That you would be able to come here.

55:08 Yes. There would already be people here. But you, please, you can wipe those people out. Let's not talk about that. Would you be able to come here? Oh, yeah, let's not talk about that. Oh, and they were fine with it, by the way. They were like, no, we, we have, we have the guns, we have the Bible. We have the. Right. What. What's. What's the problem? Like, why is there an issue? People must be savages. Yeah. Like, come on, what do we do? Well. Well. And what's interesting is you go to, like, the American Southwest, and the Spanish talked about.

55:31 The Spanish talked about the Indians the exact same thing. So it wasn't just. It wasn't just an English Puritan thing. It was the whole European conception of the world thing. Right. I mean, we kind of like how we. We have a. We have a recurring theme. We do loving to short sight. Anyone else who is not in Europe blink of an eye at the same technological level that we are, right? Because. Because we get here, right, and we're on boats with muskets and everything, and we're like, yeah, but you guys are the simpletons, so we just deserve to take all this away from you.

56:03 Like, which, by the way, we've explored in science fiction. That's the whole point of War of the Worlds. Absolutely. Yeah. That's the whole point of that book. Is that someone else or. Or Independence Day. Right. For those of you. The original Independence Day, like, something comes from the outside and is like, hey, guess what? We're gonna colonize you and take your. Take your air and your water, because you're. You don't have the weapons to defend yourself. So this. This dynamic plays out, you know, in multiple ways across the American continent.

56:31 And I just think we're in. No, not. I think my concern is if my conspiracy theories are right and we're in a lot of trouble. And our. And one of the things that's sort of an undercurrent in this book that's not really talked about is the failures of elites to understand exactly what. What Valentin Michael Smith was.

56:54 They failed to understand exactly what he was, from the Secretary General all the way to the guy who was running the Church of the Fosser. Right? All of the elites, the pre. All of them. Anytime they had any interaction with him, they had absolutely zero understanding of what they were dealing with. And I think that's a hell of a lot more common than we give it credit for. Oh, well, like, I mean, we're saying the same thing. We're just talking, like. I'm talking about the broader civilization thing, and you're.

57:19 And you're talking about the specific. But that's absolutely true. Right? Like. And to me, that goes back to, like, the language and the map and the labels and everything else like this. Like, I had a version of this, and it's so funny that this happened to this, like, I don't like the word luck really bothers me, right? And whenever someone is like, oh, John, you only are here because you got lucky, right? Bothers me right?

57:46 Now, I also, I don't have a, I don't have a problem with the word fortunate. I am fortunate to be here, okay? But luck to me, in my reality, in my definition of that word, means that like, you know, these are all just coin flips up to this thing, right? My, my whole job, the reason I get hired to do the work that I do is about finding ways to put the coin flips into our favor, right? As a sales consultant and a sales trainer and, you know, a conversationalist, I teach people how to have the kinds of conversations so that way they can be heard and be seen for who they are.

58:23 So that way they don't get treated like a salesperson and can just get rejected out to half court, right? And a lot of times that just comes down to not being expectant but being enabling as the other person in the conversation. Like, I, it's, it's weird because like, as a, as a big, dumb, tall white guy, right? I get to go through life with, with a lot of privilege, right? A lot of people are not going to mess with me like they would If I was 5, 7. They won't talk back to me like I would if I was a woman or a person of color.

58:53 I, you know, I get, I get a whole lot of leeway and then I put on my role as a salesperson and I don't get the same leeway, right? I get rejected, I get cursed at, I get called everything but my name in some of these situations, right? Just because of the, of the label that I wear. And that label is tied to a lot of stigma, right? In convention of what selling actually is, right? So these people who were like, oh, John, you just want to sell me. Let's not jump ahead. I don't even know if you're tall enough to ride this ride, okay?

59:22 That's just how it works in my head, right? And for all those people who are, who were looking to hold that up so that way they don't have to spend. Okay, cool. Like, much like, I'm sure you know when you're talking to someone who does not put you in the right bucket, I know when someone is not putting me in the right bucket as a professional person, right? And so when we're, when I'm going through this book and I'm seeing all these people intentionally kind of you know, not intentionally. They think that they're making reasonable adjustments to this person.

59:58 Right. It's because they're moving too fast and not giving anyone the benefit of the doubt. They're not taking the time to go figure out, okay, what does the man from Mars label actually mean? What does that mean? In practice, it's just easier to be, oh, you're stupid. You don't get it. So I'm going to run all over you, and you're not going to get any of these things. Right? The other part, I think that the book, I think, does a great job of is, like, pulling these lanes of, you know, the. The actual reality not being anything close to what people perceive it to be.

1:00:29 And he does a really good job of hauling it out, Right? You know, he talks about the part about being really rich and, like, great wealth and how it's a job in and of itself. And, like, if you're not. If you don't want that job, don't. Don't even aspire for it, because it'll. It'll eat you. Right? And I was. And I was like, yep, that's true. And I got to talk about this with all my clients, because everyone thinks that they got to be the next Uber or else it doesn't make sense to start, which is just the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

1:00:53 But it's fine. Let's talk about building something you're actually happy to work in as opposed to this thing that, like, is sucking the soul out of your butt. Okay, but we'll talk about that another time. And from that perspective, the. The Arabic, right? How Jubal reasons these people out so that way they see the gaps in their own understanding, right? You know, they do it about wealth. They do it at the end whenever Ben Caxton goes to the nest and then comes back and he's like, they're not wrong.

1:01:21 You're the idiot. Like, it is so well crafted. And if you have. If you have any room to want to think about other things, right? Think about the other perspective. Because you sent me the script of this thing, right? And you. And you. And you had this. This kind of Hasan question in there, right? And I. I know what you're doing. Right? I get it. I get it. You're trying, right? You're trying to push that button. And. And I was. I was ready for that question, right? Because I. I fundamentally. I go back to that.

1:01:51 To that Arabic conversation, right? If we lived in a culture to where there wasn't a press for religion, okay? And If. Because when I hear you talk about how it's trending downward, right. I perceive you to see that as a negative thing. Okay. Which, and I can understand why that's fine. I'm not, I'm not here to argue that. But what I think is the only reason it was that high was because there wasn't room for people to be themselves and to be like, hey, I don't see value in that. So I'm going to go off on my own.

1:02:21 I'm going to go educate. Am I going to inform myself? I'm going to go read these other books as opposed to just listening to the guy in the front of the pulpit tell me that it's not worth my time. Right? Like, and that's where that line that I, that I put out to you is. Is so interesting to me. But I also love how he talks about. And I forget the page of this book, but he talks about how so much religion is around this, like, huge leap of faith, right? And they put it up there. And I could remember going to people like, like, as a kid, right?

1:02:50 I'm going through my. Through my Bible phase. I'm. I'm going. I'm going to disciple now in church camp, I gave up and gave my testimony because someone told me on that I'm not a real Christian if I don't do this thing and everything else like this. And then I'm going and asking, like, how do we know? How do we know? How do we know? And it was just faith and faith and faith and faith and faith. And it was just like, cool. Can't go with you, right? Like, I just. I just can't, you know? And I think the idea that, like, language provides a different scaffolding, a different way to think about labels and interpretations of them and stuff like this.

1:03:22 Because if it really is just about love, right? Is any lane that pushes love ultimately that bad? I mean, isn't it better than, like, not believing anything at all and pushing people away? Because there are so many of the used car sales people pushing that method of like, hey, you know, the, the foster rights. I. Dude, I've been in those conversations, right? Well, hey, you're a sinner. You can still come to church with us. Okay, cool. How excited am I supposed to be now? So it's. It's interesting.

1:03:54 So I'm. Let. Let me do this. Let's. Let's transition to the second part because I want to talk about Jubal. Yeah. Critical to understand all of this. And I have a. I have a I have another thought underneath, because I. I don't just read one book at a time. I read like five books at a time. Same. And I also have. Well, and I also read books in different genres. So currently I am reading a bunch of books

1:04:21 in the Jewish tradition around the Old Testament. Okay, okay. And Judaism may have something for you or an answer to a question that you actually have, at least, as I understand it from my extremely limited understanding of what exactly is going on in that faith tradition, which informs, not necessarily American Christianity, but which informs Christianity, period, which I think is also something that Heinlein misses. This is why he leaps to Islam, which is fascinating to me. And he didn't leap backward to Judaism.

1:04:57 That's incredibly fascinating to me. And I'm going to tell you why. I think he does it. Like, Like, I mean, my perspective is, is that he's doing it to piss people off. Right. I think if he, yeah, if he made it Judaism, it would be close enough that a lot of people be like, yeah, we can believe the same things, but. But when we take like in, you know, it wasn't like in like the 80s and 90s where, like, hey, let's just put a guy in the Cape, right? And I'm. And I'm forgetting what the actual technical term is, but let's put someone in Middle Eastern garb and make him the bad guy, right?

1:05:25 Like, sure, yeah. Like, like we're not in that part of the culture. But I think, I think that if the, if he hadn't made it Arabic in something so big and so known and so much of, like, oh, against us, we can't ever be on the same page. I, I don't think anybody would have. Would have taken the note. I think he made it Arabic because in 1950, no one knew and no one knew, very few people in America knew exactly what was in the Quran. Because during that period of time in the Middle east, if you go back and look at it, they were just coming out of Cologne, British colonialism, which is why the character in here, you know, sort of is framed in British context.

1:06:08 The other thing that had happened, which was a big geopolitical event, was the Nuremberg Trials. And so you weren't going to go and beat up on the Jews because from your cultural perspective, in 1950, they had already been beat up on enough. I mean, the state of the modern nation, state of Israel wasn't established till 1948. So the time that Heinlein is researching and writing and putting together his thoughts for this book, the modern nation State of Israel is beginning to rise. The Nuremberg Trials are happening.

1:06:40 We are actually finding out. Not actually we. The world is having to deal with, particularly the secular nation state world is having to deal with what they let Hitler get away with. Lot of dynamics there. And so I wonder if he picked Islam

1:07:02 because it was the. It was the least offensive option out of the three. That's what you find a point in. In a time when least offensive meant nobody knew enough to go and check him or go and correct him. Right. And he could be sort of the. And I'm not from a malicious standpoint, but he could sort of be the. The person who kind of defines this as an exotic other, which Edward Said would come along a lot later and talk about the othering of the Orientals, which, to Highland's credit, he doesn't use that term here in the book, but that was something that was floating around in the 50s and 60s in.

1:07:39 In America. I mean, the Shah of Iran was running things in Iran from 19 or. Yeah, with Shah was running things in Iran from the 1950s to the 1970s. I mean, Iran was a modern. If you look at pictures from that time, Iran was a modern Persian nation state. You had people walking around, you know, women walking around ungarbed. You know, at the same time, in Turkey, the. I can't remember the general, but he had banned all fundamentalism, period, full stop. He said, we're going to be. We're going to be a.

1:08:08 We're going to be a modern nation state. And so he took all those people that we currently associate with fundamentalist Islam and he basically locked them up in gulags and told them to shut up. Which is like, absolutely the best way to quell any kind of like. Oh, yeah, it didn't turn out to be a problem at all. No, it's fine. No, that didn't. That didn't have any ramifications in the latter part of the 20th century at all. Yeah, not at all. No, no. And the Saudis at that time. Well, I mean, the Saudi royal family, by the way, side note, Saudi Arabia is an entire country named after one family.

1:08:47 So anyway, the Saudi. Just a side note, just something. Yeah, well. Well, there they were at a time where the number one rule, and it still is the number one rule in the Saudi royal family is we control the oil. The oil never stops flowing. That's the number one rule. After that, you could do whatever you want. After that, you can start up madrasas, you could be fundamentalists, you could be Wahhabi, whatever you want. But the oil never stops flowing and we control the oil. That's why they kicked Osama bin Laden out of their country and sent him to Afghanistan because they couldn't handle that dude anymore.

1:09:21 Anyway, that was all going to happen 20 years, you know, ahead. Which is why, again, I look at this book through, you know, the lens of all the historical stuff that happened after Heinlein wrote it. And so to your point, I get what you're saying, but I think at that time it was, it was considered an exotic religion that would have been a religion of modernity moving forward and. Like, you know, heard. Yes, right. It is so unknown that he can kind of drop his flags. Right. And there's not going to be a whole lot of people over him and everything else like this.

1:09:55 But I've read a lot of, a lot of this guy. Yeah. I don't think he's pulling punches in the name of will. These people have been beat up enough. So let's find someone else to beat up on. Right. Like, I, I don't like, like, I don't see him. I do, I do think after, I mean, I've read a lot of Heinlein that if he thought that, that the, that, that, that the Judaism lens would have been better, he would have gone with it. Whether or not he thought that they'd been beat up enough or not. I think he was very intentional in the analogy.

1:10:25 Okay, well, let's look at, let's look at Jubal because I want to, I want to switch to this. And so we pick up in part two of Stranger in a Strange Land. Part two is called his preposterous heritage. And the vast majority of part two is consumed with, and I love it, how he turns the term preposterous. The preposterous nature of exactly how Valentine Michael Smith comes into his. Well, comes into his inheritance, comes into dealing with human beings, comes into moving from being unable to walk in, in the different gravity well of Earth all the way to being able to swim and transport, transpose and transport himself out of his body from the bottom of a swimming pool while there are black helicopters.

1:11:17 Remember I said I'm a conspiracy theory guy. While there are black helicopters flying overhead.

1:11:24 I'm just going to read this little tiny piece here. While Mrs. Douglas was speaking freely on a subject she knew little about. God, I loved that sentence so much. Jubal E. Harshaw, LLB, MD, ScD, Bonvauvant Gourmet Sybarite, popular author, extraordinary and neo pessimist philosopher, was sitting by his pool at his home in the Poconos, scratching the gray thatch on his chest and watching his three secretaries splash in the pool. They were all amazingly beautiful. They were also amazingly good secretaries.

1:11:55 In Harshaw's opinion, the principle of least action required that utility and beauty be combined. Hold on one second. My wife is calling. I'm gonna pause. 3Rd. All right, let's pick up here from the break.

1:12:13 All right. So. So, yeah, we read that little piece there about Jubal, and that's a great opening to what's going to be happening, what's happening in the rest of part two, where we go into the full

1:12:30 depth and breadth of Jubal Harshaw from the nature of who he is as a lawyer and as a barrister of the law and understanding the law and of course, as a manipulator of the law, as any good lawyer actually is, all the way to his understanding of religion and his understanding of. Exactly. Or no, his beginning. The beginning of his understanding of what exactly?

1:12:58 Valentin Michael Smith, the. The man from Mars. Right. What exactly is that going to. To mean? We also learned more about the man from Mars and how his brain works and how he is engaging with. With humans in this. In this new world, right, that he has now been dropped into unceremoniously.

1:13:24 And the things that occur to me in this section really focus around. And I love how part two is called his preposterous heritage, because the beginning of it was preposterous. Well, not the beginning of it. The beginning of it and the end of it all the way to the end is preposterous. It has touches of Elmer Gantry. If you ever read that book I was reading or I was listening to music this weekend while I was chainsawing tree limbs on my property, because that's what I do to relax. And, you know, I was listening to everything from David Bowie and Space Oddity all the way to Neil diamond and Brother Love's traveling salvation show, which is.

1:14:03 Which is a. A beat that harkens back to those. Those proto Kenneth Copeland preachers roamed the south, saving everybody, right, Laying on hands and. And delivering the Holy Spirit, such as it were.

1:14:21 Now, I. I am a person who can only live in the time that I'm in. I can only live in 2025. I can't live in 1950 or 1855 or 1965. And I came along and was born after all of that was all over. I was born in the backwash of cynicism and skepticism. I was born in that time. I came of age in that time. And not just cynicism, skepticism around religion, but cynicism and skepticism around institutions all over the place, including particularly political institutions, which Jubal spends a lot of his time running up against.

1:14:55 So I will say this, as a character, most of the things that I found him doing in the book I found to be amusing, but not particularly surprising because we live in a deeply cynical, a deeply cynical time that can spot that Noel no, that is so good at spotting hypocrisy with ironic detachment that we don't recognize sincerity and we don't trust sincerity. By the way, this is what Valentin Michael Smith ultimately has to overcome, and this is why he uses church to do it. But some interesting things that occurred to me.

1:15:34 So I have friends in a lot of different areas, and some of my friends are psychologists and therapists, and.

1:15:41 They. Pointed out to me something that's very interesting. Political identity is now being shaped by ninth grade, and I believe I've said that before on the show. And I look at this as political identity replacing religious identity. Now, the problem with that, of course, is that political identity is usually based on a party or a person or a movement. And those things always ultimately fail, particularly or shift. Usually they shift, but particularly when you're young and you're a true believer, you see that shift as a failure.

1:16:16 And this is where you get purity tests. You get ideological purity tests, which currently there is a party in our country that is, is, is should have had a revolution but didn't and is going to have to go through a whole bunch of ideological purity tests to get back to something resembling a center. And it's going to be, it's going to be quite, it's going to be quite nonsensical, I think, over the next 25 years. And they have no one but themselves to blame, by the way, this political party in America.

1:16:46 But you also see a weird intersection in our time, speaking of being in our time. And I have kids that are younger and I've talked about them on the podcast before. We have, in our time, a state where human beings use number one, we're the most in America. We're the, we are the country with the highest rate of diagnosed mental health maladies out of any country on the planet. We have, we have it by a country mile. We also have pharmaceutical companies that advertise on our televisions, which I have a problem with, and advertise every solution and every pill with every side effect for these mental health maladies.

1:17:22 We're probably the culture that uses the most therapeutic language on the planet, and yet we have the highest rate of anxiety and depression out of any other country on the planet. Now, I'm not making up these statistics. These are things. I'm not making up these facts. These are things that you can go and find out on Google if you want to. So we live in a time where social cohesion has begun to fall apart. And maybe I'm being impacted because the last couple of weeks I had an amazing social experiment, an amazing anthropological experiment with a corporate entity

1:17:57 where low trust social cohesion were the name of the lack of social cohesion were the name of the game. And so maybe I'm being influenced by that in my looking at this book, but I wonder in our time, how we can interact with people. This is why I brought up theory of mind. And so this is a question maybe for John. And in our time, how can we interact with somebody? How can we interact with other people when we don't even have. We don't even have a fully? Even in the best of times, we struggle with theory of mind and we are not currently psychologically or philosophically in the best of mind.

1:18:33 So how do we. How can we interact with each other? How can we interact with each other? We don't even seek to understand each other's minds. How do we do that? Or. Or is it going to take someone coming from the outside for us to actually figure out that, oh my gosh, that person has a. Has a mind, and oh my gosh, their mind might not work like mine. And oh my gosh, that's actually something that I might want to be curious about rather than just stay up. That's uninteresting to me. And I'm going to, you know, wall myself off on Blue sky or Twitter or LA or Oklahoma because I just don't need to deal with those people.

1:19:09 People. Yeah. Yeah. How do we. This is, I mean, this is a question of our time. I know you see it. This is the driving question of our era. How do we. How do we handle that? How do we use Heinlein to handle that? Well.

1:19:25 Beautiful question. Like, and I think you worded it very deeply and intentionally, and I appreciate it. And I think that the hard. I think the first thing is, like, don't expect to get the benefit of the doubt. Right. And this is, I'm curious to your thoughts on this because we were kind of talking about it before and this is essentially kind of the gist of my, of the book that I have been working on for a while. So I might be seeing this vein Because I've been working on it for a while.

1:19:57 No one wants to be changed. First of all, was the very first thing, right? And I was at a conference and they were talking about that no one will change until they understand why change is necessary, okay? And so lots of people go around and I've done this myself on some of the things that I'm very touchy about, right? There's certain areas to where I have less room to give someone the benefit of the doubt that they're, you know, well read and well informed and everything else like this. And so what it comes down to for me, this is going to sound so bad.

1:20:27 I am a nerdy person. I'm going to go read the books. I'm going to talk in a language that most other people don't want to talk in, right? And this has been something that is, that has shown up for me on social media, right? I'm a guy who posts about sales stuff and I try to be subject matter expert in my lane and teach and try to teach with some depth. And I'll have people be like, man, you're trying way too hard. This is actually how I communicate.

1:20:57 Not, this is how I talk. This is how I communicate. This is my chosen vernacular. This is, this is not something I'm piling on so that way I can look cool on social media. I am this nerd, right? And so what it comes down to is that there's going to be a whole lot of people that will never be open to hearing anything contrary to their beliefs because they don't see me as being on the level to have anything to say, right? So, and this is weird sales perspective. If you don't see me as a human being, I'm out the door.

1:21:32 I can go find someone else to talk to. I don't have time to sit here and be. Jump. Jump through someone's flaming hoops. The sales people are all these things and everything. I don't, I don't do that. I just go find other people to go talk to, right? So I'm not trying to bend people over to my ideas. And the thing that I tell all the founders that I work with, if they don't align on the philosophy, the details in the proposal don't fundamentally matter, right? And, and I'm sure that you have on your lane met a lot of people who are like, you know what?

1:22:01 Leaders aren't developed, they're just born. We shouldn't have to teach them anything, right? And so in that mode, the philosophy shuts down. Any room for bargaining, working together, opportunity, or anything else like this. And as a sales professional who tries to teach people and show people, don't fight with people in the streets about things that you're never going to change them on because it's like going to Thanksgiving with your. With your one uncle who just doesn't agree with you about anything and has known you since you were in diapers and can't even stand to hear that you have anything contrary to what he believes.

1:22:32 Because his whole, his whole world view is that the world revolves. We're never like, don't even have conversations with those people. Right? Because until you're willing to walk away from that person and be like, hey, we're not going to get anywhere, they're going to treat you just like they treat every sales professional on this. You just want to sell me. You just want to win me over, right? So the sheer caliber of being able to be like, hey, cool, you're not going to listen to anything I have to say, and that's fine, Uncle, I'm going to go over here.

1:22:58 See you next Christmas. Well, I'm not trying to run you off. Like, I get it, you're not trying to run me out, but you're not interested in having the same kind of conversation position than I am, right? So there's an I. There's an idea in, in the New Testament where Jesus sends out his disciples. Not again, not making this about religion. Just there's an idea that triggered in my brain when you said this where he sends them out. And it is a salesman. It's. Jesus loves salesmen. Actually, interestingly enough, this is how, you know, he sends them out and he says, go to the towns of the villages, tell them everything that I'm doing.

1:23:32 Basically sell me, right? And if they won't accept, and this is the Hasan Sorrell's interpretation. So those of you who are more biblically accurate can slam me upside the head later on. And it's in Matthew, might be in Luke, it's fine, whatever. And we could argue about it in Luke. It's fine. Actually won't even argue about it. You could argue about my interpretation of it. It's fine. And you're gonna say I'm like being irreverent or whatever, and I'm not. Jesus likes the irreverent too, so. Oh, he was irreverent in his own time with the Pharisees.

1:23:57 Just read the entire book of John, please. Give me a break. So he says he sends out his, his disciples to all the villages. And he says, you know, if they will take you in. And by the way, with only a staff and a pair of their shoes, which back in the day was, please, that's all you had. Right? And he said, if they, if they won't accept what you have to say, shake the dust from your sandals in the town and go to the next town. Yeah. That is the ultimate like, salesman move. To your point. Why are you not.

1:24:28 You know what, it's fine. You have a good day. I'm not for you, and that's okay. Now here's where it goes sideways. As a, as a sales coach and sales consultant, right. Is the people who were, who were sold on the idea that they're helping other people love to lean into the fact that I'm helping, I'm helping, I'm help. No, you're selling. Right. And as the card carrying professional, I can tell when there's a difference between help and selling. Right? And these people have sold themselves. And I don't even know where this comes from, right?

1:25:05 Because I like, I know all the Bible verses just, just like you do of like, hey, take the plank out of your own eye and all this other stuff that happens, right? I'm just like, hey, just go walk your path and go do your thing. Don't make it a salesman thing. And then also like, hey, if they don't want to be with us, don't, don't, don't, don't try to force it. But we still had people who were going around trying to make everyone else their project and everything else like this. And you know, it's,

1:25:32 I can't, I can't adequately talk about how uncomfortable it is to not go to church. Living in Texas and being in a customer facing role, it is so prevalent. John, where do you go to church? Oh, we're between churches. I gotta make up a line because like, you know, it's not popular. You know, like I, I, one of my, one of my stories that I share with everyone is the last time I lied to a prospect and it was sitting at the bank and my daughter was an infant. I'm talking to them about investing some of their money into the thing, right?

1:26:04 And they see a picture of my daughter and she's an infant. Right on. You know, because I mean, she, she was an infant during the time and they were like, hey, beautiful daughter, thank you so much, I appreciate it. And they're like, how old is she? I was like, she's months and some change. I forget exactly how old she was. And they say, well, you better get her in church before she's three. And me being me, I'm like, oh, why? Like, why do you say that? Let's. I'm. I'm genuinely curious. That sounds like it's coming from a place of distinction, not preference.

1:26:34 You know, it's like, what do you mean by that? And like, well, you want to raise the right way. Okay, does that mean that I'm not capable of raising her the right way? Right? Because I'm me and I'm always thinking about all the other questions and everything. And so then I'm like, but wait a minute, hold on. We're on the clock. Don't, don't, don't go too far down this path. You know what happens, right? So just dial it down, right? Because I'm not against anyone else having their faith right? At all.

1:26:57 I want everybody to have equal room and opportunity to believe in whatever they want to believe, which I think kind of makes me different than a lot of other people who want everybody to believe what they believe, right? I'm on the far side of that, right? If you want to, if you want to believe in, in the Satan. The Satanist church, cool. I don't have a problem with that, Right? I just fundamentally don't. And so. But I also know that, like, hey, I, I want, I want, I want this business, right? I want to help with these people.

1:27:25 And honestly, this thing shouldn't be standing in the way. But I know that if I tell them, I'm not going to talk about that with you, right? I know where I'm at, right? So I'm trying to find all the salesy ways that I can get around this situation without having to copy cause a kerfuffle, if you will. And so they're like, hey, you should go to. Hey, you know, and like, will you go to church? I'm like, we're, we're between churches on a very long, very long gap, you know, kind of thing. And they're like, well, you should come to our church.

1:27:51 Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Probably not going well. Why not? Right? And so the minute they leave, I have this moment of like, God, like, you know, and then I was like, I'm not doing that again. I'm just not. Can't do it. That, that was, you know, oh, like, I just felt gross, right? And then they ghosted me and didn't buy anything anyway, right? So then I was like, man, I did all these things and I lied and like, and like, did all this obfuscation and they still didn't buy. I'm just gonna be myself.

1:28:21 Right. And that was the beginning of all of these things that I now teach people to do. And fundamentally, if. Here's what it comes down to. If I need to be in church every Sunday for you to trust my ideas and opinions, cool. Go find a sales coach who goes to your church. I gotta say, I. When you, when you talk about these kinds of things, we talk about this kind of way. Yeah. I culturally came out of the Northeast very different there, Very different up there. And it is almost. It's almost the exact opposite.

1:28:55 But I see it as the same kind of.

1:29:02 So what occurs in. In Texas or the south around religious belief in churches. And where that is contained to me is the exact. Is the obverse. It's the other side of the same coin of deception. So when you go from the Northeast to the south in the Northeast, you never hear, I'm going to make a very small one, because this is something that jumped out to my wife when we first got here. No one ever anywhere says, God bless you, never. Not for anything, please. And here, it's the most passive aggressive, back of the back of the hand kind of situation.

1:29:40 Right? So you come from a place where no one says it, and you come to a place where literally they'll hand you the groceries at the grocery store and say, God bless you. And it takes you a little while to understand that people don't mean it and that it's a cultural challenge Now. Well, here's what's interesting. Then you take it is. And then you take that cultural coding, and I still have clients in the Northeast, and you take that cultural coding back to visit that. Those areas in the Northeast where none of that cultural coding is there, and their cultural coding for all these other things, and you just begin to see how they're both sharing the exact same.

1:30:18 It's the exact same thing. It's the exact same thing. And so I've had clients in the Northeast. I've had the opposite experience. I've had clients in the Northeast who, if I mentioned anything about church at all, what I do on Sundays, other than football, which I don't watch football because I don't have time for that nonsense. But if I talk about anything other than that, nope, it's immediate turnoff. Matter of fact, I've had clients actually tell me it's immediate turn off in the Northeast. It's so like.

1:30:46 And so it's so weird to me, because it's fascinating. Do you see, like, oh, yeah. So. So, because I was thinking about this, right? As. As I was thinking about this conversation, I'm so excited to talk to you about it because, you know, your question of, you know, the, the main question you put in the script that we've not talked about yet, so I'm not going to ruin it, is I started thinking about, like, okay, how. How different can it be? And I. And I know that the. That the Northeast is not nearly as religious as the.

1:31:11 As Texas is, right? Not even close. But, like, the church that I went to was the church that I went to because everybody in that school went to it. Right. All the people who lived in Perry Homes went to it. Right. And then you go there and all the private school people go to it, and everyone is rich and loaded and like, you know, everyone has, man, it is. It's rife with judgment, right? And if you don't have a guide or the right environment or everything, because, like, I could see a spot to where a smaller church without all that full press, Southern Baptists, we're going to sell you on.

1:31:43 On faith and everything else like that that I would have, you know, probably had some room to be like, okay, maybe I can go this way. Maybe I don't need it to be proved out and everything else like this. But whenever people are telling me to jump without looking, no. Right. And it's kind of the same thing that kind of gave me some problems in the military around the idea and especially after the military. Right. Because the military kind of ruins you for. For following empty leadership. Right? Because I have been in the situation to where I'm.

1:32:12 I might have to be called to go die for these things. And the people that are calling me to do so have gone through the exact same training that I have. Right. So then I come home and some sales leader wants to make sales like war and trying to make it out to be like. And it's like, no, it does not work. You know, and so I was thinking in my head of, like, I was trying to kind of have some appreciation for just how potentially polarizingly different it is up there because, like, I've not walked that experience, but I do know what it's like to even going to a restaurant to get a job.

1:32:48 Hey, John, you. You go to church? No, I don't. Okay, good. You can absolutely work Sundays, right? I mean, it is woven into so much of how things work. It's the, it's the, it's the. My wife and I talk about it a lot. The, The. The. The Stark differences in culture. Yeah. And that is one of those. One of those things that pops up. And it's interesting how human beings. And this is the core question, right. It's interesting how human beings sort of try to create high trust and social cohesion. The tools that they use to do that.

1:33:27 Right. Because number one, it's really hard to trust people who you don't know. Absolutely. Number two, it's really hard to have faith in people because you know yourself that you're not reliable. So your theory of mind, if it even goes out this far, goes to other people not being reliable as well. So the expectation is just, well, I'm not reliable. So of course that guy's not reliable or that woman's not reliable, or that system or that institution isn't reliable. So course we have to put in all these structures because if we don't, then all these people will behave like me.

1:34:03 And that leads to all the guys. Wanting the floor length dresses and. Yeah, absolutely. Right. That's right. Exactly. I don't trust myself, so. And everyone must be just like me. So therefore everyone must go through these rules that keep me from having these thoughts. Yeah, I, I had a whole conversation with somebody again in this. In the one day. I'll talk about it on the podcast. But in this whole bureaucratic mishmash that I went through where I literally said to the person on the phone, the, the policy you are following makes zero sense in light of what I have just told you.

1:34:39 And yet you are going to continue to follow the policy. I need you to think independently from the policy. And you would have thought that I showed across to Dracula. Oh, yeah, right. Because that's a direct challenge to those systems and structures that have existed because I don't trust myself. I have low social cohesion with myself. So of course this policy is the thing that's going to protect me because,

1:35:13 you know, I can't really write. I can't really trust everybody. Anybody. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, it was one of those things that kind of jumped out to me when I was in that interaction.

1:35:24 Are you telling me that the people who rub me the wrong way are just in the middle of like a Dunning Kruger religious over compensation kind of situation? Like, like they're all just like CrossFit vegans and way too excited about it. Yes. They're all getting better at exercise.

1:35:41 And so healthy. Right, Interesting. Okay. And like, it's funny because

1:35:48 I. So in the things that I read, you know, there's, there's this kind of like known change that happens, right? That like, lots of people in their youth don't really have much room for much of a spiritual lane, right? A lot of people, when they're still figuring out who they are, if there is a spiritual lane, it comes from indoctrination of the family into religion and stuff like this, you know, And I, I don't have a problem with someone who has strong faith, like, you know, I, I love you, man. You're one of my favorite people, because your faith is yours and anyone can come ask you about it, but you're not trying to push it on other people, right?

1:36:25 And I have a handful of other people who are the people that I go ask these deeper questions with and try to understand their perspective because I know that they can see that I'm, I really am trying to understand. I'm not trying to pick it apart, but sometimes the way that I ask questions makes it sound like I'm trying to pick it apart, right? And that's, that's awareness and understanding that, you know, the, the way we show up in a conversation is going to bring some weight to it and stuff like this, you know.

1:36:49 So, you know, part of the, part of the earlier thing is like, I don't, I don't even go try to talk to anybody about deeper topics unless they have shown themselves to be thoughtful, intentional, well read, educated and stuff like this, right? So, like, you and I can talk about things like religion and censorship and government and race and all of these things, right? And like, you're one of the people on my short list. Whenever I see something, I'm like, oh, I don't know how I feel about that. I'm like, I'm gonna go ask Kayson, right?

1:37:13 Because he probably thinks differently than I do and has some perspective. You know, it's. Well, one of the. Who I can't talk to without like, well, you know, come to church, come to church. Come to church. Like you, in my, in my, in my opinion, if you're carrying around this philosophy, right, And I'm choosing the word philosophy for just, for very intentional reasons for just a second, you should be able to explain it to other people. And I demand the same people of their politics. Agreed. So if you're going to politics, religion, these are the big two.

1:37:46 The third one, of course, the third pillar, you know, the third rail is, is, is sexual behavior and morality around that. Those are the big three rails, right? You can either be driven off of or can shock you when you touch them. And the thing is, and I told this to My oldest son, years and years ago. No one knows everybody else's story. Matter of fact, most people don't know their own story enough. You talked about testimony. They don't know their own story enough to be able to articulate it to someone else.

1:38:20 That's number one. Number two, we live in a society. And this is why I started off with the medication piece and the anxiety piece and the depression piece and the pharmaceutical piece. We live in a society and culture, and I don't know if we're post capitalist, late capitalist, whatever the hell, I don't care. We live in a society that has evolved to a point right now where we have. This is one of the reasons why I do this podcast. We've deconstructed everything down to the smallest possible space.

1:38:52 Matter of fact, we're running out of things to deconstruct, and you can only go so far with that on your social capital before you wind up having a generation of people, which we do have now in the millennials, a generation of people that is struggling to create, to create and do the things that human beings have always done historically throughout human society, which is established traditions, be in a community and have a home. And they are struggling with building. At least this is what I'm seeing, and I'm reading your mileage may vary, but they are struggling with how do we build this?

1:39:30 How do we put this back together? How, how, how, how, how? Now, fortunately, there's 85 million millennials, 20 million more than the baby boomers who were a generation that was, huh, very much in the thrall of deconstruction. They deconstructed everything all the way down to their marriages and their families and traditions. But you can't. You can't have a society in a culture. And I think this is what Heinlein is getting to in Stranger in a Strange Land. I think this is one of the deeper ideas in here that's sort of buried like gold in there or like a precious pearl.

1:39:59 You can't deconstruct everything and build nothing. This drives me absolutely crazy. Like, I'm tired of deconstructing. I'm philosophically tired. I'm morally tired. I'm psychologically tired. I don't want to hear any more about problems and what problems we've got, because I know what the problems are. You know what the problems are, everybody. What. What are we going to construct that are actual solutions? And what's interesting is solutions are usually very simple. Matter of fact, they're so deceptively simple to Your point?

1:40:28 As a salesperson, they're so deceptively simple that people have a problem being sold on them. Yeah.

1:40:35 And that's what's got. That's the hook that's got us all sort of twirling around. You know, we don't need pharmaceuticals. No. Are there people who had genuine anxiety and depression who need to be pharmaceutically medicated? For sure. Absolutely. There always have been. And I don't know that you need to go to therapy. I was just reading this from an actor because you signed a contract for Marvel Movies and it didn't, like, come to fruition. Like, you just need better coping skills. You're cut off from your traditions and your family, from the people who could help you and put that into some sort of frame of reference.

1:41:13 So. And this is not me making a judgment. This is me merely looking at what you've said and looking at the society that we have and going, okay, two plus two has to equal four at some point. What are we constructing? Because a therapeutic thing clearly has limited or not limited. Yes. Well, yeah. Has limited value all the way to the end. There's always. There's always a gap somewhere, right? There's always a gap somewhere. And we've deconstructed in that gap just fine. And it used to be. And when I use the term religion in this context, I'm using it in a different way.

1:41:47 It used to be you had religion, which meant you had the street, or you had the family, or you had the neighborhood. We used to actually have that. You had the community. You had even in tenements in New York City. You had three generations of social capital going back. This is why everybody could yell at the kids on the street when they're playing stickball out in the country. You had three to four generations of social capital. This is why the father teaches the son. There's a great scene in John Adams where he's teaching his son about manure.

1:42:21 And my son was like, looking at this, he's like, oh, that's disgusting. And he knows a little bit about work, a little bit of farming. And he's like, oh, that's terrible. Why would he smell the manure? And I'm like, well, because he's trying to show him something about tradition. He's trying to show him something about a line that goes back in his family all the way back to Charles the Second. Like, who even talks like that now? And the weight of that. Don't get me wrong, the weight of that can be oppressive, for sure, but the weight of that can also be, I think

1:42:51 it could be an anchor when times get hard, when you are anxious and when you are depressed and when you formalize and institutionalize that in a church structure, of course it's going to fail because

1:43:06 we're capitalized

1:43:10 like we're capitalists. So we're going to want to blow that sucker out to its furthest end. And that's a real, that's a, if you want to talk about the real sin of America, it ain't racism. That's the real sin of America. It's wrapped up in the thing that is also our real blessing. Two sides of the same coin. And I'm saying this is a person who's a capitalist. Like, I believe that people should get paid what they're worth, but I also believe that at a certain point financialization has to end. It just has to stop.

1:43:39 Man, I have, I have very different perspectives here than you. One. Yeah, I think, I think that everyone would benefit through a round of therapy, right? And I say this as someone who's done therapy and I, and I, and I, I would say this line to people before because I didn't have anything against it, but I didn't think I needed it. Right? And then in the middle of the pandemic when my business is struggling and I'm trying to figure it out and everything, and everything just feels like, like falling apart and everything else like this.

1:44:06 Now in, if I, if I was a church going person, then sure, then, you know, there's room, there's community, there's, there's, there's ledges and stuff like this. Right? But.

1:44:19 Qualified opinion, maybe not. Okay. And I, you know, going through the therapeutic experience was, was very interesting, right, Because I went through the first time, didn't match with someone that, that I was going to really connect with and everything. And I was about to like write it off like I was a 60 year old guy like in there and there's kids on my yard. Like I was about to be just like some, well, looks like I'm too good for this. And then I was like, wait a minute, dummy. If anybody else was, was coming to you.

1:44:47 And they said that they had tried to talk with one coach and then decided that like all coaches were garbage because the first one was not good. Would you, would you let that written? No, I wouldn't let that ride. Okay, so maybe I should eat some of my own dog food and go through the, through the onboarding process again. So I did that. Matched up with a guy who was super Thoughtful, like, and it was weird because he wanted to, he wanted to meet me where I was, he wanted to get me helped the other person wanted to make it about whatever they wanted to make it about.

1:45:14 Right. And it was, is my mom, you know, like, well, let's talk about. I'm not here to talk about my mom. Right? Like, like, and I'm sure we might get to there, but I don't. My, my, my current frustration and pain and anxiety is not coming from my relationship with my mother. It's coming from the fact that my business is falling apart because we're in this lockdown and pandemic and I lost some relationships I can't get anymore and all these things. And you want to make it about my mom, you know, and so, like, it wasn't there.

1:45:39 Now I'm talking a lot about the first person, specifically because I think when you put, you know, people from your church, the deacons, the pastor and everything else like this on this pedestal of being able to give you a wider lane of advice than they actually have credibility in, that's where we end up in, in troubled waters. Right? Because I can, I can absolutely see aversion to where you can, you can go to your pastor and you can talk about a business situation and they keep it to the faith and, and all of these things.

1:46:13 Right. And I can also, it, it would be impossible to not presume that this is happening in churches all over Sundays and stuff like this to where people are struggling with business, struggling in sales, struggling in the professional lane, and they turn to the church and they get fed a bunch of advice that shouldn't be given because they don't work in that lane, they don't work in that space. And all the advice is unqualified. Right. So I'm not going to go like, I love my mom to death. I'm not going to go ask her for advice on my business.

1:46:41 If you've not ran a business, I don't trust your advice on it. Sorry, no one's coming to save me if you're wrong. So I only take advice from people that work in this lane that I'm, that I'm working in now. There's not anything wrong with that. But if you're, if you're under the impression that this wide lane gives them room to give you business advice on, on your business and the actual details of that business when they've never ran a business and they, they run a church that isn't even taxed and the business formation is completely different.

1:47:11 And like, yeah, it's a business insurer and like you can make it overlap, but it doesn't mean that it's qualified advice. Right. So I think everybody needs people to talk to who are able to navigate a conversation and be aware of their own biases and not push their biases in the form of faith and think that it's okay and irreparably damage people's lives, careers, businesses and stuff like this because, you know, well, well, God said that it's like out of our hands. So, like, you don't have to worry about this.

1:47:44 That's terrible advice if you don't understand, like, what part of the business you can take action on and get into and make a positive impact on. So this gets us into part three, right. Of the book where he. This is, this is what, this is the one we sort of, I mean, we haven't really been dancing around it. We've kind of sort of led a lot of threads into this, into this space because I do think my perspective and your mileage will vary. I think Heinlein was actually using this book to make the kinds of, to do the kinds of social commentary that you're talking about.

1:48:21 Right. And I think his, his point of view is probably closer to yours than to mine, which is fine. And when he starts talking about marks. Yeah, I would say that it's much more closer to, to the semi professional salesperson's lane than your lane as a leadership development person. Just I, I don't know, like, I could be wrong, but I think it's probably more gambler esque. Yeah. Kind of a little bit there. And so, so we get into, we get into part three and

1:48:53 part three starts in a place that you would not expect. And it's a weird transition from part two to part three. And you know, you opened up with the. Well, a description of something going on in the spiral galaxy

1:49:15 I thought was very interesting. And the

1:49:22 of male the man from Mars into a, into a carnival. As a carnival sideshow. This is how we are reintroduced to, to him. As a matter of fact. I want to pick this up here. Let me, let me sort of bring this up.

1:49:42 Oh, where is it? Let me see. Yep. Assume the fetal position. Yep. Building domes. Yeah, here we go. 20, 20, 25, 26. It was the unusual carnival rides. Cotton candy. The same flat joints separating barks from dollars. The sex lecture deferred to local opinion. Considering Darwin's opinions. The opposing show wore what local lawmen decreed. Fearless Fenton did his death defying dive before the Last volley the 10 in one did not have a mentalist, it had a magician. It had no bearded lady, it had a half man, half woman, no sword swallower, but a fire eater, no tattooed man, but a tattooed lady who was also a snake charmer.

1:50:20 And for the blow off, she appeared absolutely nude, clothed only in the bare living flesh and exotic designs. Any mark who found one square inch untattooed below her neckline would win $20. The prize went unclaimed. Ms. Paiwanoski posed in bare living flesh, her own and a 14 bottom that the ministerial alliance could not complain. As further promotion for the boa, she stood on a stool in a canvas tank containing a dozen cobras. Besides, the lighting was poor. So I open there and then you just go off to the races.

1:51:09 And. The thing that jumps out to me about Section three is

1:51:24 the way that Heinlein begins to construct an eschatology that a man from Mars can get behind. So there's the entire concept of Warner Brothers, which has been explored throughout the book. Then there's also what Mr. Smith may or may not have done to the head of the. The church of the new resident rebel, the phosphorite Church of the New Revelation.

1:51:53 And, and that's an interesting little sidebar

1:51:58 that he sort of jogged more troubling for his conformist audience back in the 1950s and 1960s.

1:52:09 And then you have.

1:52:13 You have a question that he poses, which I think is the question we've been struggling with this entire episode, you know, is. Is a belief in a transcendent anything, whether it's a transcendent politician or a transcendent man or a transcendent God? Is that. Is that a belief for, Is that a vain pursuit for the merely naive, or is that a fanatical pursuit for the truly deceived? Right, well, well worded, sir. Yeah. And the people that he begins to gather around him, from the, The Muslim we talked about earlier, all the way to the person who was the guy who run.

1:52:45 Who ran Jubal Harshaw's security, who was initially skeptical and stood in for, I think, in Highland's brain, the conformist everyman that Highland really was, like, really railing against. 50S. Yeah, 50s, dad. Yeah. Father knows best, right? All the way to Jubal Harshaw and his cynicism and skepticism, to Jill and

1:53:12 her belief and to your point earlier, her love of him. These people he begins to accrete around himself. The man from Mars does in Part three. And it was at this part that I did think, oh, yeah, he's going to Start a church? Because why not? That seemed to be the outgrowth. Well, but, But I think if this book were written now, he would start a political party. Oh, I think so too. I think. Yeah. Oh, my God. That's where I'm going. Yeah, for sure. Right. Like. Oh, hold on a second.

1:53:46 He would accrete Elon Musk around him and then he would start a political party. Yeah, you just would. Holy smokes. Yeah, right. Like. Well, okay. And so I have a slightly different perspective here as well. Right. Once again, being. Being a white guy in the south who, who had a church phase and then decided it wasn't for me, and then has. Has had a thousand people since then try to convert me and take me to church. Is that like when. When they're. When they're talking to that one senator who's part of the church and everything?

1:54:15 Like, like, that's, that's the tipping point point. Right. And so, you know, what I love about it is at the beginning of this segment, which you're not really brought up yet, is all the filtering that Jubal puts into place. So that way this man is not overwhelmed with all the attention and grifting and manipulation and everything else like this that he goes into. Because the book, I think, does a really cool job of trying to showcase how they were filtering things. But then I also. The thing about Jubal that I, that I like a lot, and I don't know if you see this or not, but I see him as like this very libertarian person.

1:54:53 Oh, yeah, right. Because, like, he goes after Jill for like, for like inadvertently bringing in her, you know, Christian values and beliefs and everything else like this. And, you know, he, he sees that people want to keep. Ben wants to keep him away from the church and everything. And he was like, he's got to be his own guy. He's got to. To go figure these things out and stuff like that. And so what I, what I thought was especially real was the, the. The ambassador from the church. Right. The senator who's.

1:55:20 Who's holding power and everything and how he's trying to figure out a way so that way he can come get this guy and take him to church and everything else. Like, and he's. And he's realizing, like a salesperson realizes that the front door is not the best way to get through. Through this thing through Jubal. So let's try to find a way in so that way I can. I can deal with my champion. Right. And as a salesperson, champions are very, very well known label. Let's go directly to the source. So they start sending mail directly to him.

1:55:43 And because Jubal is being like, this person of, like, he's gonna have to grow up and everything else like this, he doesn't keep him from it. Right. Whereas I think if we look at that time and we look at the time whenever we were raised and everything, like, there's a reason why my brother was like, hey, don't tell mom you're reading these books. I wasn't allowed to watch the Simpsons. Like, like, my family thought that that was, like, high. Can't. I can't believe it. This is going to ruin society.

1:56:07 Right. You know, and there was one time that my brother was playing Dungeons and Dragons and I was playing with him, and my mom came in, what are you guys doing Dungeons now? I'm not in this house. You're not. And so the. The removal of things from. From people in. In authority versus. We trust you enough to make your own decisions. Right. And to me, I think.

1:56:30 How do I say this intentionally? I think that if more people were, okay, here are your options. I'm here to support you and pick whichever ones you want, then we would have less of that band of I must sell you, because then I'll feel better for the decisions that I have made. That, I think is very prevalent in the lane of, you know, that. That salesperson Christianity thing that is very, very common here in the South. I think.

1:57:02 Yeah. I see. So. So the name you said right at the beginning there, way back in the beginning of our episode, and I kind of left it for a minute because I want to come back to it. You said, that's very important. And I'm going to say a bunch of other names that I associate with it. Right. So you said Kenneth Copeland. You were not the first person that I run into who was. Who's. Who looked at the influence of. I'm gonna get in a whole lot of trouble here. But this is gonna tell you where. Where I land on this.

1:57:37 So here I go. Who. You. You're not the first person who has told me that they watched Relatives influenced by who they loved, influenced by that religious flim flam man, that religious matchstick man. And that turned them away from a real relationship with Jesus Christ. Yeah. And. And

1:58:06 Kenneth Copeland. In my brain, this will tell you where my eschatology is and my. My pedic. My. My philosophy is when it comes to. To. To Christianity and to religion, I lump him in with Joel Osteen and Tony Robbins. Yep. And to a certain degree, Hal Lindsay, who wrote the book the Late Great Planet Earth, which, which kicked off a whole. You may not be familiar with that book, but it kicked off a whole lot of ridiculousness in Christian eschatology and dispensationalism. Pre millennialism, amillennialism, post millennialism.

1:58:35 Massive damage that that guy's writing did to American Christianity in the late 20th century. And I even am beginning to, and I'll publicly admit to this now and then you can all scald me later. I have a problem with Billy Graham. Oh, same. Yeah, he's the same. He's the same. He's a newer version of the same thing in my opinion. And, and so, so the, the kinds of people that came out of Billy Graham's efforts

1:59:07 and 1960s to convert stadiums of people, you get a, there's a direct line there to Kenneth Copeland. Now with all of that said, now I've mentioned who I have a problem with and I've named names. I think in 2025

1:59:24 the names change and the ideology shifted has, the ideological poll has shifted away from religion to. Politics, I do agree with. But the flim flam men and the matchstick men and the con man looking for the marks are the same. Except the problem is, the problem is the people who have substituted politics for religion think they're too sophisticated to get taken. That's the problem. And that, that goes back that like, dude,

1:59:54 I have so much to say on this topic and I'm so glad that you said Tony Robbins in that thing because he's, he's the same. He's, he's, he's the exact same, right? And I even think guys like Hormozi are very similar. Right? You're, you're appealing to a group. You're, you're pushing nothing but try hard. And I did it so you can do it and everything else like this. And then whenever, whenever anyone has any struggles or problems, you didn't want it bad enough, you didn't have enough faith, you didn't try hard enough, you didn't, you didn't push hard enough.

2:00:22 Right? And it's the same thing that like Grant Cardone talks about and, and all the bad sales coaching and sales leadership because it's the easiest thing, it's the easiest angle in the book, right? You can let your family starve, right? So let's just pile on a bunch of guilt that you're not enough of a man to go do the end. And then people or you know, if, if that, if, if that line works on you, you toe the line. Right. You work the extra shift on the plant, you go join the military, you sign up to go to the like.

2:00:51 Like all of this. But it's the same manipulative leverage. Right. If you tried a little bit harder, everything would be fine. And that's fundamentally not how it works. And this is where, like, I think having deeper understanding and better language and better labels matter, because

2:01:14 I think that most of the people that are pushing things on faith have to do so because they don't have a deep enough education to have the real conversation with the right labels and the right things. Right. So just like I have an aversion to luck, but I'm okay with fortunate. Right. Faith gets pushed by people who don't understand, like, how to give people, I think, room and time to change. Well, faith divorced from any sense of the transcendent. Right. This is where I have a problem with all the prosperity gospel people that I just named all of them.

2:01:43 I have a problem with all of them because what you're pushing. And again, I've seen the real damage that does to people. Oh, yeah. The thing that you're pushing is divorced from a sense of transcendence. So it's interesting. This is the other thing you said earlier that I want to revisit now. You know, you're a poker player, and so it's. It's not surprising to me that you don't believe in luck or that you don't trust in luck or the luck is not a word in your vocabulary. That doesn't surprise me.

2:02:12 Hold on. Because we need to. We need to layer in some intentional boundaries here for just a second. Okay? Okay, go ahead. Because I was gonna ask you about a different word, but go ahead. Yeah. Have you. Have you heard of the book Games People Play? Yes. Okay. That book was a big book for me, right? In the idea of transactional analysis and how people show up, we can kind of map back to, you know, very consistent thinking and avatars and the roles that people play and everything. And as a poker player, as a strategist in general.

2:02:43 Right. Because I approach everything from the lens of strategy because I don't want to be the guy who can't figure out a better way to crack the nut. Okay. So I have been. I've been a gaming person my entire life, right? Playing video games and then reading, like, Nintendo Power and learning about cheat codes and everything else like this, but then also spending enough time with gaming that I kind of have a gist of how gaming or how most games work. Right. And I can Think about inherent strategy.

2:03:09 That is easy for me because I play a lot of these games. Right now, this is a very unpopular conversation around my household because my wife thinks that I'm just the luckiest person on the planet because every time we play games together, I win more than I lose. Right? And then when she gets mad and I'm like, this isn't luck. Right. Like, I have spent 20 years thinking about ways and different things that I can do to control my luck. Right. And I've also done the work to see exactly how much everything I wanted to blame on bad luck was actually not bad luck.

2:03:46 I created it. I did it myself. I built it. I built the reality of that stuff. Right. I can't do it. And then you can't. Congratulations. You were. You were screwed from the start because you didn't think you could do it. Right? Right. So when I, when. When I talk about this with my. With my wife, we were getting really ramped up around this idea of, like, luck and everything, you know, Because I think that anybody who has a phone in an Internet connection can have the same path of success that I have.

2:04:15 You just have to make certain decisions. The first one is that it's worth it. Right. A lot of people don't want to make that decision, and that's okay. Right. But I'm not the luckiest person on the planet. If anything, most of my history and experience shows just how unlucky I am and how much I have to be disciplined enough to put in the effort to get to the places that I'm going. Right? So I can. I can go be the poker player who goes to the casino, sits down and doesn't pay attention to anything else at all, and blame the whole thing on luck.

2:04:45 Or I can be the poker player who goes to the casino and realizes that better players are going to play at higher levels and tourists are going to play at lower levels and learn signals of strategy to figure out which games are going to be. Be easier to win in and which ones are going to be harder to win in. And I can also study math and probabilities and science and odds and everything else like this. So that way, while we're both playing a game that's based upon luck, I am fundamentally functioning at, like, three higher levels than the person who's just like, well, I hope I get aces.

2:05:13 Cool. I don't need aces to beat you. It's going to be just fine. And even if you do get aces and take a big pot of me, if we sit here for Longer I'll get it back. Because I have the strategies, I have the knowledge, I have the experience to navigate this chaos in a way that is going to make me a better. A better mechanism in the moment. Okay. This is the same thing as martial arts thinking. Are you frozen? Sorry. Kind of gap for a second. But like martial arts. No, I'm not. Martial arts is the same thing.

2:05:42 Right. If someone says, hey, Jesan, when you get in a fight, it's just lucky that you end up winning. Do you believe that to be true? No, no, I believe in. I believe. I believe in preparation. Exactly. That's what I believe in as well. Right. And so when, when, when as a poker player, I know that I can go study things that lead to me winning more. And as a fighter, I know that I can go study things and study the right things. Right. And actually spar. Not just do forms, but actually spar and pressure test.

2:06:10 And that leads me to being a better mechanism in the moment. And as a sales coaching consultant, I can, I can show people very quickly the difference between a conversation that's going to lead to more probabilities of no versus a conversation that will lead to more probabilities of yes. But these are probabilities in and of themselves. But a strategic person is always thinking about the probabilities and the levers that they can use. So I'm fortunate to have gotten to this place that I have. Right.

2:06:36 I have met some very cool people. I've had people pour into me. I've had. I've had opportunities to do so. But at. At a certain page, at a certain page, we have to agree that it's no longer luck. So when. When I. The qu. The word. Because the word luck comes loaded and I'm glad you sort of framed that out. The word I was going to substitute for that because I do believe in this word is the word providence. It's an old school word. Okay, so what is your, what's your definition of that word? And, and providence is

2:07:11 the. All of the stuff. And you can frame it out as percentages if you would like, but it's all of the stuff that you can't control. So we can control everything that we can control out to whatever instance we need to do that. Preparation, of course, is better than no preparation. And at a certain point, and we know this, and to bring this down to martial arts thinking, at a certain point in the fight, something has to work either for you or against you. Right? Now, if you are prepared and you've put in the reps and you've put in the drilling, the likelihood that you will see the thing that will work out for you is increased versus you not putting in the reps, not putting in the drilling, not doing the preparing.

2:07:56 The likelihood that you're going to see that, zero. This is why the guys who are. Who are very much like, I just see red and go, bro, they want. To believe it's real because they've never been in that situation. And they hope that they're enough. Oh, okay, that's fine. And we've talked about it. Right? Right. And hope is. Hope is not a. Hope is not a strategy. It might be, and I've said this often on this podcast, it might be a place in Arkansas where Bill Clinton was born, but it's not a strategy.

2:08:24 Okay? And so, but Providence. Providence is when you've done all the preparation. This is how I define it. You've done all the preparation. You've done the reps, you've put in the time, you've earned your chip, and you've continued to build on that mountain to continue to earn your chip every day. And

2:08:43 it accounts for all of those things that are outside that ship. Because for as much control as we think we have, it's still. I compare it to an anthill, right? It's an anthill compared to the mountain of reality. And we cannot possibly. Gandalf has a great line in Lord of the Rings, Right? Even the wisest cannot know all ends. Absolutely. Yeah. For sure. And Providence has to cover the gap between what the wise knows and the end. And that's not an excuse to not be. Not be unprepared. It's not an excuse even to, like, have no strategy.

2:09:15 You better be prepared. You better have a strategy. I mean, that's exactly what all Lord of the Rings is about. Gandalf was prepared. Gandalf has strategy, you know, but like. And again, you know, I'm talking about, you know, Tolkien here, but I don't think. I don't think Gandalf had any. No, I don't think Gandalf didn't have anything. His plan for the ball, Rog, under the mountain. Like, he had nothing in his plan for that. There was nothing. There was no plan. There's certain things you don't plan for.

2:09:38 And you know this from. Again, from fighting, from other places. There's just some things you just don't. You just can't. Right? So Providence has to cover that. Now, Providence can work for you. And I think if you've been going in a particular Direction over a particular course of time, doing all the work that other people don't see. When they show up at the end and just see the goal, not the process. The people who don't see the process and just look at the goal and see you show up and it just works out.

2:10:03 They call that luck. Luck. Oh, for sure. They call that luck. That's. But it's. I. I think. Right. That's the, Dare I say, the hand of a certain kind of way that it would not work for the person who. To go back to the fight analogy for just a minute for the person who just sees red, bro. Like, it's just not gonna work for you. Well, and. And that, to me, I think, is. Where it's not on your. Is that. And I hate to make it about sides, but it's not. It's not in your favor. No, you're fine. Yeah. No, I'm with you.

2:10:36 Right. Like, go ahead. Sorry, man. I think you said a bunch of very cool things in there, but I also. Right. And you and I have talked about this. I don't know if we've talked about it on the show or not, but we both have kind of talked about the reason why most people go into a martial arts school. Right? Yeah. And it's not for the. It's not for the philosophy. It's for, I want to be tough, I want to be confident. I want to not be scared anymore. Whatever. Whatever version of that is driving you into the school.

2:11:01 Okay. But. Right. I don't think anybody actually hits black belt, like a. Like a tier of mastery without that flipping to the philosophical side of things. Do you agree with that?

2:11:16 Oh, yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Yeah. Okay. I think that. Yeah. So I. I can. I can acknowledge where fortune was in my favor. Right. Because the guy who told me to go to a kung fu school, right. And kung fu is where all these weird military ideas I could. I could wear without the military propaganda and the weight of war and all these other things. Right. So, you know, it started in the military. I can. I can acknowledge that now. I honed it in. In martial arts training right after I'd made the swap of, like, I'm not here to be tough.

2:11:48 I'm here to be different. Right. And different is okay. And stuff like this. So I do think that it's very easy for lots of people to never turn and face and be open to the idea of a different philosophy. Right. And there are people in my school who had been training longer than me. Right. And I think that they would tell you that they're. That they're better at it than I am. Right? But I think. I think if you go and you talk to people that have been trained by both me and them, I think that the people that have, like, learned from both of us would tell you that I can educate and teach it better than they can.

2:12:26 Okay? Because I'm talking about the philosophy. I'm talking about the fact that, like, hey, it's okay not to fight. It's okay to, like, not get into a scrap. It's okay to not close this deal. Now. You need to have certain other things around you for this to be okay. Right. But this is where it all kind of comes back down to how the lane is funneled, Right? Okay. Yeah. Like, I live in Fort Worth, Texas, right? And for those who don't know, I live right outside of this little bitty subdivision called White Settlement, okay?

2:12:59 Now, I live. I live in 2025, right? And that's great because I have access to the Internet. I have access to whatever news and media I can educate myself enough to have value on, to go check consistently. But let's go back to 19, even call it 80, right? The only source of news you get is what's coming on the TV or what's being delivered in your newspaper mailbox that they're willing to give to you for free. Right? And if it's. If they're not aware of their biases of like, well, no, we're not going to talk about that because I think this is right.

2:13:32 Or let's pretend that you're just like one of my sales coaches who, who told me one time, because he didn't like a political post, that salespeople don't talk about politics when really, if I was talking about his politics, it would have been really okay. Right? So there's all of these things, and sometimes it does come from a place of, like, good natured intent. Hey, you really want to make it about that, right? Hey, John, you sure you want a beard and long hair? Some people might shorts say to you, right?

2:14:01 But if it's, if it's. If there's no lane for any other opportunity, I think that that's where we screw the pooch. Yeah, I would agree with that. Right? Yeah. Because if, if, if there wasn't suppression and all lanes were open, then. A. I think everyone's a lot more comfortable in the lanes that they actually end up being in. Right. Because I don't have a single problem arguing why I think the way that I think with anybody else on the planet. And I'm not the one who gets hand shaky about it because I'm.

2:14:35 Because my world is being torn down around me and everything else like this. You're allowed to believe whatever you want, and I'm allowed to as well. But it's whenever there's fear that you're not going to pick my side. So we're going to just close off this lane. That's where I have a problem. That's where I think that we get into it being all sideways. And so I didn't finish this thought earlier, but I kind of want to go back to it. I do think that it's very easy when you're younger and youthful to not have much room for any kind of spiritual path.

2:15:05 Right.

2:15:09 And where I'm at now. Right. Realizing that I practice stoicism just the way. The way the most Christian men do their daily devotional. Right. A little bit every day. And surrounding myself intentionally with other people who feel like I can see that it's the same thing. It's just mine doesn't have a religious deity at the end of it. Who's going to save me, me at the end of it. So what it leads to me is like, I need to. I like, since there is no like, end all, be all place to wear like, like, that means I got to do the work every day.

2:15:36 Right. And what I find are the people with the strongest face and the people who, who are not trying to sell me on their faith are the people that are doing that work every day. Right. And it's not perfunctory, it's not for show. It's not for, you know, who can be the biggest and best Christian in the congregation. And so stuff like this, it comes from a place of just. This is important to me. Right. And so if it's important to you, awesome. That's great. Okay. If you're using it to, to manipulate for status or presence, whether you're like the pastor and you're going around and thinking that you're like the God's gift to everything because you, you have an answer, even though it might be unqualified.

2:16:14 Right. Different things like that. And it's coming from a place of like, well, I'm going to hold this away from you because I want to give you the answer that we believe in. That's where I got a jump ship. Right. And that's where you saw in the book the. The appeal of. Of

2:16:33 Valentine's Church, right. To others. Right? Well, it's not a Church, School. It's a school. Yeah. And it's a discipline. And it's a discipline. Right. They just run it like a church. So that way the people will, will. This is the coolest part of the, of this whole book. Reading it the second time. If he hadn't put it in the church format, if he hadn't made it look and feel and sound like a church, no one would go take the language lessons that then expand the comprehension for them to realize it's all just love.

2:17:01 So I would, I would love to see that in a political party. But I think like, here's the problem, here's what I think a political party is too much focused on. So this is why you need both. Oh, gosh. Okay, so we've been talking for a long time. I think that this is where you're going to say that this is why both lanes need to matter. Right. The politics. Right. The political party as well as the spiritual lane and. Right. I fundamentally agree with you. Right. Yeah. Church and state, we need both.

2:17:28 We need both. And they need to be separated in my personal opinion. Because if, if, if what we're trying to say is that to live here you must be a God fearing Christian and go to church every Sunday or else you don't belong here. If that's what we're trying to say. I don't really think that that holds weight,

2:17:51 personally. I also, I, well, and I would, I would, I would add to that. I don't think it holds weight when we say, as we are saying in a lot of places, you need to,

2:18:05 and I see this in workplaces, you need to monitor yourself politically and say the right think things so you don't get sent to hr. That's the mini version of. Now, again, again, I have no problem. I have no problem attached to like 15 other things though. Well, here's the thing, here's the thing. I don't think that. No, let me frame it this way. Let's look at Jubal. This is a good way to get into this. So. Or to enter this. So Jubal, the problems that a modern feminist would, would have with Jubal have absolutely nothing to do with his religion because didn't have one.

2:18:50 Yeah. They have everything to do with his cultural orientation which comes from his politics. His, to your point earlier, his libertarianism. Right. So I have a question about that. Just real quick. So are you saying that if, that if you don't have religion, your cultural values have to come from politics? Are you saying that that's what happened in the book. I'm saying that they will. Well, so, so, so I'm saying that in the book, the replacement for the politics was religion. And in reality, in 2025, the replacement for the religion has become politics and political views.

2:19:30 Because think about it. And by the way, I'm going off of a very simple political philosophy. So the feminists all said back in the 1970s that the personal was political. Okay, well, you open up that door with the atomization of the individual away from the structures that we were talking about previously, like tradition and community and family. What does the individual have to anchor themselves to then? If the personal is political, and by the way,

2:20:01 if every decision that you make has a political consequence. Let's fast forward to our current era where the kind of shoes I wear is a political signal when I'm dating and I'm not dating, but I hear things, the kinds of shoes I'm wearing as a political signal about whether or not I can even connect with somebody at an emotional level. That to me indicates the full, for lack of a better term, the fulfilling of politics in a religious realm for a certain, for a certain group of people. And by the way, I believe that group of people is actually fairly large in this country.

2:20:37 I don't believe it's tiny. I believe that, that, that and, and, and whether or not, whether or not we think that's a good thing or a bad thing, that's a different kind of conversation. I just think it's, I just think it's actually already. I think the filling, the fulfillment has occurred. We've reached the. I think we've reached the high watermark of politics. Just like in the 1950s, we reached the high watermark of religion. I think we've reached the high watermark of politics in this country.

2:21:05 And now people are. Well, and now people are. And I think it's going to happen in the younger generations, not the older ones. And maybe this is just back to my original point, way back at the beginning of this. I think people are going to. No, maybe this is just a swing in the pendulum as it goes back and forth in the natural evolution of the United States of America. But I do think that after 250 years as the longest standing constitutional republic on the face of the planet,

2:21:34 I think we have to become a mature country by hook or by crook. We have to be, we have to figure it out. What does mature country mean, in your opinion? I think it means a lot of different things. But I think, I think at the political and at the religious end, you have to have a religious, for lack of a better term, eschatology. And this ties into some things we're going to talk about here at the end. So let's go ahead and pull this in. I think you have to have an eschatology that somehow deals with, or not eschatology, sorry, a religious philosophy that somehow deals with the cultural and social mores that continue to be devil us throughout history.

2:22:14 So we don't have. Explain the raise, just real quick ideas, paths, precedents. Right. So we don't have the reason why we are so one of the main reasons why we are so we twist ourselves into knots about race. One of the reasons why it doesn't actually, actually have anything to do with the Civil War or even the Civil rights movement. The preachers during the time of slavery, all the way down through the Civil rights movement had very little, not very little. The mainline preachers had very little to say or very little to write about slavery that would put it in a, or run it against a biblical context.

2:23:00 This is why Martin Luther King Jr. If you look at his speeches, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. By the way, look at his speeches, he made biblical references. Now part of the reason he did that was to align the, the attaining of political rights with people who understood to your point earlier, like you said, who understood all the verses and knew where the things came from. He was socially, he was socially clicking in their heads. 40, 50, 60 years later. The social clicks in our heads are political, which is why Black Lives Matter doesn't have anything religious on their website at all.

2:23:41 Instead what they have are cultural appeals, right, to people because the culture now has shifted away from religious appeals to political ones. Now again, we can argue if this is a good or bad. I'm merely saying that it is happening along the course of time to becoming a mature country. I think every, not. I think we know we can look at the history of countries, particularly the history of Rome, Greece, Egypt, England moving into the modern era. France goes through these kinds of evolutions and eventually winds up somewhere on the other side.

2:24:16 Now the fact of the matter is the United States of America. Well, I think we could both agree it is walking towards a transcendent miracle that we've only had one civil War. That's a transcendent miracle. Okay, something, something's working somewhere. I mean it just the casual commentary of like how many people have, have said, man, have we ever been this divine? No, I mean, I mean, I mean one time and we ended up killing a bunch of people about it and stuff. Like this, you know, exactly. You know, hopefully it doesn't have to get to there.

2:24:57 Right, right. Because you know, in like as a guy who studies rhetoric and marketing and everything else like this, like there's. I. The pendulum thing that you talked about a second ago though is like super fascinating because like I think of it as like pendulum swings left, right. And then someone hits it this way and then it goes this way back and forth. Right? Yeah. But to me it like. And maybe, maybe this means I'm a conspiracy theorist. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Right. And now you're.

2:25:27 Congratulations. Now you're back to my rabbit holes. Exactly. Careful, careful. It's like I was just having this conversation in a completely different line with my accountability partner. Right. Because we were talking about this concept of luck and different things and you know, he changed the label to fortunate. And I was like, okay, like I can, I can respect that, you know.

2:25:51 And by the way, I think it's going to take us a while to get there and like it always does. Nation states, like the first, the first big thing is we've got to like figure out cohesively what is it. And we've been trying to. We've been struggling with this 250 years. What does it actually mean to be an American if you're divorced from everything but your founding documents? The document is thin. And by the way, I appreciate the document. I like the document. I think the document is amazing and I think it's a miracle the document has lasted as long as it has lasted.

2:26:18 But the document, but the document in and of itself, both politically left and politically right has been stretched then. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone feels like they're radically clear on the original intent of the founders. And I would wait that, that if, that if we could have a Bill and Ted style phone booth and any one of those guys set thought of it right now, they would be so overwhelmed with the progress in innovation. Oh yeah. Like this. That they would be so floored and they would. They. And I, I would imagine that if we pulled all of them, the overwhelming majority would be like, we should have changed some stuff.

2:26:58 Right. Like, like we didn't think you guys were going to get this far. That's right. That's right. Because. That's right. We can only, we can only be as innovative as like we're able to see. Right. So they thinking this far that like, like, you know, after my, after my trip to the, to the, you know, southwest, you know, don't bleep me. You know, I went to Roswell right We drove past there. Right. I went to the museum of. Of. Of Nuclear History and everything else like this. Like, you're telling me those guys were thinking about that capability when they write in that document?

2:27:33 Absolutely not. Right. So the idea that, like, well, we should remain is absolutely insane. Right. Like, we wouldn't let kindergartners write laws. Yes. And there's always pieces of that document we want to keep. So, Right. Everybody all the way out. Everybody wants. Everybody's very passionate. I always mention this. Everybody's very passionate about the First Amendment, left, right and center. Everybody's passionate about the First Amendment. And that's fine. Let's be passionate about the First Amendment.

2:28:03 Matter of fact, you know what? I've been reading some things in the last couple years about some folks wanting to call a Constitutional Convention about the Second Amendment. I say, go ahead, pull that smoke wagon. Go right on ahead. Call a Constitutional Convention about the Second Amendment. Go right on ahead. Because, see, here's the thing. Well, no, no, no, no, it'll work. It's fine. No, actually, I think that would work. But here's the thing. When we all show up and we're all rambunctious, which we are, and when we're all rambunctious and yelling at each other, one of the things that's going to be put forth by some delegate from some state that someone will find to be offensive, but they will have a right to be.

2:28:40 There will be, hey, I will raise you the 19th Amendment. How about that?

2:28:49 The 19th Amendment was the one that gave women the right to vote. So let's talk about amendments. Let's actually have a conversation about amendments. And the second you say that, by the way, all of a sudden all the conversation flattens out. Because here's the thing. The strength of the document, even though it is thin and stretched, I think you and I could both agree on that. The strength of the Constitution and the strength of the Declaration of Independence, the two founding documents, lies not in the fact that it's thin, because it is.

2:29:24 It lies in the fact that it appealed, interestingly enough, to something that we have forgotten about. It appealed to. And I make this kind of point on my July 4th episodes where I always talk about the Declaration of Independence in the Constitution, always finding new things in there. Right. Going back and look at the original writings. Go back and look at what they originally said, you know, all these kinds of things. And what you find there is a remarkable depth of understanding about human nature and how that is unchanging across time.

2:29:56 Absolutely. Right now, I I have not done all the study on the background stuff that you have around it and everything else like this. Right. But willing to take you at your word. But man, the depth of human understanding is going to be limited to the weaponry in the, of the time. Like so, like, like, while I, while I know that they're like, well, there's going to be someone who takes advantage of this and everything like this, I promise you. They weren't thinking about tanks, they weren't thinking about drones.

2:30:23 They weren't thinking about all these things that everyone has so much access to right now. No, they were not. But they also weren't thinking about us expanding the franchise to women and slaves. I agree. All the more reason that like, we need to go back over the whole document and like, okay, let's acknowledge that some things have changed. Right? And like, hey, let's maybe weigh this out intentionally with all this new, new knowledge that we have. Right? Because like, it's, it's, it's a, it's a very easy way to not have to argue about things you don't want to argue about as a politician is how I think about it.

2:30:56 Well, and it's, it's easy a way for you also become to our, to our, to the point that we're, I'm trying to get to here. It's easy for us to become matchstick men and flim flam men and make appeals to that document. By the way, I do think the document is going to. Both documents are going to struggle when we get to ideas of

2:31:19 this one's coming up around the corner. So everybody get ready. You heard it here first. I think I know what you're going to say. Oh yeah, you know, personhood for humanoid robots. We talked about it with Philip K. Day. I think that is, I think that is on the docket. I absolutely think that that is on the docket. What timeline do you think that that is going to show that? So just out of curiosity, I've been thinking about it since we talked about it. Yeah. So I'm, I usually measure these things from the, from the, from the frame, from the framing of my youngest child forward.

2:31:44 Okay. Not my oldest child forward because my oldest child forward will have agency, but he. Agency, but the younger kid will not. Because. No, no, I didn't say the other kid won't. I said that he will have agents. He has agency to either stop or move things forward underneath the current historical structure that he understands because he's imbued with that. Whereas my youngest child forward and you Always see this. With the last child, the youngest child is going to, just like the Terrans going to Mars, going to take that next logical step because he's under either completely different historical rubric with a completely different set of historical understandings.

2:32:21 Okay. Or I'll frame it in a military fashion. The oldest child is always the general that fights the last war, and the youngest child is always the rebel that's. That's pushing for the next over and can see the next war. So you asked me my timeline. My youngest child is 8 years old. I think that we will start having this conversation by the time he's probably 30. So 22 years, maybe 25 at the outset, we'll start having. Because. Because what's being laid right now is the foundation for this, for this conversation.

2:32:57 And part of the bricks that are being laid in the groundwork for this conversation are the bricks around the manipulation of biology. Can a man be a woman? Can a woman be a man? What does that actually mean? That's one of the big ones. But then the second one is of course AI and LLMs. Then the third big one is energy and data centers and who gets to own what energy where, because you need a bunch of energy to power all this stuff. And then the fourth great rail, which no one has talked about, is the governmental social structure that's going to allow.

2:33:30 Not allow. That's going to ensure security. Well, it's going to ensure security for people who are elderly. Because I thought you were going to go. Huh? Because the Japanese, by the way, have already gone in this direction. Because if there's not enough fertility, because enough babies weren't made to take care of all the old people who are getting old, you're going to have a fertility crisis. I'm not the first person to point this out. People other than Elon Musk have pointed it out as well. It's absolutely happening.

2:34:00 So, I mean, forgive me if I'm not taking a bunch of advice from that. It's okay, it's okay. You don't have to. I'm saying he's. He's been joined by a bunch of other people, both on the left and right, who are noted in this. So if fertility is in the toilet, that means taxation, because you always tax future workers, not past ones, taxation will be in the toilet. So how do you cover the gap? I think those are four big bricks. Biology, AI, energy and money, particularly money tied to governmental policy.

2:34:28 You bring those. I just made a hand motion for those of you who are listening. And you bring those Those fingers together like in gangs in New York. You bring those gang, you bring those fingers together. Now you've got a grip and comes a fist. And I think that fist will start to become manifest by the time he's in his early 30s. And I think he'll spend the back end of his adulthood, he'll be part of the generation that will spend the back end of their adulthood trying to negotiate what they vaguely remember as the past with the new thing that's here now.

2:34:55 Because where it's really going, where the rubber is going to really meet the road, is when that humanoid robot is walking around with somebody all the time. And every year the robot becomes more and more human looking and less and less machine looking. But I would I. Okay. Oh my gosh. All right. So many things. So many things. Okay, so. And by the way, we've been going three hours, so at some point you have to call game to call the game. Okay,

2:35:27 man, this is so fascinating because I feel like, I feel like this crux is,

2:35:36 man, at some point, okay, now I don't love this idea. I really don't. It kind of bothers me, okay? But as a guy who's read a lot of science fiction, a lot of science fiction, right? And seeing ideas about where Android thinking and robots and feelings and emotions and stuff like this could go to, okay,

2:35:59 here's, here's the, here's the view that I have, okay? In Hay San's mind, a robot, no matter how advanced or anything else like this, will never, ever, ever, ever, ever have the rights of a human being. Right? And I can see a lane where that, like, makes sense, okay? But I'm also a guy who reads a lot of science fiction, right? So why would we limit it so that way they can't be part of it, right? If they are taking care of our, of our elderly people, if we, if they, if these things are happening, like, it would feel the same to me that we're trying to find rules and laws to stipulate that we can't do these things, which then just leads to them, like, overthrowing us because, like, we kept them out of the party for too long and everything else like this, right?

2:36:40 As opposed to just like, just like we should have made the Indians, like, or I'm sorry, Native Americans, more of our lane, as opposed to being like, oh, hey, we can give them these blankets. This is going to be totally fine, right? Like, yeah, we could. We had an opportunity to do it differently, right? And the thing that I am fascinated by all the time, is how many times the, the, the popular majority wants to put a smaller group off to the side and label them as dumb, lesser ignorant, stupid, or anything else like this.

2:37:09 And part of it is through due control. Right now, most of the people, it's coming from fear. Right, Understandably. But those people who are going to be manipulators are going to pull those strings and looking for the way that the pendulum is swinging. They're going to go for whatever they go for. And I will. We are, we do have to wrap up. I'm now getting a bunch of text messages from my wife. So I have to go to more material things. Yes, I will say this. Human nature. That's my two word response.

2:37:41 Human nature will. Will out. The same human nature that both could not conceive of the tank or the franchise being expanded to slaves and women is the same human nature that in a world where the franchise has been expanded, will seek to expand the franchise further. It's the exact same human nature. Remember how I said, do you think. We'Re served by that, though? To me? And it's so funny because whenever I talk about certain political things, I realize that I have no positive answer. And so it's not like, am I right or you're right?

2:38:23 Sure. The reality that I would want to build cannot be built because humans are humans and we have memories and, well, how bad was it? Right? And then we do the same thing again to like a different, like, segment of people, right? We just, we're just really good at doing it. Right. And so to me, where I look at where all of that goes through is control, limiting, limiting access to information, limiting access to education, limiting access to, you know, these stories, right? Because, you know, like, you can read this book in Oklahoma now, would never even be allowed.

2:38:58 Probably wouldn't even be in the student library, right? So we're shutting off people from ideas that have depth and are in or are worth a tussle to try to coin Jubal Harshaw here, right? Like it's worth grokking. It's worth figuring it out and sitting with it and really figuring out, do I even understand this enough to hate it or do I hate it because other people that I follow tell me to hate it and they. And it just makes it easy because then I don't have to think about it for myself.

2:39:30 So I think I'm going to do the classic theological thing and I'm gonna punt. Well, you just have to believe, right? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not gonna put in that direction. That's not where the football's going. No, no, not in that direction. No, no. Believe in nothing or believe in everything. Whatever, whatever you want. I don't know. I'm not going, I'm not going through those uprights. No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm going through a different set of uprights. I heard. Okay, cool. Okay, let's go.

2:39:54 The theological punting is this. I don't have to know the answer to that, to how it, to your question of how, who does it serve or how will it be served? I don't have to know the answer to the question. All I have to know, all I have to recognize, I think in my, in my humble thought process, all I have to recognize is the patterns of behavior and the, the bricks that are being laid out towards a particular end. And then I have to bring, and this is where wisdom comes in. I have to bring in my understanding of human nature

2:40:31 and make those two things click together. While also, and there's two other things we have not brought up today, but I'm going to close on this while also acknowledging that there is free will and conscious consciousness among human beings that we do not fully understand. And it operates in ways completely different than mine. And we. Correct. I love, I love how much time we spent talking about that. Right. Because it, you know, I have these ideas, have these perspectives. It's a result of the path that I've walked on, the experiences that I've had had.

2:41:04 Right. And I don't begrudge anyone else for believing or not believing the things that I do. But the thing that I love so much about these conversations with you is because you bring enough of the context to where it's like,

2:41:19 how do I say this? I know you have, this is not bottle fed information. You're not, you've not been indoctrinated. And then you're like, well, here's why I, and it's just this, you've never. Right. You've sat with your ideas. Right. I, I think you wear them rather intentionally. Right. And when you're, when you're in the situation to where you're the minority and you adopt the thinking of the majority, it's always an intentional reason. Right. But it's, it's whenever the majority is trying to make it so that way it's hard to hear any other thinking other than what they like.

2:41:49 That's where I take issue. Right, right. Right. And if I had been born in a different time, I would have been a different person. And that seems Like a glib statement to make, but it's absolutely true. But it's absolutely the truth, Right? Yeah. And so the people who will be born, my grandchildren, right. I was joking with. With my wife about this in a different kind of context a while ago, and I just said, you know, our grandchildren are going to say things to us that we will not understand. We have to be prepared for that.

2:42:19 We have to be prepared for the idea that they are going to come from a worldview that will be as separated from our formative worldview as we were from our parents. Formative worldview. Yep. And we're gonna say they don't get it, right? Exactly. They're gonna think, well, word us out of touch, right? And. And if we look at every generational pattern, like, including the one that we were complaining about earlier, right, with all the boomers and I mean, it's the same thing, right? Same thing. And let's not make it a stupid generational thing, and let's just acknowledge that it's progress, that we're.

2:42:53 That we're advancing, we're getting better, and that means that we have to kind of slow down and re. Reassess our situation, the rules and our standards and our culture and stuff like that. But I think it's super easy to try to hold on to William tradition because it's easier than change, right? And so I not. Not to lean too much in the political kind of realm or whatever, because I try to stay out of it. I think. I think that one lane has a very tight message that is very easy for everyone to understand, right?

2:43:23 Small government, less taxes, have more freedom, you know, and everything else like that. And I think it's easy to fall into that. Can't tell me what to do. Absolutely. Right. And so then we. We start, you know, and then we don't continue to inform ourselves, right? We don't continue to go learn. We see something that we like and we. And we. We learn 20% of it. And then we enable the device done in Kruger effect and run around like we're, you know, crossfit, you know, vegans and everything, you know, and it's like, oh, okay, cool.

2:43:49 Yeah, you should stop eating meat. How long have you been vegan? 30 minutes. But it's the coolest thing ever, you know, it's like, cool, come back and talk to me after like 90 days, because I don't even think you know what you're getting into, right? And it's just easy, right? Like, and when you. When you understand the levers of rhetoric and persuasion in psychology. There are people who just, just want ease, right? Oh, yeah, get that and bottle feed ease to people that are looking for it because they're, they're struggling.

2:44:18 They have something else. Like hope is a, hope is a tasty medicine that goes down pretty rough. Yep. I'm gonna let that be the last word with that, that I, I promise you all that we would and we would pose a bunch of unanswerable questions and at least have a compelling conversation. And it's been, it's been over three hours and I want to thank John for joining me today, for challenging us, for challenging me, for allowing himself to be challenged not only by Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and the ideas that are in it, but also by the ideas that come out of it as it moves forward in history and in time.

2:45:08 So with that, well, we're out.