Capitalism Couldn’t Exist Without Religion

Welcome to Capability Amplifier, the show for business owners and entrepreneurs who want high performance upgrades for their brains, bodies and bank accounts. Welcome to another episode of Capability Amplifier here today with Dan Sullivan. And Dan and I were talking about something that we're both fascinated by and frankly is a very challenging subject in today's environment. And that is how without religion, capitalism couldn't exist. And I want to just explore that with you. So let's just rip this scab right off and what's your view on this? And let's go down all the paths that we were talking about before we started rolling.

Yeah. Well, first of all, a little background on myself. I grew up Roman Catholic, actually. I'm not a religious person, but I am a godly person. In other words, ever since I was a kid, I've felt that I have a one to one connection with God and I feel it all the time. And some people said, you mean you believe in God? And I said, well, it's not actually a belief, it's actually an experience. And I said, but the experience doesn't make me anxious that I have to tell other people about this or I have to get them to have the experience. I said, it's just an experience I have and I'm comfortable with it. I haven't been to church really voluntarily, when I say voluntarily, when I went home to visit my mother, I would always go to church because, because it would bother her if I didn't go to church. And so out of respect, if I was staying in her house, that was part of the, you know, that was part of the hospitality and that was part of the, you know, to do it. And she knew it. And she asked me one day, she said, you don't go to church when you're not here, do you? And I said, no, I don't. And she said, can you explain why you don't go to church? And I said, yeah. I said, because the last 10 priests I've met, I thought they should come to me for advice.

And you know something? She said, I know what you mean. She said, I know what you mean, you know, so my mother was a wise woman, you know, But I just go back to your comment. There's something that's very, very necessary for capitalism to exist and that is that extraordinarily talented people are given an enormous amount of encouragement not only for their skills and not only for their achievements, but actually for their rewards. So we admire people, use their skills and use their talents to create something that really turns out big. And we honor Them. And capitalism is the only system in the history of the world that's actually done that. So the first step was actually Christianity, okay? I mean, you can go back further and further, and there's contributing ideas. Judaism contributed ideas, Greek culture contributed ideas, and then Roman culture. It's a synthesis of actually three thought systems. Judaism, Greek philosophy, and Roman law. The Romans were the great lawmakers. So, anyway, long story short, what it did, it conquered the envy situation. The most inhibiting emotion in society is envy, okay? And it's pervasive. It's so pervasive that nobody wants to talk about it, okay? And I just like to talk about the difference between envy and jealousy, because people often use these interchangeably.

Yeah, let's do that.

So, Mike, you have something, for example, you know, all your skill sets and your ability to put together productions. And I'm jealous of you. And I want to have that, okay? I want to have that. And that can actually trigger me to improve myself, because I can drop back and say, well, you can't have what Mike has because you haven't gone through the learning, you haven't gone through the training. You haven't really committed yourself to it. So jealousy can actually be a positive thing. Envy never is. Envy never is. And what envy is, I see you have this, and I want you to lose it. I want it to be taken away from you, for example, you may very well achieve this. And if you make a lot of money, I just want all the money that you make from your achievements taken away from you. So I want you to lose your incentive from being better than me. Anything that makes you better than me, I want you to lose the incentive to do that so I can feel level with. And it doesn't make me feel good. It does make me feel good, but I want you to feel bad. That's envy.

That's interesting. I was thinking, as you're saying, that this would be an interesting test.

And, you know, some of the candidates in this political election, it's just pure politicized, institutionalized envy. I was thinking there shouldn't be any billionaires in the United States. Two or three of them have voiced this sentiment.

It's super fascinating. I just got a little bubble in my head. And this is just a. We have to go off on a little tangent. But trial attorneys are sort of an institutionalized mechanism to create and reinforce envy.

Oh, yeah, right.

I had never thought of that through that lens before. But that's really fascinating.

So here's the thing, and here's the mechanism that I just want to get the mechanisms in here and then we can range far and wide with this. The way that Christianity actually created the bypass to envy was actually heaven. They created a thing called heaven. Okay? Now, none of the religions had a really well established concept. You know, some people believed, you know, what happens after you die. And you know, if you take Judaism, you take the Greeks, you know, it was kind of loose. But actually Christianity, and I'm talking about Catholicism for the first probably thousand years. And then actually Protestantism is actually the one that really took capitalism and made capitalism a really big deal. But what they said was life on this planet is basically good luck and bad luck, depending a roll of the dice. You can be born emperor or you can be born a slave, and you should be okay with that. And it's left up to you what you want to do with it. But guess what? When you die, both the slave and the emperor are equal before God. And actually the emperor may be a second class citizen, depending on how he lived his life, and the slave may be a first class citizen heaven. So what they did is they created this mechanism that you would be able to put up with inequality, you'd be able to put up with superiority, inferiority in this lifetime. And that freed you up to actually approve of someone else's life, even though it was completely unequal to your life. Okay? And what it meant is really great talent and really great achievement could actually blossom in society and fully create society. And then you see this upswing, real upswing in material progress, you know, and everything else. But it's because of that promise that there's a reckoning. This is just stage one, you get stage two. So I wonder what you feel about that.

So interesting. So like you, so I was raised Catholic and I was sent through 12 years of parochial education. And I never resonated and that the messaging didn't resonate with me, that was one thing. And the delivery mechanism that was part. And it was combined with authoritarianism. That's the way it felt to me. I felt institutionalized. And it's just my character didn't like that. So as I was listening to you, I didn't look at it through a framework of managing society. And I think the question I want to ask you, just as a clarifying question, is you did say there's a distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism and Protestantism, and what is that distinction? And how did that affect capitalism? And about when was there a noticeable shift that I think will help me answer the question so we can go Deeper.

Well, almost every event in history is chicken and egg. You can say this is the egg and it produced this chicken, or this is the chicken that produced that egg. So it's hard to say, but there's a number of events which facilitated it and that was that. First of all, in the Catholic religion you have intermediaries between you and God. You have priests, bishops and Pope. You know, it's a three way. So you've got a.

You could even say the brothers fit in there somewhere too. Oh yeah, we had brothers and our priests.

Yeah, yeah. But there's like a hierarchical. And this was inherited from the Roman Empire, you know, the Pope as the emperor, and then you have senators who are like bishops, and then you have local officials. So there was a political structure that was inherited in Catholicism. The people in Europe who created Protestantism, which were mainly northern Germans, Scandinavians, low country, these were the most prosperous part of Europe. And as a question, did this desire for economic freedom actually create the Reformation or was it the Reformation that actually freed up the thing? So it's both, you know, I mean, both things happen. But there was a movement to say, nope, each individual actually has a direct relationship with God that you work out. And actually God admires people who are really industrious, people who take their skills and actually create new things that benefit God.

Called the three talents parable, for example.

Yeah, and that was the real break. And even today the European Union doesn't work simply because if you divide the European Union between the countries that were Protestant, turn Protestant and the former Catholic things, the rich are in the north, in the Protestant lands and the Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, everything else. They've never really been able to balance budget, you know, they've never been able to turn a profit, you know, and anyway, but it was that Protestantism and the other thing that came about was the printing press because basically 1455, the Catholic Church controlled all the means of printing. First of all, they didn't like people reading because it was independent. Who knows what people are thinking when they're reading. And Gutenberg, Luther is not possible unless you have Gutenberg and Luther, one of the four or five main Protestant pioneers, entrepreneurs, if you will. He was actually a religious entrepreneur. He had pamphlets. What they did is they just created a big broadsheet on both sides and then they just folded it into 16 parts and it was like a brochure. And all of Protestantism was actually spread through the brochures. Tell you, I mean, everybody talks about exponential growth here. Gutenberg's 1455 in the German, what became the Protestant areas within 30 years, there were 40,000 presses. Pretty fast growth.

Early Internet.

Yeah. And that was the vehicle. But ever since then there's been a movement in Christian religion towards that. You don't go through intermediaries, you go one to one. And the United States is a country that was really created on Protestant basis. Basis and not Catholic basis. It's the first purely kind of Protestant country. And it's really interesting because what I realize is that I'm actually a non church going Protestant. I believe I have this one to one religion. So there's no need to someone to take a cut between me and God. Yeah. So it's very entrepreneurial.

Yeah.

What I'm saying is quite apart from the religion and whether you believe in this, there were certain intellectual structures that people bought into. And it wasn't until you had the promise of afterlife that you would put up with inequality in this life and you would put up with other people being much greater than you and much better and you would sort of enjoy someone else's success because it kind of gave you ideas on what you could do great. And that's purely without the religious background to that, it would never have happened.

So there's a few directions we can go with this. One of them, I'm curious through your lens, how much of this was intentional Capitalism versus accidental capitalism? In other words, was capitalism a byproduct of these belief systems and just the development and the lack of envy, which also can lead to murder for sure, if you don't have laws and a legal system to take away that which is not yours.

What's your perspective?

Well, I think it's hard to know. I think it was intentional on the part of individuals. I don't think it was intentional, a societal intentionality.

Or an institution.

Or an institution. I think it was just one of.

The way to keep the workers from killing us and taking us.

You can really see this in the States that right now we have this identity politics which says that certain groups, because they were, you know, disadvantaged in the past, they should be given extra advantages in the future. And America as a country just simply doesn't agree with this. And what I would say the emergence of various minority groups in the history of the United States, you always had to have an individual who came forward and in spite of skin color, in spite of ethnic background was successful. And then it became normal. And I'll give you an example of how fast the gay movement has gone Forward in about 25 years. My feeling is that there was enough of a critical mass of gay people who it was known that they were gay, who were people's friends. And they said, well, you know, he's our friend, you know, that it became normal, it became normal. And therefore, you know, whether they were gay or not didn't matter. They were our friends, you know, it didn't matter anymore than you came from Germany and I came from Italy. It didn't really, really matter. And America has a real looseness about it, which kind encourages that. But the whole notion that you can move forward as a group, Americans reject that. Well, it was until Jackie Robinson as a single baseball player makes it into the major league. But not only does he make it into the major league, he's better than all the white players in almost every respect. And people said, okay. And then you get this little black boys who are watching Jackie Robinson, they said, you know, I'm going to play ball, I'm going to play ball. And that's how it comes up. But it's always the US really encourages an individual to actually emerge. And if that emerges, then that can become a symbol for other people. But we do not move groups forward as a whole. You got to do it on an individual basis. Because the entire basis of America is individualism. The one religious concept that I really, really love, and it comes from the Southern Baptists. There's only two American relig religions that actually have no origins anywhere on the planet. One of them is Southern Baptist and the other one is lds. Yeah, it's Mormon, Latter Day Saints. These are totally American religions. It's very interesting actually. There's two truths and the Mormons have this marvelous concept that truth is where you find it. So if other people have truths, they say that's where the truth comes from. So the Mormons have this enormous flexibility regarding truths that other people who are not Mormons have created. And they said truth is where you find it. Which I think is a marvelous concept. And the other one is a Southern Baptist. This is a minister Cummings who comes from around 1890. He had a concept which is called faith competency. That every human being is born fully equipped to have a one on one direct relationship with God. And that's a very, very American concept. And it's very entrepreneurial when you think about it. So my feeling is that there's a lot of bad related to religion. Okay? But I will tell you this, that the people who hate religion most also hate individualism most.

All right, Go deeper on that one.

Because they want there to be group Identity and individualism.

So it comes down to control.

Comes down to control, which is fear driven.

And fear of what? What do you think the inherent. And I'll go so far as to say character trauma might be, or character fear.

You mean the people who fear individual. It's innovation. It's like big corporations, you know, this thing. Like big corporations, like little businesses. They hate little businesses.

So I'm gonna just ask another question, which is at the core, do you think that there is a certain character type the way we're born? So think of it like a beehive where there's 80% workers are born and there's a certain amount. Do you think that's character from out of the womb? Or is that. Are we born entrepreneurs? Are we born with individualized thinking? Or is that caused by some sort of trauma or environmental thing? What's your perspective on that?

Well, I've been following this because I've been coaching entrepreneurs for 45 years. So I look at the percentages. I mean, use things like, under what tax category does this individual fall? You know, and it's Never more than 5% of the population that technically you would call it an entrepreneur. In other words, if they don't sell, they don't eat. You know, that's my basic definition of an entrepreneur. If you don't sell something, you don't eat. It's about 5% of the general population, I think, is willing to hit the marketplace head on. People who want to be employed want buffers between themselves in the marketplace. Okay, but you and I, I mean, right from, you know, being conscious that we're human have been.

I was absolutely born this way.

I was totally happy to hit the marketplace because I had a confidence that I could sell something. And the biggest confidence was that I could see things from the point of view of the buyer. Everybody talks about selling technique. It's not a selling technique. You just have an unusual ability to cross over, get inside of somebody else's head, and see the world from their point. So you can line up your talents and skills with what this individual would be willing to pay for.

Right. I know what you're thinking. I know what you want. I know how to communicate a message that will appeal to you. So you raise your hand and are willing to open up your wallet and understand the value of the exchange. So I think he answered the question, which is born this way.

Yeah, I think it's born.

I have a tendency to believe that.

Can be forced by circumstances, that there's just no employment. But I find they're very reluctant and they're kind of angsty entrepreneurs. The ones who are forced into entrepreneurs, you see a lot of it in franchise owner, because they're halfway creatures. They want a kind of corporate identity, so they buy into it. Now, among corporate franchise owners, there's franchise owners and then there's people who own 50 franchises. They're an entrepreneur.

Well, I think this does tie into the whole concept that you've shared in the past, the idea of wealth redistribution. So I'll do my variation of what I remember, but it's essentially if you take away, whether you tax or however you do, you take away. And it doesn't take too long until the entrepreneurs and the environment have 80% again. But you've got a much more articulate way of communicating that. What is the.

Well, here's the thing. And it has to do with I believe in individualism, but I believe that, you know, in other words, I'm very comfortable inside my own skin. I always have been, and I've always been fairly confident about my ability to make my way in new circumstances and, you know, to be thrown up against challenges I haven't seen before. And I have a lot of confidence that I can come out the other side smarter and actually more successful. So I have that. And I think that this is what we were talking about, being born entrepreneur. I think that's the thing you're born with. You only need your training wheels for a very short period of time in life, and then you can cycle alone. But the big thing on the income thing, and, you know, there is no justice in life, but there are negotiations.

And if you got a set of rules that kind of mean, you know, we got to split some of the rewards here. That doesn't come from justice. That comes from negotiations. Some of it's called a strike. There are all the.

Yeah, whatever the mechanism.

Whatever the mechanism, you work out. And part of the reason is that a lot of my ability to be successful really comes from general systems that have been paid for by other people. Okay. I don't have any problem with tax, but when it seems to be punitive tax, in other words, I'm not being taxed because the money is needed to actually create general systems that support everyone. I have no problem with that. General.

We'll call it social stability and social responsibility and infrastructure and progress.

What are the factors and conditions for progress? We know that safer places are more prosperous, so you have to have cops. We know that things that have general services like transportation and, you know, when fires start they don't spread and everything else. So we have this electricity is a really good one. You know, no individual creates their own electricity, you know, so there's a vast system. And the thing is that we're. Yes, we're individuals, but actually I benefit enormously. My brain gets better because I'm in touch with your brain and I can extend that, you know, my brain. You hope it's good enough when you're born, you know. You know, I've got a good enough brain. You know, I've got a good enough brain. And what I mean by that, it's been good enough at age 75 that I can still reach out and discover brand new things about life because I just came in contact with another human brain, which means I'm still growing, but I call that connection of my brain to all the other brains, my mind. So I make a distinction between brain and mind. And this is where I think Silicon Valley is really going wrong with their whole emphasis on enhancing the human brain. Yeah. Their IQ is going to go up three times, but they're still living in their mother's basement and they can't get a date.

Yeah, right, right.

The problem isn't their brain. The problem is they don't know how to connect with other human brains.

Yeah. Which is a mind activity. I get that. That's really fascinating. It's a great distinction. So I want to bring this back because this would be a great time to circle back to organized religion and justice, Envy, jealousy, mind. Which now we're kind of getting almost spiritual.

Yeah.

And your relationship.

Why don't we just establish that spiritual as normal. But people can get off track and get bogged down outside of spirit, which.

Is the equivalent of bureaucracy.

Yeah. Everybody says, oh, this is kind of spiritual. And I said, well, let's just start with the premise that it's all spiritual and you kind of go AWOL for periods of time when there's no spiritualness in your life. And you usually call that all your problems is when, you know, it's like when the power goes out, life gets really, really hard for the next two or three days. Yeah, that's. And a lot of people, their whole life has been life without any power whatsoever. Yeah, yeah.

So I think getting back to this notion of jealousy, envy, and let's just take on a social topic right now that's very big, especially in an election year, which is this notion of healthcare, particularly what's going on with a multi trillion dollar healthcare. And I was talking to someone who's at the Same conference we're at right now yesterday. And the estimate for the next 10 years to pay for healthcare in the United states is around $50 trillion, which is. I can't remember if he said it was either going to be half or more than all of the GDP of America up till this point. Something along that line. It was a tremendous number. Let's assume it's either all of or half of. And where's this going to come from?

I mean, first of all, a lot of it's already embedded cost. The costs are already paying. I think the big shift over probably happened during my lifetime. So I was born in 44, you know, it was real basic, you know, I mean, in 1944, you hope that your doctor had a good bedside manner because he didn't bring any other skill sets with him. So one of the things you've created an entire profession and it's a segregated profession, and that it just favors one kind of medicine. And that's been true since around the 18. Allopathic medicine, which is basically MDS. That wasn't true. You had naturopaths before that. You had osteopaths and everything like that. And it only became when this group became a concentrated professional group, I would say probably between the two world wars, because war always moves medical and health practices forward. Okay, because you have some real crises. Battlefield medicine is probably the lead innovative force in the entire medical field.

And it's technology force, because you're presented.

With injuries and diseases and everything else that force a growth of knowledge and skill. And my sense is that it was the two world wars that really got medicine established as a real profession. And all professions become very jealous of their territory. And they also attract an incredible number of credentialed mediocrities. The moment you establish credentials, you've given lifetime income to mediocre people because they've got the credential. They don't have any skill, they don't have a passion. They just have credentials, you know, and what they do is they don't want you to know about anything that would call their credentials into, you know, I mean, lawyers are the same, accountants are the same, engineers are the same, architects are the same, Movie directors are the same. You know, I mean, everybody who develops a capability faces an issue. Do they want to protect their status or would they like to transform themselves into something else? I would say only 5% of really talented and educated people really are transformative. The others, they've achieved a status. And then it's about defending your status against any Innovation.

So would it be fair to say if I just make the big mental jump, that the big challenge we have right now, let's say medicine as we know it, a lot of what is in place right now, which is disease.

Management, that's totally disease management.

It is not a forward moving transformative health or longevity focus that came from war times, brought in credentialed professionals who wish to protect their own. And then that became institutionalized, which is where we are right now, with massive insurance that is deeply in bed with government, with big bureaucracy protecting its own.

Yeah. Now what I would say is that, you know, and first of all, everything you've just said is absolutely true and far more than people actually know. I mean, the spades. But just to loop it back again, a loop back to why religion became very unpopular. Because what you're talking about, the disease management system, you could be describing the Catholic Church five centuries ago. 5. And in Europe, right up until recent point. So it's the bureaucratic embedding of status that will brick no innovation will brick no negotiation. That's really the issue. It's the tendency toward bureaucracy, which is 180 degrees from entrepreneurism. Okay. We had a podcast where we went through your six stages where you started, then you create another company, then you create another company, and then you create another company. My sense is you were getting stifled because things were getting a little bit too organized where you were. And then you headed for the door. You headed for the door with a new idea.

My organization outgrew me and I outgrew its capacity to evolve. And it didn't need my creativity any longer. What it needed was operational excellence.

Yeah, yeah. And I would say that, you know, where religion has become bad is when it has started to punish the entrepreneurism that actually created it. Right. Yeah. I mean, Jesus, you know, if you look at Christianity, Jesus was like the McDonald brothers and St. Paul was Ray Kroc. Oh, yeah. It would have just been another Life of Brian. Remember the Monty Python, the Life of Brian. And they had stalls. All the messiahs had stalls, you know, and Jesus was not seen at the time. I mean, there were 20 Jesuses, you know, there. And you know, I mean, every one.

Of them is jizai for plural.

Yeah. St. Paul was the genius that it wasn't Jewish and he could take it all through the Roman cause. The Roman Empire was the big scaling system at that time. And he was a Roman citizen. And he spoke Greek, spoke Latin in addition to Aramaic. He was the great franchisor. And I mean, there's a great story. It's actually one of St. Paul's epistles. And it's to the Athenians. And Athenians were very, very sophisticated. I mean, that's where Greek philosophy came from. Plato, Aristotle. And he goes into the marketplace in Athens and he said, I notice you have a statue here to the. It's not a statue, it's just a big black. And was a statue to the unknown God. And he said, I'm here to tell you who it is.

He just entered. You know, we were talking great copywriting yesterday here at the Genius Network. And the trick is, for anybody who's a great communicator is just to enter into a conversation that a person's already having in their head.

That's right.

So they're saying, you know, the unknown God. The unknown God.

You just put a sticker on top, call it Jesus.

And he'll be like, I just want to complete the circle here. Got this unknown God. And it's good, but it's just a placeholder. Now I'm going to tell you what the real God is. You know, I mean, if you go back and it's almost sacrilegious if you talk about Jesus being the McDonald brothers and St. Paul, but the structure, I mean, there's human structures and how you scale things. And I don't care what you're scaling, I don't care what you're innovating, what you're scaling. It has to take the same form because this is how nature, this is how evolution scales.

And it turned out that the Roman Empire had a great operating system which was conquer and conquest.

And they had a great legal system. You know, I mean, everybody thinks about the, you know, that was all masters and slaves, but they actually had a great, first of all, protection of personal property. And that's another aspect. You don't have capitalism unless you got the right to personal property. Every Roman soldier and the ability to defend it. Yeah, every Roman soldier basically went into the army when they were about 15. And if they made it through all the troubles, you got out at 40. And you got basically in today's importance probably 150 acres of land as a report. And that was yours. That was yours. You know, unfortunately, they took over a lot of other people's land so they could hand out new ownership. Yeah, but I like to go back and say, well, quite from it being religion or this and everything, is there a structure here that's just a universal structure? And I think capitalism has just taken every kind of universal structure that's ever worked every place on the planet. And it's kind of put it into a system that individuals can access.

Right, right, yeah. So it's a Borg, like infrastructure. Did you ever watch Star Trek, Next Generation?

The Borg?

Because that's basically what capitalism is. Let's just grab the best stuff.

Well, nobody, nobody argues about capitalism. I mean, and you have silly people, but they live as capitalists. I mean, there's nobody who's anti capitalist whose whole life isn't based on being a greater capitalist achiever. I mean, it was like this young woman from Brooklyn, this aoc, Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. And she's anti capitalist, but she's the American success story. So I said, what she has to do. She won one election, and now she's consulted on everything in the news media. Her next thing now is to lose the next election and get a 10 million contract on the network television and then write books and she should have a fashion line, she should have a perfume. I said, she's just in the American success system. You know, she wants to believe that she's going to correct America. I said, come on, come on, come on. I mean, you're like Renee Zellweger. Renee. She gets boxed in with her voice and her face. So she disappears for five years and comes back a totally new person. And she's likely to win the Academy Award. Oh, this is American as apple pie.

I tell you, reinvention is the great American capability.

I completely agree. And having an environment it can happen in. So I want to circle this back around to the basis of what we started with here. And I want to see what we've accomplished and thought through. So we've got. Because the original concept is religion created an environment that capitalism could survive and live in.

Yeah, and grow.

Yes.

Yeah, that's right.

And there is, and this is a question because it is the question of has the media created a hypnotic effect? In other words, is capitalism as we know it at risk? Just as we know that religion, at least certain organized religions, have been decreasing in terms of their growth. However, LDS is the fastest growing Christian religion on earth right now. Apparently now that's not in the United States, but worldwide.

Not just Christian religion, religion, period. It's 7% per year. And I calculate by 2100, you're talking about 1 billion, which would match basically Catholicism right now. And they have a better business model than Catholicism ever did. You know, and, you know, I tell people, I mean, everybody's concerned about radical Islam. I said, what about Mormonism? I Mean, and, you know, I admire enormously what they've done. You know, I always have a very significant proportion of LDs in strategic coach. And they love coach, you know, especially with our time system, because they have three things they have to take care of. Business, family, and the community. Because they're all part of a growing community.

Right, right.

Very admirable, actually. It's a very admirable religion. Yeah.

Yeah. I happen to agree. I married into a Judaism, as you know, and that's a very similar, I'd say, value system in terms of value of education, family, community.

Yep, community, everything.

And. Yeah, the whole deal. And. And historically being able to capitalize on intellectual property and the value of intellectual property. And look at where. How the entertainment business developed, which is no property, no land. If you can stand on a stump and perform in front of an audience, that's what Jesus Christ did. You never can forget. He was a nice Jewish boy after all. So bringing it back, though.

Well, you know how Jesus was God. You know, this is really interesting. He worked in the family business. Yep. He lived at home until he was 30 and his mother thought he was God.

Yeah. But there is that tradition, and a lot of Christians forget that has the Jewish roots, you know, The Jewish roots. I mean, here's the thing. Any development in history, you can say things started here, but it's not true because you have to go back to what the streams were that made this river, you know, and there's a lot of streams that came through in Christianity, but it was kind of like a node that got developed. And, you know, history demands different things from institutions as they go along, and they can get so boxed in with their present form that they don't make the leap to the next one. But my sense is, I'm very interested in anything that allows individuals to actually distinguish themselves if they have the ambition and not be penalized for. Because in distinguishing themselves, they always create new things that benefit everybody else.

Right.

You know, and I don't think they should be punished by people who are envious of them. Right. And especially when that envy becomes institutionalized and you have the power of government to enforce envy. I would say, if there's a great danger now, that. But historically, envy's always been thought a really bad thing that you should be embarrassed by. And my feeling is that when you have a situation that you're going to penalize unusually successful people and you have the power of government behind it, this is not going to have a happy ending.

No. And I would say there's a Direct relationship in comparison now to what has become the woke culture and also the bully environment that social media has enabled, which is. And again, this will sound a little controversial. I believe that you earn the right to vote in a social media environment. That is the next good evolution of where it should go to, which is not every anonymous idiot should be given a vote of any value. In other words, make it invisible. You have to earn the right to be visible and have value, just like a strong personal platform. And that could be interpreted any number of ways, which is, are you a productive member of society? And what's the value of a vote? Who's granted it? And you go back to what even the way, boy, this enters into a very murky environment. I'm aware of that. But that to me right now is where envy culture, you know, people will start behaving like bad animals if they don't understand history.

Yeah.

And that's what we've been seeing with an entire generation of anxiety ridden children in an envy culture.

Historically, there have been what I would call sacrificial generations. And that is, it's kind of like running sheep over a minefield, you know, because you, you just want a clearer path so you can get by. And sheep, you know, you don't really do it. You know, and young people have always been the sacrificial sheep. World War I, if you ever saw that great Peter Jackson film where he took the.

Yeah. Where he colorized.

Where he colorized. But he slowed them down and then he got lip synchers to actually give voice to what. Because it was silent movies in those times, there was no sound recording during the First World War. And what you found out is most of the soldiers were in that battle because their buddies went and they didn't know what the war was about. They captured Germans and the Germans didn't know what it was about. But what strike you is that they were as young as 15 years old. 15, 16, 17. I mean, a lot of them lied to get in. You know, they lied to get in, but they had no comprehension of what it was and they just wasted all these humans. And actually we're still suffering from the unsatisfactory results of that first war. The Middle east is entirely a product of the First World War and everything like that. So my feeling like the so called millennial generation. And by the way, I find every generation is divided into two parts. There's the half that thinks the other half are idiots. So I've met millennials who think the other millennials are idiots. It's not like they're a unified group here.

I'd never belong a club. Have me as the member, you know. You know. So my sense is that I think the monials are an unfortunate generation, but so was the generation that was wiped out in the first World War. Think of how many died in Vietnam or who were totally maimed psychologically. With Vietnam they're sacrificial generations and life is really rough and tumble. Yeah.

So I'm going to ask you.

It's not for everyone. It isn't.

And what I want to do is let's summarize our takeaway and our lessons learned.

This has been great. I've enjoyed this, surely.

Oh yeah. This is a great mixture of some terrifying topics, frankly. You know, it'll be like you could generate a lot of hate from having conversations like this.

Yeah, but Mike, why do we care?

Yeah, we get to create. This is amazing.

We can't get fired.

No, I love my life. Yeah, this is great. So my big takeaway from this, I had never really thought through just that simple distinction between envy and jealousy before or the relationship I hadn't thought of. And this is just my projection on this is the Roman Empire as an operating system and the relationship with medicine and thinking about it as disease prevention and also how envy and bureaucracy or disease management.

We want the disease, but we want to manage it into cash flow.

And it was Andrew Weil yesterday at this event talked about the fact that originally through his lens anyway, that the medical profession was never intended to be. Let's see, he framed it in a way that I found palatable, which is effectively, it was.

I found his whole presentation very positive and very broad minded. I mean he had a very broad minded approach to this and he was up to new things. You could tell he's really up to new things.

And I'm not sure how old he is, but he's got a very fresh brain and a fresh approach to thinking. So just to frame you, the listener here, we're at Genius Network annual event right now. Dr. Andrew Weil spoke and he really talked about the fact through his perspective. The medical profession has been bastardized for decades because now it's driven by profit, a profit motive and it was always intended to heal. And he also talked about the importance and value of, of integrative medicine and so we'll call it non allopathic and the benefits of that. And as you were talking about, you know, it wasn't too long ago when there were many, many forms of medicine like now shamanism is making a huge resurgence with plant medicine, for example, because we've proven scientifically of its benefits. So going back here, I can't help but think about, and this would be another topic for another conversation about when we see a decline in religion or whether it's Protestantism or whatever, how does that affect capitalism and entrepreneurism? And has anyone ever charted or graphed a relationship between the mindsets, the numbers, the math, and abundance, progress and wealth? I'd be really fascinated to see something like that. So what's your take on this conversation?

Well, you know, my sense is, you know, people being anti capitalist is like fish having a problem with the water. You know, I mean, there is no other system except capitalism. I mean, if they had an alternative and they were anti capitalist, I could understand.

Socialism depends on capitalism in order to survive. Socialism.

Socialism is a creature of capitalism.

You know, I think it's a byproduct of not understanding history and not actually being a productive member of society and thinking that something comes from nothing. But anyway, keep going.

Socialism, I think actually answers your question. What's happening with religion when it fades and the compassion? I mean, there's sort of a compassionate part of religion that if you don't have religion, it's got to go somewhere. And I think there's a compassionate part of socialism. You know, like, you know, I've met people are really socialists and they're really empathetic. They really feel it isn't an anger against rich people at anger. It's a real concern that if you don't have a credit card and you don't have a credit rating, you don't qualify as a human being. You know, so I mean, more and more we live in a world of economic values and economic measuring sticks about your worth as a human being. I mean, we all do this as entrepreneurs. You know, I keep score, you know, when we made a million dollars for the first time, and then when it was 10 million, I kept score and everything else. And because scorecards are important for progress, but it's not the value system, you know, it's. The whole thing is, can I get on the other side and see through the other person's eyes to see what kind of future they're trying to create? And can I create things that help the person actually do that? So my sense is, and you've brought this subject up a lot of, you know, your brain frequenc. And my sense is that there's places in capitalism that you don't want to be, you know, and there's places in capitalism that are producing great breakthroughs for human life and everything else. So, you know, I mean, I think about it as a jungle. You know, everybody's a creature in the jungle, and there's some parts of the jungle you just don't want to go. You know, don't go to the water hole at sunrise and sunset because that's when the predators go down to the.

Yeah, right, right.

You know, well, same thing in capitalism. It was just simp places that you don't want to go in capitalism. And it's common knowledge if you go there, you've disregarded a lot of warnings. And anyway, but I really love that we broke open this subject and I have a prediction that we've had podcasts where we get a huge rating, and I think this one is going to spike right off the screen.

Yeah, this is exciting. I can't wait to see what happens.

Here for the next month. You think Jesus was the McDonald brothers?

And that was what I was thinking about, too, as we were going through this. There's an enormous amount of nuance to this conversation. So if you're offended by something, first of all, you're probably a communist. No, not at all. But seriously, I think after knowing you and hearing some of your stories and also your thought processes, it's taken me years to understand how deeply you think and also understanding how you structure your speech and how you communicate. And if you're a new listener and a new learner to Dan Sullivan and his work and you haven't read his books, reading them and understanding the structure and then being able to go back to this, I think is valuable and important.

Thank you. Thank you.

So let's wrap up this episode officially because I know we've got another one we're going to tear into. But seriously, we really enjoy spending time with each other, spending time with you. So thank you for spending time with us. Will you head over to itunes right now to rate the Capability Amplifier show? Every rating and review helps spread the message and create more empowered entrepreneurs like you. And if you've already done that, please share this episode with a friend who you know can benefit from Capability Amplifier. And if you have any questions or suggestions, head over to capabilityamplifier.com there you can leave us an audio message and Dan and I listen to everybody. Single one of them. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you soon.