In which we explore the concepts of phenomena, productivity, and human capability. One claim we mentioned in this episode was that humans only use 10% of their brains. Actually, PET scans show that the entire brain is constantly active, even in periods of sleep: regulating, monitoring, sensing, interpreting, reasoning, planning, and acting. Even people with degenerative neural disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease still use more than 10% of their brains.
Recorded October 02, 2024.
Show notes and links:
“Darwin” Selected and Edited by Philip Appleman
“Phenomena” Annie Jacobsen
“Lady Chatterly’s Lover” D.H. Lawrence
“1984” George Orwell
“Brave New World” Aldous Huxley
Stephen King’s written works
“How to Read a Book”, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren
Jordan Peterson at the Rescue the Republic gathering, September 29, 2024
SpaceX rocket booster catch
Phenomenon (1996)
The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)
A Minecraft Movie (2025)
NCIS S14 E13 “Keep Going”
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Fireproof (2008)
Grey’s Anatomy S14 E2-E4 Amelia Shepherd’s brain tumor
The Good Place
Quantum Entanglement
We do use almost all of our brain
Uri Geller, Illusionist and magician
Flight 327
“Change the World”, Eric Clapton
Elon Musk “never-ending explosion” of ideas
Unschooling
Interesting read on the “Factory Model of Education”
Elon Musk’s Gigafactory in Texas
Agrarian Society
East-Gulf Coast Port Strikes
Elon Musk “Universal High Income”
Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)
Speed Reading
The Silva Method for personal growth
Transcript:
Jump to end
[teaser clip] So, is this a phenomenon in his brain, or is it just that he’s figured out how to hack
effectiveness and productivity?
Like, I imagine that I could be just as good mentally as Elon Musk and Tim Ferris and
these savant people if I just knew how to streamline my time into the right directions.
Do you believe that’s possible?
I think that that’s easier for me to believe than some people are just geniuses, I mean some people ARE just geniuses though.
[Intro] You are listening to our podcast, Do You Have a Minute?, in which a guy and his daughter
dive into deep discussions about life’s most profound and mundane questions.
While we know we don’t have all the answers, and possibly none of them, we open our minds
to new perspectives, and most importantly, we have a good time in conversation.
Join us as we explore the unknown together.
[Main conversation] So I have a question for you?
What would it take?
What would I have to do in order to get you to be disappointed in me?
Goodness.
To earn disappointment, how could you earn disappointment?
That’s a bigger question.
That’s like a “Minute conversation.”
That’s too big of a question.
You can’t just jump to the most extreme thing I could do.
That’s huge.
There’s nothing extreme we could do.
It wouldn’t be an extreme thing.
It would be a disappointing thing.
Extreme things are not disappointing.
I don’t know what a disappointment means.
You don’t even know what disappointment means.
What does that mean?
It’s like depressed.
How could I get depressed?
I don’t know.
I don’t know how I could be disappointed.
I see.
Disappointed.
Yeah.
Let’s not talk about that.
Okay.
We’ll revisit that question another time.
The important thing now is phenomenal issues.
Okay.
Tell me about that.
Phenomenal means that… What does phenomenal mean?
It’s amazing.
It’s different.
It’s unexpected.
What’s the term?
It’s not necessarily awestruck.
Is it aw?
Awesome is phenomenal?
Phenomenal.
Yeah.
Awesome can be phenomenal.
I think awesome is real close to phenomenal.
You could maybe use them for the same thing.
Yeah.
If it strikes aw, the reason it strikes aw, it’s beyond that.
You can have things that are not phenomenal that are awesome.
Okay.
But phenomenal means it’s unexplainable.
Oh, okay.
It’s beyond scientific proof.
That’s the phenomenon, right?
A phenomenon is beyond scientific proof.
I’ve been reading Darwin stuff just for the fun of it, don’t you know?
Yeah.
Which book did you read?
It’s about Darwin.
It’s got his origin of the species and all that stuff in there.
Just one thing that it said about him, which was he was trying to define phenomena,
how this world exists.
He was raised as a… Let’s start out with this conversation.
Okay.
He was raised as the theologian.
He went to seminary, Divinity School, was raised in that thing and went on his trip
at 22 to 27.
He went on his trip on the Beagle around the world for seven years studying nature and
geography.
But he went knowing that there was a definition of the species that we were built…
I forgot what word they used to describe it.
Creationism was what he was thinking.
That’s what he was trained in.
Okay.
Then he learned from that that he had it.
He came up with his view of the phenomena.
It was phenomenal how creation happened.
He was looking at that.
Then he found these scientific proofs and found evolutionary transitions.
We went through the evolution and said, well, no, there’s a scientific way,
there’s a scientific path we can follow to create this.
Creation is out the window and evolution is what occurred.
He just jumped completely to the non-phenomenal answer.
Right?
Yes.
The most rational… That’s my understanding of what he did.
The rational is opposite of phenomenal.
That’s what you’re saying in this circumstance.
The quote in here, the rational is saying he asked why questions not only about geological
features in animal life, but also about political and social situations, about life in general.
It was his ability to ask profound questions and his perseverance in trying to answer them
that would eventually make Darwin a great scientist.
As a scientist, he said, I’m not going to believe in phenomena anymore.
Phenomena, it’s not something I’m going to do because we can rationally identify the
science behind it.
We’re going to follow the science.
Then I ran across something that Jordan Peterson said yesterday, two days ago.
He was in Washington, D.C. with the Make America Healthy Again conference type thing.
It was out on the mall in Washington, D.C.
He said, they came up with the structure that we’re a society based on stories.
That’s what our social environment is.
We follow stories.
He says they had that right.
Then there’s the statement that you’re supposed to follow science.
The problem is, and he said from a philosophical standpoint, you can’t follow science.
Science is not followable.
Science is a hypothetical thing.
You’re proving things.
Science is facts.
You can’t follow facts.
You have to follow a story.
There is no story to science.
You can’t follow if there is no story.
Yeah.
You have to follow a story.
Science you can’t follow science.
That’s what Darwin has done.
He’s followed science.
He said, yeah, we can follow science.
Let’s do it.
If you follow science, it doesn’t pan out.
I don’t know.
I’m not yet at the conclusion of that yet.
That’s the middle of the conversation.
Those two things kind of matched in regard to phenomena.
Charles Darwin and everyone else in the age and in this age is concerned about
the phenomena that’s out there.
Unanswerable questions.
I think that’s a fun thing to be concerned with too.
It’s a philosophy.
Unanswerable.
Anything that’s unanswerable, you can imagine what the answers are, but you’ll never know.
Well, unless you scientifically prove some piece.
Right.
And you’ve got to continue experimenting and you get experiments on it and it works.
And when it works, you say, that worked.
That’s great.
And you get to a point.
Can you erase all phenomena though?
Can you answer all of the questions and therefore have no phenomena left?
Right.
Is it possible?
I think that’s what people are trying to head towards.
They say, well, if phenomena exists, we should be able to answer all of it.
And they want the answer to all of it.
And if you can’t answer all of it, then you just have to call it mythology.
And that’s a belief system that you can believe in or not.
And I choose not to believe in it because I know where I stand.
I stand on science.
Yeah.
Well, I’m reminded, I’m getting hints of being reminded of
something we had talked about before.
Right.
But you can’t remember what it was.
Let me see if I can remember.
Unanswerable phenomena.
Things that happen just a serendipity.
I was listening to that.
Well, that’s just in the episode that we just published.
Yeah.
About, yeah.
Unexplainable things happen all the time.
And we’ve talked about magic.
So phenomena is magic.
And I know we’ve discussed that before.
What is magic?
Magic is just, it’s operating by rules we don’t understand yet.
Right.
And the true phenomena is operating on rules that we aren’t even close to trying to understand.
Yeah.
So that’s why you call it myth.
It’s mythology.
Now, it’s a story that can never be true because we can’t prove any part of it.
But it’s a phenomena.
Yeah.
And in our finite world, we tend to want to eliminate phenomenon from our thoughts.
Yeah.
And I have a question that I was going to ask you at some point is, is there any true
acts of God where the humans… there is no scientific…
where there is no scientific explanation for it.
Something just happened because a supernatural being willed it to happen just on the spot.
Like I’m going to make this happen.
Something that you can’t.
And now it happened.
That’s it.
That you can’t explain through physics.
Things you can’t explain through physics and physical world.
Experience.
Experience.
Yeah.
So is that what we’re talking about?
Is those kinds of things?
Yeah.
It is.
Yeah.
Okay.
And your question is to whether they exist or not.
Yes.
And is that your question too?
No.
In my recent review of phenomena, there’s a book that was published in 2017.
The Freedom of Information Act and all the declassified information that’s been happening
in the last 10 years or so.
Phenomena is what it’s called, but it’s about remote viewing and the ESP experiments and
everything the government did from the 1970s to 2013, 2017.
That they’re continuing to work on.
And one of the conclusions of that book is that there are things, what we, from 2000,
1970 to now, we’ve landed things, rovers on Mars.
We know everything about Mars.
We’ve gotten very large supercomputers.
We can do all kinds of things.
And we know the universe much better than we know inside our own mind.
And the ESP things they were trying to figure out in the 70s, we still don’t know how it
worked.
But they say it’s worth study.
The government still has their classified documents into it.
But everything that’s been declassified now that she’s written about and put in that book
in 2017, there’s proof that it happens.
We know it works, but we can’t describe how it works or why it worked.
So extrasensory perception, these are the phenomena, phenomenal experiences.
They’re there.
They happen.
They can, what, you identify it?
You can…
You can experience it.
You can…
Indicate it.
Document, maybe, what you’re saying.
You can document it.
Yeah, you can document it.
It happens.
And they actually, they talk about, there’s one experiment that you can shake atoms, atoms
inside of the system.
They get joined.
I forget what the word is, but they’re together.
So if you vibrate one, it vibrates the other one.
And the distance can be across the world, hundreds of thousands of miles apart from
each other.
Oh yeah, I’ve heard of that.
You shake this atom over here and it shakes on the other side of the world.
There’s a connection.
Yeah.
And that’s an act of God.
That’s a phenomena.
They don’t know why it happens or how it happened.
And any of their tests for ESP and trying their remote viewing, there’s the other movie,
Men Who Stare at Goats.
I wanted to watch that, but I never got around to it.
Remember that?
Yeah.
So it’s about those experiments in the 70s.
Really?
In the 80s, where they were trying to use extrasensory perception and identify where
things were, just dealing with the issues of the mind.
You can document, but they can’t corral it.
They can’t say, here’s the formula.
Here’s the way to train people on it.
They think and they thought at that point and they still think that it’s a latent possibility
in everyone’s brain, but they don’t know how to get to it yet.
Okay.
So like in the Phenomenon movie with John Travolta.
In the movie.
Where he says- John Travolta’s movie.
He says, where is he at?
He’s being tested by the FBI.
He says, I’m only doing what everyone can do.
What I am doing is possible in everyone.
This is before he found out that it was a tumor causing all of it, but the tumor was
really just activating parts of his brain that were inactive before.
Yeah.
And that’s a storyline, of course.
It is a story.
It’s not science, but I mean, that’s the idea though, isn’t there-
But the science behind it existed and that’s why they wrote the movie.
And that’s why they said, possibly there’s an aneurysm that could happen that would have
tentacles that would activate pieces of the brain.
Right.
Potentially fatal.
It would kill somebody, but before they died, they would have all kinds of amazing connections
that no one else had.
Because we know we only use a small percentage of our brain anyway.
Yeah.
The whole brain up there isn’t connected.
I mean, I believe it is, but I’m just checking to make sure that there wasn’t anything recent
that said, actually, that’s all false.
We use 99% of our brain.
I don’t believe anyone has ever said that.
And that’s these extra sensory perception studies and everything else are trying to
say how can we get to use more of our brain?
And part of it is just by using it.
We gain capacity as you use more.
Yeah.
You use more, you can use more.
Do you think we once were using more or have we always used just 10%?
Are we getting dumber?
Back when we were all geniuses?
What?
Back when we were all geniuses?
Yeah.
We did use more at that time.
I don’t think there was ever that time.
No.
No, that’s never been there.
It’s possible not to use them politically.
Politically.
Politically.
There is a group of society that uses 7% of their brain and then there’s another group
that uses 3% of their brain.
And you can decide which group is which.
Yeah.
Yeah, you can decide.
It’s about like the people that believe in myths and you can always complain about someone
not using their brain.
You’re not thinking right, not thinking correctly.
Why do you believe in mythology?
Or why do you believe in globalism as opposed to nationalism?
Strength from within or why do you have to solve every large problem there first?
So where were we going before I derailed?
John Travolta’s statement.
John Travolta’s statement was that, yeah, it’s latent and that’s what the study came
up with too.
Okay.
What she wrote about.
When was that study?
2017 is when she wrote the book and it’s called Phenomenan.
And when did the study?
Do you know?
Oh no, it started in the 70s.
It’s old.
It’s all of the classified documents of the government.
Not older than me.
Not older than you.
Old enough.
So they started then trying to figure it out and Uri Geller is one of the names that was
involved in that.
He’s been around for a long time.
And they had, you know, she goes through all the iterations of how it was magic.
So I wanted to identify magic.
She talks about the magic of it at the time.
Right now it’s still magic.
It’s a phenomena.
Phenomena is just magic that you don’t have an answer for and we don’t have the answers
for it.
Yeah.
Like Area 51 and UFOs, space aliens, you know, we don’t have answers for UFOs.
Right.
So if there were answers, then it would be in classified documents or declassified at
some point.
Those phenomena just exist.
And that has to be something outside of our understanding.
So whether you use the term God on it, acts of God, you’d have to if you have a belief
in a God or a deity, an ultimate designer, that designer would be God that put these
things in play.
Telepathy.
Telepathy can occur.
And you can also do it, well, like bending spoons and things.
PK, what is that called?
Psychokinesis?
Telekinesis.
Telekinesis?
Psychokinesis.
I think it’s…
Well, in the movie Phenomena, they called it telekinesis, but that was when he was moving
it without touching it.
If you bend a spoon while you are touching it, maybe it’s called something different.
I don’t know.
Yeah.
So how he broke the glass.
Now, those things happen too.
You can do that.
The experiments are that telepathy happens.
You can talk to someone with their brain and get them
to do the things that you need them to do.
You got these magicians that go on stage right now and they show that they printed something
in the paper two weeks ago and got the person in the audience to say exactly what was printed
two weeks ago inside an envelope, it’s been sealed, whatever.
All kinds of amazing, really interesting, phenomenal stuff.
They’re doing it as a stage presentation.
They’re manipulating it somehow.
So you just assume it’s a manipulation, it’s magic, that he knows what he’s doing.
The magician knows what he’s doing.
But then there’s those things that even the magician doesn’t know what he’s doing.
The person who can do ESP and our remote view and get the exact description of property
across the world and define what’s there and walk inside.
They even listed the names on the desks and files, names on files that are on top of the
file cabinet and they get exactly all that.
They were there.
They remote viewed it, but they have no idea how they did it either.
So that’s what’s phenomenal.
You’re describing experiences that other people are having and the only, you only know this
because they said they were telling the story.
Because it was written in a book from classified, declassified documents.
Declassified documents based on testimony of these people.
Like it’s not provable that they didn’t know that they didn’t set this up.
It’s just you’re trusting.
And that’s why it’s still a phenomenon.
They demonstrated it.
It’s demonstrable because it’s there.
They did it and they don’t know how it happened.
They don’t know how it’s done.
They can’t control it.
So that’s why it can’t be relied on.
It’s unreliable.
It’s still a phenomenon.
So what I’m saying is still seems fake.
As a magic trick that someone is in the government and gave him the answers
behind the scenes.
Yeah.
Even if the magician didn’t know, like maybe something, I don’t know if you’re talking
about magicians, I’d have to read the book, I think, to really gather what you’re trying
to say.
Even the government experiments, it was the business of CIA.
It’s the FBI and CIA.
It’s intelligence gathering.
The intelligence community was trying to use these for the benefit of the military.
Are they still trying to, do you think?
Yeah, I think they are.
And that’s what she said.
The book presents they still are.
It’s classified.
Everything that’s done in that realm is classified still.
But they’ve determined that you can’t control it enough to make it available to everybody.
To make it useful.
It’s still a covert.
It’s a quiet, still a, not covert necessarily.
It’s a hidden part of the government.
Area 51 type stuff.
Classified still.
Classified.
Because you can’t, they can’t get it, there’s no breakthroughs in it.
Still there’s no breakthroughs.
And that’s what she said.
As of 2017 when she finalized the writing on the book, we’ve broken through all this
other stuff.
We know more about the universe than we know about our mind.
And we still can’t figure out our consciousness.
So that’s the question.
We talked about that in consciousness and unconsciousness and that conversation.
This is part of the stuff we don’t know.
And that’s part of the stuff.
It’s still just an act of God as far as we can tell.
Because you can’t create it.
You can’t define it.
You can’t even identify the process by which it worked.
So do you think the author of this book believed in these kinds of things before she started
investigating it?
Or I’m just trying to…
No she’s…
You don’t think so?
No, she’s written a lot of other books.
She’s a writer, whatever.
I mean, so…
I believe the book was written, the recent book, it was written because of the documents
that were opened up.
Yeah.
Now it’s Annie Jacobsen.
Right.
That’s her name.
But the other things by her, I don’t know.
This doesn’t have when her…
She wrote Area 51, but I…
Yes, she’s written about all these…
On her website, I can’t see when it was written.
So I have to…
The Pentagon’s Brain, First Platoon.
So she’s a historical writer, whatever.
But dealing…it’s not…she’s not a novelist.
She’s a research writer.
Investigative journalist.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So she’s been writing these types of books since 2005 when she wrote Terror in the Skies,
Why 9/11 Could Happen Again.
Yeah.
Oh, she was…
24, she just…Nuclear War, just written in 2024.
Area 51 was in 2011.
It looks like maybe she was on…
Surprise, Kill, Vanish.
Flight 327.
I don’t know which flight that is, but it says here that she has firsthand experience
to make her write this book.
About the Terror in the Skies?
Is that what it was?
Yeah, about 9/11.
Why it Could Happen Again.
Yeah.
And I mean, so…
Yeah.
So, I mean, she’s a investigative journalist.
She is.
As she knows, she’s writing based on documents that she’s uncovered or that have been…
she requests that they come out.
They’ve been able to summarize them.
So I saw that as a recent work in regard to phenomena because I’ve loved the movie since…when
was the movie written?
96, I think?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it’s in 96.
1996, that they did that movie.
The other thing is I watched it recently.
I fell in love with the movie again.
And the theme song, the final song, do you remember what that was?
Eric Clapton.
Yes.
Yes.
Well, because I had to finish the movie this morning because my schedule is so stupidly
packed that I watched it in three sittings.
It ends with Change the World.
And that’s the point, I think, of Phenomenon, of the movie.
The point of the movie is we all can change the world and we need to.
It’s our responsibility.
That’s why we’re entering…that’s why we’re in this conversation and operating this way
because we’ve changed the world.
The more that you do, he says, well, two or three books a day.
Why are you reading that?
Well, I’m like, just…I have questions.
He says, well, what do you read?
Well, what are you interested in?
What do you want to know?
Pick that up.
Pick up what you want to know and start.
But, you know, and it did say, when you try to get into the conversation, you start learning
stuff, even like Darwin.
It’s dry reading, but it’s hard reading to get through all of the technical stuff.
And it’s not one of the hardest books.
I guess I’m really interested in getting into some of the hard books that they say …
the tomes that you can’t really understand unless you study it for a long time.
Oh yeah.
I listen to a reading of Paradise Lost, like a section of it, and it sounds like Shakespeare
to me and Shakespeare is hard for me to understand.
Yeah.
Paradise Lost.
Milton or no…yeah, is it a new Milton’s poem?
I think so.
Yeah, I think so too.
Those epic poems that are 400 pages long.
Yeah.
That’s what you need to do though.
And you can gain information.
I mean, he learned Portuguese in 20 minutes by picking up a dictionary and learning key
phrases.
Yeah.
But that stuff works too.
Tim Ferris talks about how he learns languages.
That way he’ll go to a new country.
They’ll go somewhere.
And in 10 or 15 minutes, he can gain a working knowledge of that, you know, the things he
needs to know in order to operate.
Well Tim Ferris is operating off of like 35% of his brain instead of the usual 10.
Yeah, he has more brain operating.
And the reason he does is because he’s been practicing it for 40 years.
He started out different than everybody else.
Yeah.
Really.
Well, he was depressed.
He had problems, but he tried.
He focused on things and he kept focusing and he would find a different way to look
at it.
And that’s what he does.
He can pull a language apart.
Elon Musk is the same.
Let’s see, I wanted to compare Elon Musk to John Travolta’s character.
What was his character’s name?
George Malley.
George Malley.
And George Malley always said, you know, thousands of ideas a day.
He says, that’s just holy crap ideas.
Stuff that don’t make any sense.
And he’s just trying to explain to people all this stuff.
And he says, you know, if a mail delivery would just deliver on this route, it should
be done by three o’clock.
With a mail route.
And you can get eight more cars in your parking lot.
Just arrange it this way and no one will bump into offenders.
So all these ideas that come this had, Elon Musk, as he was talking about his lifetime
growing up, his childhood, and he was in an abusive household.
He didn’t grow up comfortably.
He grew up in abuse.
But he said, you wouldn’t want my life though.
He says, this is no fun.
A thousand ideas a day and I can’t do anything about it.
That’s the problem.
So he defined it the same way.
From the time he was a kid, his brain was working more than everybody else.
He had that issue being the autistic type of person he is.
The savant.
And maybe he’s autistic.
Probably is.
But the savant part was connected more than anybody else.
And he said, I just, thousands of ideas a day and I couldn’t do anything about it.
And you just have to work.
It was hard.
It was a hard life to grow up in.
Yeah, I imagine that would be hard.
And he’s still in that same boat.
Everything he does now, he’s doing more than any other individual could do.
He invented the, he’s inventing the engines they’re putting on SpaceX rockets.
Yeah.
It’s not something he’s got a committee’s working.
He has the idea and says, now you guys work on this.
This is how it’s going to work.
Put it together.
And they’ll come up with a problem and he’ll solve the problem for them and say,
that’s it.
Now get back to work.
All of his engineers rely on him.
Everyone’s rely on him for all kinds of information.
So is this a phenomenon in his brain or is it just that he’s figured out how to hack
effectiveness and productivity?
I imagine that I could be just as good mentally as Elon Musk and Tim Ferris and these savant
people if I just knew how to streamline my time into the right directions.
Do you believe that’s possible?
I think that that’s easier for me to believe than some people are just genius.
Some people are just geniuses though, because they have a brain aneurysm that’s got tentacles
connecting pieces that we don’t have.
Well, and their focus is better on especially on things that they’re interested in like
Albert Einstein could only really figure out all of his mathematics because that’s what
drove him.
That’s what was the thing.
That’s what drove him.
He got an idea and it’s kind of like they talked about Charles Darwin.
He asked the right questions and he stayed with the questions until he got some answers.
That’s what Einstein said.
His whole benefit was the only reason he hadn’t advanced beyond anyone else was because he
sat with the question until he came up with some answers.
He didn’t get bored with it.
He was determined to stay with the problem, with the idea.
The longer you stay with an idea, the better off you’re going to be at getting to some
useful answers, right answers, even if you blow up a few spaceships to start with before
you can actually get one to land.
Once you get your rocket ships to land and you can do it every time, then it’s going
to be really cool.
They’re all reusable and that was strictly only Elon Musk.
No one else thought that could happen, but he knew it could happen.
He said, let’s just make it work.
Now it works.
It’s just common.
Now, they say, of course it works.
I don’t have the focus or the attention span or something.
I haven’t hacked productivity and effectiveness to be able to do that.
Now you’re disappointing.
Now I’m what?
Did you say?
You would be disappointing.
Now you’re disappointing.
Because I’m admitting…
Because you believe you don’t have the capacity.
George Malley’s statement was everyone can do this and you just need to do it.
Come up with something else you’re interested in.
The way they presented it in the movie, everyone in the city, in the town, no one believed
him.
No one wanted to follow him.
He didn’t have any disciples.
Even Lace was suspect of him.
She loved him, but she didn’t try to be him.
She didn’t try to say, teach me how you’re doing that.
No one in the movie and no one in his area said, well, okay, I’ll take your challenge
and I’m going to try to learn what you’re learning.
Help me do it as fast as you.
Help me do it.
No one asked him for help.
They were all saying, you’re just an idiot.
I mean, it was a UFO, right?
A major happened to you and we are afraid of you.
They were all afraid.
Then he was trying to explain it to them at their library thing.
They just kept badgering him with their questions about the physical world.
He says, that’s not what’s important.
Find out something about the book that you like.
Lady Chattelay’s Lover, how he said, yeah, I read it three times.
It’s a story about how to deal with women.
I don’t know.
I haven’t read it.
Still, but he had an explanation as to what it was.
If you read it, whatever you read, like Darwin, I’ll get through the Darwin book.
We talked about books that I read.
I like to understand what it is I’m reading in the book and then be able to talk about
it when it’s done.
You do too.
Yeah.
You do that.
Yeah.
Yes, you’re advancing.
You’re getting closer to a fuller understanding using more of your brain.
I’m getting closer, but I don’t have it now.
Will you ever get it?
We talked about that receding horizon.
Is this not a receding horizon?
Yeah.
I think this would fit in that.
But do I have enough years to get it anyway?
To even reach the partway goal that I’ve got for myself?
I think that’s the same question that the government, military, anyone who’s thinking
about these things on the higher level, CIA, they say, we have to be able to figure this
out, but they haven’t been able to yet.
That’s why I don’t think that they’ve stopped working on it.
They can’t stop working on what consciousness is and how brains work with each other.
Napoleon Hill said it years ago in Think and Grow Rich, the consciousness that we share
consciousness, transubstantiation, I think is what it is.
We’ve talked about that a few times.
He wrote about it.
He knows how to do this.
He can demonstrate it.
He doesn’t know how it works.
He says it just works.
Yeah.
Consciousness, unconscious information is shared between individuals, between people.
You get a group together.
There’s another brain there, the mastermind group works.
He doesn’t try to explain it.
The government’s tried to explain it.
How does it work?
They know it works too.
They just don’t know how it works, so it’s still a phenomenon.
Right.
Right.
Phenomenon is just something that you haven’t been able to explain yet.
Right.
It’s magic.
But not necessarily unexplainable, right?
Well, assuming that it’s physical.
Just because we haven’t been able to yet doesn’t mean that we will never
be able to explain it.
If it’s recordable and demonstrable, it exists, then it has to be explainable.
Somehow we just don’t know yet.
What were some of the things that we had no idea about in the 50s?
Well, supercomputers.
There were no computers in the 50s.
Maybe there were some, but nothing.
The libraries we hold in our pockets, there’s no way.
30 years ago, you couldn’t explain to people how that would work.
Right.
But everyone has it.
You have a question about what phenomenon means, or how many books Annie Jacobsen wrote.
They’re all here.
Nine of them.
And you can read it right now.
We know the year they were published.
We can look at the synopsis.
We can probably get Cliff’s Notes on every one of them.
And in 10 minutes, we could know the basis of every book that she ever wrote.
And it took her 20 years to write them.
So it’s just that incredible ability.
We’ve got more than anyone else ever had.
And we just need to use it.
The potential for productivity and effectiveness is higher than ever.
But so many people are still not…
We haven’t increased the actual productivity and effectiveness, have we?
We’ve just increased the potential for it.
As long as there are Democrats in the world, we never will.
Oh, come on.
Yeah.
You got to get people…
It does take effort.
Yeah.
In order to be productive, you have to put effort to it.
Regardless of part of your thought process, if you’re dedicated to work on it, you will
advance.
I think it’s one of those automatics.
If you water a plant, it’s going to grow.
If you put water onto a biological organism…
It’s just going to…
If that water is good for it to grow, it will grow.
It will multiply.
It won’t ignore the water, the fertilizer.
You can fertilize it better.
And you fertilize your mind better.
Your mind’s going to grow better.
Right.
It’s got no choice but to do that.
Yeah.
And even that direction, it’s a beneficial cycle.
It’s never going to degenerate.
If you keep feeding it the right information, you can’t learn less by learning more.
You can’t get dumber by learning more.
And the only option you have is to get smarter.
Well, what if you…
To make a connection.
Are learning…
What if what you’re learning, what you’re reading is trash?
Like romance novels?
Yeah.
Or fiction presented as fact or conspiracy theories that really can’t…
I mean, okay.
Well, ESP is a conspiracy theory.
It’s a theory still.
You could conspire against something.
Right.
So I mean, like things that are like…
UFOs, they still exist.
They’re there.
They’re real.
What if you…
Yeah.
We just don’t know what they are.
I mean, I understand all of your time in…
And those ideas, like Charles Darwin spent seven years out on a boat and he spent the
next 40 years actually in his life.
He was sick his whole life.
He could only work three or four hours a day.
That’s the other thing I think is amazing about him.
Because he did so much on just four hours a day.
He had this disease they couldn’t figure out.
His wife took care of him in his house.
He never left his house for 40 years.
And he could only work three or four hours a day.
But the volume of work he did in that three to four hours a day was huge.
It changed the world.
It actually did.
Yeah.
Changed everything.
And he never went…
He never spoke.
He wasn’t building rocket ships.
He wasn’t doing…
He was just thinking and dedicating his life to answering the questions that he knew.
And whether he answered them right or wrong, that’s not important.
What’s important is that he dedicated his life or his mind to the questions that he
wanted to answer.
And he came up with a plausible solution.
And that plausible solution has been now discussed for the last 200 years almost.
Yeah.
180 years now.
And it’s still being discussed and it will be discussed for 200 years in the future.
Whether it’s true or not, that’s not the important thing.
The important thing is that he got…
He made an effort and he changed the world in what he did.
And we can do that.
Because Eric Clapton wrote that song, Change the World.
It’s a beautiful song.
He wrote it for this movie though.
Well, he didn’t write it.
It was written by three other people.
There’s writers for the song, but it was recorded for this movie in 96.
So the whole point of that song and that verse was to promote this idea that we can change
the world and we have it latent within us if we just operate with it.
Just read whatever you’re interested in.
Do it.
It doesn’t matter what you read as long as you’re spending time doing it.
Yeah.
Figure something out.
And when you start on one path, then it’ll build others.
I don’t think that Elon Musk was…
That he had all of his ideas when he was a kid.
I mean, he said thousands of ideas.
I think that’s the word term he used.
He said thousands of ideas.
It was hectic.
It was a hard life.
You can’t possibly use all of those.
But he’s now having 10,000 ideas and not just thousands.
So it’s still expanding.
It’s growing.
He’s not slowing down in anything he’s doing.
The question that I keep trying to ask, and I’m using all of the wrong words, is, is there
anything that you could spend all of your time reading, like a genre, and is watching
the same thing?
Or…
Yeah, or playing a video game with Minecraft.
Is there anything that would actually not help you grow?
And start examining that.
What could be some possibilities?
I have my knee-jerk response to it.
Examples of content to consume that would not help?
Yeah.
Try to identify something that would not help.
I mean, Minecraft.
I figured that out really quick.
You did, because you have history of…
But there is a brand new Minecraft movie that’s coming out in March or something that I saw.
That’s an advancement on Minecraft.
Do you think Minecraft is just stuck in its 64-bit world or whatever?
It’s making money for somebody.
I think it’s got other places to go.
Even if you’re just a kid, a 42-year-old kid, sitting in your house playing Minecraft, you’re
advancing with that.
You built a castle in the air, now put a foundation under it.
There will be a thought, there will be an idea, a concept.
What else might someone do that would be detrimental and cycle them in a non-virtuous cycle?
How about “couch potato”?
Just spend all of your time on Netflix.
Soap operas.
Well, the soap opera writers, they do that.
Netflix.
Yeah, and now that we have streaming services where you could pull up a show and watch all
17 seasons of it all in one row.
Binge watching.
So you could be there for two weeks just watching NCIS.
How are you going to grow through that time?
Can you?
I still have my very favorite episode of NCIS.
It’s mind-blowing.
It’s mind-opening.
It expands.
I mean, they end at one.
It teaches everything.
In that one episode.
It’s like a phenomenon.
That one episode.
It’s the one where he’s on the ledge with the guy that’s going to jump.
The medical examiner starts with a P. The other one.
The younger one?
The younger one.
I can only remember the older one’s name.
P?
I got his name.
No, it doesn’t start with a P, does it?
Is it the last name or his first name?
Yeah, that’s just in my brain.
But he’s sitting on the ledge talking to the guy that’s going to jump.
And he tells them, you know, I studied for my medical exam and I failed it three times.
He says, well, what did you do then?
I said, well, I passed it.
Did you tell anybody?
I haven’t told anybody yet.
So medical doctor.
Palmer.
In the office.
It does start with a P. Palmer.
Yeah.
They were listening to him on the radio.
I mean, he didn’t know he was being, he was, had a transmitter on the box, but they were
listening to everything he said.
And he told them, he said, this is why I love all the people I work with.
You know, he’s trying to tell them, this is what you should live life for.
Live life for these things.
And he said, I passed my medical exam on the medical doctor, but I haven’t told anybody
yet because I just like who I’m working with.
I don’t want anything to change.
Huh?
You know, that’s just a very pivotal moment in the whole lifespan of those people.
Yeah.
They had a lot of them.
That’s the reason you write soap operas.
That’s so you have those pivotal moments you can talk about.
Yeah.
That’s a season 14, episode 13.
It’s titled, keep going.
There you go.
I think in my brain, I thought it was a 13.
So it’s 14:13.
It was a 13.
Now I know my favorite scripture in NCIS.
14:13, NCIS 14:13.
Right.
That’s it.
That’s the one I’ll reference.
But I’ve cried all three times I watch it.
I mean, you can’t watch that show and not cry.
You can’t watch Phenomenon and not cry.
It’s just, it’s amazing.
And you become bigger each time you go through something like that.
Okay, you remember that movie that Richard made with his friends.
Yeah.
The pizza man or something like that?
Pizza man.
Pizza man.
Pizza delivery.
I don’t know.
Is that something that you could watch and learn something from?
You could learn how to dance with fairy wings.
You could watch the credits at the end.
I don’t know.
That’s the same thing.
That’s like a…
I’m just trying to think of the dumbest thing that I’ve ever seen in my life.
And that might be up there.
Napoleon Dynamite.
But Napoleon Dynamite is amazing because it was just, it was a movie just like
Pizza Man.
It was written that way.
Yeah.
Done that way.
So I think what we’re coming around to, I mean, outside of the Phenomena and conversation,
this is a completely, it’s a different conversation now.
But I think what you’re saying is unschooling is how we should all be doing it.
Yeah.
I mean, that’s how we operate after elementary and secondary school, after college even.
You stop learning.
No, you don’t.
You continue learning.
You continue growing with everything that you read and see and do.
Read three books a day.
And which ones do I read?
What are you interested in?
You read what you want to read.
And it doesn’t matter what it is.
If it’s Minecraft, read Minecraft.
If it’s Python programming, read Python.
Get an advancement in something, whatever it is that you’re wanting to do.
If it’s general conference reports, then read a general conference talk and make a connection.
And maybe that’s the key that I use is I try to make things match.
I try to connect them.
Yeah.
I mean, if I just read the book on Darwin, read about his life, but didn’t pay attention
to anything else, I just wanted to see what he’s like.
And then when I put that down, it’s a silo all by itself.
No men’s island, no silos exist.
It connects.
He connects to what Jordan Peterson said two days ago directly.
I mean, it’s an answer to what his whole life lived that way.
And from Jordan Peterson’s recent statement, his whole life was down a track that wasn’t
going to get him the success.
But he did succeed and he wrote it and lined it up.
And everyone who’s believing that and on that same line, on that same track, Jordan’s saying
that track doesn’t work.
And here’s why.
And so maybe they’ll start pulling off that track.
They’ll say, well, let’s look at another track.
Let’s get off of this track onto the story track.
And maybe Jordan Peterson’s wrong.
Who knows?
We don’t know.
We just have to keep learning, moving forward.
And from our discussion a while ago about debt and banking, banking is not the right
path to be on.
And I’m trying to think it through, capitalism is the right path.
Free markets.
You have to free that market instead of enslave that market with debt.
You free that market with capitalism.
A capital-based society as opposed to a debt-based society.
That works.
I don’t know why it works.
I don’t know how.
It’s still a phenomenon.
It’s phenomenal.
So where did we get to with phenomena, though?
Is it possible to find it?
And can you answer a phenomenon?
Can you find the reason it happened or how it happened is what you’re saying?
And then make it usable.
Make it happen again.
Make it effective.
Make it so that it can be a process.
Set it into a process that now everyone…
It’s latent in everybody.
Let’s make it not latent.
Let’s put this recipe in place so that everyone can use it.
And we’ve got the first part of the recipe.
Unshooling is where it starts, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, of course.
Of course.
So start with unschooling.
Let’s start with that with the three-year-olds and the 10-year-olds and the 14-year-olds
in unschooling so that they start that mindset way earlier in life.
And then when they’re 55 and 80, they’re going to have a much better time figuring out those
answers and getting the process set.
Yeah.
Yeah, maybe we’re delaying our brain growth by using public education.
Definitely.
The conveyor belt, the conveyor belt.
The assembly line.
Yeah.
And that was a big advance in the Industrial Revolution.
Make an assembly line.
And now, you know what Elon Musk is doing about building cars?
I haven’t studied a lot about it.
Tell me about it.
His molding machines.
He’s got a machine that will create the whole car body at once.
He’s going to mold the frame at one piece instead of welding it together.
Don’t put it on assembly line.
Just mold the thing.
Okay.
Like a done machine is, I don’t know how big.
Does the football field big or something?
No, not quite that big.
That would be pretty big, but it’s got to be big though in order to do that.
You put a whole car inside of it.
You put a whole frame of a car inside of it and you mold the thing all at once and then
it’s one solid piece.
And then you take it out and you put the tires on.
You put all the engine parts inside of it and the battery, hook it on.
And there’s some where they use this for it.
That’s one of the factories he’s building in Texas is with those huge molding
machines.
So you don’t have an assembly line anymore.
You’re going to create it and maybe you can do that.
I mean, 3D printers, you can print an engine or a small engine.
You can print things with all the moving parts inside of it.
But what about all of the jobs that you need to have?
What about all of the people that are going to be unemployed because one machine is going
to take care of something that it used to take 50 people to do or 500 people to do or
whatever?
Wouldn’t that be a cool problem to solve?
There is solutions for that problem.
Just increase everybody’s intelligence and then they can all create their own companies.
Yeah? No?
But then who would buy the stuff being printed?
Who’s going to buy it?
Each other.
Each other was creating their own stuff.
Yeah, right.
It’s the agrarian society.
So we have to take that agrarian idea and build it out.
Total basic income is the first thought.
And I think Elon has talked about that too.
Because if you get everything so that the assembly line is not there trucking, if you
make trucking automated, then your income is going to be…
Yeah, all the transportation, this strike on the East Coast, if we were automated in
it and it can be automated, now the technology is there.
It just has to be built.
There wouldn’t need to be any people on those docks.
The 4,500 dock workers, they don’t need to be there.
And the products can still move.
The supply chain still works just fine.
And it works better.
The cranes don’t break.
No one drives their [inaudible] into the ocean.
So just, he said, if the economy is working well enough, then everyone can get a universal
basic income.
And that’s putting it, we were talking about that in the political thing.
The level point right now might be 30,000 a year for everybody if you level the world.
If you give advancements high enough, then the level might be 300,000.
And you pay everyone $300,000 a year income because you need that to buy the products
that you have.
And when you’re buying all the products you have, the machines are making it for us.
The machines won’t take over.
You’ve got that dystopian world that’s saying that the computer is going to kill us all.
How in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Hal decided to hurt everybody, kill everybody.
Yeah, because that was just the best thing for everything.
Yeah.
It makes the most sense, get rid of the humans.
But a computer is not going to decide that.
Maybe.
That’s a conspiracy theory.
You could spend your whole life worrying about that conspiracy theory.
So that may be something you could cycle to zero.
That’s just in your opinion though, because what if I actually study that and then I become
like really brilliant and effective and productive and I reach all of my goals because that is
what I decided to spend my time doing.
You decided that, well, fear.
And I think it’s fear really that I’m pointing to and not necessarily space science or computer
learning.
Yeah.
If you’re afraid of computer learning and you say, because due to fear, I’m going to
stop every advancement in computer science and I’m going to take my whole life.
And we’re wondering, Darwin didn’t, I don’t believe he operated on fear.
He was looking for possibilities.
He was still looking in faith that he’s finding his next step.
He’s building it.
Einstein built something new every time.
You weren’t afraid.
Is there a story of someone who is afraid, who was afraid of trying to keep something
happening?
Yeah.
George Orwell’s 1984.
They were afraid of humans, so they had to change history.
Right.
Had to rewrite history so that you couldn’t learn anything.
They were trying to break it down.
So that’s a dystopia is based on fear.
Brave New World is the same concept too.
Yeah.
Okay.
We’ve got to stop life, stop advancement.
No more advancement.
We want to limit, put price control on all advancement because it’s detrimental to us.
And that’s a base of fear.
That’s what causes the dystopia.
And the only place for a society like that to go is cycling down.
So is fear really the element that ruins everything?
You know, I think that makes sense to me because if all your…and that’s kind of like where…what
am I trying to say?
If all you’re reading and watching is things that make you more afraid, then you’re not
going to grow.
You’re going to shrink.
You’re going to go into yourself.
People that live with anxiety have a very difficult time in just doing regular things
like everybody else.
Everybody else is managing to get by.
But if you’ve got anxiety dictating your feelings about things, then you’re going to…like
you can barely live.
That’s depression and that’s misery.
That’s a miserable, depressive,
life.
And that’s fear, you’re afraid of everything.
You’re afraid of what could happen and what is happening and what has happened before.
So end of the world projections, things like that, the…
Apocalypse.
World War III or the revelations, what’s talked about there, burning, the world burning like
fire.
Yeah.
You could be afraid of that.
You could study it all your life and be afraid.
And should you be afraid?
There’s whole societies that say you should be afraid of that.
And because of that fear, you should join our society.
Yeah.
Right?
Well, and you’re not going to do anything if you’re not afraid.
If it doesn’t concern you at all, then what kind of action are you going to take?
You’re going to take progressive action and it’s going to be the right kind.
The kind that makes you fireproof.
I mean, even just the movie, Fireproof that the Kendrick brothers put together.
Now you’re going to progress.
You’re not going to be afraid of the marriage.
You’re going to fireproof the marriage by doing all the positive things that are needed
to be done for 40 days in a row.
You don’t get afraid of, well, what’s my wife going to think about this?
You proactively work on it.
Work on what your wife’s going to think about it.
So I’m eating this candy corn and I have in mixed in this container, candy corn that came
from a small regular size bag and candy corn that came from like a mega bag or whatever.
They taste different from each other.
They’re the same company.
They must have been made in different factories or something.
Is it different in sweetness?
What’s the difference?
One of them has cinnamon and the other one doesn’t?
No.
More sugar, less sugar?
It tastes like the recipe is different.
So something different, an ingredient, not necessarily cinnamon.
Some ingredient is different.
Something like they added a, well, maybe like the wax content of the big bag one is just
a little bit higher or I don’t know, something where-
Consistency?
In the mixing process, it came out differently and the little bag tastes way better than
the big bag.
Just saying.
Maybe they had to put it in the big bag because they could never sell it in the little bags.
People would stop buying the little bag.
Even thinking about that, I mean, you could figure out the difference between those two.
But if you spun on that for a while, we’re talking about dedicating your time to something
senseless.
What’s the actual chemical composition between these two?
You take 10 of them and go into your chemistry lab and identify all the pieces or take it
to the mass spectrometer, right?
Yeah.
From NCIS.
Yeah.
Put it in there and find out everything that’s in there, all of the ideas, all of the chemicals
that are part of it.
That can be done.
Or you can just call the Brachs Candy Company and say, what’s the difference between these?
How many recipes do you operate with?
Maybe there’ll be someone that’ll tell you.
And then say, that’s proprietary.
I can’t share that with you.
Trade secrets, right.
Right.
But there, if you’re afraid of it, and let’s just use that example.
If you’re afraid of candy corn, you may say, I’m never going to buy a candy corn again
because these two taste different and I’m not going to do it.
I did have a bad experience last year with a bag of candy corn.
It was way, I don’t know if it was expired or their machine malfunctioned when they made
that batch or something.
I don’t know, but I was afraid to purchase more candy corn this fall.
Okay.
So was it hard or was it acidy?
What was the-
It was gross.
It was sweet, but there must’ve been some bitterness to it where I couldn’t eat more
or something.
It wasn’t… it was maybe rancid.
You could say maybe they tasted rancid.
Could’ve been rancid.
Yeah.
Maybe some of the oil got rancid, but it was made with it and then it was on the shelf
too long.
Yeah.
I love candy corn that’s been two years old and three years old.
You love that.
Yeah.
That’s amazing.
The only thing wrong with your candy corn and your dish right now is it doesn’t have
the nuts and the raisins and everything else from the trail mix.
I’m eating it alone.
I’m eating it neat.
Yeah.
That’s the problem.
Yeah.
Candy corn neat, no value to that.
It needs to be in a trail mix with cookies even.
I think if I built my trail mix, it would do well on the shelves.
You should sign up for the farmer’s market.
Yeah, right.
So your mix of… Yeah, you’d probably sell some of it.
I could just name it.
Name it a certain thing.
This is whatever.
It would have to be not mountain mix.
It has to be something.
Not mountain mix.
Yeah.
Mountain mix is where you use that for the base.
That’s the base.
Yeah.
What a… You could use something about cow pies.
Considering you’re living on a farm, you don’t have cows to make pies anymore.
Something really gross to me.
Yeah.
You say that way.
It’s got to change the world.
I got to change a word to make it fit.
Because we’ve talked about words don’t mean what you’re supposed to mean.
I got to find a word that everyone’s going to say, that means this, and say, no, it means
this.
Brightness.
This is what the word means.
And I’ll say, wow, it does mean that.
You’ll change the world.
That’s what we want to do.
Every action we make should be to that point.
So that’s what this conversation is about.
It’s changing the world.
We actually are just talking about Eric Clapton’s song.
Eric Clapton’s song just summarizes the whole point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When we were talking about unschooling, unschooling will change the world, and it’ll change the
world because of the process it puts you on.
And it’s the process he’s talking about that George Malley promoted.
I don’t know what happened.
There was a light and I fell down.
And now I just want to read.
Yeah.
Develop yourself to want to read without having to be knocked down by a light at midnight.
Or without having to have a brain tumor.
Yeah.
Or have a brain tumor.
Of course, they did that.
Grey’s Anatomy had that issue too.
They went to the same idea.
And I don’t know what season it was in Grey’s Anatomy where Patrick, who was the guy?
Dempsey.
Patrick Dempsey was that brain surgeon, and his sister was the brain surgeon.
Oh, Dempsey.
Patrick Dempsey.
Yeah.
His sister was the surgeon too.
She came into the hospitals after she came in.
And then she, I think he was killed off already.
He died.
And the sister began, she had all kinds of epiphanies and insights.
Insights that she could solve things that no one else could solve.
And they found out it was a brain aneurysm.
It was an aneurysm.
And they had to get it out.
They had to stop it.
And so she had to go back to be a normal person.
But for a while, for a couple of episodes or five in that season, she could solve about
anything.
And she would, you know, it was part of connecting parts of her brain.
The same story.
But it was killing her.
Connected things.
And so she had to choose.
Yeah, it was killing her.
It made her, it was killing her, but it made her a genius for a while.
And so that, that savantness, and she had to mourn losing that, but staying alive.
Yeah.
So the concepts are there, and I think they’re real.
That’s why they’re in stories.
And these are the stories that we live by.
They bother people, though.
Normal people, people who don’t want to think, who just want to skate by life.
Yeah.
Why are you wasting all your time trying to, I don’t know, whatever, figure out what Darwin
had to say?
You’re not a scientist.
Who cares what Darwin had to say?
And nobody does.
Few people care about that.
Or what Napoleon Hill had to say, and how it relates to Darwin.
Yeah.
Well, that’s a specific line of learning that maybe doesn’t help you get to whatever goal
you’ve decided you’re trying to reach, whatever lifestyle you’ve decided is ideal for you.
Like not everybody is going to be into reading Darwin.
Maybe they want to read Stephen King’s books instead, and learn and grow through that avenue.
I mean, you can’t really force an interest in something.
You can practice being interested in it, but it’s either going to take or it’s not going
to take.
With that individual.
So you’re going to have communities, back to our discussion, communities that have an
affinity with you in your discussion.
And there’s going to be those that are on totally different mindsets that love to cook.
And you’ll have people that don’t love it, and how every answer comes from a perfect
recipe instead of every answer comes from a perfect philosophy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that’s reasonable.
So that’s why… that’s the level two communities that’ll exist.
You’ll have your clubs.
You’ll join the clubs you have an affinity with.
I think an important thing to learn from that right there is that everyone is going to be
growing in their own way from what they’re doing.
We’re all different.
And so we’ve got to stop being so degrading on other people’s stuff.
Stop looking at the people you know and be like, they’re wasting all of their time watching
Grey’s Anatomy.
And instead be like, I wonder what they’re learning from that.
That’s probably something completely interesting and going to help them out.
Like I don’t know.
And probably they would come up and say, it was a fun show.
I had no idea what it was about.
Yeah.
Maybe.
Maybe they’re not.
You have plenty of people that are just brain dead watching it.
Like they read a book.
They’ll read a book.
They’ll read the words, but it didn’t mean anything to them.
They didn’t ask any questions of the book.
That’s why Mortimer Adler wrote How to Read a Book, and Why.
If you don’t have questions, you’re not going to get anything out of the book.
You’re going to read the words and the words will pass.
You’ll get past that page and it didn’t mean anything to you.
It didn’t comprehend it.
It didn’t internalize it.
So are you saying it’s okay if we pass judgment on these people that aren’t thinking about
what they’re learning?
No, but are they progressing just as well?
That’s the question.
If you’re just skating through life, if you’re skimming everything and you’re never thinking
deeply about it or making it, if you don’t try to improve your life, but you’re just
skating through life, are you productive?
And effective.
Say you go to work.
Are you productive and effective?
You’re going to work every day.
You’re a UPS driver.
Say you drive a UPS truck and you get the products there every day and you do it for
30 years of your life, but you don’t listen to anything while you’re driving.
You listen to the radio, change the world, but it doesn’t mean anything to you.
You don’t do anything with it.
You’ve got your radio running on and you deliver the packages and you’re very successful at
what you do and you get to the end and you retire.
But did you have a successful, productive life?
And you die six months after you retire because you’re just bored now.
What do I do?
I got nothing to do.
That’s a good question.
Would that life any less lived than Elon Musk’s life?
Building 17 different companies, getting us to learn.
I think this is the question that I was trying to ask when I was asking, is there anything
you could be reading or watching that would make you not grow?
Right.
So…
So what’s the answer?
Well, the most generous answer would be, of course that life was worth living.
Of course it was.
Right.
And judgment.
You shouldn’t judge that person.
Say, well, he didn’t do as much as I would have done.
If he were smart, he would have listened to podcasts when he was on there in his truck
instead of radio, chilling down for years.
But we do that to ourselves.
I mean, I do that to myself actually.
I don’t know if everybody does that, but I mean, it’s something I can do, you could do
to yourself.
I sometimes just want to listen to music when I’m at work, but then I think, eh, that’s
not going to make me any smarter.
So I’m going to fight my way through this podcast that I’m listening to and see what
I can pull out of it.
You issue a judgment and say, be better than you are.
Yeah.
I’m judging myself for just wanting to, after I’ve completed my work, I sometimes just want
to sit and watch a movie on my phone.
But then I’m like, well, what about this book that I’m listening to?
You know, stargazing, I like to just sit there and watch the stars and do nothing.
But I do have a star chart in my house and I’m trying to identify more and more constellations.
There’s so much you can learn by looking up.
And there are two meteor showers, three this month, that I’m going to go out and try to
find plus the comet.
So like, yeah, I’m doing a lot with the sky out there, even though I don’t have a telescope.
Yeah.
It’s a part of life and I’m learning by it.
But it’s okay that you don’t bring out your star chart.
And on the 13th?
It’s okay that you just sit and enjoy it.
What’s on the 13th?
13th, look to the east.
Look at the sun go down, you’ll see the comet.
They say that’s going to be the brightest side as it’s heading down.
You’re supposed to be able to see it right now for the last two weeks.
We haven’t seen since the Stone Age?
Yeah, 80,000 years ago.
The one that they know, it’s on this cycle that came a long time ago, 80,000 years ago,
and now it’s coming back through.
So it’s supposed to be on about that look this morning and I couldn’t see it on the
western, on the western horizon.
But it’s going to be on the western horizon on the 13th, just as the sun goes down, it’ll
be on the back side of the sun.
It’s ahead of the sun right now.
And in the next two weeks, it’s going to go behind the sun and you’ll be able to see it
on the western.
But maybe the mountains, they’re too tall where I’m at and we won’t be able to see
it.
Maybe I better go up on top of the mountain on the 13th.
Yeah.
Chances are the weather is going to be nice still.
Yeah.
So maybe I will do that, maybe I won’t.
I mean, it doesn’t matter if you see that comet or not.
Right.
It’s maybe not going to be a life-changing experience.
But maybe for someone, they will see it and that will inspire something big.
But I think it’s going to be just as cool if I do end up getting a telescope someday
and look at the rings of Saturn.
That would be amazing as anything.
And they’re up there all the time.
It’s just, you know, right in the middle of the sky.
You can look at it anytime.
Waiting for you to see it.
Waiting for the right telescope.
So that’s just an interest of mine that I enjoy rather than listening to music or a
radio show.
Actually, I do turn the radio on once a month probably.
When I’m in the kitchen, I’ll turn on the country station while I’m loading the dishwasher.
And when the dishwasher is loaded, I turn it off.
That’s your daily allotment of country music.
My monthly time music is allowed while I’m loading the dishwasher.
Other than that, I don’t have any other radio.
And I used to have speakers all over the house and put music on all the time.
I used to run the things, but I don’t.
No music.
That’s not a phenomenon.
That’s a choice.
So you make your choices and we need to not have judgment of people with how they’re operating
in their phenomenal life.
Because every life…
George Malley was living a phenomenal life.
He was given something that allowed him to think better, given an aneurysm that made
him see light.
And it was a phenomenon truly until they found out what it was actually.
Yeah.
Scientifically, well, and again, that’s just the story.
And that was the story in Grey’s Anatomy.
There probably are scientific studies about that though, aneurysms that caused genius
for a minute or a time.
Idiot savants who exist.
And I just haven’t read the story.
We don’t know who ever studied that.
Yeah.
But it could be studied, I’m sure.
And you can create more of an idiot savantdom in your head by focusing on it for a while
or a long time and finding the right number of books to read a day.
Hm.
Or even just the right number of pages to read.
Yeah, number of pages.
Or you don’t have to read a lot.
The way to increase your photographic memory so that you can look at a page, speed reading,
look at a page and internalize that.
What I talked to a guy a week ago, a week ago or so, that he said, I can read a thousand
pages a day.
I can read a hundred pages an hour.
He was a technical, what did he call himself?
He read through the rules and the laws, technical reader and editor, technical editor in a hospital
setting.
So he said, I had to scan the documents.
So I’d read it.
And he said, I know what I’m looking for.
And I said, do you verbalize?
How do you read through that many pages in an hour?
He said, I don’t know.
You can’t verbalize it.
He said, my brain looks at it, I look at it and I know what I’m looking for.
So I look at that page and if there’s an anomaly, what I’m looking for, is there or it’s not
there.
And so he said, I’m not necessarily comprehending everything, but I’m looking for what I’m looking
for.
And he was successful at that career.
That was the whole career that he did.
And so I’d speed read that way.
But if I need to comprehend it, I do have to slow down and read each paragraph.
But there’s got to be a way speed reading that you can speed it up.
And I’ve found the limit that I’ve got right now is I’m voicing everything.
I have to read it and say it before I comprehend it.
You’ve got to be able to look at something comprehended without having a voice.
But I haven’t studied speed reading courses or anything long enough to find out that that’s
what they do.
And if that’s not what they do, then my course needs to create it that way.
Yeah, well, that’s a skill that I think that you can get if you work at it.
I don’t think that you have to be any particular type of person to be able to read and comprehend
without…
It’s a latent skill inside all of us.
We just have to work on it.
Yeah.
Probably like every other skill.
Like every other one.
Like everything that we can do, we can do all of it.
Just start the Silva method.
That’s part of the phenomenal.
They mentioned that in this phenomenon book, all the methods that they were trying to figure
out because they know that method.
Mind control, something I’ve looked at a little bit and there’s still societies all over the
place teaching that mind control.
And that’s a telepathy type thought or course.
I don’t think I’m familiar with that.
But maybe I just need more description.
At some point you’ll get familiar with it.
He used it in education, elementary education.
Mind control allows you to do more with your brain.
Get your brain more active.
But I haven’t heard in that description at all that you just comprehend that you’re reading
your…you’re just reading it.
Photographic memory is what I’m going to figure out.
And even if you have a photographic memory, do you comprehend it and understand it all
at once as one page?
Or do you have it in your mind and then you can read through and comprehend it as your
voice through this sentence?
Those are just bigger questions.
Yeah.
Where do we go from here?
Interesting.
There’s so many avenues to go, so many tentacles to jump down.
Yeah.
Rabbit hole.
There is no end to where this conversation can take us.
Right.
So, conclude it for us.
What was there?
What’s the end?
The end is, well, you did say a little bit of it.
Don’t judge other people for what they like.
I think what people are saying these days is don’t yuck other people’s yum.
But I think that might be a little bit…
I’ve never heard that before.
…talking about other things.
Don’t yuck other people’s yum.
Yeah.
You do you.
Yeah.
And maybe there are true phenomenon out there.
I’m not entirely convinced because I tend to believe that everything has an explanation.
We’ll figure it out someday.
You’re skeptical.
It just may take hundreds of years.
You’re a healthy level of skepticism.
Yeah.
But I totally agree that there are things that we haven’t explanations for right now
yet.
That we don’t have explanation for.
We don’t have…
And that’s all it is yet.
And that’s all it is.
The belief, and I hold that same exact belief, there is an answer for everything.
We just don’t know it.
And it doesn’t matter to me right now that we know it.
Well, yeah.
It doesn’t matter to me either.
I am happy letting people have ESP and telekinesis experiences.
It doesn’t really affect me at all.
And even if you choose to try it someday or feel like you’ve received an answer from some
other brain across the room, it’s okay.
You call it intuition.
I just had the intuition you were thinking about that.
It looked like you were.
Well, I was.
How did you know?
And you say, I didn’t know.
Just had that feeling.
Well, let’s work on that feeling a little bit more and see.
And just the fact we’re talking is going to make a difference in what we’re able to do
together.
Yeah.
And maybe it’s just by the volume of words that are shared or by some other phenomenal
connection that only exists based on the conversation.
Yeah.
Maybe someday there won’t be any true phenomenon things going on anymore.
And that name, that word will have to mean something like awesome and brilliant and not
like this amazing trail mix.
This amazing trail mix that’s been built.
Phenomenal trail mix.
Yeah.
So that’s the bigger question.
Is there a phenomenon in God’s world that supreme being deity that is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent?
Are there any phenomenon in that type of world?
Yeah.
And with the receding horizon that certainly he’s not just bored as a God developing all
this stuff and designing everything.
I would think there has to be phenomenon there.
That’s the season four of The Good Place.
You can’t have heaven if you don’t have any progress possible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That’s interesting.
Well, phenomenon can’t be eradicated.
You can’t get rid of it.
You might be able to get rid of the evil, but you can’t get rid of the phenomenon.
Okay.
Perhaps.
So enjoy it, have fun with it.
It’s there.
Identify it, document it, but don’t worry about having to explain it or make it science.
You don’t have to make a phenomenon science.
Unless it really interests you.
Unless that’s something-
And if you do create it, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
It’s still there.
Maybe you’ve described it fully and if you can be the magician that can do this piece
and even develop a process so you can teach it to everybody else, that would be cool too.
And that changes the world.
That’s why we do this for fun, for the fun of it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
That’ll work.
Good.
All right.
Bye now.
Talk to you later.
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