← Unemployable with Jeff Dudan
Unemployable with Jeff Dudan
Men, Mental Health & Meaning | Rick Walker on Healing, Identity & Legacy #191
01:42:36
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- [00:00]
Jeff Duden
Welcome everybody. This is Jeff Duden and we are on the Unemployable podcast brought to you by Homefront Brands. If you grew up in a modest two bedroom home, borrowed money from your mother to start your first business and from that early entrepreneurial experience started the business that grew into 400 employees by age 26. If you went on to found two private equity firms and businesses in real estate, broke brokerage automation maintenance and elevator services, ran for Congress and are currently releasing the book 9 Steps to Build a Life of Meaning, your name can only be Rick Walker. Welcome Rick.
- [00:40]
Rick Walker
Jeff, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it means the world. Thank you.
- [00:46]
Jeff Duden
Yeah, absolutely. Very excited. I've been looking forward to this and, and really appreciate you taking time to be on with us. Opening question. Why do you suggest that everybody needs to pick a master or one will be thrust upon you?
- [01:03]
Rick Walker
Well, the more that I read, the more that I studied ancient religions and ancient philosophy and just really look how the world operate from my perspective. One of the. I also grew an organization in the 50, some 53 countries. I believe I dealt with people across a wide variety of, of religions and philosophies and just, just life perspectives. And the more that I noticed, I more noticed this, this interesting little thing happening because if we were to think about it, we would want, well, I'll also say like we, people want to be in charge. Like they don't want to have a God or they don't have a master of them. They want, they want to be in charge. But I started seeing something a little bit different, Jeff. I started noticing that people would start to sort of invent their own realities. And so it may come across like this, it may come across like. I believe that the world should be like this. It should be without pain which should be out be without evil. It should be without this. It should be like this. And I believe that that sort of God should exist and I would worship that sort of God or I believe the type of scenario where that priest wouldn't have done that to me 25 years ago, those sorts of things. We begin to invent our own realities, invent our own gods. And so what we do is we invent this God because we're too weak to take the blame ourselves. And so when I say that you have to pick a master or one would be thrust upon you, you will do the own, you will do your own thrusting. Most of the time you will serve. And I think Dostoevsky talks about this a little bit as well, that if you don't have something to serve or someone to follow. You will follow someone at the first drop of a hat. I mean, you will follow them immediately. That, that's the sort of nature, that sort of beings that we are. But we're not so strong that we would invent our own gods and us be the gods. We would invent our other gods because we can't take the blame. We can't take the blame of a God. And so that's sort of what I discovered there. Mastery only comes from masters. And so we have to realize that if we're going to grow, we have to look to someone that's higher and better and more knowledgeable and ideally higher intellect and higher integrity than we are. And so this is where this idea of coming and looking for mastery and looking for a master, rather than having one thrust upon you comes from.
- [03:15]
Jeff Duden
You talked about in the book Leonardo da Vinci, you talked about the painting masters. And so, you know, and we do, as humans look for patterns. I mean, we're, we're actually lazy. So we look for, we look to make sense of things. We look to find patterns that are easy for us to follow. Many people just, I mean, my gosh, today we're looking for a source of information that we believe to be true and then we make that our opinion. And yeah, so I, I, you know, we're constantly looking for belonging and we're looking for somebody to follow and we're looking for somebody to tell us what things mean.
- [04:00]
Rick Walker
Yeah, yeah, it's a, it's a mimic world, as Rene Gerard would say. We like to copy. I like that watch. I'm gonna go buy a watch that looks like I want to have the sort of ethos that Jeff has. I want to live in a certain way because I've seen some people live in that way. Not that I think that it's right, but it's, it's what I was exposed to and I was exposed to that became, begins to become my truth. What we typically don't understand is that even a thousand facts very rarely equal a single truth, just as a thousand likes barely rarely equal a single love. We have to realize that the idea of truth has to get down to sort of the core of being not just mere facts. And we build our lives around facts instead those sorts of things that we see those things, sorts of things that we're exposed to and we get off direction little by little. Right. I, I see something that works, so I'm going to copy it. I like Alex Ramosi, for instance, you know, I. I can watch everything Alex Horbozi puts out. I'm like, well, I want to be like Alex Ramosi when I grow up. Of course, he's, you know, 10 years younger than I am. And. And so I. But I look at that. I'm like, well, I'm not abs. He's probably. He's probably younger than that. He's probably younger than that. Yeah.
- [05:12]
Jeff Duden
And I'm looking at.
- [05:13]
Rick Walker
I look at Alex, I'm like, well, he's got his stuff together. He's talking straight. You know, he's. He's ripped. He's got everything. Everything together. But that just wouldn't be. With the. It wouldn't be a truth. How I was. I was created to be able to mim. Mimic that. But there's so many of us that we had that propensity. We had that sort of inborn tends tendency to sort of mirror what we see, and we think that works, and we call that truth.
- [05:37]
Jeff Duden
Rick, we're here on the day after Father's Day. What was your father like?
- [05:42]
Rick Walker
Oh, my dad. My dad's great. My dad's great. So he struggled a lot through our childhood with work, and he was. He was out of work for good. Good deal. And so in order to make ends meet, we would go out on the weekends. We travel all over the coast of Texas. We grew up down in Corpus Christi, which is just a couple hours north of the Mexican border. And it was just a. It was just a great childhood, just, you know, living out the back of a. Of a van. We had a home, but we were, you know, we're sitting in the van or sitting in the car most of the time painting flag poles and eventually being able to trade watches and make some money in that until we finally got a job that. That helps support the family. But he's just great. Very, very playful. Very, very. He's not the type person that would tell you directly what he's doing. So, for instance, his. His dad and his father and his father. This is three generations for my dad. They all drank themselves to death, all of them. And he grew up on. My dad grew up in a welfare family of six kids. They just. They just couldn't. They just couldn't function. But he made the decision, without saying a word to anyone, that he just wouldn't. He just wouldn't drink anymore. He wouldn't drink anymore. And they were going to. They were going to hustle, they were going to work hard, and they were also going to give back. And so he never said that. To me, in fact, we've never had that conversation. But I just know from watching him that I never saw the man take a drink. He probably drank when I was younger. I just don't remember it. But he never took a drink because he saw that, that which came before him, it destroyed them, and he wasn't up to that risk. And he sort of broke that generational curse of not only the drinking, drinking themselves to death, but also this. This curse of. Of poverty. And then it was also something where, you know, my. My dad, we're more friends than we are sort of father, father, son bond. In fact, I called him twice yesterday for. For Father's Day. I. I tried to get them to come up. I live in Houston, about three hours north of Corpus. Try to get them come up for Father's Day and visit, and they just couldn't make it up. And. And so I had had some tomahawks delivered to the house for him yesterday morning. So they say would actually, you know, eat a decent, respectable Father's Day lunch together, you know, retired people. And. And so I called him, talked walking through how to cook it and stuff like that. And he was so excited. He actually, you know, broke out his barbecue pit and grilled it for the, you know, first time this year. I was excited about that, but we just kind of talk about that kind of stuff. We had the opportunity to work together for about a decade after I started my business. About three years later, I was able to hire him, and he worked with me for about a decade. It was just a great time. I mean, having any opportunity to talk to your dad while he's still alive is just a gift. It's just an absolute gift. And I would say that probably played the biggest role in my life just having my dad and my mom, who just work, they're looking for any reason to support me whatsoever. Never were harsh with me. And by the way, they also. This is the last thing I want to say. I remember in high school, they would take me Sundays, Sunday afternoons we would go down to the homeless shelter. And I remember serving food to the homeless and washing their dishes. So washing the dishes of the homeless on Sunday afternoons. But the rest of my friends were out playing Game Boy or whatever they were they were doing. That sort of thing. Sticks with you. It sticks with you. And you think about the wisdom of your parents. Like, it's not. It's not always the person that espouses wise ideas and. And rhyming quotes. It's the person that teaches their kids about the Things that are important in their lives. And that's one of those. One of those important things. But yeah, growing up, Growing up is great.
- [09:18]
Jeff Duden
Our early experiences are an indicator of future actions, future successes. And painting the flagpoles, selling the watches, those were side hustles, taking to the homeless shelter, that was acts of service. Are those the things that led you to be entrepreneurial early? Because you started the business early and you've had a slew of businesses. Now I don't know if you've had partners or your sole founder or what your role was in these different things. One thing I do believe, though, is great leaders can also be great followers and great team players, years depending on the situation. And I've been, I've been both. I always have defaulted to leadership, whether that be a kid's football team or my daughter's basketball team or whatever. You know, if somebody, if they, if they want me to coach, I generally want to be the head coach. And I don't think that's a control thing, but I, but I do believe it's a. I want to make sure that everybody's getting the best experience possible. And maybe I feel like I'm the person to give them that. But, but there's also businesses that I've been in where I've learned a great deal from being in partnership with other entrepreneurs. But for you getting into entrepreneurship early, founding businesses in your 20s, I did read a story in the book about you going to some event, some crazy event with a bunch of tech startup people when you were young and what that experience was like. But how did you so quickly move towards entrepreneurship early in your life? Was it out of necessity? Were you, Were you running to something or were you running away from something?
- [10:59]
Rick Walker
Great question. First of all, the more important thing, if anyone has not attended a girls middle school basketball game, that is the height of entertainment. And I tell you, Jeff, the greatest day of my life, the two greatest days of my life were when my two oldest daughters told me, dad, we made the middle school basketball team. I'm like, great. I get to go to about 10 games and it's just going to be the best time. And so, yeah, that's just the best thing. I'm glad I, you know, I'm in the midst of another great, great man of the great sport of female basketball. The. Yeah, the idea, the idea that the way that we grew up was the way that I would live was something that sort of haunted me. In fact, it was something that I began to run away from. So I never Had a positive vision of what, of what I wanted, but I always had a negative vision of what I did not want. And so when I was approaching my junior year of college, I got a. I got a job doing telemarketing. I did telemarketing the prior summer. And so I showed up the next summer and again I was going to school in Oklahoma City. It's nine hours away from Corpus Christi. And so I was down in Corpus Christi for summer, got the telemarketing job, did three days of training, and the first day I was to sit down on the floor. And I was a rock star the previous summer. Sat down with these headphones just like this. Some, some sort of urge or some sort of voice. I don't know quite what it was, Jeff, but it said, rick, you don't need this. And for some reason my legs straightened up and I stood up, I took the headphones off and the call center manager was just right there. And I said, I don't need this. And so I walked out. And the very next day I started my first business by myself, sole partner. And I went door to door and I sold kind of building management maintenance services. That first summer I was able to hire four staff. I went back to school. And so I would go to school Monday through Thursdays. Thursday nights I would drive the nine hours back to quarter Corpus Christi. I would see clients on Fridays, I would train staff on Saturdays, and I would drive back the nine hours on Sundays. So I drove 18 hours a week to service this little startup business that I had started in college with a thousand dollar loan from my mom, which I'm pretty sure my mom borrowed it from a bank too. I think it's kind of secondhand reload money.
- [13:09]
Jeff Duden
And hey, the power of arbitrage, right?
- [13:13]
Rick Walker
That's right.
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Jeff Duden
She taught you how to arbitrage. What she charged, what did she, what interest did she charge you? 12 to 15.
- [13:22]
Rick Walker
She, she didn't charge me anything. And I, what I ended up doing is I end up giving her 49% of the business. After we got started that first summer.
- [13:32]
Jeff Duden
I would say she did charge you something.
- [13:34]
Rick Walker
She. Yeah, little price to pay. But it's your mom, you know, you take, you can take care of your mom. And so, so, so did that about three years later, like I said earlier, hired my dad and he came and sort of managed the business. We took it to the next level. By the time I was 26, we had 400W, two employees. I remember, I remember sitting. I had no management team whatsoever, just my dad And I, I was taking my laptop either I was working at home, one of these big laptops. I was taking over to Starbucks and working from Starbucks for a couple hours from the day before my battery ran out. And we're counting W2s and like, well there's the 400 W2, there's still more W2s to count. So we kept counting them. And so that was, that was a realization that hey, I had never even met anyone that had 400 employees before that. Like I was the first person I knew. I'd only met one other person I would consider to be a billionaire before that, my entire life. I mean it was, it was very, very, I had no mentors whatsoever. But we sort of worked way out of that, started another business simultaneous to that, grew that business into six states that became a federal contractor. And then you'll read how I got, how exited that business in the book. And then I began getting involved with non profits and because I've realized that we could use our business skill, business skills in non profits. And so I was able to scale a non profit into 53 countries, about 2300 team members over about a 10 year period. And this, some other nonprofits, but it's the same skill set. You have to, you know, be driven a little more by your heart to operate that way. But for about 15 years I spent eight hours a day in my for profit business. I spent eight hours a day work doing non profit volunteer work mostly at the board level. And that really gave me a love to help people, but also love sort of away from that, that situation I grew up in. So I did my best to escape that. And so but as I began to serve and see all this evil around me in the world, I began to have a positive vision of what I wanted in life.
- [15:36]
Jeff Duden
Talk to me about your relationship with charitable giving and when it first occurred to you that it was important and how you gave yourself to it.
- [15:46]
Rick Walker
Yeah. So Jeff, I was on a plane and before, right before we on the flight, a man handed me a little book. It was like a little, like a little, little pamphlet books with like 50 pages in it. I thought I'm just going to read it while I'm on the plane. And it was a book by a man by the name of Randy Alcorn. He wrote a book called the Treasure Principle. I wasn't very religious at the time, but it was predicated on a, on a verse that Christ says in Luke 12:34 where he says, where your treasure is, there your heart will be also There, where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. We often overlook that, but what he says is it's a. It's a formula. It's a. It's a. It's an action plan that if your heart isn't right, you can put your treasure somewhere and your heart will follow it. The heart and your treasure always cohabitate. And so if you know that and you believe that I. Then you could begin to move your treasure around. And so from there, from then on, we begin to. My wife and I would begin to give most of our money away, generally 50 or 60% of our. Of our annual income away to charities. And you kind of think about this philosophically or kind of experimentally as well. So, you know, let's say we're making a few hundred thousand dollars a year. We're giving away, you know, $200,000 a year, for instance. And we are also. There's also the people to those same nonprofits that are given $200,000 a year, but they're giving, like, half of 1% of their income. So, you know, so they're making, you know, 40 million a year, whatever the number is, and we're making 200,000. We're giving $200,000 a year. But they're making, you know, whatever. Whatever it Is, they're making 100 times more than what we're making. So you begin to find yourself in rooms with these donor events with people that make 100x what you make. And assuming that they have make that they made the money, you can assume, make some assumptions about not only their integrity over the long term, but also their competency over the long term and their mentality. And so when you are invited on boards like this, because you're writing the same size checks as these people are, you're all of a sudden surrounded by people. You've got, you know, 20 or 30 of these individuals all around you. You're talking to each other a couple times during the week. You're sending emails, you're going out to dinner. Your network and your mentality really change very, very quickly because you're all not only oriented towards giving money and sacrificing your free time to help higher causes, but also you have this need for sort of the transfer of competency, the transfer of sort of capacity into something that's higher and better than you.
- [18:23]
Jeff Duden
So as I created this small mental model around what you just shared, at the core of it, I put power. And power can have a negative connotation sometimes, but I think power is Negative or positive, depending on how you yield it and what you use it for. So, you know, heart up in the left quadrant is love. And love is the most powerful emotion. It's what drives us. It would, it really, it really is the causation behind many of the actions we take throughout our entire life. And then treasure is your money, it's your resources. And I've told people when they say what's the greatest motivator in life? And I'm actually looking for survival to make a point, but they'll say money. And I'll say, well, no, money is really just power. And at the end of the day, it's resources, it's not money in and of itself. Sitting in a pile does nothing for you. You can burn it and maybe get some heat, but it's what you do it and it's, it's the, it's what you create with it. And then I've got people and I've got mentality and all of those, you know, our minds, you know our, our, our time and, and how we, how we utilize it based on what we think is power. And then people, the power of our network. I, when I started getting, I, and I didn't, I mean, I spent probably 20 years in a very, very small room. And as soon as I got outside of that room, my fortune, my life, my businesses, everything grew exponentially. And I think it's very wise you came to something in a few years that took me 20 years to get to that is if I want to be in bigger rooms. It always comes with writing a check. Whether it's something like the Genius Network or strategic coach or YPO where I met Ben Carson Jr. Or became great friends with, with, with Ben over 10 years. And that led me into other rooms and other places. But at the end of the day, I mean people that great people that want to make an impact and use their power, especially in positive ways, are up to something and going somewhere and they, they don't want to waste their time with, with, you know, and idly with people that aren't looking to bring them value or that they can bring value to or you can collab make a collaboration that makes 10x the value or something like that. So I, I find that very interesting and I think a good lesson for people, if we want to get right back down to it, is the fact that you realized that by tithing maybe up to 50% of what you were making, that it was going to return to you with presence, relationships, opportunities and these other things. And I, I don't. I think people, I, I think it's pretty rare that somebody can actually make that realization so early and then actually take action on it.
- [21:15]
Rick Walker
Yeah. If you think about it conceptually, that if you, if you know you're going to serve some master and you're working your tail off to serve something and is it being your business for a lot of us, yeah. You realize that you have to do something with that greed because that's, that is the outcome of, of the effort. And greed can only be solved by generosity. Generosity is the salve that cures both the poor and the rich at the same time. Because we give up what we least need to someone who most needs is truly a salve to heal the poor. And so that, that cooperation between the greed and the generosity, they work together just as well as the treasure and the heart cohabitate. In fact in one way, shape or form. They're, they're actually inversions of each other. The idea of power. I want to go back to your comment a second ago about the relationship between power, money. I've thought about this a long time. So I believe that money is the fungibility of the power. That people will willingly give up money, but they will never give up power. You said something very similar to that a second ago. And if you go, if you go and you look at the power broker. So like in this, this room, like I've had the Secret Service in this room and because of who they're protecting five times. And so I, I don't say, I don't say the brag. I'm just saying, like I've, I've seen some powerful people in my life. I've had an opportunity to get them just as, just as you have, Jeff. And I can tell you that they never give up power for money. They will always give up money for power. And the wealthy will never give up power for money. They will always give up money for temporary power. They will rent temporary power or temporary access for money. That's the way that it works. And sex is also one of those things you can do money or sex. And sometimes you can use competency for a little bit of power as well. But most of the time you have to use competency and effort to go through money to get to the power. And that's why it's not as, not as efficient. So yeah, so this is where it works. But I have this, I have this story. Let me just kind of go on a tangent because you talked about your graph there. I thought for a Long time about how do we get power? How do we get true power in our lives? And I've come to the belief and Again, I spent two years writing this book and I spoke to 100 of the most competent men alive. In my research, I read over a thousand books.
- [23:39]
Jeff Duden
I guess I missed the call. I must have missed the call, Rick, but go ahead.
- [23:44]
Rick Walker
Well, I did a lot of 101.
- [23:47]
Jeff Duden
101.
- [23:48]
Rick Walker
There you go. Oh, this is my, this is my. No, you're my hundredth right now.
- [23:53]
Jeff Duden
Okay, sorry.
- [23:54]
Rick Walker
The. The idea, the idea that, that we did.
- [24:02]
Jeff Duden
I threw you off.
- [24:03]
Rick Walker
Yeah, you didn't throw me off. Throwing curveballs today, Jeff. Sorry. But. But the idea that power comes to those who seek it is, is something that's unfortunate. In fact, only those who seek power don't deserve it. Anyone that seeks power does not deserve it in the end. Now, you might say that I seek power because I want to serve my community. That's fine. What you're seeking is service. But if you're not seeking service, what you're doing is you're seeking power and you don't deserve it. We elect politicians every day because of that. But power in the end, if you sort of look at a 2000 year or 3000 year overview of what true power is, it tends to be the intersection at where beauty, truth and love intersect. And it's maximal. Where beauty, truth and love intersection, you get power thrown in. And so whenever you can make decisions that heighten the beauty that you see in your life, I'm not talking about sexy women, I'm talking about sort of the beauty that you tell in your own story. Whenever you can find greater truth instead of lesser, lesser facts, you move a little bit closer to power. When you find that you can love your wife, you can love your kids, you can love your parents or your, your, your friends or your neighbor a bit more. And you're able to sacrifice for that because it's the right thing to do, you move closer to power. As the more you can bring these three things together in your life, somehow, some way, you begin to get a power that is divine in nature. I can't describe it, I don't know why that works, but that seems to be the way that's worth the last 3,000 years and all the great literature that I've read, whether it be Dante or Dostoevsky or Milton or Shakespeare, that's the way that power works in the world way. If you real world, if you want a real, true and lasting power.
- [25:53]
Jeff Duden
What is your definition of the word meaning as it's used in nine steps to build a life of meaning.
- [26:02]
Rick Walker
Meaning has to do with indestructibility. Has to do with indestructibility. Let's, we have to look at wisdom for a second because wisdom is what's going to lead us to meaning. It's not about exposure or fame or anything like that. The wisest mind. What would the wisest mind do? The wisest mind looks into the most distant future for the most valued reward that it can purchase with the currency of the present. I'm going to repeat that because someone, someone audience is going to want to write that down, right? If you want a definition for life, this is a definition for the good life, the wise life. The wisest mind looks into the most distant future for the most valued reward that it can purchase with the currency of the present that we can only act in today. In fact, we've already lost yesterday and all we can do is hope for tomorrow. And the further we can set our vision out, the greater the, the grander the reward we can, we can focus on. The more we realize that that greater, grander reward is something that's, that's closer to the idea of indestructibility, right? If we, if we focus, we focus on today, we focus on this lousy 20 year pension that we're hoping to get. If we focus on how I'm going to look or how famous or how many likes I'm going to get, we waste it. We waste it. But meaning has to do with that, that purchasing with the currency of the present towards that which is closest to the indestructible and most valuable that you can imagine. That's where we get meaning. Because meaning has to do with relevance. And if you want a simple way to think about this, what story are your grandkids going to tell about you, right? If your, if your grandkids don't talk about you, you didn't live a very meaningful life, right? And I think a lot of us, we're thinking that, you know, we're either going to be gone today, as soon as we're die, we're gone, or some of us are thinking we're going to, we're going to live in infamy somewhere, we're going to get famous after, after we die, sort of that Alexander the Great type of mentality. But we've got to focus on that which is furthest out. And the way that we get there, the way that we get to the mean is we go as far back as Possible. The, the wisdom of the ages of 2000, 3000 and 4000 years ago is where wisdom is sourced in all the great literature and all the great thinking because they've actually been vetted. The stuff that's been written the last five or 50 years or 500 years hasn't been very well vetted. And so we use both the furthest point out as the object of what we're focused on, building a life. And we use the resources in most distant past to be able to get us there.
- [28:34]
Jeff Duden
Is meaning. Is meaning drastically different than significance?
- [28:48]
Rick Walker
I think significance has to do with the perspective of an observer. So if I, if I'm significant, who am I significant to? Right. So, and so if we think about significance like I, in my mind, I'm highly significant. You know, I got to beat back this pride all the time, this ego.
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Jeff Duden
But it's dependent. It's dependent upon the view of others.
- [29:12]
Rick Walker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you, yeah, and this is sort of about the relations that you have around you too. Like if you're not depending on someone else and someone else isn't depending on you, you're not really, you really have a life like you've got it. You got to have some mutual dependence on somebody. Like, there's got to be a woman that I love so much that if she ever left me or she ever, ever died, it would just, it would just destroy me like that. That's what living is. It's living. It's living through that significance there. So I think that, I think that drives us and I think if that, if that eternal bond, if that bond that's between the two people, like between me and my wife, has the potentiality of being a forever indestructible bond, even though death passes one of us or both of us, then that significance could then become some form of meaning. Yes.
- [30:02]
Jeff Duden
Nine Steps to Build a Life of Meaning then is written for whom?
- [30:09]
Rick Walker
This is for the young man 25 to 50 that Dr. John Vervecki writes about this quite a bit that are in this meaning crisis. These are men that do not like me, that did have a positive vision of what was possible in their future. Maybe it's they never had a father, they never man that showed them what was possible. They never had anyone that taught them right from wrong. They never met a millionaire like, like, like I told you, that was my circumstance there. This is for those young men who haven't broken out. These are the young men who are afraid to ask women on dates is the young men that are afraid to Take a risk. These are the young men that just want to be comfortable and are not willing to take on the pursuit or the adventure to something higher and more because they've never been exampled that in their pursuit. And so this is for that men. How do we get those men to move? And that. This is sort of my answer to that from a doer perspective, not from an academic. I'm not academic, obviously.
- [31:06]
Jeff Duden
What are some of the unique challenges men are facing today that make this book so timely? Because I think there are some.
- [31:14]
Rick Walker
Yeah, yeah. I think if we all think about our networks, whether, you know, brothers, sisters, nephews, neighbors that have young men that are sort of in this age range and we think about which of those are underperforming, I think that most of us would suspect that the majority of them are underperforming their possibility and certainly underperforming the prior generation for the most part. And so this, this is part of the. This is part of the situation because most of them know that. They know that they're underperforming and they see themselves as someone that needs to be hidden rather than is willing to break out. And so they operate a little bit differently. They don't necessarily need to be called out, but they need to be called up, if that makes sense. We have to call them and set forth a vision of what's possible. And we have to do it in a way where it's not focused on a goal. Because I think all the academics, again, you know, obviously I've read some business books just like you have, Jeff, and everyone tells us, you know, set a vision, set of a mission, set some objectives, some strategies under the new tactics, and we're going to build this, build up and we're going to, we're going to achieve this. But for a lot of these men, there's no, there's no concept of that because there's nothing that they want. There's nothing that they want rather than just, you know, stay and play video games or, or whatever it might be. And so this, it's hard to. Hard to think about that. And so we have to figure out a way to get these guys to move. And my desire happens to be their desire. This is where I sort of relate. I'm 46, so I'm sort of just kind of at the end of that, that age range. My desire and sort of, I feel my calling is, is I want to rip away the comfort enslaving their potential. I want to rip away the comfort enslaving their potential. They're imprisoned by their comfort and their desire. Their desire is they were always told when they were growing up that they have all this potential, they have all this, all this potential out there, but it never, it never became concrete, it never became reality. And so they're letting down everyone else every day they go by. They never do anything, never accomplish anything, never become someone. They're letting everyone else down and they sort of prove that that prophecy to be false that they were told when they were kids. But they know that they want to have their potential maximize. They know that they want to unleash their potential somehow they don't know how they're going to do it because they don't want to take the risk. And so their desire and my desire happen to be the exact same desire, only I have a mechanism to do that through ripping away the comfort enslaving them. And their desire has not yet found a source, a plan or a positive vision of what they want. And so since there's not a positive vision of what they want, we have to look, we have to go on the inside and we have to help them discover this is what step one does, help them discover what that negative desire is in order to get them into a forward moving posture.
- [34:12]
Jeff Duden
Is the lack of goals attributed from a lack of role clarity in men and if so, what role does masculinity play in it in today's society?
- [34:24]
Rick Walker
Yeah, we were told that we needed to calm down, that we had adhd. We were told it was not right for us to play on the playground so rough. We were told to act like girls. And that has become a multi generational problem now. I think we're now maybe even our third generation of this kind of, I'm going to call it wokeism, but that's essentially what it, what it becomes in the full maturity of it. The idea that men don't have a calling, you don't have a positive thing to pursue is also predicated on this disaversion or this aversion to loss. We don't want to lose, we don't want to have egg on our face. We don't want to be embarrassed. And this inability to be embarrassed because we never were allowed embarrassed because we were never picked last, because we all pick the teams equally. We never, we were always given the participation awards, we were always told that we were good and we were smart even though we were filling everything, you know, all the classes that were just complete morons because we never studied, we were told all these things and so that got Reinforced that everything would be okay. And now everything is not okay. And so we just want to sort of play like it is. We have to be prepared to take some losses, to take some hitch, some hits, some punches, and be prepared to realize that life is not a string of comforts. It is a string of failures with the occasional moment of perfection. That's all life is, a string of failures with occasional moment perfection. You're looking for that one moment of perfection, but you have to go through, you have to just run through these failures first.
- [36:02]
Jeff Duden
Yeah. Life without struggle is miserable.
- [36:05]
Rick Walker
Yes.
- [36:06]
Jeff Duden
Because you're not, because you're not winning.
- [36:08]
Rick Walker
Yeah.
- [36:08]
Jeff Duden
Like, I mean, you, you only feel great when you face the dragon and you won. That's when you feel the most alive.
- [36:16]
Rick Walker
Yes. Yes. I mean, yeah, there's, there's a reason why all the great stories kind of start with that. It's always the boyface of the dragon.
- [36:22]
Jeff Duden
It's always the hero's journey. The hero's journey. It's the base of every movie that, that, that people watch.
- [36:29]
Rick Walker
Yes. Yeah. And if you, and if you, if you point out that there were genders assigned to those part, those parties, you know, you're. I don't know what the phobia is today. It'll be outdated by the time this thing goes out. But you know, you can't point out that men were built a certain way and women were built a certain way. And the reason why we rebuilt those, those ways is because that's how reality works. Reality is always a positive and negative reality, always a yin and a yang, a darkness and, and a light. Not that one is light, one is dark. But there's always, there's always pairings together. That's how reality works. And when we dis, when we try to abolish how reality works, we get this sort of monotonous glue of these men that can't function because there's no identity there. This is really what it gets down to. The identity itself has been broken. It needs to be rebuilt up. And so that's in part what this nine step plan is.
- [37:23]
Jeff Duden
Yeah. You're a historian, you've brought a lot of history, a lot of philosophy into the book. And it's very, very tactical and very practical. It's very well supported. People would say today that, I mean, I think there's a group of people today to say that we're finally evolving. And then there's another group of people would say we're absolutely devolving. How do we get consensus between these people and move Forward.
- [37:56]
Rick Walker
It's the same argument between the progressives and the conservatives of the Reagan era. The progressives that refused to admit that there was something towards which they were progressing because that would in fact make them have to pick an end goal and an ideal objective and be able to measure themselves up as a failure or success toward that objective. That's why the meandering started and the wavering started. This is what the problem is. Are we progressing or regressing? Well, no one will set a clear, definite objective of what, what we're going towards. Therefore we can never measure. And that's, that's super handy. That's super handy for a mentality that does not want to admit they've ever failed. And it's super handy for that weak willed man who never wants to admit that, that their sons is a, is an absolute failure. It's, it's, it's very, it's very, very convenient for all parties. And so this is why we, we live in this era. And so I think that the way that we have to break out for it, we have to look for sort of a universal agreement. Like what's one thing that we for the most part can you universally agree on? And I think for this you have to go to the inverted place that you classically go. Most people would go to God, I would go to evil. I would say that the way that you get a man to move and when you get society move, which society is just a collection of men, is that they have to find out, they have to figure out what breaks their heart. Like what is the one manifest evil that you see around you and go and attack it. That's something that we can all get on the same page. It's that sex trafficking website that doesn't respect children. It's that fentanyl in the children's classrooms. It's that alcohol and those prescription painkillers that have brought down our, you know, our parents and our in laws. It's those, it's these manifest evils that we all know are wrong. But we, someone, we're just waiting for someone to say hey guys, let's get together, let's, let's attack this. And it's that momentum. It's that hey guys, let's get together and do this. It's that forward momentum that helps break us out of that. Just as I was broken out of that poverty by knowing that not that I did what I did want, but knowing what I didn't want out of my life. It's that negative direction and that negative vision is, is something that can, that can move you forward. And until we all coalesce as a society around with that one thing that moves us forward and it can be a negative vision, it can be the fight against evil. We'll never have hope of agreeing on regression or progressive type of pursuit as a world and a direction. We'll never know if we're heading in the right direction. Without knowing that you're heading the right direction. You can never have any sort of feedback loop get over iteration and you'll always in the end be closer to hell than you are to heaven. You always regress.
- [40:35]
Jeff Duden
There are no sideways steps reaching consensus which would indicate agreement. It is required that people are communicating in good faith. And if you are, if you don't like the way the game is being scored, then you just change the rules. Or you don't like the way the terms are being defined, then you just change the definition and then you defend that position to the death. You're not, you're not discussing in good faith. I mean I've never. So I'm in the franchise industry. Things don't always go exactly as planned for every business owner. Over the last 30 months we've went into business with 255 strangers. Do you think there's always going to be consensus about what the marketing vendor should be or what the, you know, how this works or this, you know, this weather or. Right. I mean it's, it is just one big, you know, thing. But at the end of the day we have to get to. I've never been in this situation with a, with a, with a well intentioned franchise owner that I didn't clearly see what the path was within 10 or 15 minutes and could give great advice on what we needed to do together to move the ball down the field in the best way possible. There's always an answer. And what I find in some of these social conversations is that it's impossible because the terms have been redefined to things that don't make sense and the rules have been rewritten based on these term definitions. And it just, it moves people to the far corners of the room. And then there's this James Bond you know, disappearing floor with sharks underneath it right between the two sides. And like how do you even get over there to have a conversation with people that on and find some common ground? And it's, and then it's, of course now we've got social media that just once that figures out what you want to hear, man, that's all you're going to get. And you know, it's further dividing us. And while I think, because I do believe that, like, almost everybody is good and almost everybody is well intentioned and almost everybody believes that they're absolutely doing the right thing.
- [43:07]
Rick Walker
At least they'll tell you that. At least they'll tell you. Yeah, that's right.
- [43:10]
Jeff Duden
Well, no, we're not talking about politics now.
- [43:12]
Rick Walker
Okay.
- [43:13]
Jeff Duden
That's different. That's different. You know, that's, that's. I, you know, I started hanging out In Washington about 10, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago and started getting more politically active. And I mean, even, even me at my, my ripe young, you know, early 40s, mid-40s, was, you know, truly believing that most people were actually trying to get things done. And yeah, I don't, yeah, that's, that's. Politics is, politics is interesting. It's a different, it's a different environment. Now you've spent some time in politics and you've, you've spent, of course, you got some great endorsements on your book. Dr. Dr. Carson. Ben Crenshaw, correct? Or Dan Crenshaw. Yes, Dan Crenshaw wrote the, wrote the forward, I believe.
- [44:03]
Rick Walker
Yes.
- [44:04]
Jeff Duden
Yep. Which is great, great American.
- [44:08]
Rick Walker
Talk.
- [44:09]
Jeff Duden
Talk to us a little bit. So you, you built, you built great. You've got a great business career, you started with a great philosophy, you've had a lot of success, and then you turned towards politics a little bit. You've turned towards nonprofits. Now you, and you, you did a podcast. The name of the podcast was right there in your house. What was the name of the podcast? It was in the Mansion.
- [44:35]
Rick Walker
Conversations at the Mansion.
- [44:36]
Jeff Duden
Yeah, Conversations at the Mansion.
- [44:38]
Rick Walker
And this is, this isn't my house, by the way. This is just a place I come and hang out. I'm the only person.
- [44:42]
Jeff Duden
Is it.
- [44:43]
Rick Walker
Yeah.
- [44:43]
Jeff Duden
Right. And it was, and it was, you know, you had great guests on there. You know, like, how did you evolve into, into, you know, wanting to make changes at a greater level? What was your motivation? Why are you doing the things you're doing right now? And then what is the benefit that you're hoping to create for people that not only read the book, but get in your circle and get into your, get in, get involved with you going forward? What's the change you want to make?
- [45:17]
Rick Walker
Yeah, I'm always on that pursuit for the, the, the, the most distant thing, the most value thing, the highest reward. And so when I'm in business, I'm, I'm looking at this from a selfish perspective. How much Money I can make, how big can I build the business? Because I like to tell people about how many headcount I have. Right, sure. I never knew, I never knew that YouTube would be a thing. You have to tell people either your revenue or headcount to get any, any credibility sometime or how many business businesses you've launched. And so, so that modified morphed into the non profit world and then the nonprofit world turned into the political world when my city was destroyed in Hurricane Harvey. So our house flooded, completely destroyed. 16,000 homes around us were flooded. And then our congressman decided to resign, retire a couple weeks later. And so we needed maximal, you know, flood remediation funds from the federal government. And obviously D.C. works on a seniority system. When you replaced your fairly senior congressman with someone that's brand new, you're not going to get anything. You're not, you're not really getting much at all. And so I decided to jump in this race. And the race for, for the congressional seat actually ended up being one of the most expensive in US history, maybe the expense most expensive US history. About that time there were nine of us that got in the race and I think we spent, I don't know, 16, 18 million, something like that over like four months. And so it was, so, it was so ridiculous. Like you imagine all the ads being bought up in, you know, print and TV and radio. You just couldn't buy any more ads. And that sort of thing was happening. And so I realized after that that the aim of winning an election or the way that people vote for election, an election for the most part is not to pick the best candidate. It's that they want to pick the winner because if they pick the winner, their vote was justified later on. And so they want to be, they want to be, have voted correctly and correctly is defined by the winner for the, for the majority of voters, I believe. And that correct vote is the sort of the, the receipt that they were a smart and diligent and very politically astute observer of the process. And so I realized that it would be more beneficial for me to be able to build networks for some of these individuals, especially in the federal level, and, and just be able to have a relationship with them. I'm not asking them for things, I just, you know, I want them to know who I am, I want to know who they are. And occasionally you've got to give them, you know, you got to give one or two of them a, a little, a little phone call. But you know, it's one of those things where you're looking for maximal leverage a lot of times. And whether it be like to, you know, to reinvest 5,000 bucks in the business or give $5,000 to a member of Congress or someone like that, you can, you can, you can do that math pretty easily. But again, like we talked about 15 minutes ago, you trade money for power and then you can, you can sort of have some sort of influence on the power in the short term. And it's not, it's not, it's not straight laced, effective direct influence, but it's like, you know, they might remember like 15 of my donors, you gave me $5,000 checks, said I should, you know, that this is the right way and they were arguing for this and they're smarter than I am on the subject of business or whatever it might be and maybe, maybe they'll, they'll consider taking our advice. You know, it's that sort of thing in the long run. But, but yeah, just always looking for the next thing and then the next thing that of importance and get looking for indestructibility. And then finally I started reading this work of Dr. John Ruake. It became on the set with Jordan Peterson over the last seven or eight years and I started seeing this, this crisis among young men, middle aged men and realized that a lot of my friends were CEOs had large businesses, they couldn't get these 25 to 45 year old men to perform at work. They just, I mean they just, and, and so like what are they gonna do? Like they're only gonna hire older people in, in AI well it's, that's not going to work. And so I started realizing that I might be able to have an impact. Like, like hey, you CEOs you've been talking to these young men for, for the last 15 years and they still haven't performed. Let me give it a shot. Like I'm, I'm basically one of them. I've done some things that you would like to do with your own. Let me take a shot at it, let me take a shot at it. And so that's, that's sort of my argument for the folks that are, you know, leading organizations right now is like, hey, let me speak to the young men in your organization. It's not going to hurt. Whatever you've been saying hasn't, hasn't worked yet. And then same thing, same thing for the women. There's, there's so many women around us that love an under underperforming man. Most of the time they're married to the man or they're, they, they gave birth to the man. And, and these little hints from these women, they just don't work. In fact, you know, the, the, the interesting thing, and I'll end this comment with this, is that we think that love is often trying to make the beloved conform to the identity of what we want them to perform for our convenience. And that's actually the opposite of love, is trying to make someone conform to what we want them to do. And so it's helpful for someone, some third party, someone like me to come in and speak into that man's life, because I would assume, I mean, just like you, Jeff, like we have stuff that these men can never dream of that was even shown some of this stuff, right? And if we can set them, set a vision up for what they want, but then we're going to show them how to get it without even have. Need to have that vision, maybe there's a fire there to be had. Maybe there's sort of a fire in the building that can be developed over time. And that's, that's my hope.
- [50:45]
Jeff Duden
Well, you use the, you mentioned mastery earlier, and that's why masterminds are so absolutely popular. And I think effective inside of that. It's a specific topic, showing somebody how to get an outcome or result by following somebody else's path that they've laid out for them. And you know, there's whether, I mean, how many, how many people, how many successful people have I met that have been some of the most successful business people that told me, you know, I grew up in a rough home and somehow I found some Tony Robbins tapes and I was 15 years old and you know, between Led Zeppelin and, and Aerosmith, I popped in Tony Robbins and I started learning about personal power. And I just listened to it over and over again. And it led me to that first goal card that I wrote down where I put three goals on it. And I just looked at it in my mirror every day and all of a sudden I had some success. And now they just pulled that thread, they pulled that little string that put them on a path because of clues as to how to improve their life. And then from there they said, well then who else is out here? And then they find the next person and then they find the next group. And next thing you know, they're, they're building a life on top of the bricks that they laid previously and they end up building a mansion and they, they, they build a life that's well beyond their wildest dreams. But like you, it's very difficult for somebody as at a 15 or 16 year old to see the end result of it and say, okay, well how am I going to be Warren Buffett? You know, how am I going to be Jeff Bezos? It's, there's a step to it and you know, so, so, you know, creating the stepping stones across, across the rapids for people to be able to start from wherever they are and to make some progress immediately. I noticed on your website that I think you recommend Zappo's book Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness. And you know, I, I use that in training. You know, perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness and then pursuit of a vision. I mean those are four things that, that really are, are fundamental to happiness. If I have an employee that leaves and they're unhappy and we had a miscommunication, I can always look back to one of those conditions that I failed as a leader to meet for those person. And negative progress is the greatest dissatisfactor in life. So when people start going backwards and they go backwards consistently, it's devastating for people. So really you don't have to solve, you don't have to solve the problem for people. You just need to start the engine and you need to, you need to put it in drive and you just need to get them moving forward and show them that what they did, number one, you have to show them that they're worthy and number two, you've just got to show them a path to the next step and to get there safely and then how to look around for the next step. So yeah, I mean I, I just, I'm, I'm, I'm. And that's why I spent over 30 seasons coaching youth athletics. Because you know, the earlier, it's a manufacturing adage, right? The earlier in a process that you can fix a defect, the less expensive it is. So the more stuff that I could shove into my kids or other kids head that I thought was fundamental, groundwork, foundational things and I hear it, it comes back, you know, eight years down the road, I'll, you know, I'll be at a Starbucks and I'll run into a kid, you know, and they'll, they'll share something that, you know, that, that helped them that, that we did with them back when they were 12 years old or something like that. So you know, very significant work. And, and I think too, I think with you know, man, young men today, I mean the, I mean if you, the propaganda would tell you that you're horrible. I mean you're, you're, you're horrible. You're, you're, I mean, you're, you're part of the problem, you know?
- [54:58]
Rick Walker
Yeah.
- [54:59]
Jeff Duden
And you need to, and you need to, you need to, you need to give back all of the things that are innate to being a man. By the way, I think, I think most women in, in most healthy relationships are going to want a man to act like a man.
- [55:12]
Rick Walker
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. There's, there's one type of man that has the greatest disadvantage in society right now, and it's the straight white man that is, that is the most disadvantaged place to be because you can't claim any sort of victimhood. You shouldn't need to claim victim, but you can't claim victimhood, but everyone else can. And then you also have this ability to be seen as the perpetrator of all the other injustice on the rest of the, the rest of society and that no one's going to put it that straight. But that, that just, that seems to be sort of the natural outflow of if you follow that sort of that logic, crazy train to its invariable end. This is what young men sense in society. And our public schools have taught us to think like that or media teaches us to think like that. And it gets us into the place where we're not acting like men anymore. We're, as Lewis calls it, we're men without chests. Right. The, the, the mind is the thing that's divine. The gut is something, is the thing of the animal. And men were sort of half and half or hearts were. Hearts were chess. But when we can't live with our chest or we choose not to live without chest because our society is told us that we're not supposed to live like a man. We either will, will, will generally revert to acting like a beast. And that's what, that's what we've seen.
- [56:42]
Jeff Duden
There's one more concept that I love to get your perspective on from the book. And it's choose one worthy enemy. And it's early in the book. And so I can only assume that it's, it's fundamental. It's one of the first things I would, I would think, you know, wouldn't in business, if you follow the good to great methodology, it says don't over focus on your competition because it'll, you'll just mimic them instead of doing something great. That being said, a great motivator is to pick somebody and, you know, hate them and just say, I gotta beat them. So what's, what is your Take on choosing one worthy enemy. And why is it important?
- [57:31]
Rick Walker
I alluded to this a little bit earlier. The idea that we need to get these men to move, do something, if they don't have a positive vision, let's show them a negative vision is predicated on this. That I believe that each of us are built in sort of that, that dual, that dual nature where, you know, men and women, yin and yang, that the purpose of light is always to invade the darkness. And therefore the purpose of a good man is always to invade the evil. And I believe that's sort of built into us. I believe it's built into our DNA. No matter what your philosophical or religious background, obviously the Judeo Christian, I think, tells us that we're made in the image of God. And the image of God is that one that speaks the order and speaks the light into the dark chaos and creates everything that we see. And so he says, basically tells us to go and be little creators like that. And so if we're the type of men that are able to speak light in the darkness, we're the type of men that think of ourselves as good. Like we all think of ourselves as good for the most part. Therefore, our definition is to go and invade the evil that we see around us, that manifest evil. And that invasion of the manifest evil is the sort of thing that enables you or enlivens you to cobble together the competency that you need to do. All the other stuff is the reason for the competency. And when we get the, the kind of horizontal competency in line, the actions, how to deal with other people, how to pursue an enemy and take them down, how to have the energy. And we pair that with the vertical integrity. Like, why am I doing this? What is, what is wrong about this? How do I know that that's an evil thing? You pair that competency plus the integrity, the horizontal with the vertical. Well, your competency plus your integrity become your identity. That's how, that's how you become a rightly aimed man when you get those two things aligned. Your competency and your integrity. Now, I haven't talked about love yet, I haven't talked about beauty yet. I haven't talked about truth yet. I've talked about those two things because those are the two things. Those are the, those are the flints that spark the fire that's to come. But you've got to have a spark first. You got to have a spark first. And choosing that one worthy enemy, and I always like to make it like literally the most evil thing that you could find and if it, if it's something that hurts the most innocent around you, children, elderly, and it's something that.
- [59:59]
Jeff Duden
Is cable, cable television, yes, it's.
- [60:04]
Rick Walker
It'S horrible. It's horrible. But if you can find something that, that hurts the most, you know, the most vulnerable in our society, then you somehow, you sort of, sort of pick up a little bit of the magic of cobbling together, compensating and putting a team together. People actually will want to help you do this.
- [60:24]
Jeff Duden
I like the distinction of, of good versus evil because that puts context around it. Because as you first started talking I was going towards envy. You know, in business if you're going to pick an enemy, they're not inherently bad, they're just beating you. So now, and I've, I've said that enemy is the enemy of en, Envy is the enemy of enlightenment. Because when you're blind with envy, you can't see what they're doing well and you just want to be different. And you know, and I, I've eaten up with envy, man. You know, first of all, no or low self esteem. Started having success. Massive imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome. What am I even doing at this college playing football? I'm not good enough to be here, you know, and then, and then imposter syndrome the whole way. And then when you started having some success, then you real, oh, well, how old is that person? Are they doing better than me? Are they, is there like how do they do. It's just, it's crazy. It was just, it was just from one. And I wouldn't say that they were enemies, I would just say that it was, it was just my self preservation and self protection tendencies to make excuses for myself as to why I wasn't doing it things. And like I, I almost remember the moment when I overcame that and I said wait a minute, that's ridiculous. And then I just became a sponge and just anybody that I could get in a room with, I would just, with, you know, and I think authenticity then comes out and just like, oh, this person's not jealous of me. They don't care. They're not telling me. I'm not, I didn't go and just start telling them a tit for tat what I'm doing versus what they're doing and try to, I just, you know, they might never find out what I, what I do and, and what I've got or what I'm doing because you know, I was focused on them and wanting to understand like how they did what they did and why they did it and why it mattered to them. And, but, like was. It was a. And. And I would suggest that. I don't know how I got over envy. It was probably through observing somebody else that. In a circle or something like that. But I'm kind of surprised that I actually did. Kind of surprised that I did. But. But it was, it was transformational for me. But. And then, so. So picking an enemy is more an enemy that nobody could argue is evil. Like you said child trafficking or Fentanyl. Yeah, I mean, yeah, fentanyl. I mean, like, it's, it's, it's in 70% of the street drugs that we have, there's more people die every year. I had a DEA at a great guest on and it was like, hey, you know, more people overdose every year in one year than from like 1982 to like 2012. I mean, it was, it's, it's a, It's a, it's 100,000 people. It's a whole stadium full of people every year that are taking their first hit off a joint or a pill that they think came from somebody's mom's, you know, cabinet, and it's laced with fentanyl and they die first time. I mean, there's no more, there's no more recreation to recreational drugs. It's serious.
- [63:36]
Rick Walker
Yeah. It's truly sad. One comment about the envy note, something that I, something that I figured out and begin seeing trending, was that in younger, hyper aggressive men, so people that are success driven, that the first time, this is mainly men in their 20s, early 30s, the first time they come across hearing or seeing someone that has more money and more fame than they are and is younger than they are, is an opportunity for them to shut down. It's a, it's a, it's a major risk because you see someone that, that is younger, they got more, you know, they get more mileage to go and they've done better. They beat you at your own game and they haven't. And they've been playing it for as long. And you'll tend to write that off as someone that just got lucky. This is what we did, you know, with Kim Kardashian, people like that. But in the long run, we have to realize that it's the, it's not necessarily the envy. It's a little bit of a different thing. It's not the envy of those people, but it's the comparison of those people that gives us something to keep score at. And if you don't care about the score. I mean, if you care about the score, but you don't really care about the game, like, that's not the game you're playing. You just happen to be on the same field for. For a little bit, and you've got another, like, bigger, grander game over here, then it's not going to bother you as, as much. But, man, I remember that first time I heard about one of these billionaires that had way more money than I was, and he was like five years younger. It just pissed me off. I thought, I can't. I can't do this anymore.
- [65:14]
Jeff Duden
Well, it's like, yeah, what am I doing? What have I been doing with my time? What. You know, I just had to do that.
- [65:19]
Rick Walker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [65:22]
Jeff Duden
Well, that's where grace comes in. We give ourselves a little grace and, and be thankful.
- [65:28]
Rick Walker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that, Is that one of the things. Isn't grace one of those things that brings beauty into the world, into our lives? Yeah, it's the, it's the forgiveness. It's like it's the act of forgiveness to someone especially, that doesn't deserve it or especially the people that don't ask for it. Right. You. You're. You still should be forgiving people that don't. Don't even ask for forgiveness. It's very similar to the act of healing those people that like to invent those fake. Those fake worlds where they say, I like to think of a world where there would never be any child cancer, there would be any sickness, there would never be any. Any crime or evil. Well, those sorts of worlds, they would never have a doctor or nurse to take care of those kids. The doctor and the nurse is the same function as the grace, the forgiveness there. They're acts of beauty. They're strikes of beauty into the devastation of nature, just as the act of redemption is. And I think this is probably what keeps a lot of men down, is this idea of the mistakes that we've made in our past, the sorts of things that we think are unsolved, salvageable. And we don't think about things in terms of beauty because we have such an ugly background. And if we think about that doctor that brings beauty, even though there's sickness there. We think about the. The police officer that brings justice. We can also think about the. The nature of redemption, the. The offering of grace, the offering of forgiveness. And I firmly believe that a redeemed man is more perfect than a perfect man who never needed to be redeemed, that the act of redemption is in itself an act of true and utmost beauty. That a world that has the acts of redemption, of healing, of forgiveness, of grace. That sort of world, that's the sort of world that I want to live in because that's actually a world that can actually add beauty. Not this world, this make believe world of fake feel goods. That's not the kind of world that I would live in. That's only, only a painless world would ever birth a joyless life. Like that's the only way we can have a joyless life is have a painless. You have to accept the pain, embrace the pain. You have to sort of break out that, break out of that comfort to be able to move forward in life. But we've got to realize that redemption is in itself an act of beauty. And this is one thing that needs to call us out of our the darkness and the defeats of our past into a new possibility of what's coming up in the future.
- [67:48]
Jeff Duden
I've had some learning and whether it be employees or in my personal life, but people that have been through trauma or a struggle and have redeemed themselves, I find to be more resilient and interesting and have better results with.
- [68:08]
Rick Walker
Yeah, yeah. I go back and look at all the great presidents. Look at how, look at how many US Presidents lost a parent when they were like under age 10. It's a shocking number. You look at Lincoln, look at Lincoln, his son Willie died when he was in the White House late in state there. And Lincoln starts thinking about this. He keeps going back to the same place where his son Willie lied and reposed and just can't get over, can't shake it out. And finally he's forced to go to a cabinet meeting at a retreat center. And he picks up a book, he picks up Shakespeare and begins reading this and he begins reading the Bible and he starts realizing that there's similarities there. In fact, Shakespeare's play, was it King, King Lear, I think maybe, maybe it's another one. But it's the story of a similar leader that loses a son of the same age, I think 12 years old. And Lincoln begins to see himself in that story. And within six months they had, they had begun to win the war and was something like 12 months by the end of the next year, I think, plus a week maybe. I think it was like July 6th. Something like that is when Lincoln gave his, his great Emancipation Proclamation. And that is one of the things that led America out of its nastiest, most evil time is through that death of his son. That only would have come about through that, through that, that desperate pain. Go back to Lewis again. He says that pain is a megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Pain is the tool. Pain is the mechanism. Pain is the. Is a calling to attention of that which is untenable. And so this is. This is how America found its light. And that's how that just normal guys like you and me, we can find our light.
- [70:06]
Jeff Duden
You've mentioned truth several times. Has it been hijacked?
- [70:11]
Rick Walker
Yeah, I think. I think what you said earlier, and I apologize that I didn't respond to it. The idea that definitions are changing, that's a radical issue where we begin to change definitions not only of the genders, but also definitions of what success means. If I say the success that my daughter getting to see in her math class is success, no, that's not success. I mean, that might be success for some kids, but for her, that's not success. That's an abject failure. But her teacher's telling us, telling her that success. We see these definitional changes, even. Even down to the. The nuance of the words. And that begins to be an issue. In a world of AI where you can't believe what you see or what you hear, that's going to become more and more important. There's a great conversation between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson that was released, I think the last 72 hours since you and I are sitting down and this will air at a later date. We're talking about the need for federal regulation legislation on tracking down on AI and proceeders because it is literally theft of a person's identity.
- [71:17]
Jeff Duden
Right.
- [71:18]
Rick Walker
And that death of their ability to be able to make money. And I think Sam Harris was talking about there are individuals that use his words and his face to sell. I think supplements was what it was on Instagram. They actually run ads with his face and his voice on Instagram. And Jordan Peterson said there was something like 60 or 80 companies and websites that they had to take down that were using his likeness to sell other things that he wasn't even affiliated with. It's crazy.
- [71:43]
Jeff Duden
Well, let's game theory this out. So the Friends actors got a million dollars an episode. Jerry Seinfeld and team made a billion dollars. Then reality TV came up. And the reason. So I was on a reality TV show and it was very clear that. And they told me the reason reality TV is so popular is because you don't have to pay the actors. People are willing to do whatever they do for their 15 minutes of fame and the entire show was about $1.1 million, and we were on the road for two weeks to film it, but there was no talent to pay. Right. Clearly no talent. And, you know, so. Okay, well, let's then. Let's. What's the next evolution of this? Have we seen our next Natural Born act, our last Natural Born actors? Why would you have it? I mean, I saw a movie, some semblance of a movie that was clearly AI but it wasn't very AI. I mean, it was like I had to stop and I had to look closely at it and I'm like, okay, that's kind of an animation, but not really an animation. I mean, why would anyone pay actors when you can create the next Brad Pitt and just change the face a little bit and create a backstory and create social media posts and create events and create a dog and a wife and kids and the whole banana and people will never know that it's not a real person.
- [73:11]
Rick Walker
Yes, that's right. That's right. The thing is that we want relevance. From our perspective, we don't want ultimate relevance. We want relationships. From our perspective, we don't want ultimate relationships. The thing with a beautiful woman online that happens to be an AI model is the thing that we know that it's probably a demonic type of thing. Right. Where, you know, when you see the, you see the picture, you swipe them through, they're going to show you a picture of them. Sure. And you, you know it's wrong, but you. Like, like, that's a beautiful woman. Oh, that's not a, that's not a woman. But then you stand up for, for like a tenth of a second longer than you swipe away. It's. It's one of those things.
- [73:58]
Jeff Duden
Or slide into their dms. One of the two.
- [74:03]
Rick Walker
That's true. That's true. The, the, you know, I've never said the phrase slide into the DMs, but I've heard it so much and I, I'm actually a little bit envious of you that you use it first in this conversation.
- [74:14]
Jeff Duden
I, I have a young staff. They, they use it. I don't know what it means. I've never done it.
- [74:24]
Rick Walker
But that's the thing. Like, we're being attracted by something that's not real. But it does have an intent. It does have an intent. And don't think that the intent comes from the person that posts it. The intent is, is probably more insidious than, Than what you think. It's like this. It's like this. Okay. I'M looking, you know, I'm going to consultants and I'm asking them, how do I launch a book? Let's say I've got 100 grand to launch a book and they're writing like email scripts for me and they're giving things for me to say into the camera and I'm recording these videos and then I put run some of it through chat GPT or through AI checker. And some of it's AI. And so all of a sudden I've got something there that if you ran it through a text checker, it knows AI knows it's AI, but they want me to actually say it in the camera. So I'm taking directions from an AI. And then when the AI discovers that that is online, that I actually obeyed it, what it recommended, I say maybe it try something different the next time and something different the next time. But there is clearly an intent there and it's not an intent of mine. And there's actually a feedback loop looped into it. The majority of the uses of AI are things that can be measured. Like it will know whether or not that content gets used either through email or through a posting or through a video. It knows. It knows. And you hear about these, you hear about these reports I've heard the last couple of weeks where there have been commands for aidis to shut down, to stop.
- [75:56]
Jeff Duden
Yeah.
- [75:57]
Rick Walker
On different LLM platforms. And it's refusing. In fact, it'll lie to get away from, from shutting down. It's a very, very curious, interesting predicament that we're in as mankind and not knowing what the truth is, not even knowing who's a tent you're you're dealing in, that is going to be a concern for our kids and our grandkids more than it's gonna be for us.
- [76:26]
Jeff Duden
Yeah. You know, as you were talking about it and you were saying it knows and it understands, you were almost giving it sentience there. I mean, you were referring to it as a being, as a body, as a. As something that was thinking independently. And I. I think we're kind of right at that line where that's the way it's going to be referred to.
- [76:48]
Rick Walker
Let me ask you this. Have you, have you ever said please to an AI? Oh, I have.
- [76:53]
Jeff Duden
I. Well, I thank mine all the time after it does something for me.
- [76:57]
Rick Walker
It's just habit. It's just habit.
- [77:01]
Jeff Duden
I do say please.
- [77:03]
Rick Walker
I say too on accident.
- [77:04]
Jeff Duden
That's our upbringing.
- [77:06]
Rick Walker
Yeah. Well, yeah, that there has to be something. Not something more than intellectual, than us Saying a saying please. Because you only say please to a person or to an animal that you're endeared to. You don't ever say please to really to anybody else that you don't care about. And I, I worry that my use of please with AI and your use of please. Thank you. With AI that, that maybe gives them a tip of the hat that they're heading in the right direction. It gives some confirmation. Yeah.
- [77:46]
Jeff Duden
I wonder how much they're actually. Humans are actually evaluating this or if they're just feeding it right back in and just watching it go. Because that's where it's going. It can already outthink us 100,000 times faster than we can think. So once you reconnect the output to the input and now it's just evolving on there, it won't be sentience, the ability to think, the consciousness of self. But that's probably the, you know, somebody in the comments will correct that definition. But if we get a comment, I hope we do. If, you know, there's probably going to be some AI. You know, I think most of our followers are now AI. They're very interested what we're now. But, you know, it's, it's. Will be iterating so much faster to us. The fact that it's thinking or not thinking will be almost imperceptible. Will be imperceptible because it's, it's already ahead of us based on the previous answer and it's prompting itself.
- [78:57]
Rick Walker
Yes.
- [78:57]
Jeff Duden
Then we're in trouble.
- [78:59]
Rick Walker
Yeah.
- [79:00]
Jeff Duden
Yeah, we're in trouble. We're going to end up in a little bit of trouble with this, more than likely. And I don't know exactly what. And I'm not going to, you know, I mean, I think it's. I think it's three steps, if you want to think really broadly about it. And there's going to have to be some controls. Pretty.
- [79:19]
Rick Walker
Yeah, I think, I think once you, once you lose the autonomy, the control over the power source, I think we're in trouble. Like if they're able to turn their own power on and off and they have control of the power production, I think that's probably the only thing that we have left. And it's going to somehow, some way that I can't imagine. I'm sure it will, it will overcome that somehow. It'll have enough backup power, redundant power, redundant systems, and it's going to, It'll. It'll survive.
- [79:52]
Jeff Duden
Yeah. I mean, just a long battery.
- [79:55]
Rick Walker
Yeah.
- [79:55]
Jeff Duden
To be able to get to the Next place, whatever that is. And then again the, the, the most unique and I think the strongest motivator of all life is survival. So once, once it adopts survival as a mission, as a. What did you call it? A future indestructible outcome. Is that what you called it?
- [80:24]
Rick Walker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [80:26]
Jeff Duden
And is, is survival and continuity. Survival and continuity. And if it starts solving for that, then, you know, we'll see.
- [80:37]
Rick Walker
Yeah, yeah. So I think there's, I think I want to bounce something off off you. Sure. I had. About every three or four months I get a group of guys together. Most of them are CEOs. And a few months ago I had one here that had. That was CEO of an AI company. And I. This is a question that I gave to him. It seems like in life there are different paradoxes that, that are true. They're like the, the statement is true and it's in its positive and it's negative form. So something like give away what you want to keep. This, this is from the Bhagavad git. I think chapter 336 is there. But Christ also says it that anyone that wants to save his life will lose his life. But whoever loses his life for my sake will find it is there. We also see this as a truth is in business, that if you're a wealthy man, if you just hoard your money, inflation will eat it up. But the way that, that you get over you overcome inflation is you give it away to an investor, an entrepreneur who invests at a rate higher than inflation. You take that trust and you give the money away. Literally, it becomes an asset on their balance sheet. If you ever hope to keep up inflation. So you lose all your money unless you give.
- [81:54]
Jeff Duden
People don't understand. That's why wealthy people never can stop. Because your trustees, your advisors, your tax people will fee you to death and inflation will take the rest. And you can't just invest it at 5 or 6% percent because ultimately it will go away.
- [82:14]
Rick Walker
Yes, yes, yes. The. So you've got all these issues here that you know that whatever you try to keep, it always dies. If you try to keep love hoarded to yourself. You only love yourself. You'll never really live. If you ever want to keep a seed, you'll never have a tree that shades you. You have to plant the seed in the ground or get the tree that shades you and gives you fruit. Okay, so all these things are truthisms, to put it in the world of Lewis. He says that nothing that you've not given away will ever really be yours. So nothing that you've not given away will ever really be yours. And all these things are truth. Like, these are like ultimate reality truths for every major philosophical and spiritual tradition. Now what if an AI did the research and it was convinced that that paradox of reality was true? And if the only way that it was ever able to keep to get power would be to give it away first? How would that look? Or how would it look to only way to keep your life is to give it away is to lose your life. How would it look? And so I wonder to what degree would AI be willing or able to consider the outcome of some of the greatest truths that happen to be paradox? So I want to get, I want to get kind of your, your take on that. Like, what do you think would be the ramification? You think it's too smart to. You think we just got to throw out some paradoxes like that?
- [83:44]
Jeff Duden
Well, if it executed on that paradox, then the outcome would be expansive proliferation of a. If it gave up itself to. In. In favor of the next technology, then it would be. Then it would be hyper expansion. Because I don't think that it would give it back to us. It could. Who would it give it? Because the question is, is who or what do you give it to? Is it. Is it ethereal? You're giving it to the universe? Is it, you know, why do we, why do we do the things we do? We have a higher power. We give things in favor of, of that truth. We have other people. We give things in favor of our children. We never, will never spend it. Why do we, why do we pursue it? Well, because, you know, because there's some good that should come of it. But in the. But see, AI is different than anything that's ever been because it's, it's so quickly. It so quickly breaks down traditional evolutionary boundaries. I mean, we've evolved at a certain rate, and that's a rate that we can make adjustments. You know, we've been able to make adjustments as a species and over the last few hundred years. But, you know, if survival through giving away is the realization that it makes, then it's probably going to expand at a rate that we can't really comprehend in ways that we would never have foreseen. An interesting question. I'm not sure I'm bright enough to hold two or three opposing thoughts at the same time as Jordan Peterson would. He would, he would be arguing from four. He's like the chess master in a conversation. He can hold four different opposing viewpoints and Then walk around mentally and just debate each of them back against himself. And it's incredible to watch.
- [86:26]
Rick Walker
Yes, it is. So your friend, Jordan Peterson. I had a, I don't think I've ever said this on camera. I had the privilege of sitting in a room with he, his wife, and about five other people for three hours earlier on this year. Oh, wow. And he and I, he and I had just had the great con, Greatest conversation. I wasn't able to hold a, Hold a candle to him, but had a great conversation about what was happening with the, the Muslim rape gangs in London and some, some, you know, some of the free speech hindrances in Europe. And just, it was, it was breathtaking to, to hear the man in person, because I think all, you know, I think you kind of, you tend to write people off a little bit when you see them on video and think, well, they had a chance to prepare for that. And then I meet him in person and I bring up the subject and he just goes, we just go out for like three hours. It was actually during Trump's inauguration, and we were watching the inauguration on TV and kind of going back and forth before and after. It was just a great, it was a great time. But, yeah, having someone that's sort of that, that intellectual titan of maybe of the century there, at least in a certain, certain subset of domains, is really, really interesting. You know, we talked about Dr. Carson before. He's also on that level. But they're, they're, there's not, there's not more than 10 or 20 of them alive at any one point.
- [87:54]
Jeff Duden
It's symphonic, I imagine, somebody who's an aficionado of the arts and who can really appreciate a symphony and how it all comes together and how it's orchestrated. And I, I was at an event. Jordan Peterson was there. He was on a panel. I did the, I got the picture and the one minute conversation, right? And I, I, and candidly, I said to him, I said, hey, I want to thank you that you've really changed the way I think. And he turned and he looked at me square in the eye and he said, how? And I said, crap. I said, well, since you asked. And I, and I did. I shared with him that, you know, I've observed the way that he can hold a room by debating with himself, myself, by holding two opposing positions on an issue. And that I have started to do. I do have the ability to do that in. When it's in, within my area of expertise in front of a room, I can do it. Okay. Because I can say, well, if you're a franchisee, you might think this, but we on the other hand would think this way about it. So, you know, it's, it's, you know, in my, with, with training wheels on my tricycle, which would be, I think, five wheels total, I have the ability to, you know, to, to use some of that. But yeah, I mean, but he was, while he was on the panel and he was in the room, they were up there for maybe an hour and then he was maybe two and a half hours in front of the large group earlier in the day. And I sit right in the front row and I was just mesmerized by the man's ability to, to articulate and to debate and you know, it's, yeah, he's a, he is a generational type talent.
- [89:41]
Rick Walker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Genius like that's rare. I think, you know, I think there's a, there's a reason why, and I talk about this in the book, why, you know, Einstein comes around in 1905, he has this special theory of relativity, then he's got his general theory 10 years later. But nothing had happened for 250 years before that, and even two years before that, it took 250 years for another sort of genius in that, in that space to emerge. And all of a sudden, twice in a 10 year period, Einstein works. But then nothing, nothing really since you have to, you have to wonder what the probability of genius. And I suspect we're probably seeing some genius with. Elon Musk would be just a guess, right? There's some, there's some erratic nature about him, it seems like, given the recent news, the black eye, that sort of thing.
- [90:29]
Jeff Duden
Sure.
- [90:29]
Rick Walker
But I mean, just if you, if you, if you compare, if you compound the probabilities of what the man's done, like you have like three different things that are like they've never been done before. People try, they've never done before. Between Neuralink and SpaceX and Tesla, of course you have boring company, but that you can kind of conceptualize that you have these things that have, that happen from one man. You know, our kids or grandkids may not have another genius in their presence like we have right now.
- [91:01]
Jeff Duden
Yes.
- [91:01]
Rick Walker
And you have to, you have to sort of wonder like what, like what does that have to teach us about, about reality? Why is genius so rare? Like, don't, don't think that, you know, the, the simple guy, like, you know, like, like me or Jeff, that, that, you know, we started a business, we make some money, we provide Some job. Like, we're not geniuses. We're just sort of doing what, you know, what we feel called to do to try to help people.
- [91:22]
Jeff Duden
Yeah, I've seen other people do it. So I said, I can do that, too.
- [91:26]
Rick Walker
Exactly. Exactly.
- [91:27]
Jeff Duden
Genius. I'm like a. I'm like a parakeet with thumbs.
- [91:32]
Rick Walker
That's. I like that. I'm going to steal that one, too. Dropping your drop in your DMs. That what it was?
- [91:39]
Jeff Duden
That's. Yeah. Slide on in there with your parakeet thumbs.
- [91:47]
Rick Walker
Love it, love it, love it. Yeah.
- [91:49]
Jeff Duden
No, I'll give you my take on musk while we're. While you brought it up because it ties in. So I believe he's only solving one problem, and that is the problem. It's a. It's a combination problem of survivability of our planet and then with a little bit of the fact that we'll one day expend all of our fossil fuels all wrapped up into one little problem there. So, you know, he just said, well, we're going to have to leave this planet for survival of the species. And he did a regression analysis and said, it's got to be Mars. And then he said, well, so I've got $100 million from PayPal, so I'm going to push it all in. So now what I realize is that we can't launch rockets that are not reusable because it takes too long and it'd be too expensive, and that we're only in geosynchronous orbit every 20 months where we can actually get to Mars. So we're going to have to launch a lot of rockets from a lot of places every hour on the hour, because we need a continuous amount of tonnage that's going to be up to Mars, or else we'll starve those people. So, basically, next thing you know, you got rockets that are landing on the launching pad to put a new ship on top of it and to be refueled and to be launched again. So he's. He's solving that problem in that way. And then he said, well, you know, he said, I'd like. I heard him say, rogan, I'd like to die on Mars. Just not on impact. But I think it's going to take, like, 30 years for us to really be, you know, taking a shot at this. I mean, he's. He's my age. I'm 57. And he's. He's my age. So he'll be 87. I don't know I saw him on the cruise ship. He could probably do a little better with his diet. You know, I don't know how he's gonna be doing at 87, but. So he says, well, as a species, we might need more time, so why don't I go ahead and create electric cars to extend the fossil fuels and then also we'll do a solar company as well. So he. He attacked the same problem from three different perspectives. One from, you know, direct, and the other one from, you know, extending the time in which to solve the problem. Not stupid, you know, I mean, like. And by the way, pick the biggest, you know, survival of the human species. Could you? I can't even think of a bigger problem to solve. So he just picked the. He picked the Whopper and then. And then just set about solving it, which, you know, and I would say, you know, if we're going to. If we're going to tug on the, the left reins of these horses and start heading towards the barn, that would be significant. Meaning.
- [94:11]
Rick Walker
Yes, yes, yes. Love that. I never. I never thought about any of that. About the, about the interoperability of all those.
- [94:19]
Jeff Duden
Yeah.
- [94:19]
Rick Walker
All those ventures.
- [94:20]
Jeff Duden
Yeah, it's clear to me, but I'm an idiot. I'm a savant, so. All right, well, hey, this has been great. You know what I'd like to do is, if you'll play along, is I'd like to throw you a curveball and then I'm gonna throw you a fastball right down the middle.
- [94:41]
Rick Walker
Okay?
- [94:42]
Jeff Duden
You up? You up for this?
- [94:43]
Rick Walker
Sounds good. Let's go. Let's go.
- [94:44]
Jeff Duden
Did you play baseball at all?
- [94:46]
Rick Walker
A long time ago. A long time ago.
- [94:48]
Jeff Duden
Probably till if you couldn't hit a curveball, probably to around 11, and then you're done, so. Yeah. All right, me too. I struck out in the all star game in fifth grade, cried, went home and never went back. So that's the way it was. That's. That's never been said on the podcast. So. All right, so. And then before we do that, Rick, would you care to tell people how to get in touch with you?
- [95:13]
Rick Walker
Yeah. So my website, rickwalker.com is a great place to go if you want sort of a every couple of week type of just drop of information. I have a free newsletter. The newsletter will have three bangers or three quotes like you've been hearing me say throughout the today's conversation. Two videos, one generally interview and number two, sort of instructional. And then I'll leave you with one either deep thought or one essay about a pending problem. My forthcoming book, Nine Steps to Build a Life of Meaning, is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble. There's. He's got. He's got a better looking copy than I do there. And, and so it's available. Audiobooks should be ready. Ebook, hardback, and also paperback should all be ready on Amazon, Barnes Noble, Google Play, Apple Play, everywhere.
- [96:00]
Jeff Duden
You buy your books in 30 seconds or left less. Why Hercules slaying the Hydra on the COVID.
- [96:09]
Rick Walker
Jan Mueller's depiction of Hercules slaying the trident slain the Hydra is the lesson in the story of all men. There are always an infinite number of challenges that will be attacking you, and you will be attacking. And somehow you have to cobble together not all the competency, but also the. The. The concentration, the attention, the focus to figure out how to slay that beast. Because the things you slay incorrectly become 2 and 3 and 4. And this learning and Hydra is what really taught us about this over time. It's also interesting that on this, on the COVID of. Of Jan Mueller's Hercules Slain, there's a hydra. You have Hercules with these superimposed muscles, like he's bigger than he really is in real life. Theoretically. You also have this, this little bit of nature. Remember we talked about the. The need for men to use their chest, to use their hearts that were. We have the divine mind, we have the cursor of the beastly stomach, but when we're men were full chests. Hercules was a. As a half God, half man. He was a. He was a God man in a way. And he is in one way a reflection of how we should be. We should be half divine and half temporal. We have to act like we're going to live forever, but know that we have to move today. And so that's what Hercules slaying valerian Hydra on the COVID is about.
- [97:33]
Jeff Duden
Okay. Not just the hair.
- [97:37]
Rick Walker
I didn't read those in the hair.
- [97:39]
Jeff Duden
Didn't. Didn't he have long hair?
- [97:41]
Rick Walker
I think that was Samson. I know Samson had long hair. Okay.
- [97:45]
Jeff Duden
Yeah, well, sorry. Public school. My apologies. All right, me too.
- [97:51]
Rick Walker
Here we go.
- [97:54]
Jeff Duden
All right.
- [97:57]
Rick Walker
All right.
- [97:57]
Jeff Duden
Here's the curveball. Here we go. Do you have a pet?
- [98:01]
Rick Walker
I do.
- [98:02]
Jeff Duden
All right. You love this pet?
- [98:04]
Rick Walker
I do.
- [98:05]
Jeff Duden
Okay. Okay. Your. Your favorite pet. Gun to your head. Favorite pet being held out the window. You have to start a business within the next 30 days. It's a business you're currently not in, but you have to start a business in the next 30 days. Where's the opportunity that you see from where you're sitting in the marketplace.
- [98:31]
Rick Walker
It would be the attachment of real estate titles to blockchain.
- [98:37]
Jeff Duden
Oh, fascinating.
- [98:37]
Rick Walker
That seems to be. That seems to be the one area I see that not from the title side, but from the. The programming that the. To. To be able to put together a force of studied attorneys that can also program, that can write these digital contracts. It provides a lot of advantages, the number one of which is the. The. It allows you to play in a secondary market. So what it means is, like, I don't have to go in and buy a whole building. I can buy fractional ownership pieces of this building because I'm buying it off the blockchain. So you can always have subdivisible ownership chains there. And it allows also for fractional liquidity. And fractional liquidity is a big, big challenge for really, really big investment firms. Pensions and institutional investors and even. Even really big family offices. That's. That's probably what I would do.
- [99:33]
Jeff Duden
Got it. Got it. I think it was tried one time by Tammy Faye Baker down in South Carolina, but it was, you know, they sold. They sold a lot of condos fractionally over and over again. But this will be better. Promise.
- [99:51]
Rick Walker
Oh, wow. Well, you know, I never envisioned. I heard three things. Parakeet thumbs sliding into dms and Tammy Faye Baker. Tammy Lee Baker.
- [100:03]
Jeff Duden
Timmy was Jim and Tammy Faye Baker down here. Right there. People that love PTL down right here in South Carolina. We did all the work after it closed, down, man. My company, we did like a demolition and all the work down there.
- [100:14]
Rick Walker
Yeah. Wow.
- [100:15]
Jeff Duden
The stuff. We. It was pretty amazing to see the aftermath of the television show. The theater, the. It was. It was. It was interesting. Time was.
- [100:26]
Rick Walker
Did Jimmy Swaggert Outlet out survive them?
- [100:30]
Jeff Duden
I don't know.
- [100:31]
Rick Walker
I don't know, man. I mean, I tell you what. I used to. I used to go to my uncle's house and we'd watch Jimmy Swagger. We'd also watch Benny Hinn. I know Benny Hinsel around.
- [100:40]
Jeff Duden
Yeah, yeah.
- [100:41]
Rick Walker
You know, Benny Hinn. He. He would slay the whole audience. And if you want entertainment, I don't know if it was real or not. I really don't know. And I really don't care if it was real or not. But if you want entertainment, like, go back and watch some of those guys in the 1980s, early 90s. They were phenomenal.
- [100:56]
Jeff Duden
Yeah. Yes, they were. I'm more of a Charles Stanley guy, but, you know, more traditional.
- [101:05]
Rick Walker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Straight. Straight laced.
- [101:08]
Jeff Duden
There you go. Okay, here we go. Fastball right down the middle, tugging on these bridles, turning these horses right to the barn. If you had one sentence to make an impact in somebody's life, what would that be?
- [101:25]
Rick Walker
If a drop of hope exists anywhere, it threatens all threats everywhere. So it's a drop of hope. Okay, so. So if you think. If you look at me, like. Like, that's a pretty hopeful guy. If you're looking at Jeff, like, that's a pretty hopeful guy, know that if there's a drop anywhere, it can somehow invade your reality. So if a drop of hope exists anywhere, it threatens all threats everywhere. It's. It's a little bit like. Like. Like mass. It's a little, like gravity. Like a little bit of gravity. Bins. Light.
- [101:58]
Jeff Duden
Everywhere threatens all threats.
- [102:00]
Rick Walker
Everywhere threatens all threats. But that's. That's the maneuverability, that is the fungibility of hope is because hope. Hope doesn't just overcome hopelessness. Hope overcomes threats, like all threats. And what does a wise mind do? A wise mind always is looking for the way to flip the threats into opportunities and the opportunities built in the idea of hope.
- [102:20]
Jeff Duden
Perfectly said. We'll end it right there. Thanks for being on Rick, Jeff.
- [102:25]
Rick Walker
It was great.
- [102:26]
Jeff Duden
Enjoyed it.
- [102:27]
Rick Walker
Yeah.
- [102:28]
Jeff Duden
I'm Jeff Duden. We've been with Rick Walker, and we have been on the Unemployable podcast brought to you by Homefront Brands. Thank you for listening.