THROWBACK THURSDAY: Crypto, Collapse, & Faith w Steven Menking on I AM LIBERTY

M hm, I figure down green scream. We want to just eliminate protect you. Oh. Absolutely, the ability of all those every working American to access more credit than they should have been able to mask the underlying fact that lower and middle class incomes were not rising. Isn't other fans to eliminate it. We've been time a long time ago. Women, that's been a side terrorism. Let's talk only about our own homegrown animals that are patrolling the America right down. So it goes down to the simplest thing. Be prepared, be vigilant, and welcoming folks. The light is on, the donuts are hot, c Im Liberty Show, and the good news is the coffee was warm as well, so your hosts made it on time. For those of you who miss last week's show. For the first time in the history I mean, and when I say the history, there may be nearly a thousand episodes of the Eyem Liberty Show out there. I know there's at least three to four hundred live shows. And for the first time ever, I was reading my son a book up in his room well last Wednesday, and I fell asleep and I woke up. It was nine to eight pm and I almost had a heart attack. Get thirty two years old, heart attack dead, died in laying right next to his son with a book in his hands. I woke up nine o' eight and I couldn't believe it. But that wasn't even the surprise, right. The surprise was I said, Okay, it's nine to eight. I'm dead tired because after nine o'clock, if I'm not doing a show after nine o'clock, I'm basically useless. I wake up super early. You guys know the deal, so i'd be okay, I'm gonna log on to the phone, go in the chat real quick. If the chat's empty, then I know. G Man said, guys, James has gone over to the dark side. I don't know what's going on. So we're gonna close the show out for the night. And I'd have been left with a big bunch of explaining to dude, to g Man and to my surprise, uh uh, bring the chat room up and there's a ton of people in there. I couldn't believe it. G Man kept them going, he kept them alive, he kept the faith. He knew I was coming. It's amazing. So here we are. I'm back on top. I appreciate it. I appreciate everybody coming back. No hate mail. It was good. It was good. We make mistakes. I was going to open the show with some Alfred Tennyson. I was reading it before the show. I might end it with the show because he has this poem called the Lotus Eaters. It's all about death, and I've been reading a lot of Eggar Allan Poe lately and uh and on. It's one of these things, you know. I used to think that you, when you were intimately involved with and spending a lot of time observing and thinking about life, that you are sort of like on the opposite side of the spectrum, so you weren't thinking about death. But the more I read about the Maudlin and things like like this poem here, I kind of it kind of feels like life and death. There are two things that the more you read about one, the more you feel about the other. Right, you feel more connected to one, and you're when you're more contact because I don't know if it's it's a very interesting thing. The more you enjoy life, the more you not fear death but almost understand it in a way, and the more you want to reveal about both quote the Raven says, Highlander, you know, not my favorite, not my favorite. I was always a big Telltalehart fan. I've seen the play when I was I thinking fourth or fifth grade, and I thought it was the greatest play of all times. How come every play isn't this cool? This guy's ripping the floorboards out of his house to dig up the dead man who's been burnt. I loved it. Anyhow, We've got a massive show tonight. For those of you who are unaware, I know everybody in the chat room got the brief. That's going to be a two hour show. I Am Liberty is going to be a two hour show in the live sense going forward. Now, if you go to I amlibertyshow dot com, there's other podcasts there also that I record, and they are not going to be two hours. They're usually about a half hour to forty five minutes. But I don't know if I like the challenge. I don't know if I am like addicted to the high that is a live show. But to be completely honest with you, we're going to be bringing some great guests home. We have an incredible guest on tonight, and it's really hard for me because I don't know how to shut up. I yack right, I go down to like these waterfalls of topics, and it seems that I just don't have enough time to do everything I want to do. So g man, thank you very much, has given me a whole other hour to play. So if you can stand it, and if you can handle it on the East Coast, staying up till eleven o'clock every Wednesday, that's a good way to start the second half of the week. Dead tired. You're gonna have me for two hours every Wednesday, live, all right. So I do appreciate you guys who are gonna hang tough, because I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of you that do. And I also completely understand to all my great fans out there who decide that ten o'clock is enough. I am liberty. I get it. I get it. I know there's life out side of im liberty. I'll always tell you guys that one of the most humbling things in the whole world, with all the media and with all the distraction and with all the access to entertainment, that there is the most humbling thing in this whole podcasting journey. For me is the fact that you know, all these people take an hour out of their life to listen to the IM Liberty Show, and sometimes some fans even listen to like two hours or an hour and a half each week. That blows my mind. That blows my mind. You got Netflix, you got Amazon Prime, you got you know, every podcast from every popular every popular person there is has a podcast. And then you've got your family and never got your job, and then you've got you know, whatever little time you have, let to do what you want to do. And still you say, hey, go pop and listen. I am Liberty for an hour. Well now I'm taxing you for two hours. All right, let's I think we need to just bring the guests on tonight. Usually I do a little break, we do a little commercial thing, but we're gonna play with commercials a little differently now in the two hour show. I don't have a lot of announcements to make. Oh one other quick thing before we get rolling. If you're not a subscriber to my YouTube channel, which chances are you're not, because I don't have any subscribers on my YouTube channel, I just started doing something in the mornings. I just started about two days ago, and it's a little four to five minute video probably will happen three to four days a week, and it's called Pondering, and go check it out. I think you're gonna like it. It's almost the opposite of the IEM Liberty Show. It's quick, four or five minute segment. If you want to get the brain rolling early, if you want to get the steam pumping out of your ears at work, you're gonna like Pondering, all right. So go to YouTube channel you tube slash, I'm Liberty Show. Check that out, subscribe and you'll get those things shot right to you if you've already follow me on social media getting them shot to you anyway. But that said, let's get our guests on here. Let's get the main man, Stephen Menking, an absolute wonderful man. I mean a guy who you read the title of the show and you say to yourself, cryptocurrencies, collapse and faith and yes, one man encapsulates all that. And I think in a way that we don't even have enough time to cover it all. So Stephen had me on his show on the Objective. You can check all of his great shows out on the Objective dot org. And I'm gonna have him tell you about the Amateur Society as well, because I think I want to join the Amateur Society. It sounds like one of the most awesome things you can do for a guy like me. But without further ado, why don't we bring Steven on let him talk about what he's all about. Steven, how are you tonight? Well, I'm doing fantastic, my friend. It's a pleasure to be here on this inaugural two hour broadcast of the im Liberty Show. Again, I'm Stephnmenking. One of the things you can do is check out our website like you mentioned on the Objective dot org, and we're also up and running at Amateur Soociety dot WordPress dot com. A bit of a intro is going to be helpful. Here some perspective on my life. We'll keep it a little bit brief. If you want to expand on any one of these things as it's relevant, we can certainly do so. But I graduated from college in twenty ten, studied math and economics and was always interested in finance. I wasn't a Christian at the time. I was following my own path and I wanted to get a good job finance provide for my future family, maybe retire early, if you know what I'm saying. But you know, that plan led me to Wall Street. I started working at Morgan Stanley in Manhattan doing technology investment banking. I was an analyst there for a couple of years, and I saw people making sacrifices that I wasn't willing to make, staying late in the office and not attending to their young children, things like that, and you know, making good money. I wasn't quite awake to the overall dynamic of the financial system. But what I did know about economic policy was that the academic side of it was more or less inaccurate, that it was politicized, and that a lot of it was fictionalized in terms of the way that policy was implemented. But I thought that people were naive and ideologically blind, and I didn't even imagine that there was a top down structure that was specifically built by evil and intended to suck the lifeblood out of every man, woman and child walking this earth. And I left the investment banking sphere started working as a proprietary day trader, just trade in stocks, you know, That was my job for a while, And then then I got saved, and that process took about six months, where I did an extensive amount of research. I was an agnostic leading up to that, because in high school I studied a lot of philosophy from the Ancients to the moderns, and ended up in a place where I recognized the limits of human knowledge in terms of the observational faculties, and I decided that the most humble way to approach things was to simply say, there may be a God, there may be something outside of the universe, but there's no way for us to access it. And it turns out that that's actually a rather prideful statement, because it is making a statement about that boundary of our conceptual knowledge, in that even if we can't reach beyond that gulf, beyond that divide, to get outside into the objective, the transcendent God, an omnipresent, being the creator of the universe, would certainly know how to and certainly able to reach in and to reveal himself to us. And so I had just adopted that casual agnostic position. I was always a good student, and so I thought highly of myself in terms of my ability to reason, to educate myself and others and I did hold the process of acquiring knowledge and great esteem. And so when I started asking those worldview questions again, what's the meaning of life? What happens after death? Where did everything come from? Why is there something rather than nothing? I ended up in all sorts of different YouTube videos and debates and books and everything else. First became convinced that God was real, or at the very least it was more reasonable to believe in a transcendent creator than it was to say the claim that that wasn't the case. And then I became convinced of the truth of Christianity. And that was a, like I said, a six month process. And then right after that, like literally the week after that, I got fired from my job in finance, and so I was left in a bit of a lurch. And during that time I started the Amateur Society because I realized that I was absolutely starving for meaningful conversation. I was tired of the just chit chat, the small talk everything else like that. And during that time I was also doing research on the true origins of the financial system, the Federal Reserve, the g Edward Griffin stuff, as well as the secret societies different sorts of things like that having my eyes open, redpill the way that we would say it these days. And in that interval, I started the Amateur Society as a weekly discussion group, and that was back in twenty fourteen, and I, you know, we've been doing that ever since, talking about various topics in science, technology, philosophy, psychology, politics, economics, anything and everything. And what we'll typically do is we'll look at a question that people overlook or just simply assume that they understand what's going on without doing a lot of digging, and we'll ask some questions about definitions, realize that we don't really know what we're talking about, dig a little bit deeper, and then understand how worldview and our approach to the big picture questions affects how we approach all of these other different areas of life. And my constant exhortation to the group is that living this investigated life, fully pursuing the implications of your worldview and pressing in until you squeeze every last drop that you can out of these things is an incredibly worthwhile pursuit. That pressing in to find knowledge in the spiritual as well as in other domains is one of the critical things that we need to do, because if we're not growing, we're standing still. And if we're standing still, then we're falling behind. And so a couple of years went by and I developed those skills and got connected with a couple other people and including John Robertson, who is the producer at the Hagman and Hagman Report, and so we built a different show, a platform called on the Objective, with a goal of informing and helping the remnant body of Christ, specifically through spiritual content as well as coverage of current events. Even though we're not really a news show and things like that. It's more commentary, it's more higher level, but that's where I'm coming from. I can speak to all sorts of different topics and areas. I've a profound fascination with a wide variety of things. And I was actually on the Hagman Daily Show earlier today talking about Stephen Hawking and theoretical physics and that kind of stuff. I'm not an expert in any one of these given fields, but I fancy myself someone who is able to think about at the very least and attempt to articulate some thoughts, to try and translate the complex into the straightforward, and that's part of my calling. When I got fired, I was seeking the Lord about these things. Like God, this is totally new for me. I have nothing right now, but I'm gonna trust you, and I got the calling to be a teacher, and so I'm a private tuner now. I work with students of all ages, mostly high school and college, working on economics and math and standardized tests. That's my day job. I also run a cryptocurrency asset fund, and in between that, I'm podcasting and appearing on shows such as this. So it's an incredible path that God has laid before me. And it's been almost four years now walking with the Lord. But I'm fantastically blessed to have these opportunities and to deal with the struggles that are in my way and in the way of everyone else. We're dealing with such a mailstream that it can be difficult to step back and understand what's really going on. So I try to, whenever I can press into the Lord, seek the peace that the Holy Spirit offers, and think about these sorts of big pictures issues so that I can avoid getting swept away by the EBB and flow of the tide on social media. I described it the other day as just being drawn and quartered by the news cycle, because oftentimes you feel like you're getting pulled in all sorts of different directions. But that's a long winded brief background of my story in my path. So hopefully your audience is more acquainted with me and the journey that I've taken, and so you know, let's get into wherever you want to go. It's a pleasure and a privilege to be to be here, and I really appreciate the opportunity. Sure, no problem. Yeah. One of the things that's really interesting about the process you're talking about over at the Amateur Society is I feel like it needs a name, not that the Amateur Society itself needs a name, but we've definitely reached a point with the Internet and with social media where we need a process and we as a society, we almost need training on how to really dissect the headline and pull the truth out of the headline as opposed to just retweeting the headline. So I really I didn't realize that was what was going on over there at the Amateur Society. I kind of pictured, like, you know, guys, hanging out and talking about these topics. But I didn't realize you guys go onto this deep process of really kind of searching and digging and finding out what the story is beyond the story not only is that. Of a but to be fair, the yeah, to be fair, the conversations are usually quite casual in terms of the way that we're approaching it. But I'm trying to weave in the philosophical aspects and provide some sort of structure. I mean, it's taken a few years to get that pattern overall, but we keep on looking at the worldview side of things and seeing how that sort of trickles down into the decisions that we make on a day and day out basis. The causal chain seems to be that your worldview is going to determine your priorities, and your priorities are going to determine your or values or vice versa. You could say worldview values priorities, and then those priorities are going to determine the thoughts that you have in terms of how you rank order preferences, and then that's going to determine your decisions what you choose as opposed to what you what you neglect and that's going to determine your actions. And so it's like building this bridge to understand that our worldview and our approach to these big picture questions and our understanding of these things is absolutely critical for figuring out how people are going to make decisions. So it's if I, if I had to call it any one thing, it's it's difficult. Maybe we'll think about it during the show, But the principle is using worldview and big picture questions that seldom get investigated to connect to the practical solution level of how do people make decisions? Because that's a that's a profound kind of topic in its own right, but that's that's the way that that dynamic goes. But nonetheless it's it's never over the top technical or or formalize in terms of the terminology and things like that. It's more of a structured discussion to sort of convince ourselves that it's worth taking time each day to think about these things a little deeper and to really stretch ourselves and expand ourselves rather than simply just letting them go by. Yeah, it's just really shines a light on one of those things that one of the many things one of the many problems I guess you could call it a problem or challenge, one of the many challenges that technology is creating for the human race. And you know, I thought that there'd be like a clear day stee when we will be able to say, okay, technology is outpacing us and our ability to absorb it all. Man, I think that day's long past. And the problem with it is, you know, not many people are doing the due diligence that your group is doing it. And I think that everyone has to be responsible for doing a due diligence because of the inactions of others. We suffer from the inactions of others. I mean, that's one of the biggest lessons of life that I've ever learned, is that we all suffer from the inactions of others. And that's that's an ugly thing. But I think it's going to get even more ugly because you know, technology is not slowing down now. I did have one question that came out of that intro that you did, and it's just, you know, it's nothing deep, but it's something that came to mind when I heard it, because we all know that, you know, so you went on this six month journey and research session that kind of pulled you out of your agnostic background. And I have to imagine that some of that made its way around your office at the trading job that you had, or at least somehow it got you know, someone got wind of it. And I picture a guy who is in the process of finding God in Manhattan if you were working in Manhattan still at that time, and it has the question comes to mind, Steve, do you think that your direction spiritually affected your job? You know, did the people around you make decisions about your job and about you working at that organization because of the fact that you were doing what you were doing with your spirituality. Well that I can't say for sure, Like I didn't get that direct kind of feedback. And to be honest, I was doing this in a relatively private setting. It's not like I was watching, you know, three hour long debates while I was sitting by sitting at my desk on the trading floor. But I would have had a couple of conversations and maybe it would have seemed like a difference in overall behavior where I would have been marginally less focused on the day and the day out of the of the trading kind of mechanics, and I suppose that people may have picked up on that and everything else, but there wasn't anything that was overt. I was in Manhattan at the time, so it wouldn't have surprised me if there were. But you know, I basically got called into the floor manager's office and he said, all right, well, Steven, everyone likes working with you. You're good at what you're doing, but you know, it's time to go. And there were other there were other sort of conditions that were operating in the background at the time, so it wasn't mentioned specifically, and I didn't have a sense at the time that that was a major component to it. It's a it's a variety of it's a variety of different things. But yeah, nothing really overt that I could tell. I think it was more just the Holy Spirit taking me out of the path that I wanted to walk for my own life and transitioning me into the path that God wanted to me. God wanted me to walk out that I was ultimately called for. And so ever since then, my life has been extraordinarily fulfilling and educating, and I've had the privilege to speak to different people and to speak into other people's lives. But it's a constant growing process. It's a constant process of discovery and expansion of skills, whether we're talking about economics or preparation or figuring out what to do with life. I mean, I just turned thirty, and so you know, I'm looking ahead at fifty years if we have them God willing and thinking about well, what am I going to do. I need to do something that is going to keep me fulfilled and keep me motivated and keep me moving. And now God has led me into plenty of different paths. There have been doors opened, and I have almost almost too much to do. And so it's I take pleasure in at times when I can get some rest, but that includes being disciplined about my spirituality, just because when we get overwhelmed by the number of day to day tasks that we have to complete, and fair enough, I mean, people have day to day tasks, whether it's children or bills or assignments at work in different projects. I mean, but at the end of the day, I got a word in prayer during a time of fasting at the beginning of this year, where God spoke to God spoke to my heart, not audibly. But I was in a prayer meeting at Times Square Church where I attend in Manhattan, and that's Pastor David Wilkerson's church, in case people are familiar with him, and the word that I got in my spirit was to be overwhelmed, but not by the things of this world, the chaos that's around us, but to be overwhelmed by God. And so on the objective Twitter account. Every morning, I'll put up a put up a quick tweet just to be overwhelmed by God's mercy, be overwhelmed by God's grace, be overwhelmed by God's forgiveness. And sometimes if I'm off of social media or particularly busy with my tutoring clients and other things like that, That'll be the only social media post I make for that day. And I mean fair enough. So I'm being led into a place where I get up a little earlier, I spend some more time reading in different in different things, and it's a it's an awesome it's an awesome place to be. It's just you know, this is a this is a crazy kind of world. And even if I can't attribute uh, the my my firing to people around me, recognizing that I needed to go someplace else where I wasn't fitting in quite the same way anymore. I can certainly attribute it to God recognizing that the plan that He had for my life was so much more rich and abundant than the plan that I could have made for myself, and that I was walking for myself that it's not even worthy to compare. So a tremendous, tremendous opportunity to be here to talk about any topic, big or small, that that you want to pursue, my friend. Awesome, Great, Yeah, so, uh we're coming up. This is I really wanted to feel this one out, Steve, and I told you that before we came on the show, because for one thing, I really hate sticking to a script, and for another thing, when you have a great guest on, you know, minds go where they go, and it's it's almost like against the rules of podcasting in my opinion, to sort of try to pull the reins on that sort of thing. You said you're tutoring and you're also you're operating what was it, a cryptocurrency? What that was way out of my wheelhouse. Yeah, So I was brought on at the end of last year to be the portfolio manager at a cryptocurrency asset management fund. It's basically like a hedge fund, but the focus is instead of stocks and bonds, it's in cryptocurrencies and blockchain related assets. Okay, great, yeah, yeah, sounds about right. What I was wondering is I kind of would and I didn't email you on this, but I'm sure it won't be a problem. One of the things I've been talking about a lot is kind of trying to get people to start looking at income a different way. I like the idea of diversifying your income and getting away from this idea one job, one big salary. Everything falls onto that horse, and you know, if that horse dies, you got a big problem. I don't know if that's something you would want to talk about when we come back from the break, but I really would like to get your thoughts on that sort of movement away from the you know, one good job, one big salary, to a more diversified income where you're pulling income from many different things. And I know, I'm sure you have a website, you have a podcast, you know all about that. You know, the different areas that a person can pull income from as opposed to the traditional big salary. Sure thing, let's go for it. I'd be more than happy to talk about that kind of stuff from the perspective of what people used to call it in the financial field, it's called the side hustle. But you know, in today's day and age, you do have to be diversified to prevent yourself from getting thrown off the rails if anything catastrophic happens to any particular company that you're at, or any particular opportunity. Plus, you know it's difficult. People are already working multiple part time jobs and everything like that. So there are different kinds of skills, different kind of avenues that you can pursue. But if you think creatively and put your time into these things and budget your time accordingly, then there are definitely ways to improve your income stream and everything else like that. But it takes some personal development and it takes effort. Frankly, this stuff doesn't just fall into people's laps. So if we can provide some solutions in that area, I'd be more than happy to continue that conversation after the break. Great, Well, you hit the nail on the head on two keywords, and we'll talk about those as soon as we get back, So Steven, we'll take a quick break few minutes and we'll bring you right back on. And I guess we're talking diversified incomes when we get back on the Iem Liberty Show. All right, everybody, stay tuned, be right back back to life hump day on the Iron Liberty Show. Folks, thanks for joining in two hours, two hours live going forward, The Iron Liberty Show has got an hour bump, super excited. What can I say because of the folks listening right If you're not around, there's no needs and no need for me to be around for an extra hour. So I do appreciate you guys joining us. We've got Stephen Menking with us tonight, and I want to keep the ball rolling on that visit on the Objective dot org to get all of his podcasts and some other great podcasts that are up there as well. People I've done interviews with and associated with. Just look, it's one of those times, you know, we're living through one of those times where I know the struggle, and one of the big struggles is who can I talk to? Who can I trust? Can I who can I really connect with? Where are the good guys you know, that's one of those things that's a big struggle today. You don't hear it a lot from men, but you know, I don't have to hear things to know they exists. We are going to get on the subject of faith. We touched on the subject of faith already. I have serious faith in the fact that there are men all across this nation, the looking for the right guy to listen to, or looking for the right guys to talk to, to hang out with. You know, again, where are the good guys? Where do you find them? Because we need that and we've got one of the good guys with us on this show, and like I said, he's affiliated with many others. So Stephen, you before the break, we were talking about going into a segment on diversified income and I just felt like it would be a good turn for the show and one of the reasons and I knew. I knew immediately as you started to explain it, you hit three words that were just they resonated with me. You said you have to be creative. You said that it's going to be challenging, and you said that it's going to require personal growth. And many people. I think. Look at the side hustle, like you called it as almost kind of a burden. Right, I've got to work two jobs. I've got to do this, I've got Now, everybody's situation is different. I understand that, but there's something to be said about the human animal and these three things in particular. Like I think yearn for these three things. I think. I don't believe in people who aren't creative. I don't think it exists. I think creativity is in you know, I think it manifests itself in different ways. But I think there's a part of every person that wants to be creative, desires to be creative, and gets shoved into a you know, a box cubicle and they have no personality or anything at work, so that creativity dies. I also think that people need to be challenged, and we live in a time where things are so good that those challenges don't come. You know, those challenges come on candy crush or whatever it is. And finally, the demand to grow, that demand for personal growth. I mean, if you don't really push the pace on that, it doesn't just happen on its own. You know, you don't just simply self actualize just because like it's some part of the lifespan. So I know that was Lengthy's the little secondary intro there, But I think this is a great topic for those reasons because these are exactly the things that I talk about when I get on the subject of diversifying income, not so much about the idea that you need more money or you need money from I think you do mean money for more than one source. But what are your thoughts on what it takes to sort of live in this world of diversified income and how it meets your needs, you know, your sort of human animal needs. Well, that's a great question. I'm not here to give people like a Ty Lopez style, oh Bi Lamborghinis because I did internet marketing kind of speech like all that stuff. It's just nonsense. And so if we're going to be real people in the real world, we have to be able to think through things critically and ask ourselves what is it going to take? And the answer is it's never going to be simple, but it's going to be fascinating, rewarding, et cetera. So let me tell you a few different things that people can do to get started. Okay, first of all, we need to recognize that from a worldview perspective. Well, I don't know what other people's worldview tell them, whether you're an insignificant speck of dust that's doomed to die and then nothing thereafter. My world, he tells me that I was created in the image of God, and that includes this creative capacity itself. I am certainly not God, nowhere near in any kind of capacity, but there is this ability to have free will and to choose to improve things. We have that capacity, and how dare we not choose that path? This is the two roads diverged in the wood. I took the one. Let's travel by from frost here. When we're looking at these sorts of things, we have to recognize that what everyone is doing is not necessarily the solution. It means that if nobody's doing something, that's not necessarily the solution either. But ultimately we have to figure things out for ourselves. And so this starts with understanding who we are. It starts with sitting down and saying, not just oh, I have this particular goal, how do I figure out how to get there, whether it's a financial goal or otherwise. It starts by sitting down and doing a serious inventory of who I am and what I have, and a brutal assess your skills. Honestly, it's no use lying to yourself in these endeavors because we're trying to get real solutions here. Do you spend too much time in frivolous pursuits? Take a look at what you spent your last week doing, and I guarantee you have at least five hours in there. There's no way that you don't. There's no way. I mean, I have an extra five hours. I'm sure it would push me, it would push me to the brink, but you know I could squeeze it out. And if I can, then then so can you. So we have to be honest. If we're not gonna be honest, then we're never gonna get anywhere. And that includes assessing our meta skills. Can we read? Can we speak? Can we write? Can we think? Can we perform these kind of operations to articulate ourselves in an authentic way? Can we communicate with other people in an effective manner? If we can't do that, then whatever solution we have is never going to get off the ground. Right, So in this situation, we have to say, Okay, well, it's going to be very difficult for me to think creatively. If I don't know how to think, it's going to be difficult for me to incorporate new ideas if I can't read or if I can't if I can't speak them, if I can't have that kind of communication. So we have to think about what are we doing with our time here on here on this earth, whatever time we have. We don't know how much time that we do have. And so if we're not even thinking about these things, if we're just on autopilot, then we're just gonna, you know, cycle off the cliffs, so to speak, because the road is ever moving and the dangers are ever present, and one of the most insidious dangers is becoming complacent. And as you mentioned in our relatively affluent society, the richest in all of history generally speaking, as we look at the economic statistics, as fraudulent as they may be, people's quality of life and access to luxury and leisure is more so now than it has been at any point in history, roughly speaking. Now, certain people are in dire straits, and that's fair enough. It's easy to get in dire straits these days, and it is not necessarily a reflection on your own self. But consider this, ask yourself the question that Alexander Souljanitsen asked himself when he found it self in the Soviet Gulag. He was a profound support of the Communist Party, and then after the revolution whoop away to Siberia and he asked himself the brutal question, what happened in my entire life? Is there any of this that can be placed on my back? What kind of responsibility do I have for these kind of situations? Because he encountered people who were capable, in the midst of tremendous suffering, to keep their dignity, to behave in the quote unquote right way, to not just sink into the depths of depravity and nihilism and bitterness and resentment and murderous vengeance. And so if we ask ourselves that question, what have we done, but not dwell on it and say, all right, what did I do last week? How can I improve my life moderately? And by moderately I mean by a fraction of a percent? Because if you and this is one of the one of the most powerful things in finances, compound interest, if you get a little bit better each day, then in a couple of years, you wouldn't even recognize yourself. And that's part of the Christian walk, but it's part of everyone's walk. Everyone has the capability to do this to improve our ability at reading, speaking, writing, thinking, to understand how we're spending our time. Because when we put our effort into thinking about those things, then plans will begin to formulate how could I improve this. We just have to get into the habit of improving things when we recognize that we can actively improve them, and that starts in really small ways. And this is why Professor Jordan Peterson exhorts people to clean up their room. You know, people are like, oh, well that you know, what a what a bold kind of solution in a semi sarcastic way, but it's true. We need to be able to put things in order at a small scale to build up our capacity to put greater things in order. So if I tell you all right here, here are eight different strategies, eight different avenues that you can pursue in order to expand your different income streams, that's not going to do anything for you if you can't communicate, don't have the kind of creative solutions based attitude to say I'm actually going to go for it, because none of these things are just passive all the way through. Now, passive income is the best kind of income. That's the take money to make money kind of income where you can set it away and then you can get residual checks essentially, But we can't talk about that honestly unless we've had a conversation about these underlying skill sets. What I tell my high school students is that I care less about your SAT scores and more about your ability to communicate with other people. Because if you are someone who people want to communicate with, then opportunities will come to you. You won't have to seek them out because people want to be around other people they can communicate with. How rare is that when you get a text from someone, or an email at work or something else and it's someone who you don't want to communicate with, getting that communication makes you feel bad. Now, ask yourself, are you that kind of person? And this is a tough question. When you reach out to other people, do you think that other people are really happy to hear from you. That's a difficult thing to answer because it requires being capable of giving of ourselves for other people so that we can establish those relationships. Not being a doormat, not being someone who gets rolled over because people don't like dealing with that either, but someone who is attentive. We have to be watchful, We have to pay attention to find opportunities for us to help other people out. Even in the minutest of ways. Even a small improvement on a day to day basis is critically important. Improved by one tenth of one percent your capacity in any one of these critical categories and in a couple of years things will be much much better. And that needs to be a part of the process that can be taken in bite sized pieces to review. So let's get back to basics and then I'll kick it back to you. So before we begin talking about some of the specific strategies, but before any of this side hustle stuff gets off the ground, you need to do some real honest inventory of who you are as a person when what kind of situation you're in now that involves, like I said at the top, how do you spend your time? If you took an inventory of the last week, could you even remember what you did? Is that a good sign? Do you have a schedule, et cetera, et cetera, and then ask yourself, can I really read? When was the last time I read something out of intellectual curiosity because I enjoyed it? Can I speak? Do I feel comfortable articulating myself to other people, particularly more complex ideas? Can I write? Can I string an actual sentence together without sounding like a fool? And I think? Can I actually investigate or ask several questions in a row? And you can train yourself that way. When you find yourself in public having a conversation with someone, please please try, please try to ask the other person as many questions as possible. And just as an aside Dutch, we'll pray for We'll pray for Shirley. We'll keep you in our prayers. Thanks for joining us tonight. It's just a just a quick hat tip to the to the chat, take care and getting getting back to this. See if you can ask people as many See how many questions you can ask someone before they ask you a question. My own personal record is something like between thirty and forty minutes. And at a certain point I was just it was just surprising. I was trying to send a new personal best. So you know, ask yourself these things, where are you on these big picture skills and capabilities, and then you can figure out what you need to work on. Because if you have a wounded really relationships, if you have wounded people, if you yourself are wounded, it's going to be much more difficult for you to establish a meaningful a meaningful path towards diversifying income if you don't have the strength of character to keep it up because or the resources, the mentally, physically, et cetera. Because it takes effort, it's rewarding effort, it's compelling effort, it's meaningful effort, but it takes effort. So we have to do a real accounting of who we are and what our capacities are before we get into those specifics. But I'm more than happy to get into into some additional tactics if you, if you'd like. Well, to be honest with you, it's still awesome too. By the way, let me go back to the beginning of that thing and just say that's like, ah, that's the YouTube video everyone needs. Probably wouldn't be the YouTube video that gets all the views, but it'd be it's definitely the one that everyone needs. And if you if you peruse YouTube at all, you know exactly what I mean by that, but a great intro to it. Uh. I don't know that we need to go down the line of detailed methods for generating the diversified income because I you know, if someone is inclined to do it, Steven, I think they're gonna go find it out, you know. And I think we've got to even though we have the time that we have, I think we have limited time and our time would be better spent. I wanted sort of exactly what you gave me, which I appreciate, which is the your sort of your overarching philosophy on this idea of the options outside of that one big salary, and you brought up something that is super powerful and it kind of almost was the It was almost the overarching idea over the whole thought, and that was know thyself first, which kind of made me laugh because I did ah today. Actually I posted a pondering episode on YouTube that was just that. It was. It was along the lines of get to know the person that you are and the person that you want to be and the differences between. So that was kind of cool from a more shallow perspective, though, I do want to talk about something that I discovered in this in this whole what it was. It was sort of in the periphery of a creating diversified income and jumping into the world of freelance writing and sort of taking my podcast from a hobby into more of something that could maybe generate income. Also, one of the things I did when I sat down and really did sort of a personal inventory about myself, and it was very similar to what you mentioned. What am I really capable of? Those types of things? What am I not capable of? What am I good at? What am I not good at? What do I want to get better at? You know, where's the value in spending the time to get better at said thing? I really started to drill down, Steven to this idea of what you know, it's weird because you have hobbies and you have what it are called intro but I really wanted to figure out, like what really dry? What really dry? What really makes me happy? You know what? If I had to sum it up into one word, what is it that makes me happy? And I think that's there's a lot of little things in life that make people happy, but it's sort of like momentary or momentarily happy. You know, what I came to to find is that the most important thing to me when it came to creativity or business or the podcast, in and of itself, what are these these things that I'm doing, The most important thing to me turned out to be expression. It turned out that expression was just so high on the ladder, and I had never considered it until that. You know, I considered other things making a difference, you know, bringing information to people, look at these things, you know, making enough money that I can live the way I want to live, that type of thing. And it was very important for me to kind of pull that out of the mess, to pull this idea out of the mess that oh, this is what has driven me, because it's driven me almost my whole life. And I think, if you're gonna go down this road, like Steve mentioned about, you know this really important self audit, one of the great things to do is to find out what really drives you. I mean, because you could tell yourself there are a lot of things that drive you, right, the bills drive me, the kids, the wife, whatever it is, those things drive you. Of course, because you have to drive if you're in that situation, you have no choice but to drive, and you wake up and you probably think about those things. But there's there's like a lump of coal in there somewhere that you have to find, and you have to find what the real fuel is for you down there, because there is a I think everybody has a real fuel. I said, I was lucky enough to dig mine out, and I found out that that's what it is. It's expression, it's self expression. And whenever I'm running low, or whenever I'm running out of you know, like you said, getting to the brink, whenever I'm running out of that spunk, that's what I reach for. I reach for that idea of self expression and doing what I do for a living allows me that, it allows me that in a way that I've never had it before, and I don't think I could get it any other way. And that really that's a whole nother driving force once you figure out what that fuel is and you can go, Okay, yeah, this is what I'm standing to lose. Yeah, that's good. That's some good information there. I am liberty faithful. If you're listening to this podcast, you know, one of the cool things about a podcast, I like the that it can find people at different times in their life. And I know for a fact that the information that just went out from nine point thirty on is finding some group of people one person, five people, twenty people, one hundred people, whatever it is. It's finding these people at just the right time. And that's powerful. There's no getting around that. That's powerful. Uh, do you mind if we move on, Steven? Do you have anything else to add on this topic? Like I said, I don't think we need to deep dive into the different methods and you know, ways to generate that diversification of incompass. I think that information's out there and I think the people who want it will go find it. Yeah. The only thing I'd add here, James, is that for a variety of different people who can express what I'm talking about with even greater clarity and experience and everything else would include people like doctor Jordan Peterson like I mentioned, or Jocko Willink speaking from a leadership and a competitiveness standpoint and an attitude mindset kind of perspective. And so you can look up their material. They're they're everywhere, and you know when you are when you're mentioning these things when you're trying to find what matters to you, find what you what you can't live without. I mean, you have to pay attention to what you pay attention to, because your body is like clinically fine tuned to pay attention to the things that derive. Meaning you essentially look at the world in terms of tools and obstacles, and so you know, the question you would ask yourself is what do you do that you know is good for you? Where you lose track of time? I mean, if you're a if you're an expert mechanic and passionate about cars, you could be out in the garage for five hours and it seems like it seems like no time has passed whatsoever. And so that's a good proxy or a decent metric. But if people are interested in some of the specifics of the of the multiple income streams and diversifying, they can always send me an email my email addresses on the objective at gmail dot com, and I'd be more than happy to follow with any of your listeners to have a conversation or to exchange some specific tactics and ideas. So I agree there's plenty of information out there we don't necessarily have to spend too much time on it here, because we've already sunk a bunch into that important information about the backdrop and the context and the philosophical underpinnings of who we are as people to put ourselves in a position to pursue something like that, because that's when we really get meaning, is when we have a worthwhile aim and we're making progress towards it. That turns out to be, from a clinical perspective, more rewarding, and people get more of a happiness reward from making progress towards a valuable or meaningful goal than from actually accomplishing the goal itself, which is kind of kind of an interesting phenomenon. But nonetheless, people can certainly send me an email to follow up and ask any extra questions about the details there, happy to move on to whatever you had in mind. Excellent bringing out the big guns in Jordan Peterson and Jocko willink Man. I've been listening to Jordan Peterson like crazy over the last two weeks. My wife's looking at me like I'm out of my mind because I hated school, so for her to turn around in the kitchen and I've got a professor up there talking at me. It's one of those funny one of those funny things that happens as you can get older, you know. But he he and he. Remarks about that too in terms of in terms of his lectures. He'll be like, I just started posting these things and then all of a sudden people were fascinated by it, and I was like, well, this is marvelous. There's something about the message then that makes sense, because otherwise, why would you spend an hour, two hours, three hours, ten hours listening to someone drone on and on about psychology and the structure of myth and archetypal stories and and everything like that. So you know, I'm I'm right there. I'm right there with you. Yeah, no doubt. I watched the video the other day about him breaking down Pinocchio. You might you might scoff at this. Guys, you have to watch this video Jordan Peterson breaking down Pinocchio. It will blow your mind. But uh, yeah, he's done. He's done that in plenty of different venues. That's primary from his uh, from his first book called Maps of Meaning, and so he teaches the psychology course at the University of Toronto that's based on that he has a couple semesters worth of those lectures, and it's all about different fundamental archetypes and different things like that. It's very powerful about the structure and nature of being as a way that's encoded into story. So it's not just oh, there's a symbol, it's a triangle, it means this, or there's water, it means that. It's a bit it's a bit deeper pointing to this archetypal understanding of human life. I would I would definitely recommend for people who are trying to improve and get everything in their lives together. His latest book, Twelve Rules for Life and an Antidote to Chaos, for people who are a bit more sort of inclined to study the ideology in the background his earlier books Maps of Maps of Meaning is excellent. I would I would probably recommend more like the lectures where you get more visuals and more feedback and more interaction and a bit more depth. I think that's that's pretty compelling as well. He also has a podcast, so you can you can fire that up. And what I what I do for for all these things, I have too many different, too many different sources of information, so I have to. I have to make good use of my time. And I listen to things on usually to two time speed, but if someone's talking really fast, got or they have a different accent, I have to go down to one point five. But you know, there's plenty of plenty of excellent material out there, like I mentioned, But happy to you know, happy to answer any questions for the listeners. Again, so I do appreciate that I threw that on the objective at gmail dot com in the chat from folks. Again, that's on the objective at gmail dot com. Uh, one more thing, one more thing on Jordan, because this is an important one, especially in this day and age. You know, people who listen to the Eye on Liberty Show, they know that I'm big on things like lifting weights and fitness and working out and being strong and you know, all those things that sort of historically define like yeah, I guess it's historically defined manhood. And we're moving into a time. I think we've already moved into a time probably before this time, where you know, that role, that man role sort of got less and less traditional. And what I really liked that Jordan did is he started to break manhood down from a you know the perspective of a tall, skinny professor who sounds like Kermit the Frog. And when I first saw his videos, you know, I'm a big fan of Jogo Willink man. He's right up my alley. And you know, guys like that, you know, you pull a lot of this idea of what banhood is from guys like that. And I know because I was I was not always this way. I used to be a guy who would kind of scoff at people like Jocko Willink And so I know there's a lot of guys out there who are looking for sort of a model that isn't ex Navy seal, can do a thousand pull ups type of guy. And there's a lot more to Joco Willing than that. But getting that information and getting getting that deeper understanding of, you know, what being a man is, what interacting with women is all about. When you can get that information from a guy like I said, who looks and sounds like Jordan Peterson and has his background, it's super valuable. So if you're out there and this is resonating with you, you know that you're looking for sort of a mentor that you know, a mentor for manhood that isn't sort of what the going rate is or what you're used to seeing, because it doesn't fit with you. I know, I spent a lot of my life being that guy, you know, being that kid who was in garage bands and writing poetry and you know, really into the arts and felt like, there's no way I'm ever going to be a strong guy. There's no way ever, I'm ever going to fit into that mold you know that my dad was or my grandpap was, or whatever it is. It's very compelling stuff and it's definitely worth your time, but I don't want to pad the room with any more Jordan Peters, and he's getting enough love these days. But he's got great content out there, no doubt about it. Steven. Since we're on the subject of income and that type of thing, and this is something that affects preppers and non preppers, it's just it just really affects Americans in general, and maybe not even from a retirement standpoint, but just from a basic you know, comfort and the idea that you can live without worrying about, you know, an anvil dropping on you. I read the other day that less than fifty percent of Americans have four hundred dollars in their savings account. And this is not new. This is something I read over at Michael Snyder's website, the Economic Collapse Blog dot com, probably five or six years ago. I don't know if the stat was so bad back then, but I know that for a long time Americans have struggled with saving money. And I don't know, Steven, if I again, it's sort of like the diversification of income question. I'm not poking and prodding you for tips on how to save money, but I kind of would like your diagnosis on the thing and your thoughts being in finance, what's the deal? Why can't Americans put any money away? Because people can't do maths? Boom? And I mean, and I mean that very seriously, to the extent that, yeah, dropped the bike. That's that's what a math tutor would typically say. But the point is if people have access to credit, or access to access to supplies or to streams of resources that they don't associate with something tangible or concrete, then it can be easy to become habituated into making incorrect or improper kind of decisions. For instance, if you have outstanding credit card debt. The interest that you're paying on top of that debt if you're only making minimum payments is twenty percent plus crazy exculpatory kind of rates. And so if you have a credit card, and anyone with a pulse and sometimes even people without a pulse can get a credit card or even a voter ID card in some cases these days, then you will be in a position where you can obtain merchandise, obtain things and not have to pay for them. This is the credit cycle. But because people, I mean, addition and subtraction and the basic operations are hard enough. If you ask people to do calculations on percentages, let alone compound percentages just on the fly, they won't even get the order of magnitude right. And that's not an indictment on the people necessarily, it's an indictment upon the absolute utter failure of both families and schools to train children up with the right kinds of skills so that they can develop this kind of attitude and approach towards these things. I mean, I run across people, kids to adults all the time who say, oh, I hate math. I'm not a math person. That's garbage. And people who people who will say math isn't interesting, And I'm not trying to criticize those people. I'm trying to criticize that attitude. If you understand the way that math works, even just at a rudimentary level, if you can visualize the way that numbers interact, and you have the wherewithal to put a plan together, and you have the capacity to just create opportunities for yourself, then you're not going to have a problem. But this starts from a values perspective. It starts ultimately at a worldview perspective. Do you have a responsibility to provide for yourself and for your family. Many people have been damaged so badly or have so many issues where they don't even want to care for themselves. They will care for their pets, let's say, but they won't take care of themselves because they understand their own lives. They understand what they've done and in many different ways. It can be difficult to live with ourselves sometimes because we've screwed up in so many different ways and hurt people, and there are things that we've done that only we know, and maybe it's between ourselves and God, and it's extraordinarily challenging to get motivated to improve yourself and everything else like that, and let alone at a certain point to say, you know what, I really think I should learn math. That just doesn't happen spontaneously. People will get into get into a hole, and they'll keep digging, and they'll just keep on digging and digging and digging to the point where you reach a you reach a point where any kind of hardship, any kind of emergency, is essentially the death now of someone's financial future. Because there are all sorts of virtuous cycles and all sorts of vicious cycles. And this is alluded to biblically by what's known as the Matthew principle. To those who have more will be given, and to those who have not everything will be taken away. And that's like, well, this is criminally unfair, and we need to redistribute the income in order to do that. Well, what would be better is if we gave everyone the skills, because without the skills to appropriate more proper budgeting techniques and everything else like that, you know, it's going to be a challenge. Like people win the lottery and then they're unhappy and broke. And for certain types of people with addictive personalities. Winning the lottery and having access to funds and whatever they want to consume could be the worst thing that's ever happened to them. And so people don't understand how to handle their own money, and even when it's even when someone's handling it for them, it doesn't it doesn't work out quite right. And of course this is not to take away from the really incredible, bold, powerful, hard working people who have had their economic opportunities sapped and sucked away from them by forces that are beyond their control. Now, in that kind of environment, it's just it's a it's an incredibly difficult thing to hear. Oh, yeah, you're you're you're bad at math, so you're not saving. No, you're working hard, you're you're a powerful person. You're trying to provide for your family. And the opportunities that were there just aren't there. And so it's incumbent for for people in that demographic to do whatever they can to pursue different kinds of opportunities. And there are those other opportunities available, but it's it's like an adapt or, you know, or encounter the kind of obstacles that you really don't want to encounter. So I mean, people's consumption habits are one thing and everything else. But I think you would find that if people woke up to the idea that they need to take responsibility for their own lives and that that kind of shouldering of responsibility will actually give them meaning in their lives, is some purpose, something to do to help to help them, to help themselves, and then to help other people to take an inventory of what they're spending their time on, what they're spending their money on, what they're spending their resources on, and to not ignore one of the fundamental iron cloud principles of economics. Most of textbook economics that I've learned is more or less nonsense. It's like semi applied common sense with the veneer of technical language and different kind of causal chains that are just oversimplified and based on assumptions that don't match the real world. Like you wonder why professional economists and financial people always get their forecast wrong. You know, if if they actually figured it out or had these ideas covered in terms of being able to anticipate what would happen moving forward, then everyone would be you know, everyone would be megabillionaires. But that's just not the way that things go. So what you find is that people have to understand the notion of opportunity cost. And that means that when you make a decision, you're not just making one decision, let's say, a decision about how to spend your time. You're not just making one decision about, oh, I'm going to do this. You're also saying no to every other alternative. You're turning down everything that you could have done in favor of the one option. So it's not just yes or no to one particular thing, it's yes to this and no to a thousand other things. Now, you don't have to get everything perfectly optimized and exactly right in order to start making better decisions. But once you realize that, oh, man, like what I spend my next hour doing is actually a really meaningful decision, then you'll start to take it a little bit more seriously, and maybe, just maybe you'll begin to develop the kind of discipline and understanding to acknowledge your shortfalls and where you might be making these kinds of mistakes, or to put together the kind of approach and the kind of plan that prevents you from being in that situation. Now you can't control all circumstances, and sometimes obstacles are too big to be sort of chiseled down in a gradual fashion. However, for the extensive majority of people, the near universal population, you can improve your life by doing small things better and by making incremental decisions. It has to be increments. People are just going to say, oh, this guy on the podcast yelled at me for not knowing math, and so now I'm going to turn my life around to show him. I mean, if you do, good for you. But that's not typically how it works. Typically you have to make the decision to change, and that is something that people are in many cases loath to do, even if they know that what they're doing is let's say, counterproductive. But putting everything in the light of this idea of opportunity cost is critically important in my view, just because opportunity cost demonstrates to us that even the small things that we choose to do or that we choose not to do, make a big difference, and they add up in an incredible way. I mean, how many decisions do we make in a day in terms of our behaviors. I mean, let's round down and call it a few hundred Okay, few hundred things that things that we do and we can prove at least, how about we improve one of those. How about we make one better decision each day and try that for two years and then get back to me. See if life doesn't get better? See see if tackling the problems when they come up, as opposed to just putting things aside and waiting until they become overwhelming, such as credit card debt, and you know, bad relationships or conflicts that you allow to fester. See if addressing things right when they show up is isn't a better isn't a better plan? It's painful, but sometimes the path of least resistance is the most dangerous path. It's powerful information. You know, you are just rocking these topics, Steve, and I really like the direction that you've taken with each of them because you're giving. You're giving more than what the average person I think is looking for, and I appreciate that. You know, you're definitely giving me more than I even more than I expected. You already talked for about an hour, I think, on your show, so I came in with kind of high expectations already. Yeah, one of the things you mentioned is he talked about teaching kids at a very young age, and it was kind of the perfect segue into one of the last things that I wanted to talk about with you tonight. Uh, don't mind the jumping around on topics. Trust me, my my listening base is very familiar with jumping around of topics. If it seems to like we're going from one to the other or whatever, I think we stayed. I think we stayed on a pretty good track thus far. But we're gonna sort of leave economics behind, if that's okay with you, because you brought up the kids. You brought up children. You brought up an interesting thing because you know, teaching kids, even sitting down and teaching kids, is not what it used to be. And when I was thinking about the show earlier this week and having you on, I was thinking a lot about kids and sort of what the household looks like. And one of the things that came into mind was that I was thinking that kids for a long time grew up with at least three parents. And that might sound weird, but let me explain. So I was thinking, you know, this day and age with well, like you said side hustle after side hustle and people doing this, people doing that, not managing their time correct. I mean, there's a lot of parents who are struggling to make it and they're just not around their kids, and there's no getting around it. It's not good for the kid. And you know, we know children, we all were children at one point. We know that they're resilient and hope to God they'll find their way, but the paradigm had shifted so much because I what comes to mind is thinking about kids living twenty thirty forty years ago and before having a mom that they were responsible for pleasing, you know, and having very serious rules with mom, and having a dad that they were responsible for pleasing, and having those you know, maybe different but similar rules with Dad and expectations and those types of things, and then also having a very real presence of God and sort of the repercussions of that relationship as well. You know. One of the things that always pops into my mind is the being written into the Book of Life, which is an important part of the Jewish religion, and it's this idea that you know, God is watching, God is watching, and when you're at the temple, you have to be very careful about how you act and cautious, and you know there comes a time when God will make the decision whether or not to write you in the Book of Life. And it was an interesting thing to me because I thought, all of that pressure, really it creates better kids. And you look at that. I mean, of course, not overall, but you look at that idea of Wow, So a child who grew up in those days, most children grew up with this idea that there were three people who were watching them constantly. Right, even if Dad was at work, you always knew things would be bad. Mom is watching, and if Mom tells Dad that things were bad, it's gonna be a problem. But you also had this higher tier that is no doubt missing in most homes, right this even if, even if religion is present in the home, Steve, I wonder how much of it is levied in the way that it was back then, with the sort of fire and brimstone, and you know the punishment that is uh, you know, it's shown in the Old Testament a lot. And I don't know, you know, I don't. I don't frequent churches. I don't really I'm not in organized religion very much. But I don't know. I think the kids are missing something from not having that sort of i'd like to call a three parent household. I don't know what your take would be on it, but I think they're missing something because of that, not just from the lack of religion in the household, but I mean from the lack of I don't know, not understanding that God can be a spiteful God. What are your thoughts on that, Well, it's a complicated topic. Whenever we get into the exact notions of theology and doctrine, I'll preface it by saying that I don't have any doctorates in divinity or anything else like that. But I can't speak hypothetically to the parental example and the way that that might go. I am not a parent myself, and so you could take it with a grain of salt. But I do know a thing or two about human nature, and you know that people are fallible, and so if someone is attempting to and valiantly I might add, even so to raise children by themselves. And in certain cases the parents or one of the parents is incapable of raising the children, or doesn't want to, or isn't around, or there are endless varieties of circumstances. So it's inappropriate to paint with the broad brush, but it's worth keeping in mind that one person is incapable of you know, people get tired. Nobody has endless reserves of energy, patience, compassion, and everything else. And the only way to improve in those areas in truly meaningful ways is through the power of the Holy Spirit and by the agency of God alone. Because if we try and do something as complicated, as meaningful and as important as raising children in our own strength without someone to back us up, to encourage us to shoulder to shoulder that load and to also come to handle that responsibility, then it's almost a non starter. And so what people will typically do is they will outsource parenting to schools, outsource parenting to society and everything else like that, just to lessen the load. And it's one thing for me to sit here and say, well, everyone's just selfish, because you know, it's kind of like, well, I haven't been there, and so it's hard for me to speak with authority on this issue. But I can say that we can look at the construction of society and the construction of families and definitively declare that, based on legitimate scientific and social scientific evidence, that it is better for children when they have a mother and a father in the home. But that's obviously no guarantee, especially of success. It's no guarantee of being built and sort of brought up in a way that fosters the kind of the kind of values that make for a complete and a progressing society and as a whole. And ultimately this stems from the stems from God, the stems from our world views and our understanding of right and wrong. I mean, we live in a culture and in a society where standards of objective morality have gone out the window in favor of situational ethics and subjectivity, where you know, you can't tell me what right and wrong are because what I think is right is right because me thinking it's right makes it right, and there's nothing that you can say to contradict it. And so this is this is a world, yeah, like literally, this is this is a world where where this postmodern ideological structure is ruling the day in academia and in institutions of power, and it filters down through the lowest levels of our education system, where our children are taught that they're nothing more than animals, so to speak, and that they're inconsequential and that there's nothing beyond their senses, and that they should follow their heart and whatever they want to do is right, until you end up in situations where the level of confusion and hypocrisy is so profound that you wind up in situations where people on one side of their mouth would say that a five year old can determine what gender they are and it be totally valid, and on the other hand say that an eighteen year old who can serve in the military can't own a firearm. And so you know what we get is a mishmash of nothing, and it's backed up by this assertion that logic itself is an oppression tool of the patriarchy, of the white male, cisgender heteronormative patriarchy. And so this is identity politics and intersectionality and these different academic guises that just out and out nonsense classes itself up as in order to seem fancy. Like for me, I don't care what a French psychoanalyst from fifty years ago had to say about the meaning of texts and how life has an infinite number of interpretations. It's nonsense. It just it makes absolutely no sense. And it's beyond that, it's actually evil and pernicious because it leads to situations where people are thrown off the deep end by forces greater than their control and they can't stand up to it. And it takes someone bold, It takes someone definitive and confident and secure to say no, that doesn't make sense and it's just flat out wrong and it's dangerous. And whatever you say, no matter what you do, I'm not going along with it. But we need that kind of intransudence. We need that kind of stubborness. We need enough people in this country who are willing and able to stand up and to do what's right in their own lives. But the issue is so many people have been compromised in or weakened in one area or another that they just don't have that strength to stand up. They have to have to work too hard so it's easier. They don't have the reserves left cognitive, emotional, psychological, financial, spiritual, or otherwise to stand up and to declare that what everyone else is doing is wrong. I mean, is it true or is it not true that there are some things that even if everyone said they were right, they would still be wrong. If every person on this planet decided that it was okay to to torture children for fun, would that make it right? And if your answer to that is no, then you believe in objective moral values and duties. And that in and of itself is one of the many different components of arguments that people have put together in favor of God, the found the foundation and the plumb line for these objective moral values and duties. And so you can go back and forth in all these different contexts and bemoan the fate of the fate of society all you want, and fair enough, there's plenty to be most. I mean, if I read you a preface from Livy's History of Rome, in which he investigated what was going on at the downfall of the Roman Empire, you would swear, apart from certain specific terminology, that it was written about this day and age, about this very time. And so we're in this incredible situation where many people will look at it and say this is redeemable. This is something that we can't get out of. And it starts at home, It starts at that indication, because if the family structure slips away, if the mechanism of transmitting values to the next generation slips away, and it's in the process of doing so, then we end up in a scenario that is dangerous and is unavoidable in history apart from God's mercy. And so if I'm reading this, and I will here, I will hear, I will what we can do is we can look to Livy. He's writing this at the downfall of the Roman Empire. This is a couple millennia ago, now, okay, So what he writes is this the subjects to which I would ask each of my readers to devote his earnest attention, or these the life and morals of the community, the men and the qualities by which, through domestic policy and foreign war, dominion was one and extended. Then as the standard of morality gradually lowers, let him follow the decay of the national character, observing how at first it slowly sinks, then slips downward more and more rapidly, and finally begins to plunge into headlong ruin, until he reaches these days in which we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies that's potent, it's powerful, it's evocative. And this is someone who is writing the definitive account of the fall of the Roman Empire, and he wrote it in this preface. He's defining why he's doing this, that the entire civilization, the entire structure, is collapsing, and he is attempting for posterity's sake to know why. And keep in mind the context of what was going on this man's time, this is Livy. He didn't have the internet, Titius, Livius. This is he did not have these resources. He had books. He was a man of wealth and education because he could read and write. That's enough. That's enough for us to understand that he had more resources than most. But keep in mind that this kind of project that he's embarking upon, how on earth is he going to know if he's going to finish it. This is a project that takes several decades. This is a life's work. And he thought he recognized that the current state of affairs in the Roman Empire was such that someone needed to chronicle what was going on, and someone needed to do it, to start right from the very beginning, to trace how we ended up here, so that future civilizations wouldn't fall into the same traps and wouldn't end up writing the same spot that Rome did. And so when I read those words, they come right off the page, especially that last part. These days in which we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies. That is so powerful, because when we try and fix something, we make it worse. We can't even get the solutions right, even if we had a good idea of what to do, and we don't even know that. And so, my friends, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, this is a time where God's intervention is necessary. It doesn't matter ultimately who is who's in the Oval Office, even though I'm incredibly grateful each and every day that we have Donald Trump in there as opposed to Hillary Clinton. But it is so important to see the big picture here. I'm doing the best I can with the resources at my disposal. I don't have a lifetime of experience, but I have enough to tell you that this is a dangerous path. But I know that many people provide that kind of warning, and that many people ascribe and succumb to the ethos of inevitability. But I know that there is a god in heaven, and all power is given unto the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. And he is the god of the impossible, And if he chooses to judge us, then who could say that it would be unjust? However, he is also capable of judging the evil and providing a way for his people to make it out. But he's going to do that for a people who are pressing into him, who know his name, who hear his voice, and who seek his kingdom with all their might and with all their heart, and who act accordingly to these things. So if we are going to dig this thing out, it's not going to be based on a twitter's war, or even a meme war, or even a march or anything else like this. This has gone far enough to the point where it's only a spiritual battle that can bring us back from the brink, and we have an opportunity to do that. The fact that we're still talking about these sorts of things means that that window of opportunity is still open because we could have been judged, and it wouldn't take more than thirty five seconds flat for the whole thing to take place, And so people can spend their time planning and preparing and improving and developing income streams, and all these different things excellent, good, fantastic. These are all great priorities. But if our ultimate priority isn't our spirituality, then we will watch our dreams go down the tubes the same way that the Romans watch the barbarians claw themselves over the walls and in many cases just walk white rock right through, because the walls were rotten from the foundations in and everyone inside was simply drinking wine and having the time of their lives and rendering them ever more brief. So in Shames and everyone here at the I Am Liberty Show, this is a critical moment. It really is. Whether we're talking about personal development, preparation, economics, finance, any of these kind of topics. If there's one thing that I would leave you with, it would be this impetus to press into God and to get your spiritual house in order, not because of some imminent threat, even though there are many different things to be concerned about, but because that is where the source of our strength is. If we are weak in that area, then everything else will succumb. We are facing a plethora of tactical evil that has been built up for quite some time with the goals of fulfilling the prophecies that are in the Book of Revelation and all of the different occult manuals that these people follow. And with that in mind, people aren't They're not just going to let it go. They're not just going to let it go lightly. They'll do whatever they can and whatever it takes, because we're not talking about people with moral scruples. We're talking about pure e. And if you don't think that pure evil exists, open your eyes, open your eyes. And I know that I'm talking to people who understand what I'm mentioning. The point is we need to be fueled up and fired up in these times. And so I'm optimistic because not because of any of my capacity, not because of anything I can do, but because of who God is and what he wants to do. God's will is not that any should perish, but that all should come to the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. He's searching to and fro in this land for people who will stand up, for people who will say, I'm following God. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. I don't care what it takes I don't care what the consequences are here. I am Lord, send me, and we can only do that when we get either to a desperate enough state that we're pressing in, or we just come to that realization led by the opening of our eyes through the Holy Spirit, that that is our only recourse. Yes, there are other applications to be made, there are other decisions to be had, There other fields and avenues to pursue. But if we don't get that right, then none of the rest of it will matter, because we will see what happened to Rome happen to America. So that is not a warning of impending judgment. I'm not a prophet. I haven't heard from God. I just know from history the patterns that take place. But I also know that there is a God in heaven who intervenes in history, who sent his son to give his life, to die for our sins, and that his right hand is offered and extended to us. Not just the free gift of eternal life, which would be so much more than enough. It's not even we're talking about, but the abundant life here to live meaningfully and to improve, and to reach out to others and to help pull them up and to point them to the same God who empowers you and who lives inside you each and every day. That is my ultimate and final message here, James. It is this is mission critical. We are at a historically significant time and I believe that there is a great harvest due to the Kingdom of God. And if we are willing and able to just listen and to obey, then we would be overwhelmed by what God would do through us. Stephen, Men, king, ladies and gentlemen. Bravo. How do you expect me to have a guy like this on forty five minutes? That would be a sin in itself. Try to shovel all that into one show. That's impossible. This is Stephen. I thank you so much. I can't think of a better guest to have had on for the first two hour show. I can't think of a better guest to have laid out the reason behind a two hour show. You know, if we want to have discussions like this, it's this is just what it's takes. It takes an hour and a half to unveil this thing, to open up the layers. Of something like this. That's just what good conversation takes. It takes time. That's why you're turning off CNN. That's why you're turning off the news. You don't want a fifteen minute segment, you want an hour and a half segment with a guy who knows what he's talking about. Steven, I appreciate you, man, unbelievable great content, great time. Thanks so much. Anytime, my brother. I'm always willing to jump back on with you. I hope to have you back on the Objective with me again soon. I think this is a time for us, for us to speak out, and you've been doing that for a long time. Here a veteran in this in this affair, and so I just thank you for the opportunity to speak to your audience. A shout out to everyone again. If you want to check out our materials, you can find me and the rest of my team at on Theeobjective dot org. And if you have an email a question that you want to send via email, just send it to on the Objective at gmail dot com. That's the best way to get in touch with me. Awesome, Steven, Thanks so much, man. Enjoy the rest of your night, get some rest. I know you're a busy guy. Same to you, my friend, God blessed. I'll talk to you soon, Yes, sir, talk to you. Cool. What are you talking about? Stephen Menking on the IM Liberty Show. Listen, where have the good guys Gone? You just heard from one of them. This is what I was getting at. Where have the good guys gone? It's so important that you find these voices. There's so many voices. That's the problem, right, there's so many voices out there. What do I listen to? What do I watch? The age of television is history, it's over right. Even talk radio is struggling AMFM radio. There are voices out there, like Stephen men King. There are incredible voices out there. You can get another show up there, Soaring Eagle Radio dot com, another powerful show. I'm just telling you, this is the direction that the I'm Liberty Show is moving into. And it's not the topics, right, It's not the topics per se that are important, though the topics we touched on tonight were incredibly important. But the point of the two hour show is to be able to peel the layers on conversation with guests and even without guests, because listen to me, I've got so much in the queue here. It's unbelievable. I mean, I've got stories about I mean, one of the big things I wanted to talk about, and we may get we have a little bit of time, we might still talk a little. I wanted to talk about New Jersey. Right they're raising taxes again, and they're looking like they're going to be another part of this piece by piece sort of financial collapse that's happening in the country. We didn't have time to really get to it with Steven, and that's fine. We could talk to him until probably two am, and we wouldn't be able to cover everything we wanted to cover. But if you remember a ways back when I was talking about the situation that Connecticut or Vermont was finding itself in, I said that it looks like we're gonna have a state by state financial collapse or economic collapse sort of situation where these states are finally reaching the point where they're buckling under everything that they're paying out right, whether it's pensions or whether it's benefits of the whole thing. And we're seeing that with New Jersey, and we're gonna see it with more states and more and more and more states that are run like this, They're gonna tumble, They're gonna tumble into this financial chaos. But anyhow, what I'm getting at is, in order to be able to have these long winded discussions, we needed to have more time, right, we needed to have more time. We've got great people hanging out in chat still, thanks so much for it on guys. I know, for you East Coast folks out there, I'm asking a lot, right, two hours of your life every Wednesday. You don't know how grateful I am for that. That's an incredible thing to me. I mean, it's one of the most incredible things that we have people hanging on here two hours. We're twenty minutes till eleven, and they're still here on the IEM Liberty Show because well, it's because it is what it is, right, what's to see the old saying the truth has a certain ring to it. I think that's what it is. The truth has a certain. Ring to it. There's one story that I want to talk about, Okay, I have an article up here about the schools and the running out on school to go protest guns and that whole crazy thing that was brought on by the Women's March. I've got the article about New Jersey preparing to raise taxes because they've screwed up Lizen. We talked to Stephen Menking about saving money, but look, it seems that there is no leadership on the planet. They can do it either. It's not an excuse. It's just an observation, right, It's just an observation, that's all. Now. The story that I want to tell you got him. If I see one more headline about Shia Labuff, however you pronounce his name, I don't know what I'm gonna do. I can't read an article without seeing this homeless bum's face. I mean, everywhere I turn, it's a story about this guy who cares about him. One of the big reasons I couldn't watch Transformers. I could not get past I'm not looking at this guy for two hours anyway, White Coffee, White Coffee protesters forget the Boyle Heights is in the Latino only neighborhood. I don't know if you're familiar with the situation in Boyle Heights, all right, but there's a neighborhood else in East LA called Boyle Heights, and well, pretty much to be pretty simple with the situation, what you have is people moving in to this Boil Heights is predominantly Latino. I'd hate to say predominantly Dreamer, but it's a predominant Latino neighborhood. Yeah, and you have people moving in there, and they're buying up property, and they're you know, predominantly white, hipster young kids buying up property, buying up storefronts, opening our galleries, opening coffee shops. And the most. Incredible thing is going on, and no one is framing it as such, but there's such incredible racism to these white people that are moving in that you won't even believe it. This coffee shop, it's called weird coff Weird Wave coffee, I think, yeah, weird Wave coffee brewers and the Latinos and other silly white people are out there with signs boycott weird Wave. They're calling it white coffee. Right, it's been called white coffee. Windows have been broken out of this place. I mean, it's an incredible situation. It's an incredible there's people out there screaming at the owners. You know, they're calling it an anti gentrification movement in the article. The article goes on, but I'm troubled by the so called anti gentrification movement, fomenting resistance to new institutions like the art galleries and artists and coffee shops that have moved into the neighborhood. You know, you know how I am about words. I just did a show about building bridges with words, right, turning one word into something that it was never intended to be, or hiding the real meaning of a word behind these other things, right, building a bridge from one to the other. This anti gentrification movement is a very scary set of words to me, because I wish it would I wish they would identify exactly what it is. And you know, it's something that a lot of people refuse to believe is even possible or even exists. But we're dealing with white racism. We're dealing with racism towards white people. I mean, if you're if it's being waged against the white the place that they're calling white coffee, right, and we're seeing this art gallery has gone under incredible, it damages to the property and things of that nature. Where are we if we can't admit what is exactly going on? Right? Where are we at if we can't admit that white racism exists? And while it may not get the clicks or the headlines that minority racism does. I talked about the bridge between the idea of silent white racism and the situation in South Africa. Right the idea that we have a sitting congressman who decides not to move forward with a Supreme Court justice nomination because of the fact that he's white and he doesn't want so many freaking white guys in there. I want the place to look a little more. All these things add up. And then when you have blatant white racism, people yelling get out of our neighborhood, get out of our neighborhood, you have situations like this taking hold, like the one in East la here and Boyle Heights. Look it up, Boyli Heights. Look at the situation there. You have people moving in, people moving in, buying property. There's nothing illegal about what's happening here. They're bringing good coffee and art to a neighborhood that, in my opinion, looks like it needs a little more Okay, it looks like it could use a little more culture, and it's being met with sheer racism towards white people. And as bad as that is, when you search Boile Heights. In the situation, you're gonna find more articles that are demonizing the coffee shop owners and the art gallery owner than you will about what's really happening. And you're gonna see code words upon code words because the media is they're just it's impossible for them to white, to write racist against whites, racism towards whites. They can't stomach it even But listen, it's a reality. It's a reality, and it's happening in a lot of places. It's happening in a lot of places, but this issue in Boyle Heights is one worth checking out. I thought you guys would enjoy that. Listen. There's no topic that's off topic. And you know me, I'm always gonna talk about white privilege and I'm always going to talk about this creeping racism that's happening because while a lot of people can't really see what it's capable of in the short term, you know, I'm playing the long game here, that's my role. Okay, I'm playing the long game. What do I mean by that? I mean I have two babies upstairs in bed, Okay, and you know what, I want those babies to make babies and I don't necessarily need those babies to be white babies. You know, I'm not coming from it from that angle that I want this lineage of white white genealogy underneath me. No, I don't care about that. What I care about is whatever decision they make, I want it to be the decision that makes them happy. And I don't want there to be a society waiting baited breath and bare teeth for those babies just because of the color of their skin, right, And I don't want these words like anti gentrification to be filling the mouths of people when we need to be having a real discussion about how the demonization of the white man is finally paying off, Right, the demonization of the white man is finally paying off. And how many murders and how many kidnappings and how many disappearances can we tack up to that right there? These are things that you can't quantify. These are things that you can't quantify, but these are things that happen. Look, we had a great show, positive show, strong show, real show, great first two hours. I don't want to get you down, but you have to be aware. You have to be aware of what's going on. You have to be aware of what's at stake and aware of what you know what these things do, and if you saw something like this anywhere else, it'd be an issue, and it should be an issue. You know, Stephen was talking about things that are right and things that are wrong, and more people in the nation I know, you know the universality of right and wrong. I know they do. Whether they act on it or not, is one thing right because you can know you're right and wrong. We've all been in situations growing up where we decided to do it was wrong because it was what we wanted. You look at a situation like this, you look at the many situations that we've seen unfold in recent times. We know what's wrong. We know what's wrong, and we know that this blaming and this strange hatred is going to take us down a very very dark path. So let's end the show to night, the first two hour show, with a little poem or a little stanza, rather a little stanza from Alfred Tennyson drift you guys off to sleep with deep thoughts about death? Howbut that. It's beautiful, Okay, It's a beautiful little stanza about the end of life and as I told you, the more I explore how good life can get, because that's kind of what I'm on. I'm kind of on a mission, right I want to see how good this thing can get, because it's been getting better and better and better. And when you're on that pursuit to see how good life can get, a lot of times you worry about when you think about you and them so much worry about it, but you think a lot about the end of it all Right, we all have fears, we all have questions, we all have concerns about the end of it all. Well, this stanza from The Lotus Eaters by Alfred Tennyson, it is just an amazing look at the end of it all. So let's get into it, and uh, we'll get into it and we'll get out of it, and that'll be the end of the show, all right. I thank you guys so much. We'll be on next week. It'll be two hours and we'll be having a ball. But let's get into this one. The Lotus Eaters by Alphad Tennis. Hateful is the dark blue sky, vaulted over the dark blue sea. Death is the end of life? Ah, why should life all labor be let us alone. Time, driveth onward fast, and in a little while our lips are dumb. Let us alone, what is it that will last? All things are taken from us and become portions and parcels of the dreadful past. Let us alone? What pleasure can we have to war with evil? Is there any peace in ever climbing up the climbing wave? All things of rest and ripen towards the grave in silence, ripe and fall and cease. Give us long rest, or death, dark death, or dreamful ease. It's James Walton with the I Am Liberty Show. Today's broadcast has come to you through the courtesy of the Prepper Broadcasting Network. See our hosts, show schedules, and archive programs and more at prepper broadcasting dot com. Thanks for listening, but don't want to