Episode Transcript
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0:00
Here we are sitting at your desk where we got
0:02
together and recorded a bunch of episodes last year. I'm
0:05
seeing these little sheets of paper. Remember
0:07
when I gave you these sheets of paper? Yeah, little
0:09
brown Swiss house or whatever? Chalet.
0:12
Chalet, my bad. Yeah. You
0:14
haven't cleaned here for a while. Shut up. No,
0:16
it's like artifacts. The historian in me loves that you
0:18
just left it untouched. Oh, yeah, okay.
0:21
We'll go with that.
0:29
It's like your archaeology. The further
0:31
you go down in the layers on the desk,
0:33
the more further back in time you go. Right?
0:36
That's right, yeah. There's history in here. There is. Nice
0:38
place you got. Okay, well, let's have another
0:41
conversation. You heard about this Sentinel
0:43
Island thing? Sentinel sounds
0:45
like a robot that you use
0:46
to guard a place. But
0:50
I have heard of Sentinel Island. It's somewhere
0:53
in the...
0:54
where is that? Is that in Asia? Yeah, Bay
0:57
of Bengal. Okay, that's near
0:59
India? Yes. Okay. And
1:02
Sentinel Island, North Sentinel Island
1:04
specifically is the one that's in question for this
1:07
conversation, is a part
1:09
of an island chain that looks like to me,
1:12
the naked eye, is a part of another island chain that
1:14
runs north to south, closer to
1:16
Laos and Thailand and Myanmar. It
1:19
wouldn't look where it's sitting. It doesn't look like it would be
1:21
a part of India. But
1:22
a good chunk of it apparently is controlled by
1:24
India, including this one little
1:27
circle-shaped jungle-looking island
1:30
called North Sentinel
1:32
Island. And this is where you probably have heard
1:34
of it before our conversation today. There
1:37
is a people group there who are
1:39
overwhelmingly untouched by modernity.
1:42
They're
1:42
not connected to civilization in
1:44
any way. Okay. Where
1:46
does that take your brain? Well,
1:49
they've seen airplanes. They had to have
1:51
seen airplanes. Yeah,
1:54
about that though. What? In 1953
1:56
or 56, India... passed
2:00
an act entirely
2:02
dedicated to the preservation of
2:05
non-contact with these people. I
2:07
think that included air traffic. You
2:10
can't go close. It's five nautical miles
2:12
for any kind of boat. The whole
2:14
idea was to create this non-contact
2:17
bubble where they would not see or
2:19
be exposed
2:21
to the outside world. Are they technically
2:23
citizens of India? Well, that's interesting.
2:26
I dug into that a little bit. Well, first of all,
2:28
does this island, is it owned by India? It's
2:30
owned kind of by India
2:33
as much as it's ever agreed
2:35
to be owned by India. Okay. I mean,
2:37
really, doesn't somebody there have to sign
2:40
off on it at some point for them to be
2:42
Indians? And I don't think anybody
2:44
ever has. So it's
2:46
an island with a people group ranging
2:48
somewhere between 40 and 400 and
2:51
so many inhabitants there are, but how would you know it's thick
2:53
jungle? You can't go on there.
2:55
A few people tried way back in
2:57
earlier times. Somebody violated
3:00
the rules a while back with a helicopter and
3:02
they fired arrows and threw spears at
3:04
it. And so we have images of
3:06
some Sentinelese tribesmen, but
3:09
the people on the island threw spears
3:11
at helicopters at
3:12
a helicopter, a helicopter. Okay.
3:15
Like they got close enough to try to land and they thought they
3:17
would hit the helicopter or they were just like, Hey, you're
3:20
a thousand feet in the air and I'm gonna throw the spear at
3:22
you. The image I saw, it looked like it was a closer
3:24
swing than that. You have your computer there? I do. Just
3:27
pull that up. Go Sentinel Island helicopter
3:30
or something like that. I think you'll be able to see the images. Okay.
3:32
They're, I mean,
3:34
they pop up around the internet once
3:36
every year or two when people are talking
3:39
about interesting things and mysteries of
3:41
the world. This Sentinel
3:43
Island comes up. Did you get it? Oh, so
3:45
you got some, some guys here on the beach.
3:49
These are the warriors. Okay. Got big
3:51
spears, got long bows. They have
3:53
long bows. Okay.
3:56
Is that an at-lattle the one guy
3:58
has there? I can't tell. It's
4:00
kind of grainy. And so yeah, so this is
4:03
a low elevation shot. So somebody
4:05
got pretty close and this is, this
4:08
is the head on look of somebody aiming
4:10
a bow at you, a long bow. And not only like
4:13
aiming it at you, but this is somebody that knows how to use it. It's
4:15
like the long bows at an angle. You can, I don't
4:18
know, you can just kind of tell that this person knows what
4:20
they're doing with the bow. And if you
4:23
saw Avatar 2 recently,
4:25
you know that long bows are the ideal
4:27
weapon for taking down helicopters.
4:30
Yeah. I learned that recently. I haven't
4:32
watched that. I can't miss. Every single time. I
4:34
haven't watched that. Why even have a helicopter? I'm
4:36
also seeing a picture of a boat here and it looks like
4:38
a pretty modern boat, or at least the construction
4:41
is made out of wood. Yeah.
4:43
So I'm gonna throw
4:45
a flag on the fact that they're never, they're
4:48
never contacted. Cause I'm looking at the construction
4:50
methods of this boat. Now I just recently
4:53
went to Peru and
4:54
I saw a boat, like
4:56
a dugout canoe right there on the side of the
4:58
Amazon river. Yeah. And
5:01
it looked less modern than
5:03
this boat that I'm seeing that apparently was taken from
5:05
a
5:06
photo from the air. I wonder if this boat like drifted
5:08
up on the island or something. Here's what happened.
5:10
I know what picture you're looking at. A few years back,
5:13
some fishermen got whipped into
5:15
a storm and ended up beached on
5:18
Sentinel Island. They were immediately killed and
5:20
efforts were made to recover the bodies. Now
5:22
my theory is, and I don't know this off the top
5:24
of my head, I'm sure you can Google it and figure it out right there. Those
5:27
helicopter shots of people on the island, I
5:30
bet that was authorities trying to verify
5:33
that those fishermen were indeed deceased.
5:37
So that boat might've been some sort of rescue
5:39
craft or life boat kind
5:42
of thing that ended up landing them on Sentinel
5:44
Island. I know of two visitors or
5:46
two groups of visitors, if you will, who have
5:48
set foot on Sentinel Island in recent
5:51
memory. And that is one of the incidents
5:53
with the fishermen. So I bet that's the boat you're looking at.
5:55
Really?
5:57
Okay. Very interesting. So
6:00
what are we talking about today? Well,
6:03
I want to go back to the very general question
6:05
I asked you a minute ago. Where
6:08
does that take you? Emotionally, like what questions
6:10
does that prompt for you? It's a really weird proposition,
6:13
isn't it? Well, prior
6:16
to 1999 or whenever The Matrix
6:18
was, the film came out,
6:20
I would say, you know, it would be
6:22
great to contact them, right? And,
6:24
you know, we probably have things that they, you
6:27
know, we've just discussed this in the past and
6:29
you said something like, hey, medicine or something.
6:31
What was your position?
6:33
We could take the medicine?
6:34
Yeah, I mean, we've talked before about the
6:37
ethics of reaching out to
6:39
a people group, a civilization
6:42
with reduced technology.
6:44
The basic question is, well, do you go
6:46
in there? Like surely they have cancer, everybody
6:49
has cancer. Well, we have some treatments
6:51
for cancer. How can we monsters
6:54
withhold treatments for cancer
6:56
and other diseases? We solved
6:58
all of that and they're dying from it. We could help
7:01
them.
7:02
Or is the ethical thing to say,
7:04
they wanna be left alone. They
7:06
are making their own way. They're solving their
7:08
own thing. To show up to quote unquote
7:11
help is to effectively end
7:14
their civilization experiment, because
7:16
it's over.
7:17
The second the Stone Age meets the
7:19
postmodern age and the advanced digital
7:21
age, that's not a fair fight. It's not
7:23
balanced. The one is just gonna devour the
7:25
other. So what do you do ethically? I think that's
7:27
a conversation we were having a while back. Yeah,
7:30
I'm reminded of several things. I'm
7:33
just gonna tell you the thing. You know how everybody
7:35
has their own life experience and
7:38
different things come to mind. I'm
7:40
just gonna tell you a few things that come to mind.
7:43
One of which is, there's
7:45
an old movie about the
7:47
Zulu, I think,
7:49
Shaka Zulu. And so,
7:51
he's this warrior in Africa
7:53
and the British
7:54
colonists come over the empire comes
7:57
over and there's this battle between these villages.
8:00
and these British that have machine
8:02
guns. And, you know, Chaka Zula is really good
8:05
with a short spear and he bangs a short spear on a
8:07
shield and, you know, just this
8:09
dichotomy between super
8:12
sophisticated modern technology. They could
8:14
smelt iron and they can make steel
8:16
and they can make guns and all that. And
8:18
you have this other side that has spears and stuff. That's
8:20
interesting.
8:21
Yeah, the Boer Wars, like the Dutch
8:23
as well in that part of the world. So
8:26
the part of Africa. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
8:28
sure. Yeah. And interesting clash.
8:30
Yeah, that's interesting. The other thing
8:32
it makes me think about is, I don't know where I saw
8:35
this, but there was a documentary about this one tribe.
8:38
I think they were in the Amazon
8:40
and part of their tradition, the
8:42
men
8:43
would wear these things. Here's a
8:45
content warning for parents
8:47
that may be in the third chair. Like if you have kids around,
8:50
I'm gonna give it about five seconds here. I don't know what
8:52
you're gonna talk about. Let's give them seven seconds. Seven seconds.
8:54
It's a doozy. Seven seconds. It's an image
8:56
that's not gonna go away. Okay. I mean, I
8:58
know what you're talking about. Is that enough time?
9:01
Is the second word in what you're about to describe
9:03
sheath? No. Oh, okay.
9:05
Well, it's the penis gourd. What?
9:09
How's that difference from a penis sheath? Well,
9:11
there's this, I don't, it was just called
9:13
a penis gourd. I don't know if it was National Geographic
9:15
or if
9:16
it was whatever it was, but I
9:18
remember watching a documentary. I've never
9:20
had a microphone conversation about penis attire
9:23
in my entire life
9:24
until right now. And I wanna thank you for
9:26
that. Well,
9:30
there's this tribe and
9:31
there's different things
9:34
that people wear and
9:36
some tribes, the
9:38
females will wear skirts, grass skirts
9:41
or whatever,
9:42
but this particular tribe, there's this thing
9:44
called a penis gourd.
9:45
And the men of the
9:47
village will take a, there's a long gourd
9:50
that grows near where they are.
9:52
They hollow it out and they take
9:54
a string and tie the string around their neck and
9:57
they hold the string out. And
10:00
and they put the gourd over their
10:02
penis and they tie
10:04
the string to the end of the gourd. And so it just holds
10:06
it there like that. Have you ever seen this? So
10:09
again, we cannot content-warn
10:12
hard enough for talking with the kids, but
10:14
I genuinely want to understand. So I'm gonna
10:16
ask question five, four, three, two,
10:18
one.
10:19
Is the idea that this function is almost like
10:22
foot binding or other long-term alterations
10:24
to physiology where they're trying to change the
10:26
penis? No, no, not at all. It's just
10:29
a way to conceal from honesty is my understanding.
10:31
And so- But then how does the
10:33
string factor in instead of like a belt? I
10:36
don't know. I just feel like you're judging mighty hard right now.
10:38
This is a cultural thing. And
10:40
if you don't understand this, that's on you. You're right. But
10:45
one thing that's interesting is the place
10:47
it took my mind is there was a moment when
10:49
a group
10:51
of researchers, or I don't know if they were linguists,
10:53
what they are, they went into this village
10:56
and
10:57
they had a, do you remember back in the
10:59
80s, there were these old
11:01
plastic flashlights and you would open the
11:03
top of the flashlight, had an old lamp, like a filament
11:06
lamp. Yes. And you put two
11:08
C size or D size batteries
11:11
in there. Like the cheapest generic
11:13
red flashlight. Yes. Yeah,
11:16
with a white switch, with little lines
11:18
across it to grip on the- And a little plastic lens-like
11:21
thing over the lamp. Absolutely, yes, we were talking about
11:23
the same thing. Yeah, and I'm not so sure that modern
11:26
children will know the flashlight we're talking
11:28
about, but you know what I'm talking about. And so- Or
11:31
torches. Yeah. For listeners
11:33
in the UK and UK influenced world. Yeah, and so the
11:36
people that were there from the, I'll say the modern
11:38
world,
11:39
which, you know, who's to judge,
11:41
but you know, the people that had access to plastic
11:44
injection molding technology, we'll say that. Okay.
11:47
They had a flashlight. And one of the villagers
11:50
took the flashlight, took the batteries out, flipped
11:52
it over, and used it as a penis
11:54
gourd.
11:55
And it was his attire.
11:57
And it was socially acceptable. in
12:00
his tribe that this is
12:02
how I conceal myself. And what's
12:04
interesting is there didn't seem to be any, golly,
12:08
I wish I,
12:09
I don't remember where I saw this, but I remember thinking,
12:11
oh, that's weird, because you
12:14
would think that there would be all kinds
12:16
of social awkwardness things going
12:18
around with like what type of gore do you use
12:20
and how big is it and all these kinds of things. And
12:22
it just wasn't a thing to these people. The
12:25
issue was I
12:26
need to conceal myself and this gets it done.
12:29
And I remember thinking that was fascinating.
12:31
And so it was this strange blend of modern
12:33
technology
12:35
being plastic injection molding and
12:37
the social norms of this
12:39
particular village.
12:41
I just remember thinking, there's a lot about this I don't
12:43
understand.
12:44
And the little boy in me wants to laugh
12:47
and go, ha ha ha, look how funny this is. I
12:49
mean, there's obvious jokes there. Come
12:52
on, that's reasonable. I mean,
12:54
anything that's farts or parts of the body you cover
12:57
with clothes will always, there's gonna be some
12:59
impulse that people have to chuckle about that a little
13:01
bit. But also, the fact that people
13:03
cover those things with clothes means that that's
13:06
a cultural text. It means that there's a cultural
13:08
shared agreed upon decision that's happening there,
13:10
meaning that it's full of meaning.
13:12
But what was interesting is that
13:14
the fact that they were covering that part
13:16
of the body.
13:17
And nothing else. Yeah, and nothing else.
13:20
It was almost like, I don't
13:22
know, it was very clear to me that there's something
13:24
about that I didn't understand that was accepted
13:26
within that specific
13:28
localized society.
13:30
And I thought that was fascinating. I thought that was wickedly
13:33
fascinating.
13:34
So anyway, that's the second thing I thought of. And the third thing I
13:36
thought of, which is not what I thought
13:39
I'd be talking about immediately after talking about the last
13:41
subject. Fair enough. Was the book
13:43
Through Gates of Splendor.
13:45
It's by Elizabeth Elliott. It was actually
13:48
a formative book in my life. A famous missionary's
13:50
wife. Yes, yes, Jim Elliott
13:53
was killed in Ecuador along with four other
13:55
people. There were missionaries. Let
13:57
me just look up their name here because I don't want to get this
13:59
wrong.
13:59
Nate Saint. Yeah, Nate Saint's
14:02
the, he's
14:03
the one that comes to mind. He was the pilot. So Jim
14:05
Elliot,
14:06
Pete Fleming,
14:07
Ed McCulley,
14:09
Nate Saint and Roger Udarian.
14:11
And so these five guys and their families,
14:13
they went down to Ecuador and they said, hey, we're going
14:16
to
14:16
reach this unreached people group
14:18
with the gospel of Jesus, right?
14:21
We're going to tell them, we're
14:22
going to give them the good news, which also means telling
14:24
them the bad news first. Yeah. So for the outsider,
14:26
and
14:27
I understand it's easy for people
14:29
like you and me to just take it for granted that that's some
14:31
people just heard and know about. We're talking
14:34
about the message of the kingdom, the idea
14:36
that there were all sinners, the long promised
14:39
Messiah, who is the one who solves
14:41
the human problem of sin and death
14:43
and suffering and ick and all of that stuff. And
14:45
that somehow what he does by
14:48
dying on the cross and being resurrected
14:50
deals with the brokenness of humanity.
14:53
Yeah. Yeah. You accept the grace that's
14:57
given freely through Jesus. And so the
14:59
three things that are easy to say, God, great grace,
15:03
buddy of mine, Steve says it that way.
15:05
So this is what makes Jesus different. Jesus
15:07
is God.
15:08
He actually died, rose from the grave
15:11
and that his grace is freely
15:13
given. There's nothing you can do to work for
15:15
it. Sure. Yeah. And so, okay. We're
15:17
on the same page. We're on the same page. Cool. And so
15:19
they,
15:21
being Christians were like, I'm going to go down here
15:23
to this unreached people group. And
15:25
I'm not okay with the little,
15:28
you know, as soon as you're in Sunday school and you're like, but
15:30
what are the people that don't hear about Jesus?
15:32
You know? Yeah. Yeah. They're like, well, I'm
15:34
going to go let them know. Right.
15:36
And so, because there's a, there's a conflict
15:38
that happens in your mind when you're like,
15:40
but you know, they don't know about the good
15:43
news. I need to tell them the good news. And so these
15:45
five missionaries
15:47
went down
15:48
and it did not end well.
15:50
They had a very specific plan. They were working on the language.
15:53
There was a, it's an interesting book. Well, Donnie, is
15:55
that the tribe? Well, Donnie, yeah. The known
15:57
locally is the Alka A U C A.
15:59
And so I read this book just
16:03
before I left college and I
16:05
went to Ecuador shortly after that. It
16:08
was huge for me and because I don't
16:11
know the one thing that Jim Elliott said that
16:13
I thought was fascinating and
16:15
it resonated with me is he
16:17
is no fool who gives up what he
16:19
cannot keep to gain what he cannot
16:21
lose.
16:23
That's something I think about all the time even now.
16:25
So another thing I loved about the book, in
16:28
the book Nate Saint who is the pilot,
16:31
he developed this really cool way.
16:33
He had this really cool yellow airplane.
16:36
He developed a really cool way using drag
16:38
and I think I've told you about this before.
16:41
You fly the airplane and you have a bucket
16:43
on the end of a string and
16:45
if you slowly let the bucket
16:47
out, if you can imagine an airplane flying straight
16:50
and you imagine a string rolling out of a
16:52
bucket,
16:53
it will drag, will affect
16:56
that bucket differently at different altitudes
16:58
along the string, right? Well,
17:01
the bucket obviously has a lot of drag. The string
17:03
has less drag
17:04
and you have tension up there at the
17:07
airplane. You have tension on the bucket all the way down. So
17:10
Nate Saint developed this really cool thing
17:12
he could do. He could bank the airplane,
17:14
have the string coming out of the airplane
17:16
and he could slowly ply out
17:19
that or roll out the string
17:21
until the bucket reached the ground. If he's
17:23
at a certain bank angle, he could
17:26
fly in a circle
17:28
in that bucket. He could drop things on
17:30
the ground. When I say drop, imagine a bucket. You look
17:32
up and you see a bucket
17:34
and you see a long string
17:36
and an airplane going in a circle around
17:38
it but the bucket's not moving. It's stationary
17:41
and it comes all the way down to the ground. Because
17:44
he manages the drag and the drift
17:47
and all these things, the airplane
17:49
velocity, because he's a good pilot and he's got a feedback
17:51
loop, which is him looking at it as he's flying,
17:54
he could communicate, so to speak,
17:56
with the ground. He could even put a telephone on the ground
17:59
with a... with a wire
18:01
all the way down. Talked to people and they're
18:03
like, he could put it, one of the things they did is they put a chicken in
18:05
the bucket. You put a chicken in the
18:07
bucket and you drop it down.
18:09
This is how they initially made contact
18:11
with the tribe. Dropped a chicken in the bucket
18:14
and then they even put some stuff in and they brought it back and they
18:16
got really excited.
18:17
Then they went in to visit these people.
18:20
They
18:20
developed a way to land the aircraft
18:22
on a small little
18:25
beach along a river, along
18:27
an oxbow in the river.
18:29
They were ultimately killed.
18:31
It's fascinating. They were killed
18:34
with spears. There's a description
18:36
even of how the interaction went south.
18:39
There was some initial promise of
18:42
positive contact,
18:43
even some maybe exchanging of gifts
18:45
or something
18:47
that looked like it was going well and
18:49
then things just flipped. Somebody went
18:51
and procured one of the
18:54
spears that was used. Those are still
18:56
made.
18:57
You can have it right here. You
18:59
do. That's the same one I have.
19:00
I think somebody must have sent us both of these at once
19:03
and I'm embarrassed that I no longer remember
19:05
who, but for years now, I've had this in my office.
19:07
Exactly that spear.
19:09
Yeah, I remember the letter because in the letter
19:12
they said to maintain the balance
19:14
of power between Alabama and Wyoming, I'm
19:16
gonna give him a spear as well. Well, it was
19:18
even before and it's even after. Yeah,
19:20
I'm embarrassed that I don't remember who sent this as well,
19:22
but it's really cool because there's a string on the end because
19:25
you throw the spear and then you can unwind the string
19:27
and then you pull it back.
19:28
It's really interesting. They found
19:32
some of the spears that were in
19:34
the men. They found
19:37
some of the pages of the Bible that the
19:39
men had
19:40
left in that area.
19:41
And so it looks like the tribesmen had put
19:45
things on the spear that they intended
19:47
to use to kill the specific individuals,
19:49
which is wild.
19:50
It's really, I'm confident
19:53
we've talked about this before. I feel like we have. Yeah,
19:55
yeah, we have. But I love it. So here
19:57
I am again. Yes, and
19:59
the long-
19:59
story short is eventually
20:02
there was forgiveness between the people who
20:04
killed those men and their families and
20:06
ultimately that message of the kingdom
20:09
of God and all of that ended up really taking
20:11
root in that particular community. Now,
20:14
if we are to be honest about the history
20:17
of missionary movements and all of that,
20:19
you have to also acknowledge the things that didn't work
20:22
because
20:23
there's some awesome, amazing stories
20:25
where things went great and there's
20:27
just tremendous benefit for everyone. There
20:30
were also incidents of exploitation,
20:33
imbalance, weirdness on the
20:35
whole. I think right now it's very popular to
20:37
treat any kind of look back
20:39
on the missionary movement. It's just this total
20:43
racist colonial debacle.
20:45
That's just not fair or true at all.
20:48
At the same time, then of course, folks who really cherish
20:50
those memories are
20:52
going to want to counter with what? No, the whole
20:54
thing was beautiful and perfect. And
20:56
the truth is, I think the missionary
20:58
movement is something that went right alongside
21:00
the rather exploitative colonial
21:03
economic movement. And it was the missionary
21:05
movement, not governments. It was the
21:07
church that went and really held
21:09
back the full exploitative impulse
21:12
of the resource grab that went along with 19th
21:15
century colonialism. A great
21:17
example of that is in Jamaica, the
21:19
story of William Nibb. Did
21:21
I ever told you about William Nibb? No.
21:23
High schools are still named, the biggest high
21:25
school in Jamaica, I think is still named after William
21:27
Nibb. He's there, Abraham Lincoln, liberator
21:29
of the slaves. Really? Amazing
21:32
dude. Put everything on the line
21:34
to side with the people
21:36
of Jamaica, with the locals, with the natives
21:38
of Jamaica and business hated
21:41
him, government hated him. He was an English
21:43
guy. His church got
21:45
burned, his home got burned, there was a bounty
21:47
on his head. He's hiding in a ship
21:49
just offshore for more than one night
21:52
trying not to get killed. But ultimately
21:54
he's the one who was looking at it and was like,
21:56
we cannot own the people of Jamaica.
21:59
You can't own.
21:59
You can't buy, sell and trade
22:02
people.
22:03
Slavery is an abomination in the eyes of
22:05
God. Slavery is incompatible
22:07
with the Bible. This has to go. And NIB1,
22:10
but the forces of government
22:12
and business, they wanted to keep that relationship
22:15
as long as they could. So it's
22:17
stories like that where you gotta look back and
22:19
realize that this, it's not a very accurate
22:21
depiction of you're like, oh, well, these, you know, gold
22:24
grubbing business people, they partnered up with
22:26
Jesus people and went and enslaved people and all
22:28
of that business. I can point to some examples
22:31
where that happened, but for every one of those
22:33
that you can bring up, I think I can show you 10, 20, where
22:37
it was the missionaries who gave up everything, all
22:39
comfort, everything,
22:40
because they saw not just an opportunity to go
22:43
reach somebody with what they believed to be true
22:45
about God and Jesus and all of that, but
22:47
their sense of God inspired
22:50
justice was offended by what they knew
22:52
to be happening in these places of initial
22:54
contact that were occurring in the age of
22:56
colonial boom.
22:58
They ended up being the ones who went and looked out for the
23:00
people who were getting exploited by greed. I
23:03
just don't think they get enough credit. I think they get crapped on
23:05
a lot. And so that's me sticking up for them. I know
23:07
people like that today. How do you mean?
23:10
I actually know them, like
23:11
people that spend time in other
23:14
countries
23:15
that we can't talk about. Yes, yeah,
23:17
yeah, yes.
23:19
Yeah, you can't talk about them because if people,
23:21
they're in a different country and they're doing something and
23:24
they might be working a job locally,
23:27
but they're actually missionaries. And
23:29
one of the things they're trying to do is they're
23:31
trying to make sure that people in the local area
23:33
are treated well. And
23:37
that's enough to say about that. Yeah, because
23:39
there's literally nothing we can say because you and I
23:41
are both connected to the same kind of stuff. Because
23:43
they could die. And we absolutely can't even
23:45
give hints or wink, wink, nod, nods about it.
23:48
Yeah, you and I both know what's going on.
23:50
Yeah, exactly. And I think that's cool. I think
23:52
so too.
24:10
And I think that
24:13
brings us back to the Sentinel Island deal.
24:16
You have to imagine that that's going to capture
24:18
the attention of somebody, that somebody
24:20
who pictures the adventure missionary
24:22
travels of Dr. Livingston, I presume,
24:24
in the 19th century, and
24:26
Zimbabwe, and Victoria
24:28
Falls, and just all of that legendary
24:31
stuff. People who were raised reading
24:34
through Gates of Splendor and know the
24:36
story about what happened in Ecuador. It
24:38
could be really easy to look at that and fixate
24:40
on the adventure, high risk, high
24:43
adrenaline aspect of that. You
24:45
could also
24:46
say that that specific
24:48
method
24:49
is not particularly effective. I say
24:52
that with weight because we know
24:54
some of the ancestors of some of these people,
24:57
like grandchildren, and we know
24:59
them. And we say that from the comfort
25:01
of these microphones.
25:03
Absolutely. We're not even doing this live. That's
25:05
how low the risk is. Like anything we think is stupid,
25:07
we can just make go away. Right, but
25:09
I think there's an argument to be made on
25:12
what is the most effective way
25:14
to reach people and what is the purpose of
25:16
reaching people.
25:17
Yeah.
25:18
Jesus anticipated that question.
25:20
I just got done doing that whole book of Matthew
25:22
thing on my podcast. The whole book of Matthew
25:25
thing. I don't know what you want to call it. It
25:27
took
25:27
a long time. It was a lot of work. But
25:30
even there, Jesus'
25:32
commissioning of the people he sends out with this
25:34
message about,
25:35
really overwhelmingly, it's a message of justice.
25:39
He sends them out and he's like, hey,
25:40
you got to be true to serpents and innocent as doves
25:43
here. Because
25:45
things are stacked against you and the people
25:47
who are doing evil, exploiting other people,
25:50
abusing their power and position.
25:53
They are very entrenched and they're very good
25:55
at what they do.
25:56
And you guys who I'm sending out, he's just
25:58
got like a bunch of fishermen and small business owners
26:00
and stuff, like total
26:02
motley crew ragtag crowd that Jesus
26:05
had gathered and that he sends out in the
26:07
about the one third mark of the story
26:09
of the book of Matthew, he sends them out
26:11
and he's he isn't just like go be good.
26:14
And by just your supreme decency
26:16
and not swears, everyone will know
26:19
that I'm the Lord. It's not like
26:21
that at all.
26:22
He tells that uses the word shrewd.
26:24
You got to read the room, you got to look at the
26:27
situation and think about what you're doing. Well,
26:30
those guys bumble through the rest of the book, but
26:32
we know that after Matthew, history
26:35
and tradition and other parts of the Bible tell us
26:37
they looked a lot more shrewd.
26:39
And they're what they did when they went
26:42
out after the Bible holds out as the
26:44
death and resurrection of Jesus
26:46
did not look the same depending on where they went.
26:48
Now, all but one ended up
26:50
meeting the same fate as Nate Saint
26:52
and Jim Elliott. I mean, eventually
26:55
you're saying a message that is a complete paradigm
26:57
change when you go out with that particular message.
26:59
And Jesus said that wouldn't always be greeted well.
27:01
Isn't that interesting that that Christianity,
27:04
I
27:05
mean, as soon as I say that people will be
27:07
like, but the Crusades, but like Christian, Christian,
27:10
yeah, it's an excellent counter example. But
27:12
for the most part, Christianity has spread by
27:16
people being killed as
27:18
opposed to conquering. Yeah.
27:21
I mean, that's why it caught on. There's this,
27:24
I don't know where he's at now, Washington state, Baylor,
27:26
he's been a few different places. Rodney Stark is
27:29
a sociologist. I've read all its stuff. Absolutely.
27:31
I don't know who that is. It's okay. He's
27:34
a guy who focuses on why things
27:36
stick historically. I
27:38
mean,
27:38
there were 50 messianic claimants
27:41
we know about in the timeframe of Jesus.
27:44
Tons Josephus, the Jewish historian,
27:46
who was a contemporary of Jesus.
27:48
He gives us probably 20 stories
27:51
of different people. I'm the Messiah.
27:53
I'm raising an army. We're going to start from
27:55
here and we're going to kill Rome. We're going to kill these
27:57
guys. I mean, it's crazy.
27:59
I've done videos on all these different claimants
28:02
holding themselves out as Messiah, but only one
28:04
stuck
28:05
ever
28:06
for all the people who've claimed that.
28:09
Well, Rodney Sark's question as a sociologist
28:12
is, how the heck did that happen? Why
28:14
that one? Why that guy? I
28:16
really like his look at it because it's not like
28:19
a evangelical apologetic
28:21
make you feel good about your beliefs kind of
28:23
book. It's just sociology. And he's got a series
28:25
of arguments for why he thinks it caught on.
28:28
One of the big reasons is
28:30
they didn't have the sword. They did not
28:32
have the opportunity really for 400 years
28:35
before you really start to see things
28:37
begin to flip toward Christians having any
28:40
kind of authority. And they didn't become a meaningfully
28:43
persecuting group ever until
28:45
about 700 years in pockets when
28:48
they started to meld with government.
28:51
And so to start, it's very compelling. He's like, they
28:53
didn't catch on by killing all of their
28:55
rivals. They caught on by outliving
28:58
their rivals by when plague hit compelled
29:00
by their understanding of how God is and what he
29:02
would want. We just can't leave everybody to die. So
29:04
we're gonna stay here and anybody who's here, we're gonna nurse and nurture
29:07
back to help. And so then Sark goes
29:09
through and he has chapters where he analyzes what
29:12
percentage of increased survival that
29:14
kind of nursing or attention would give given what
29:16
we know about what diseases were each of these,
29:19
and made up each of these different plagues. And
29:22
it's fascinating to just see somebody put math
29:24
to it and be like, all right, the plague hit this percentage
29:27
of the empire. That's this many people who would have been affected.
29:30
The death rate in general without care
29:32
seems to have been about this. With
29:34
care, it seems to have been this. And we've
29:36
got all of these primary sources saying that Christians
29:38
hung in.
29:39
That means
29:41
when those cataclysmic events occurred,
29:43
either Christians caring for Christians,
29:46
which promotes the growth of Christianity, or
29:49
Christians caring for non-Christians, which
29:51
would be compelling for the non-Christian, like
29:54
you stayed in risk of death to look out for me,
29:56
that would result in the proliferation of Christianity.
29:59
Stark views all of this. a lot of those moments as being kind of quantum
30:02
leap jumps in Christianity
30:04
gaining a foothold by living out
30:06
its stated values.
30:08
I like it.
30:09
Yeah, I really like that. As you were sitting
30:11
there talking, I was
30:12
sitting there thinking about the Shema.
30:15
I think it's interesting in Deuteronomy, it's all
30:17
your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.
30:20
But in Matthew, when it's re-quoted, it's
30:23
all your heart with all your soul and all your mind.
30:25
So that laying down of
30:27
your strength, I'm kind of reading things
30:30
in between the lines that aren't there. Sure.
30:32
Yeah, I am. Let's be honest. But I think
30:34
it's interesting that the mind component, the mental component
30:37
is brought in and I
30:39
don't know, people are one with logic and
30:41
the logic goes something like this. Oh,
30:44
you're not asking for anything. You're actually
30:46
just helping me?
30:48
Why?
30:49
That doesn't make sense. And so it's
30:51
the counter logic that ends up
30:53
making it work. Yes. It's
30:56
upside down. Right. And
30:58
that brings us back to your question about the shrewdness,
31:00
Jesus' word there, not mine,
31:02
or efficacy
31:04
of the strategy we're talking about that the Sentinel
31:06
Island thing got us into.
31:08
Does it really feel to the recipient
31:11
like you're just doing something for them in that kind
31:13
of circumstance?
31:15
Or would the people of, let's say, Sentinel Island,
31:17
let's go away from the Ecuador example, let's
31:20
say you and I went around
31:22
some churches and raised some money. We printed up
31:24
bright yellow t-shirts that say Matt
31:26
and Destin mission trip to Sentinel Island 2025
31:29
and we wore hats
31:32
and we did a mime show like
31:34
all the things that they used to do in the 90s. Let's
31:37
make it puppets. Let's go with puppets. A
31:39
very dramatic puppet show. Oh,
31:42
it hurts. It hurts. But let's say
31:44
we
31:45
did that. It's not going to work. No, wait. No,
31:48
let's let's think about it a different way. Okay. You
31:50
and I are on the island. Okay. We're
31:52
on the island. Okay. So we're in violation
31:54
of international law and Indian law. We
31:57
are from Sentinel Island. Oh, okay.
32:00
Okay, and we're there
32:02
and we're sitting by the fire. Yeah,
32:04
and we're like hey, man,
32:06
I think tomorrow I want to go hunt some pigs
32:09
Yeah, I do look at my new arrow. Look
32:11
at this. Do you see this? Yeah, dude.
32:13
I've sharpened this for so long Look how
32:15
sharp this thing is touch it. Yeah.
32:18
Oh, it's very pointy pointy
32:22
I Would say
32:24
pointy no my daughters They mingled
32:27
two words when they were kids and so
32:29
they couldn't say pointy and so it ended up being
32:31
pointy And anything that
32:33
sharp we still call it pointy. No, we're on
32:35
the island right now. Yeah, they don't exist
32:37
in this reality Yeah, I hate this reality now,
32:39
but all right. It's pointy pointy.
32:42
Yeah, okay, so great arrow, dude I'm
32:44
thinking about tomorrow
32:46
going out and shooting a pig with
32:49
my arrow. Are you in? Yeah We should jam some
32:51
fruit in its mouth after that and put it on a spit
32:53
and rotate it. I'm game dude Yeah,
32:55
that's what I want for tomorrow. It's way better
32:58
than all this fish. We absolutely want to go. Let's
33:00
get okay Okay, we sleep, you
33:02
know lots of jungle sound. We
33:04
pray to tribal God before we go to bed. No,
33:06
we're not even we had nothing We got no we don't even know concept
33:09
of that. We don't know. Okay, cool. Okay, so
33:12
we get up. Yep We're going hunting. Hey, dude,
33:14
wake up. Wake up.
33:15
Oh, is it pig day? It's pig day. Let's go.
33:17
All right Don't forget the new arrow. Oh,
33:20
yeah, the pointy pointy one. Yeah.
33:22
Yeah, I got the pointy one. Okay, so we go out Yes,
33:25
and we start on our pig hunt wonderful. Are
33:27
there pigs on this island? Let's say there are
33:30
I really want to know now Like this needs to
33:32
be rooted in facts because of how factual
33:34
this example is. They gotta have fat.
33:36
They gotta have protein So
33:39
you can get fat from fish
33:41
head Can you
33:43
get fat from fish head? Yeah.
33:45
Yeah, like a fish head stew will produce fat
33:48
But coming up with fat is one of the tricky things on
33:50
islands But that's why you get like Hawaiian
33:52
barbecue because lots of different pig species
33:54
can do well Cuz I can root around for anything
33:57
in that kind of environment why you don't get
33:59
larger games than pigs. Okay
34:01
so we're we're kind of out
34:04
towards the edge of the perimeter of the island.
34:06
Okay. We're still in the ender canopy. Okay.
34:09
And then we walk out and then we see on the
34:11
horizon a boat. Okay.
34:13
It's a big boat. It's like a container ship.
34:17
Wow. What do you think about this
34:19
big thing that you and I just saw on the horizon?
34:21
What do you think about that?
34:22
Now like in this reality,
34:25
I don't know. Our parents have talked
34:27
about boats and flying things.
34:30
You know, so was a story handed down
34:32
from grandparents about
34:35
flying objects that used to go right
34:37
over the island all the time. I think they're like
34:39
they've got to be smart. They know. But
34:41
we've only seen that once in our lifetimes.
34:44
Only one time has
34:46
one of these flying objects appeared.
34:49
But we saw it plain as day. I'm telling you,
34:51
island destined. I was there that day
34:54
and I saw that flying thing before
34:57
it left. That was real. Just like our
34:59
grandparents told us. And it was loud and
35:01
terrible. Yes. And we hate it. Yes.
35:04
Do we hate it?
35:05
There's a couple of the kids
35:08
from the younger generation
35:09
who are uncomfortably obsessed with
35:12
it. That's going to be the downfall
35:14
of society. So we're going to preach
35:16
hard against that. Yeah, we hate
35:18
it. That's
35:21
how all the things work. It doesn't
35:23
matter that we're on this island or if we're like
35:25
here. You know, it's true, man.
35:27
Interesting. We just rally around
35:29
the thing that we hate together. Interesting.
35:32
Okay. I don't know where I'm going with this example. It's just kind
35:34
of interesting to put the shipping container shows up. Oh,
35:36
yeah. Yeah. How do you feel about
35:38
that island destined? I
35:41
don't know. I mean, that's big. It
35:43
looks like
35:45
that looks like a craft of war. It's bigger
35:47
than ours.
35:49
We have this little bitty thing that we
35:51
sometimes go out fishing in. That thing's big. I
35:54
feel uncomfortable around that thing.
35:56
And I don't like it. I just don't
35:59
like it. Yeah. Yeah, it's powerful,
36:01
it's using technology, I have
36:03
no chance of understanding. I don't see any rowing
36:06
or sails. Yeah, how do they do that?
36:08
Yeah. I mean, it looks like magic.
36:10
Again, do not mistake
36:13
my little role-playing here
36:15
as being that I think these are unsophisticated
36:18
midwits.
36:19
We would go onto that island and immediately
36:21
die given the tools they have.
36:24
We have no cultural memory of how to survive
36:26
like that, even with our fancy educations.
36:29
We're not gonna live out a robust, happy life
36:31
like they're going to be able to pull off on that
36:33
same chunk of ground. It would be torture
36:35
for us. We would not know what to do. We would not
36:37
succeed the way they've figured out to succeed. They've
36:39
got a billion shortcuts. I don't think
36:41
these are idiots. I think these are competent
36:44
people with solid core
36:46
aptitude and ability at the level
36:48
of the brain.
36:49
But come on, look at how big
36:52
that ship is. If
36:54
I can't touch it and poke at it and take
36:56
it apart, if I don't have time with it, I
36:59
can't just figure that out from a distance.
37:01
It's just intimidating. Interesting.
37:04
And I think that communication
37:06
barrier or that experiential barrier
37:08
that's there,
37:10
as long as we just don't let that
37:13
thing penetrate that barrier, we're
37:15
good. We have an enemy and we understand it to
37:17
be an enemy and we don't have to worry about
37:19
getting close to it and all that kind of stuff. So
37:21
I think if I was a
37:22
person in power,
37:24
I think it would be really important to tell
37:27
people, hey,
37:28
you have to keep the barrier up. Like,
37:31
keep the barrier up. The last thing we
37:33
wanna do is communicate
37:34
with those people. That's the last thing
37:37
we wanna do. So interesting thing happened.
37:39
I was reading something a while back
37:42
about
37:43
a guy from Sentinel Island. Something
37:46
happened and he ended up on a mainland hospital.
37:48
He learned Hindi on the hospital. I think
37:50
this was generations ago.
37:52
We were talking decades and decades ago.
37:55
And then returned
37:57
to Sentinel Island, maybe.
37:59
I'm not sure if he went back
38:02
or if he went somewhere else, but I think he went
38:04
back. And
38:05
there was a lot of interest apparently in going
38:08
to interview this man, because
38:11
I'm not aware of anybody understanding at all the
38:13
language of the Sentinelese. I
38:16
don't think there's any possibility of verbal
38:18
linguistic communication at this point. But
38:21
there was a guy some time ago
38:23
who could have served as the, what
38:27
was the dude's name? When the settlers came
38:29
to New England
38:30
and they met a guy
38:32
and spoke English. Wasn't Squanto.
38:35
Oh, wow, dude, what was his name? Was
38:37
it Squanto? Yes, thank you, thank you, thank
38:39
you for knowing my discipline better than I know
38:41
it. Yes, that's the guy.
38:43
So
38:44
you could have a situation like that, where just inexplicably
38:47
you've got this liaison between cultures,
38:49
between languages, it could fast forward everything.
38:52
And I don't think any of that interview
38:54
ever occurred, but
38:57
I could certainly see how somebody in the anthropology
39:00
world would be like, this is the greatest
39:03
prize.
39:03
It'd be like interviewing someone from the distant
39:06
past. We have to get this interview,
39:08
we have to do it. And ultimately I think the strength
39:10
of the law and the enforcement behind that
39:13
Indian Protection Act from the 1950s or whenever,
39:17
probably prevented such an interview from
39:19
occurring.
39:21
You understand the appeal, right? Like what we
39:23
could even learn about humanity, if you could
39:25
get that conversation untainted,
39:28
untouched before all of the robots
39:30
and all of the technology and all of that contact
39:33
happens.
39:34
If you could get a meaningful, mostly
39:37
pre-contact interview
39:39
with someone from there, what could you learn
39:41
about our distant past? Have
39:43
you ever read the book Brave New World?
39:46
Yes, I have. Okay, there's a
39:49
thing that happens in this book where you have
39:51
this person
39:52
in the modern world.
39:54
And I would say it's a dystopia. Oh yes.
39:57
Yeah, so it's a world where
39:59
they're-
39:59
Huxley, right? Yes. Okay.
40:02
It's a world that's so civilized
40:04
that they plan out every
40:07
person that is to exist and
40:09
you are rated according to your
40:12
capabilities and so it's it's
40:14
kind of like
40:15
if we were to maximize is
40:17
that even a word? It worked for me. You know what
40:19
I'm trying to say. Everything about
40:21
society and we're like hey you're a beta
40:24
or you're a you're an epsilon like we're gonna
40:26
score you based on your capabilities and we're
40:28
gonna plug you into certain jobs. You know
40:31
that's how we're gonna do things.
40:32
There was this individual that
40:35
went to America and he went to I
40:38
think it was New Mexico. He went to a reservation
40:41
and he was allowed to
40:44
observe this tribesman
40:46
and this guy was doing all these really
40:49
strange things and he was trying to he's like
40:51
what on earth is happening and
40:53
it was weird because this guy was more in tune
40:55
with his humanity that the
40:58
tribesman was more in tune with his humanity
41:00
than this modern person was and
41:03
it was interesting. It was just like I
41:05
didn't really understand it. I remember getting
41:07
to the end of the book and thinking what was that? I
41:10
thought it was rather interesting. The
41:12
other day on the way home
41:14
I've been
41:16
inside a lot. I've been looking
41:18
at screens. It's the winter so
41:20
I've been doing all kinds of work. I've been working
41:23
with CNC machines. I've
41:25
been using my brain a lot but I was driving home
41:27
the other day and I had somewhere to be at a certain time
41:30
and I looked at the river and the sunset was
41:32
beautiful
41:33
and it was beautiful an hour earlier
41:36
but because it's the winter the sunsets take a long time
41:38
and I was like you know when's the last time I got out
41:40
at the river and just walked down to the river.
41:42
So
41:43
I got out I just
41:45
blinker on
41:46
pulled over got out of
41:48
my truck
41:49
and then I started running back towards
41:52
the bridge
41:53
and I couldn't get a good view of the bridge or
41:55
the sunset from bridge number one.
41:58
I had to go to bridge number two and to get to bridge number two
41:59
I had to run across
42:02
bridge number one and there was no shoulder.
42:05
So I had to run basically in traffic on
42:07
a really skinny bridge. I
42:10
was like, I'm going. And so I went to
42:12
bridge number two. On
42:14
my way to bridge number two, I crossed a dead
42:16
deer
42:16
that was on the side of the road. Two sofas
42:19
that had apparently flew out of somebody's vehicle.
42:22
It was awful, like litter and stuff.
42:24
And then I finally got down into the mud on the riverbank
42:27
and I could hear the birds.
42:29
You noticed, you know, when we've been driving together,
42:32
I've been looking. You're smart. You've seen me look
42:34
at the birds every time we're driving. Yeah, of course. Me
42:36
too. Yep.
42:37
So I finally got down there and
42:39
I
42:40
looked at the sunset and I looked at the birds. I took some
42:42
pictures and I thought to myself,
42:45
why the heck have
42:47
I not done this more? I live here, but
42:50
I've been inside all this time.
42:52
Do I really have it better? You know, and so that's
42:55
another thing. This makes me think of you got these guys
42:57
on the beach.
42:58
With their bows and arrows and their spears. I
43:02
think it's pretty cool. You
43:04
know, because there's something about stepping
43:07
on the riverbank
43:09
next to a muscle shell.
43:12
That's been opened by a bird and
43:14
the muscle has been eaten out and just watching that. There
43:17
was something cool about that. And I feel
43:19
like I've gone too far.
43:21
I feel like I have.
43:23
What's the word? I
43:26
feel like I'm
43:27
very self centered and I
43:29
think that my world is extremely important
43:32
sometimes and it's really not.
43:35
Am I making any sense at all?
43:37
Massive amounts of sense. Okay. I
43:40
live somewhere beautiful too. I picked it. It
43:42
was on purpose. The last two places
43:44
I've lived are the two most magical places that
43:46
I could ever imagine from when I was a kid.
43:49
Yellowstone National Park
43:51
and the Black Hills of South Dakota.
43:53
Those are the places that inspired all my curiosity and
43:55
interest. This is what my child
43:57
like image of draw a mountain.
43:59
would look like, draw nature. I
44:02
would just draw a kid version
44:04
of those two places. I love them.
44:06
And the stretch that I've been in, and
44:09
you know, I've been going pretty hard working
44:11
on some stuff for various projects and
44:14
really pushing things, YouTube
44:16
and podcasting, lots of work. And
44:18
I'm down there in my basement and got
44:20
my headphones on. So I can't hear
44:23
things that other people are doing. So I don't get interrupted.
44:25
I stare at that glowing rectangle and
44:28
I stare and I stare. And then I read some books
44:30
and then I talk into a mic and then I stare at the rectangle.
44:33
And then I read some books. Then I talk into a mic.
44:36
Days will go by.
44:37
I'm like, wait, what are you doing, dude?
44:39
You moved here
44:41
because of the beauty that's right outside your
44:43
window and you keep that window closed. So the glare
44:45
doesn't cause problems on your precious
44:47
glowing rectangle. And then I
44:50
will just blow things off on zero notice.
44:52
I'll even tap out of an appointment if I have to.
44:55
And I will get in my vehicle and I will go be with the fish
44:57
in the mountains.
44:59
It's this abrupt kind of, no,
45:01
I have to address this now.
45:02
It can't be, I need to reconnect with this
45:05
someday and make a new habit.
45:07
I have to go now
45:08
when that impulse hits me. Am
45:10
I understanding you?
45:12
I think so. I think so. Which is
45:14
why I think that it's important to get more in touch
45:16
with that side, which is why what I'm
45:18
gonna do now is I'm gonna take this water bottle. Oh,
45:21
dude. I
45:24
hated that. And I'm gonna cut the end of it off
45:26
here. And I made
45:28
you a penis cord. Thanks
45:34
for picking a two liter. I'm sorry,
45:36
I thought that would be funny. That was pretty funny.
45:40
It's C3, that wouldn't work. Here's
45:42
mine. That's
45:45
a joke. I
45:49
think
45:49
we as people
45:52
in the West and I've
45:54
got a laptop, I've got so many modern
45:56
things within arms range. I also have this spear
45:58
that someone sent us. All this stuff is within
46:00
arm's reach. And I
46:03
think a certain amount of comfort's great, but at some
46:05
point, I think it's good to think
46:08
more like the people from North Sentinel
46:10
Island.
46:12
This episode of No Dome Questions is brought to you by stamps.com,
46:16
and they wrote the tidiest,
46:18
niftiest little thing here at the beginning that I think
46:20
really explains it well. I'm gonna just read this. When every
46:23
person, moment, and penny counts
46:25
in your business, you can't afford
46:27
to take any of them for granted. stamps.com
46:30
gets it because for the last 25 years, they've
46:33
been helping businesses like yours save
46:35
time and money, so you can focus on
46:37
your business knowing stamps.com has
46:39
all your postage needs covered with premium
46:41
discounts and great rates.
46:44
So I would like to
46:46
create a mental image here. I
46:48
think it'll be a useful way to frame
46:51
your thinking. A
46:53
long time ago, I made a website,
46:55
and it was one of the first websites I ever made on the
46:58
internet. It was called Godzilla for Hire.
47:01
I was hoping that would be the name. It
47:04
was called GodzillaForHire.com. I don't
47:06
own that anymore, but what we did is
47:08
we were poor college kids, and we didn't have a lot
47:10
of money
47:11
at all, and we decided
47:13
what we would do is we did have a Godzilla
47:16
doll,
47:16
and I had a Sony Mavica
47:19
camera that went to a floppy disk,
47:22
and I was like, you know the
47:24
camera? I was like, I'm gonna take pictures of
47:26
this Godzilla doll doing stupid
47:28
stuff,
47:29
and then I'm gonna offer to
47:31
hire this out to people,
47:33
and it was actually the first internet award
47:36
I ever received. Somebody emailed
47:38
me, and they're like, hey, your website's so good, we would
47:40
like to give you an internet award. Was
47:44
it just the internet award? Was that what it
47:46
was called? No, it was like, I forget what it was, it was
47:48
like a comedy award or something. They gave me an image
47:51
that I could post on my website with
47:53
HTML. That gives you an idea where we were at
47:55
on the internet.
47:57
The way we did this is we
47:59
would put like... a picture of a little chef's hat that
48:01
we had folded out of a napkin on top of his head and
48:03
we had like a spatula and we're like, hey, chef
48:05
Godzilla for all your chef needs.
48:08
And then we had all these little
48:10
things that we put glasses on him and gave
48:12
him a calculator and we're like, hey, Godzilla is
48:14
an accountant. He
48:15
can do your taxes. And
48:18
we did all of these things. What was the part where you
48:20
made the money?
48:21
Let's not make it weird, Matt. Just let me
48:24
go with my story.
48:26
And so- Yeah, no, please, do. No,
48:28
this is a good idea.
48:29
We went through all these different things. It was really
48:31
quite funny.
48:32
And then the last thing we did
48:35
is we popped off one of the Godzilla
48:37
arms and we put a hot dog
48:39
in there.
48:40
And we said, hot dog for an arm
48:43
Godzilla
48:44
for all your hot dog for an arm needs.
48:50
That's right there in the name, Doug. It's
48:52
genuinely funny. And
48:54
we're like, we don't know what your hot dog for an arm needs
48:57
are, but if you do need that, Godzilla,
49:01
the hot dog for an arm Godzilla's got you covered.
49:03
So- We'll meet, may exceed
49:06
your needs. Now you're probably wondering
49:08
why I'm bringing this up while we talk about stamps.com.
49:11
Weirdest thing, yes. Yeah, yeah,
49:13
but oddly it actually works because
49:16
what I want you to do is when
49:18
you think about postage that
49:20
you have to put on something,
49:22
I want you to think of stamps.com
49:25
because it's got you covered for all your postage
49:28
needs. See what I'm doing there? So-
49:31
Barely. This
49:34
is an ad. People
49:40
hopefully want to get back to the part where it's a
49:42
show. Whole
49:45
run up. That's literally the worst payoff
49:48
in the history of the program.
49:51
It's like a Norma McDonald joke.
49:54
So good. No, no, no, it's not
49:56
that good. It's not that good,
49:58
the moth joke. Oh, I thought it was-
49:59
That's good. Okay, anyway, so... That's
50:02
the one. Yeah, but when you think about postage,
50:05
you need to think about stamps.com because
50:07
that's what they do. Let's say you got to ship
50:09
a thousand of something, okay? Okay.
50:13
Like, if you go buy a stamp for each one,
50:15
that's a lot of money, a whole lot of
50:17
money.
50:17
Yes. But stamps.com, they've
50:20
worked it out where you can actually get
50:22
lower fees on postage, and
50:24
that's a big deal. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.
50:27
Well, I do. You're making it sound like it's this
50:29
great big hypothetical. What if you need to send out
50:31
a thousand things? It's not hypothetical because
50:34
we have used this
50:36
to send stuff out to patrons on 10
50:38
Minute Bible Hour on my YouTube channel,
50:40
stuff like that. And so I remember
50:43
when Camilla got all set up, she just got the little scale
50:45
and made this little corner shipping area
50:48
in our little goofy in-home office. And
50:50
I thought it was going to be this massive weeks-long
50:53
project, and she and the kids just
50:55
sat down one afternoon, and they got
50:57
a little assembly line going, and the postage thing
50:59
was cake. And it was
51:02
so much cheaper than the bids
51:04
we got to go and take it somewhere or ship
51:07
it in the traditional way. It was just, it was
51:09
awesome. It was an incredibly simple solution
51:11
for a thing we needed to achieve. Yeah,
51:14
it's that simple. If you've got a business and
51:16
you need to ship stuff, you need to be thinking about
51:19
stamps.com for all of your postage
51:21
needs, and I know the mental image that just
51:23
came through your head, there it was. It
51:25
worked as a Godzilla doll with a hot dog coming out of its
51:27
arm. It makes me think of stamps. So
51:30
here's the offer.
51:32
So set your business
51:34
up for success when you get started with stamps.com
51:37
today. Sign up with the promo code NDQ
51:40
for a special offer that includes a four-week trial,
51:42
plus free postage, and a free
51:44
digital scale.
51:45
No long-term commitments or contracts, just go
51:47
to stamps.com, click on the microphone
51:50
at the top of the page, and enter the code NDQ.
51:54
Look, I know that automatically there's
51:56
a bunch of people who are listening who have their own
51:58
businesses. as pretty obvious
52:01
proposition for that member of the third chair
52:03
because you're sitting there right now and you're
52:05
running your shipping costs through your head and you're
52:07
like, well, would I save money on this? And they're saying
52:10
here that it's up to 84% off of USPS and UPS
52:14
rates. So yes, probably you would
52:16
save a lot of money with this. But Destin,
52:18
before we get back to talking about the thing, what
52:21
about the people who don't own businesses? How
52:23
is something like this going to be useful for them?
52:26
Somebody that needs to ship out a lot of stuff,
52:29
just go for it. Stamps.com used the promo
52:31
code NDQ and
52:33
it's like having a little post office in your office.
52:36
All you got to do is have a printer, a laptop,
52:38
set everything up, you can ship stuff out, save
52:40
money. It's
52:41
the way to go. Yep. So again, to set
52:43
your business up for success or you
52:46
for success if you just want to ship a bunch of stuff,
52:48
you can get started with stamps.com today
52:50
and sign up with the promo code NDQ
52:52
for a special offer that includes a four week trial
52:55
plus free postage and a free digital
52:57
scale. No long-term commitments or contracts.
52:59
Just go to stamps.com, click
53:02
the microphone at the top of the page and enter the code NDQ.
53:05
Matt, I think I need the last word here because
53:08
I know what people are going to think when I
53:10
say it. Oh, okay.
53:12
Go to stamps.com
53:14
for all your postage needs.
53:21
I think that the people at stamps.com
53:24
are about to see a nearly inexplicable
53:26
spike in business.
53:30
I mean, there's a decent chance you're just going to get a call and get offered
53:32
a job just as a heads up because that
53:34
connection is so strong. It's undeniable.
53:37
It is. Great job, man. No, great job. No, you're
53:40
welcome. You're welcome.
53:43
Okay. Gord joke just now aside. It's pretty
53:45
good. It was a pretty good joke. The
53:48
reason it's funny is because it's transparent and it doesn't
53:50
work. No, it doesn't work at all. Yeah, that didn't come
53:52
through on the microphone, but it's really ineffective.
53:55
It's just kind of distorting and weird. It's
53:57
just going to be weird for everybody. I'm probably
53:59
not.
53:59
I'm not gonna wear it, just as a heads up. That was funny.
54:02
Yeah, go ahead. Okay, good. We talk about the Sentinel
54:04
Island thing. It's an interesting thought
54:07
exercise. That's how the conversation goes, where I'd expect
54:09
it to. If you imagine, what would it be like to
54:11
be there? What would it be like to be a fisherman
54:14
who gets washed up on shore there? What would it be like
54:16
to be an Indian legislator
54:19
in the 1950s, coming
54:21
off of everything with the Indian
54:24
independence movement and the values of Mahatma
54:26
Gandhi that is shaping culture
54:28
and society? How do you apply all of these
54:30
values and all of these things that you want for yourselves
54:33
to these folks who live on this island? Oh, interesting.
54:36
Oh, so you're saying,
54:38
I don't understand the politics of this. You're
54:40
saying that India was gaining its
54:42
independence at that point in time from the UK.
54:46
And so whoever came up with this,
54:48
did they have the impression like, hey, we're
54:50
doing the same thing to this group? Is that when this happened?
54:53
Well, surely it had to. When formed
54:55
it, right? When was the law passed or whatever?
54:58
1956, 1953. Was it
55:00
really? Yeah.
55:01
Okay, that's amazing. So, I mean, you've got a generation
55:03
there who's been thinking about this stuff an awful lot.
55:07
And here you've got this tiny little,
55:09
I mean, numerically of no consequence
55:12
people group. They're no threat, they're
55:14
no real benefit. I mean, it's just,
55:16
I
55:16
mean, it's just like a little town way out in the sticks, except
55:19
it's on an island and they've never really met
55:21
anybody from the mainland.
55:22
So what do you do? Well, I think the ethically
55:25
consistent thing in their mind is probably
55:27
what they did.
55:29
So cool, I dig it. And I like working
55:31
through the thought exercise, you and I,
55:34
well, okay, what if you see it from this angle,
55:36
this angle, this angle, what would you do? Going back to
55:38
what I was saying earlier, I was gonna make
55:40
a joke about the matrix in 1999. Oh,
55:42
wow, yeah, remember that? Had it been in 1999, I would say, oh,
55:46
well, let's take them technology so they can do
55:48
things better. Now, I
55:50
don't wanna infect them with social
55:52
media. Ah, yeah. So.
55:55
Can you imagine if we just led with like
55:57
TikTok? Here you
55:59
go. give you a pretty good idea of what's going on outside
56:02
the island. Just use this device and just kind of
56:04
swipe here. You've been in a place where
56:07
Americans are in a village
56:09
in Africa or South America.
56:12
And you've been in a place where
56:15
the American is uncomfortable interacting
56:19
with a villager.
56:21
So they lean on the technology crutch.
56:23
They pull out the phone or they pull out the camera and they take
56:25
a picture and they say, Hey, look at this picture. I just took
56:27
of us. And then
56:29
the children will start looking at the, Oh, take
56:31
a picture of me. I've seen it play out
56:34
many, many times. And unfortunately
56:36
I've
56:37
participated in that because I was like,
56:39
well, you know, if I can,
56:40
you know, I've been, yeah, but unfortunately,
56:43
I mean, come on pictures, that's human.
56:45
It's, it's totally understandable why
56:47
you would do that. It's a point of non-spoken
56:49
human communication to look
56:51
at an image, celebrate it together, point
56:54
at things.
56:55
You got to cut for myself some slack.
56:57
That's you trying to connect with another person and you
56:59
don't have a lot of tools to do it. It's interesting
57:01
though, isn't it? In your pocket. The
57:04
medium is the message.
57:05
The medium is the message.
57:07
And if you pulled out a sheet of paper and drawn
57:09
a picture of the two of you together, that means
57:12
something very different. Then
57:14
check this out. Click. Look what I just did.
57:17
Snap in a picture with your phone in your
57:19
pocket. It's a different thing.
57:21
So we gave it out from a whole bunch of different angles,
57:23
but let me bring it back to this.
57:25
Should we go status quo here? Or should
57:28
somebody go and talk to these folks? The
57:30
world is what the world is. Maybe it's time.
57:32
Maybe there's so many benefits they could receive
57:35
that are being withheld
57:36
that it's incumbent on the rest of the world to
57:39
go and help these people.
57:41
I don't know. What I think is interesting
57:43
is, um, there's a telescope they're going to
57:45
put up on a mountain in Hawaii. And
57:48
I remember thinking, Oh, it's a great place to put a telescope.
57:51
But there was an argument made by
57:54
a local person that says, here's the deal. We've
57:56
got one mountain top.
57:59
We have one mountain. mountain top here. It's
58:02
Mauna Kea. Is that how you say it? Oh, okay.
58:04
So yeah. There's telescopes up in this area,
58:07
but we have one pinnacle of this mountain.
58:10
Once you build something there, it's
58:12
done. Look, we've done
58:15
it.
58:15
We've taken that away.
58:18
And so that's the problem here. Once you
58:20
do this, it's done.
58:22
Yep. And you can't undo that.
58:24
Yep. And that's the problem. Yep.
58:27
So much
58:28
of what I would say has been
58:30
ugly, thoughtless, and unfortunate about
58:33
the age of expansion that just
58:35
burst out. Technology hit a certain point and
58:39
the dam just broke. Like
58:40
this whole second
58:43
half of the earth untouched.
58:45
What is the start? What if we found a third half
58:47
of earth right now, dude? Would you not go?
58:50
You'd go. Yeah. Yeah. I have to know
58:52
they have different animals there.
58:54
They got like kinds of ducks that nobody
58:56
knows about yet. They have potatoes. You
58:58
have to see the new kind of ducks. Well,
59:00
let me ask you this in Star Trek. There's
59:03
a,
59:03
I'm not a Trekkie, but it's called the prime directive.
59:06
Right. What is the prime directive? I
59:08
think is
59:10
that the instruction that is
59:13
Starfleet goes out. You're
59:15
not to engage with any pre
59:17
warp drive technology
59:20
civilization.
59:21
We need Bob back. Yeah. Of course we
59:23
do. Yeah. If you've got a pre
59:25
warp civilization, that is the arbitrary
59:27
line in the sand that somebody drew and
59:29
they're like, all right, if they're not there yet, we just have to
59:32
let them play it out. We observe
59:34
from a distance, but we don't
59:36
reveal our presence and we
59:38
don't mingle. Is that the prime directive? That's
59:40
my understanding. Um,
59:42
it protects unprepared civilizations
59:44
from the danger of Starship crews
59:47
introducing advanced technology,
59:50
knowledge, and values before they are
59:52
ready.
59:53
That's interesting. Clearly
59:54
that's Gene Roddenberry offering
59:56
comment on the in
1:00:00
the crazed, expansive
1:00:02
rush
1:00:03
that pretty much wrapped up about the time that
1:00:05
he was a young boy.
1:00:07
Oh, talking about colonialism? I'm talking about, yeah, I'm talking
1:00:09
about when Roddenberry was a kid,
1:00:11
the frontier was pretty much wrapping up. That
1:00:13
was it. Golly, man. But
1:00:16
I go back to the mountain thing that you're talking about. Right,
1:00:19
you throw that telescope up there. Well, it's advanced
1:00:21
humanity. We're gonna see what's in the stars.
1:00:24
Awesome, I'm really for that.
1:00:26
I like the idea of launching one into space better,
1:00:28
doing it from up there. But
1:00:30
that is the one mountain top you got. And once that's what it's
1:00:32
designated for, that isn't going away unless
1:00:35
it's by some sort of act of violence, which is a pity.
1:00:38
Same thing when I look around the Black
1:00:40
Hills, the West,
1:00:42
I see malls, particularly
1:00:45
of the strip variety, everywhere.
1:00:50
Yeah. I go to Branson, Missouri.
1:00:52
I like to fish there in the winter. I drove through
1:00:54
there for a day.
1:00:56
I'm looking all around this lake, and it's a pretty lake.
1:00:58
A man-made lake, but also every
1:01:01
hillside.
1:01:02
I remember a beautiful hillside from a couple years
1:01:05
ago when I'm there. That was the one place that
1:01:07
still felt like, nah, housing development.
1:01:09
It's never going away. I went to the
1:01:12
place Tara and I lived when
1:01:14
we first got married, and I went there
1:01:16
recently. It was the first house we rented. And
1:01:19
she's like, oh my goodness, send me a picture. So
1:01:22
I went and took a picture of the barn. I remember
1:01:24
a little cat we had named Brimley would sit
1:01:26
on this post. The guy who recommends
1:01:29
oats? Yeah, Brimley. Exactly.
1:01:32
I think you've told me that before.
1:01:34
I'm tracking, yeah. It was great. We went
1:01:36
to the place where I remember this
1:01:38
young girl would come ride a horse behind
1:01:41
the house, and we didn't really know anything about horses. It
1:01:44
was just really interesting to see the
1:01:46
place, but right
1:01:49
at the end of the driveway, I remembered it to be
1:01:51
trees, and I remember all this stuff. There were
1:01:53
several, what I call McMansions. They
1:01:56
were like little suburb developments.
1:01:59
They're just thrown up. And
1:02:01
it was clear that the runoff wasn't planned very well.
1:02:03
And so there was like a little,
1:02:05
they could have made it look pretty pond,
1:02:07
but it was kind of grown up and it was just like, this
1:02:09
is where the low point is. And we got to, and
1:02:12
I remember thinking, man, this was beautiful.
1:02:15
And once you got to the place, it was still
1:02:17
beautiful. But I remember thinking, this
1:02:19
isn't great.
1:02:21
And so I also remember
1:02:23
someone talking to me recently, they said, hey, we went
1:02:25
to a vacation. We went to an island
1:02:28
and this was a whole family. They took their whole family
1:02:30
to an island, which I thought was amazing. Wow.
1:02:33
And they said, hey, it was like a
1:02:36
big deal. This was like,
1:02:38
our kids are about to go to high school and we're
1:02:41
gonna have one last hurrah while we're all still in the house.
1:02:44
And the dad, or I forget
1:02:46
who it was telling me, they said, yeah,
1:02:48
most people when they go to this place, they go to this island,
1:02:50
but now everybody goes there. So we go to this other
1:02:53
place and it's just quiet.
1:02:55
For now. Until
1:02:58
everybody hears that. Because when
1:03:00
I heard him say that, what did I think?
1:03:02
If I went to that place, I'd wanna
1:03:04
go to that island. I'm not going to that dumb crowded
1:03:06
one, like all the dumb idiots. Exactly,
1:03:09
right? Going to the other one.
1:03:10
We watched most of
1:03:12
a River Runs Through It the other day. Never seen it
1:03:15
before. It's a fly fishing movie. I've never seen it before.
1:03:17
It's rough. It's a boring show. I didn't finish
1:03:19
it. Some things happened and I was like, I'll come back to it. And then
1:03:22
I never did. So that tells you what I thought of
1:03:24
it. Maybe that made sense 30 years ago.
1:03:27
Didn't move the needle for me. But
1:03:29
at the beginning it did a little bit because it's in
1:03:31
Missoula, Montana. I lived in
1:03:33
Missoula, Montana. I feel great affection
1:03:35
for Missoula, Montana. They're talking about locations.
1:03:37
I know the Blackfoot River. Last day
1:03:39
I ever spent with my brother, it was on the Blackfoot River.
1:03:42
Me and Adam Doty and my
1:03:44
whole family and my kid brother.
1:03:46
And it's a trout river and we all
1:03:49
put on snorkels
1:03:50
and we snorkeled it. I didn't know how to fly fish back then,
1:03:53
but I thought trout were beautiful and neat. I
1:03:55
probably saw a bigger trout that day than I've ever seen
1:03:57
in my whole life.
1:03:59
Snorkeling. a mountain
1:04:01
river with my brother and my
1:04:03
childhood best friend, we lost a snorkel
1:04:06
in there. So we're trying to battle back upstream
1:04:08
and get the snorkel. And anytime I go back
1:04:10
by Missoula, just real sad about the
1:04:12
Blackfoot River. I'm like getting out of that water. That's the
1:04:14
last time I saw, last time I saw my brother,
1:04:17
last time we were all together. Wow. Right there trying
1:04:19
to battle upstream and dive down and get the snorkel
1:04:21
from all the trout.
1:04:22
Wow. That we're guarding the snorkel. Wonder
1:04:24
if it's still there. Guarding the snorkel. Yeah.
1:04:26
So, I mean, it's the Blackfoot. It's
1:04:29
the first place I lived out of college. It's the first
1:04:31
place, like me identity place. The we
1:04:33
picked when we got married. This
1:04:35
was neat to hear all of those points of commonality, but
1:04:37
there's one line. There's
1:04:39
no drone shots back then in these movies. I had clumsy
1:04:42
helicopter shot of some kids running through a
1:04:44
field. And the narrator says something
1:04:46
like, and when I grew up in Montana,
1:04:49
this is pre-World War I.
1:04:51
It was a place of primal
1:04:54
innocence.
1:04:56
There was still do on it. And
1:04:58
I felt something. There was still do
1:05:01
on it. I felt something. Yeah.
1:05:03
Just it was so big.
1:05:05
It was so untouched. And the little dent they
1:05:07
were making on it probably seemed like it was of no
1:05:10
consequence.
1:05:12
Missoula is different now. It's filled
1:05:14
right up. But
1:05:16
that's half of where my heart goes when I think about
1:05:18
the Sentinel Island thing.
1:05:19
Is where your heart's going with the DMS
1:05:22
with it? Or do you not?
1:05:24
Is anything really unspoiled? Is
1:05:26
it nice to just imagine that there's something?
1:05:28
I mean, one little, however many acres,
1:05:31
island there is somewhere that's just unspoiled?
1:05:36
That feels pretty good. But now let me add
1:05:38
this to the mix before we wrap up. We
1:05:40
were traveling through the South the other
1:05:42
day, right? And Camilla had
1:05:44
an interaction with a lady
1:05:46
who believed she has a gift of healing. She was miraculously
1:05:48
healed people. What? Yep. She was an unusual
1:05:51
woman. It was an unusual interaction.
1:05:54
I'm not persuaded that she actually
1:05:56
has that ability. I'm not necessarily sure. I don't
1:05:58
think she's even- She specialized in like-
1:05:59
lower back pain kind of stuff. Leg
1:06:02
lengthening and yeah. Leg
1:06:04
lengthening? That's the kind of miracles that that
1:06:06
crowd does. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm
1:06:08
enormously skeptical of
1:06:10
such claims.
1:06:12
I don't practice that
1:06:14
religion, whatever. We don't need to get into it. So
1:06:17
we're always polite when we run into
1:06:19
somebody of this stripe,
1:06:22
but
1:06:23
she's went right up to Camilla and she's like,
1:06:25
well, I'm a healer.
1:06:26
So what
1:06:28
do you need? What kind of healing do you need?
1:06:30
Camilla was very polite. My daughter was very
1:06:32
polite. Why would you be mean to this lady? I'm
1:06:35
not looking for a fight
1:06:36
at the dressing rooms at Target.
1:06:38
Like this is what I want from life. So no,
1:06:41
we're good. Thank you so much. And we just kind
1:06:43
of moved on. And then we were
1:06:45
talking with some other friends and family and kind
1:06:47
of having a little bit of a giggle about it. And I got to thinking about
1:06:49
it. I was like, you know what though?
1:06:51
How big of a jerk would you have to be if
1:06:54
you genuinely believed that you could
1:06:56
lay your
1:06:57
palm on somebody and
1:07:00
pray something or something
1:07:02
and they would be healed of their affliction?
1:07:05
How big of a jerk would you be to keep that to yourself
1:07:07
and not at least offer and
1:07:09
try to give that away
1:07:11
if you genuinely believed it?
1:07:14
And so I came to kind of respect
1:07:16
the lady in our disagreement that
1:07:18
this was kind of how she had found peace with
1:07:21
that tension. It was like,
1:07:22
hey, she believes I got this gift. I have
1:07:25
to run it by people. I have to give them the
1:07:27
option. Now I know there
1:07:29
are people in the third chair who are listening to us talk about this
1:07:31
anytime we get into Jesus gospel,
1:07:33
Bible faith stuff. And that's how they view
1:07:35
what we believe here. I get it. I'm
1:07:37
in peace with that. But the
1:07:40
same way though it was challenging,
1:07:42
I got to a point of being able to muster empathy for
1:07:44
someone who believes something I don't believe, that being this
1:07:46
healing lady and her impulse to say,
1:07:49
I have to give this away.
1:07:51
Surely someone who does not agree
1:07:53
with you and I and our understanding of the world and God
1:07:56
could look at us and be like, well,
1:07:58
I totally understand why at some point.
1:07:59
you might want to tell somebody like if you really believe
1:08:02
this is truthful and life-giving and good,
1:08:05
you could probably want to mention it.
1:08:06
So what do you do with that
1:08:09
impulse that somebody might feel to
1:08:12
give away something they believe is good and right and
1:08:14
true to people who've never heard it while
1:08:16
balancing that with the fact that there's
1:08:18
some degree of unspoiled and untouched happening
1:08:21
there?
1:08:22
In my life, in my relationships,
1:08:25
I usually build the bridge
1:08:28
and then wait for the person to walk across it.
1:08:31
So you're proposing
1:08:33
a 450 mile land bridge a causeway
1:08:36
to uh sentin or sentinel island? No,
1:08:38
I'm still talking figuratively. Oh okay good, that
1:08:40
makes more sense. No, like relationally,
1:08:42
I
1:08:43
don't hit people in the head
1:08:45
with what I believe. I
1:08:48
just let it be known in like the least
1:08:51
intrusive way possible like hey
1:08:53
I kind of over here this is kind of where
1:08:55
I'm at
1:08:56
and then if people ask questions
1:08:59
that's cool and
1:09:01
then I'll have the discussion but for me
1:09:03
to say like hey I believe this and I think you
1:09:05
need to think this
1:09:06
like that's a different that doesn't work
1:09:08
for me when people do that to me it's off-putting and
1:09:11
weird and I don't like it. Yeah, I don't like it at
1:09:13
all. I have a friend who thought off-putting was spelled
1:09:15
o-f-f-d-u-d-d-i-n-g
1:09:18
like oh gross. It's gross.
1:09:21
It's gross. It's off-putting. That's
1:09:25
really good. No, I think
1:09:27
uh
1:09:28
just the way I do it in relationships is I just
1:09:30
say I'm here, you're there, cool,
1:09:33
I still love you and like you. Right. And let's hang
1:09:35
out. Yeah, I like that vibe. And then it's
1:09:38
just a little more difficult to talk about when there's
1:09:40
a literal island there. Right.
1:09:43
I
1:09:43
think an important thing to note
1:09:46
is there there are
1:09:47
different Christian understandings of what that
1:09:49
scenario actually means.
1:09:52
There are some who would say God
1:09:55
by his providence like he ordains
1:09:57
he knows he just knows and he sorts all that out.
1:10:01
somehow whoever is going to respond
1:10:03
to God will respond to God. Okay.
1:10:06
There are others who would say like, no, it's
1:10:08
a very volitional thing for somebody to respond
1:10:10
to God.
1:10:11
And you kind of, you kind of got to help get them to
1:10:13
that point through like, I'm
1:10:16
just, I'm laughing at you just sitting
1:10:18
here trying to like
1:10:19
casually explain Calvinism
1:10:22
and Armenianism and all the stuff.
1:10:24
You're just like, yeah, I mean, like if you could
1:10:27
just paraphrase it like this, it
1:10:29
was like, wow, this is, this is complicated
1:10:31
stuff. That's right. When we talk about things, we'll
1:10:33
be due.
1:10:34
But then, one thing I would say is
1:10:37
I
1:10:38
don't think it's okay to check your mind at the door.
1:10:41
You have to ask these hard questions and
1:10:43
you have to know where you stand on them. It troubles
1:10:46
me that as we talk, you are stroking the blade
1:10:48
of that lethal tribal Ecuadorian
1:10:50
spear. Like it just, it's very
1:10:52
foreboding as though I've said the wrong thing.
1:10:55
Okay. I'll put it up. Cause you've got that spear. I'm
1:10:57
sorry. Okay. No, it's all right. That is strange. I'll put that
1:10:59
up.
1:11:00
Still others would look at that and say,
1:11:02
and there's stuff in the Bible about the physical
1:11:05
created world being evident enough
1:11:08
to tell the story.
1:11:09
The rocks will cry out. Uh, yeah.
1:11:11
Or Romans one that, you know, in tones
1:11:14
of like people can do the math. You can see
1:11:16
it. You can reason backwards from existence
1:11:19
to get to a point of being like, Oh, like I think maybe somebody
1:11:21
made this and I think maybe they might be like this.
1:11:24
Are you familiar with the concept of the spear man? As
1:11:27
I sit here with a spear.
1:11:28
Yeah. That it's a way
1:11:31
to illustrate the infinite nature
1:11:33
of existence. And if you go to the very last
1:11:35
thing that is known and explored on the edge
1:11:38
of existence of the universe and you extend
1:11:40
a spear into it, that
1:11:43
I
1:11:43
don't know, what does that mean? What are the consequences of that? I guess
1:11:45
then that's the new end of things. Yeah.
1:11:47
And then you could
1:11:49
do that over and over.
1:11:51
And eventually you, you can rationalize
1:11:54
yourself to infinity, like infinity
1:11:56
in space, infinity in time.
1:11:58
You know, it's a big. concept
1:12:01
and
1:12:03
it's interesting because that has
1:12:05
a lot to do with how I rationally arrived
1:12:07
at oh there must be a prime mover. I don't
1:12:10
know I
1:12:11
think that's a very interesting
1:12:13
concept and it is a way
1:12:15
that a person
1:12:17
could get to some very very big questions
1:12:19
and I think people should think about that. Yes
1:12:23
and
1:12:24
man that could be episodes upon episodes
1:12:26
right there.
1:12:27
I want to chase that
1:12:29
but instead no pun intended I'm going to move
1:12:31
toward the plane landing here. All
1:12:34
these different scenarios that we've hypothesized about
1:12:37
regarding the Sentinel Island thing and
1:12:40
a humanitarian impulse, a
1:12:42
religious impulse, a specifically Christian
1:12:44
impulse, a curiosity impulse,
1:12:47
an anthropological impulse to want to go meet
1:12:49
these people and engage.
1:12:52
Somebody ran this experiment.
1:12:54
There was a guy a few years back
1:12:57
who was of a particular
1:12:59
stripe of Christianity where there's a big emphasis
1:13:02
on hey they can't know unless you go tell
1:13:04
them
1:13:05
who decided that he was going to take the
1:13:07
risk and go to this island
1:13:09
and try to make contact with the
1:13:11
people of Sentinel Island in the style
1:13:14
as he imagines it of
1:13:17
the great missionaries of yore that he
1:13:19
read about.
1:13:20
So he goes to India.
1:13:21
He documents a whole bunch of it. He communicates
1:13:24
with friends and family and
1:13:26
he pays a couple of
1:13:29
local fishermen to break the rules
1:13:31
and take him to the island. He
1:13:34
goes to the island and he
1:13:36
is keeping a journal and
1:13:40
he makes contact and he doesn't get killed.
1:13:42
It looks like there's even a light exchange of
1:13:45
gifts. Really?
1:13:47
Local fishermen are still there. As soon as
1:13:49
it feels like that was enough he gets back on the boat.
1:13:52
He apparently goes away. He
1:13:54
comes back again. I'm not
1:13:56
crystal clear on whether he came back
1:13:59
a second time.
1:15:59
were defending themselves.
1:16:01
Yeah. Maybe they were defending themselves
1:16:04
in a really big way.
1:16:05
And if somebody had done this to the Spanish when
1:16:07
they landed the way back in the day,
1:16:10
it would have worked out differently in the new world.
1:16:12
Right? So, yeah, obviously
1:16:14
those
1:16:15
are very different scenarios because one
1:16:17
came with power and one came with nothing. I mean, there's
1:16:19
one kid showing up versus men
1:16:21
in armor with guns and economic
1:16:23
motivation. I mean, it's very, very different in terms
1:16:25
of
1:16:26
military threat, but in terms of cultural
1:16:28
threat, when you're talking about
1:16:30
a people group that small, that one guy,
1:16:33
that's a pretty big deal.
1:16:34
So this is interesting because I've followed
1:16:36
this story as it's unfolded. It's intrigued me for a long
1:16:38
time. And I've seen very
1:16:41
secular minded people
1:16:43
who theoretically would not be sympathetic to
1:16:45
the
1:16:45
missionary movement, almost come
1:16:47
to the kid's defense a little bit.
1:16:49
I've read Christian types who've
1:16:51
been very, very critical of this
1:16:53
young man and a lot of stuff in between
1:16:56
because I think it's a- It's murky. It's ethically-
1:16:59
It's gray, the gray area there. Clumsy. And
1:17:01
so, huh, yeah. So if you don't know what to do, leave
1:17:04
it alone. I guess,
1:17:06
go with that as default.
1:17:08
I don't know, but I'm getting uncomfortable.
1:17:11
Can I take this off now? This
1:17:13
is, this is, this is a joke. Yeah,
1:17:18
thanks for clarifying that. To be clear, I'm holding a bottle
1:17:20
up to the microphone. This is just,
1:17:22
this is just. I don't know, man.
1:17:25
It's,
1:17:27
I don't have answers. Maybe it's in the
1:17:29
immaturity of my thought at the moment,
1:17:31
but I'm gonna have to wrestle with this for a
1:17:33
while
1:17:34
and go read about it for sure.
1:17:37
Yeah, that's where I'm at. This one
1:17:39
to me- You better believe I'm going to look up satellite
1:17:41
data. Oh yeah. I'm
1:17:43
going to look up some satellite imagery to see what's
1:17:45
going on. There's, oh, you know what? It's
1:17:48
obscured. There's a NASA satellite, GOES,
1:17:50
right? You can see where fires
1:17:52
are all over the world.
1:17:55
And that's, you know, you can see where
1:17:57
humans are cutting down forest and
1:17:59
burning things.
1:19:58
I
1:20:00
would beat it into a spear immediately or a
1:20:02
spear tip. I don't know, the
1:20:05
line, where would I draw the line? Written language?
1:20:08
Man, that's fun, right? I think it's
1:20:11
a fun exercise.
1:20:13
And if we can't immediately jump
1:20:15
to the obvious moral conclusion sitting
1:20:17
right here, if it's not just immediately
1:20:20
morally apparent to us,
1:20:22
I think that does mean that it's a, I mean,
1:20:24
it's at least a somewhat complex question.
1:20:27
And it means that the what do you do with
1:20:29
Sentinel Island
1:20:30
extend lives by giving them technology
1:20:33
that extends lives and improves nutrition
1:20:35
and all of that, or do you leave it alone?
1:20:37
I think if we can't come up with that prime
1:20:39
directive technological line
1:20:42
quickly off the top of our heads and it's not immediately
1:20:44
apparent and evident, then what
1:20:46
you have here is a bona fide conundrum that
1:20:49
is just worth wrestling with. What's
1:20:51
interesting is
1:20:52
let's assume that the people of this particular
1:20:55
island are great to each other. They
1:20:57
treat each other well,
1:20:59
they have something akin to rights that
1:21:02
they honor amongst themselves.
1:21:05
Then there's this other island
1:21:07
and you know that
1:21:10
on that island, people are taken advantage of, women
1:21:12
are taken advantage of,
1:21:14
children are killed or whatever.
1:21:16
You know that there's,
1:21:18
well, you and I would call evil is taking place
1:21:20
on that island.
1:21:22
Is it weird that I almost am more compelled
1:21:24
to go jump in? So
1:21:28
is that weird?
1:21:29
I mean, maybe they're working it out. Right,
1:21:31
because- Maybe they almost got it whipped because I
1:21:34
mean, some post-warp civilization
1:21:36
might look at us in 1859 and be like, they
1:21:40
buy, sell, trade and breed people.
1:21:43
We just got to liquidate this. No, come
1:21:45
back in like six years. We're gonna have a big fight.
1:21:48
We're gonna start improving on this and then you won't
1:21:50
believe how much better it is in a hundred years. Like
1:21:52
we're really getting somewhere here. I've got a ways
1:21:54
to go,
1:21:55
but we're getting somewhere. You got to at least
1:21:57
have some kind of awareness of how systemic.
1:23:59
It's just super super super
1:24:02
interesting.
1:24:30
you
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