Perry Marshall: Getting to the bottom of the swamp and Defeating Cancer

Biology is about a hundred thousand times more complicated than electrical engineering, and I am not kidding. A teaspoon of bacteria is more sophisticated than a building full of Google engineers. Mike Levin at Tufts University has done experiments where he induces cancer in amphibians and then gets cancer cells to revert back to normal cells.

Most people are not conscious enough of their own gifts, their own abilities, the things that they innately do without even trying or without even thinking about it.

Sometimes you need to challenge authority. And sometimes it's a very rough road.

My first conference was in 2006, and it was a Google advertising conference. It might have been the first Google advertising conference anybody ever did. I went to my mastermind group, which I would never not be part of a mastermind group, and I said, "Hey, I'm doing this conference, and I want to put butts in seats, and here's what I'm doing. What suggestions do you have?" And Dan Kennedy says, "Well, what do these people want? What kind of things do they want?" He said, "Would you be willing to spend the registration money on marketing to get them in the seat so they could buy more things later?" I said, "Yes."

I said, "Well, we have this program, and the winners of the program get free Mac computers." And he says, "We'll give them one of those." And one of the guys in the room jumps up and he goes, "Apple just came out with a brand new computer. It's called a MacBook Pro. It's just coming out right now. And give those away." And so everybody's like, "Perry, that's a great..." Encouraged by all this peer pressure, on the way to the airport I call the Apple store. I find that the Apple store is completely useless for a question like this. I have to go higher up.

Well, eventually I got to the Midwest regional sales manager of Apple Computer, which was somebody you could probably get ahold of back then. And he cut me a 13% discount. And he said...

I ended up buying 170.

Yes.

Well, the list price was $2,000, and I was buying them for like, what, $1,700, $1,800, whatever that number was. So this was way beyond anything I had ever done. And the first problem that I had was, so how are you going to pay for these? Can I give you a purchase order? No, you cannot give us a purchase order. You have to give us a letter of credit, which means that you have put all the money in a bank account, and then when the stuff gets delivered, the bank will give Apple the money. Well, my bank in Chicago, they said, "Oh, it's going to take us a month to write you a letter of credit." I have no idea why. I ended up getting Cornhusker Bank in Lincoln, Nebraska, to give me a letter of credit, because I'm from Lincoln and I knew somebody. And we're off to the races.

So I put this out there, and a funny thing happened. I was going to send a press release, and I mentioned it to the Midwest regional sales manager. He goes, "Do not, no, no, do not put this above the radar." I go, "Why?" He goes, "Because a major automotive manufacturer tried to do a very similar promotion, and Steve Jobs killed it. As long as we can make sure Steve never hears about this, you'll probably be fine. But he's really touchy about his brand and other brands." And he just doesn't like that sort of thing. So, no, don't do a press release.

But I had, like, the coolest seminar offer ever, which was: come to a $2,000 seminar, get a $2,000 MacBook Pro free. And so I had a problem, which was, first, as I collected the money, I had to transfer the money to Cornhusker Bank and keep this thing going. This turned out to be popular, and people were signing up for it. And I'm hoping and praying that they actually deliver them on time like they promised they would.

And one day I got a call from the director of operations at Apple. And he said, "Perry, I've got good news and bad news for you." And I'm like, "Oh, don't you screw me over." And he goes, "The good news is your computers are on a plane from Shanghai. Right as I speak, they're on their way to the United States. The bad news is I don't know where to ship them." I had never even thought about this. Where do you put $300,000 of computers? Now, at the time, my house was probably worth $170,000 and not paid for. And I have all these computers that I have paid for with all this money from these seminar people. And what am I going to do? Well, I would never put them in my basement. What if somebody broke in?

I called a friend who worked at a warehouse. They would do it if I gave him a lot of money, but I didn't want to give him a lot of money, and we dithered about this for a while. And finally the Apple guy got the shipping company to just hang on to them until the delivery day.

So finally the delivery day comes, which is the day before the seminar. The seminar is in Chicago, at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare. Oh, here's another problem. After we announced the computer promotion, our registration spiked, but then the hotel sold out. It wasn't just us; it was some other conferences. And so now my registration kept climbing, but I could not offset my meeting room costs with rooms. And then they said, "Fire code says that we have to move you to a bigger room, and that costs $15,000. And we don't have any rooms that we can sell you to offset it." So I had to pay them $15,000, which they allowed me to do with food and beverage, which is why we had an extra reception. So not only did they get their MacBook Pro computers and a perfectly great seminar, but they also got a reception with chicken and wine and snacks and stuff.

Yeah, that's the reason why. Nobody asks questions like, why was there an extra reception?

Well, the really interesting part was the day before, when the delivery truck came with all the computers. It had pallets of these MacBook Pros.

And so the truck delivered them all, and they put them in this room, and then the hotel manager brought me a clipboard and asked me to sign it. And what the clipboard said was, "Hyatt Regency Hotel assumes no responsibility for the property in this room." And I said, "I'm not signing this." They say, "Oh, but it's safe." "If it's safe, you won't make me sign it." It was a total skin-in-the-game argument. And we are having a standoff with the hotel management over these computers.

I call my meeting planner, and she gets on the phone and she cusses them out and reads them the riot act. "I do millions of dollars of business with you and you won't..." And legal has already gone home on the East Coast, and so we can't get a hold of them. Finally the hotel manager writes me a letter on hotel letterhead. It says the only people with the key are the director of security and you. "We never had a security incident. If we have a security incident, we will notify, you know, Prudential Insurance," like all this. I'm like, well, this is as good as I'm going to get. And so I signed it, and we put them in a room, and then the next day everybody showed up and they got their computers. And that was my baptism of fire. That was my first seminar. We had 300.

That was my first seminar. I had never organized a seminar before.

There were so many moving parts to this thing. And we had the audio-video crew. When you haven't done a seminar, people have no idea how much scurrying around is going on behind the scenes: getting the speakers lined up, and did the person show up, and is their PowerPoint presentation loaded in with the audio-video, do they have their microphone, and all that. I remember walking through this crowded hotel lobby, and everybody wants to say hi to me. And I just remember thinking, oh, I wish I was just home reading a philosophy book. This is so intense. I just want to go home.

And then there's another part about that seminar, if that wasn't enough. So, first session of the seminar. Everybody's got their computers. They're sitting there with the computers on their laps, and they're like, "Oh man, this is really cool." I have a guy who came from Apple as a favor to us to explain, or something. And he's explaining GarageBand and all these things, and everybody's all happy. And I'm in the hallway, and this guy comes up to me and he goes, "I've got a bone to pick with you. I signed up for this before you had the computer. I didn't pay the extra $500 for the computer. And now there's an Apple commercial at my seminar. I want to know what you're going to do about it." And I should have sent him home and given him a refund, but I didn't. I worked out some deal where one of my consultants would do a session with him and make him happy.

Well, Sunday morning, I decided I'm going to do a Sunday morning spiritual talk before the full seminar starts. So Saturday, I announced two different times, I said, "Tomorrow the seminar starts at nine. I'm doing an optional spiritual session at eight. If you're into that, come. And if you're not, stay at home and watch Gilligan's Island and come at nine." I just felt like I wanted to add a spiritual ingredient, because that's part of my beliefs, and I think there's not enough discussion about these kinds of things in the world. And so I tossed and turned all night. I had a premonition that, I don't know, something would go wrong.

But anyway, eight o'clock, half the audience shows up. So I got 150 people. I give my talk. I'm about 45 minutes in, and the same guy that complained about the Apple computers stood up. And he goes, "This is an outrage. I paid good money to come to a Google AdWords seminar, and this is Sunday school." And I heard a little voice inside my head say, "Be quiet." And I stood there, and I looked at him, and I took my bottle of water, and the seconds dragged by, and all of a sudden, all at once, it erupted, and people said, "It was optional. Finish your story, Perry."

And I finished my story, and then the session was over. And the rest of the day, I got nothing but respect. Nothing. In fact, I went to a breakout session in the afternoon. It must have been three o'clock in the afternoon. I was giving a talk for people that were interested in that, and I was sitting on the stage bantering with some people who came before I got started, and people filtered in, and now there's like 30 people in the room and they're scattered all over the place. And I said, "Okay, it's three o'clock, let's get started." And everybody in the room moved to the front row. I've never seen that happen anywhere. I didn't tell them to. They just all said, all right, ready, at attention. And I did my session. And so that was my first seminar.

Well, I had people come up to me and say, "Hey, I'm not a Christian like you. I'm a Buddhist, but I really respect you doing that." Well, they do. And it doesn't offend them in the slightest. Everybody knows I have different beliefs than them, but everybody's afraid to talk about it, and they appreciate it. So I've always incorporated some kind of ingredient like that in my events. We have prophetic people there or something. We do it all kinds of different ways. There's not a formula, but I get very, very little pushback on that. And we don't overdo it. It's respectful. We don't ram anything down anybody's throats.

In fact, I think almost everything I do, because this extends into the science work, I think all of it is a demilitarized zone. And I think all of it is what I call a seeker group. What do I mean by a seeker group? Well, when I used to go to a megachurch in Chicago, we had this thing called a seeker small group. It was a Bible study for people who most definitely do not necessarily believe the Bible. It was designed for people that were not from church backgrounds, and they may be a Buddhist or an agnostic or a burned-out Catholic or a Hindu or anything. And it's totally different than running a Bible study, because at a Bible study, everybody's, theoretically, on the [inaudible]. But there was no baked-in assumption that you agree with any of this. We're just opening it up. I thought it was exhilarating, and it was dancing on the airplane wing every single time. You never knew what you were going to get.

And Megan Macedo said to me, oh, I described this to her, she goes, "Well, Planet Perry is a seeker group." Well, yeah, it is. And she said after our last seminar, she goes, "I have a few observations to make about your people. Not only do your audience tend to be people who have had several failure cycles and they've drunk the pink Kool-Aid and now they're over that and they're ready to learn the real stuff, not only is that true, I think most of your people also have had at least one existential crisis. So they're a normal human being." But you have to kind of admit to yourself that you're ready to have an existential crisis instead of shoving it down with alcohol or cigarettes. And so that's one of the things that I love about it. And it definitely extends into my science work. It's more uncomfortable territory. There's a lot more ambiguity. And you need a lot more grace for however people are showing up on any given day.

If I had to put that on one person, it would be my dad. So my dad was a pastor in a large church. He didn't run the place; he was just one of the pastors. And when I was 12, my mom's mental illness returned. Now, nobody really understood this very well at the time, but she had had a couple of little bouts with mental instability earlier in her life, and this time it was here to stay. And so our family was bedlam for a year and a half. She was fighting with everybody, and she was kind of delusional, but nobody really understood what was going on.

He cast around for a while, and he got her to a psychiatrist who correctly diagnosed her as having bipolar with mild schizophrenia. And he put her on medication, which immediately had a positive effect on her. And no sooner did that happen than he got called into a board of elders meeting, and they said, "Hey, you just took your wife to a psychiatrist. We don't do that around here." And they demoted him, and they publicly humiliated all of us. Like, the following Sunday there was an announcement from the pulpit in front of all these people: "Well, Bob is having some problems in the family," and he stepped down from his position as an elder.

And my dad stood his ground. As my mom went through her process of sorting this out, and she improved, he got in the face of one person in particular, the senior pastor, who was really behind all of this. And he said, "You are wrong. This is not some rebellion issue or anything like that. This is a medical condition, and she's on medication. And you owe me an apology, you owe her an apology, and you need to reinstate me, because that was wrong." He was one of the few people that would stand up to a very strong, charismatic leader. And he got his position back. He got an apology letter. And he vindicated himself. And then he got cancer. And then he died a couple years later. I guess about three years. There were 2,000 people at his funeral.

And so I learned early that sometimes you need to challenge authority, and sometimes it's a very rough road. That was not an easy road. We felt like pariahs. There were a lot of people that were like, [inaudible]. But usually when something kind of shameful like that happens, most people will just back off. They don't really know what to think. They don't know what to say, so they won't really say anything. And then we just felt like pariahs. And there were a few people that really stuck with us and supported us and helped us with things. We had relatives that said, "You should get the hell out of Dodge, Mary." And there are arguments for maybe he should have done that, but he stuck it out. And then when he had a terminal disease and we had medical expenses and all the rest, there was a whole bunch of people around us that were there to support us.

So that's real life in a faith community, by the way. It's not all roses and frequent flyer miles and lattes and whatever. People work out their deepest emotional and spiritual issues with each other in communities, and sometimes those communities are rough places to be.

Well, that's very true. I'll have to think for a second to give you a good answer, but let's just start with that interview. So rewind two years before that interview. I had been an acoustical engineer. I had a speaker design job, which I had always wanted. I'd been doing that for a couple years, then there was a slowdown, and I got laid off. My wife was three months pregnant. I could have gotten an acoustics job out of state, but I didn't want to move out of Chicago again while my wife is pregnant. And so I went into sales.

No. And I had a friend...

Because I was a multi-level marketing distributor. And so I had already been driving all over the place, making appointments, making phone calls, networking with people. And that's a whole sordid, sad story that I've told many times. Why did I do that? Because I got fired not once, but I got fired three times in a row. One time for playing a practical joke and two times for asking too many questions.

And that really shook my confidence, getting fired from a few jobs and scrambling around. And so I go to an Amway meeting, and they're talking about, you know, there's the 40-year plan, which, you can get laid off, and you could be 57 years old and then get fired and then you drive a taxi. And I'm relating to this at age 21. It's true, right? I would have never taken something like that seriously before, but all of a sudden I was very uncomfortable, I was very agitated. And so I got in Amway, and I totally drank the pink Kool-Aid. I believed everything they told me. I went after it for six or seven years. I was just relentless, stupidly persistent.

Okay. So Amway is one of many, many multi-level marketing companies that works like this. I sign up, I buy some stuff, maybe I sell some of it too, but then I sign up you, and then I get a percentage of all your stuff, and you sign up John, and all of us get a percentage of John's stuff. And then John signs up a bunch of people, and on and on it goes. And in my professional opinion as a marketing consultant and author and expert on marketing and all the rest, I think somewhere north of 90% of the MLM industry is scams. I think it is one of the most illegitimate industries. There are companies that are for real that actually have a product, and they're not scamming people, but it is a God-forsaken...

It is. And most people sort of kind of know this. They just don't know why. Part of my story was I had to completely deprogram myself and do an intervention on myself that nobody could do for me. And this was partly because of the Internet. In the late '90s, the whole "what's wrong with Amway" started spewing out on the Internet. Before then, you could keep a secret from millions of people. After the Internet, you couldn't do that. So I spent probably about a year painstakingly sifting truth from fiction. I had lunch meetings with Diamonds and ex-Diamonds, and I had conversations with lots of people, and I figured it out. I completely deconstructed the whole entire thing to my complete satisfaction. This is true. This is false. This is true. This is false. I walked away from it, and I've been an anti-advocate ever since. But I had to do that.

Well, I was in the middle of that, or towards closer to the end of that, when I met you. So the backstory is, the first sales job that actually worked for me, John hired me. John was a consultant working at that company with a fair amount of authority. John said, "Mike, I think you should hire Perry." They hired me. So, backing up, I'm an engineer doing Amway on the side. I get laid off. Well, I don't know, I've met a lot of sales reps. They don't seem to be any smarter than me. I think I'll do this. I remember one friend, he said, "Perry, you don't just stick a pencil behind your ear and get into a whole new career, just like that. There might be some complexity to this." "Yeah, I'll handle this." And this is another pattern: I jump into things like, well, I'll figure this out. Well, it was two years of bologna sandwiches and ramen soup and baked potatoes and salsa. Salsa is another good cheap food. Potatoes, really, you could eat for like a week on 10 bucks.

Well, it was a hugely fortuitous thing, because I was running on fumes. We were in a pretty serious financial situation by then. I had a baby at home who was a year and a half old. My wife had come home from her job. Our credit card debt was going up. I was not usually getting a sales commission from my job.

I was 28, 27. And that job was not a good fit for me. I had learned all the things that Synergetic needed me to know by then. And it felt right. I remember the job offer came, I took it the weekend before I started work. I just had this feeling in my stomach, like, this actually feels like it's going to work. And it did. And props to you, because that was the relief I felt when the wolf was suddenly not at the door anymore. My first paycheck was the biggest paycheck I'd ever gotten. And I snagged a few sales, and I got some commission, and it did great. It started to work. It was a sales job that only an engineer could do. And that was the key. I am not a car salesman who slaps you on the back and tells you jokes and tells you how he likes the fish picture on your wall. I'm not that guy.

Well, I was endlessly curious. When I had that sales rep job, everything just kept going wrong. I would have a deal that looked like it was going to work out, and then it would not work out. And then another one, and then it wouldn't work out. And this would just go on and on and on. And so I discovered Dan Kennedy and direct marketing in '97, and I bought this product from him, and I started studying it. And then I come to work at Synergetic, who had a website, and they had emails, and they had a CRM system. And it was the first time I'd had all of that at my disposal. Plus, we were marketing nationwide. Yes, it was a tiny little company with very little resources. But Mike, like me, was left-handed. He was open-minded. He would say yes to any reasonable request, and most people would not.

And so it was the right combination of necessity is the mother of invention. I've got my hand in this direct marketing world, and I'm reading the Dan Kennedy newsletters. I'm figuring out on my own that all that stuff from direct mail and print advertising applies directly to internet pages and all of that. We're learning early SEO, and we're making it work. And it was thrilling. It's like, well, here, we've got a contact database. We've got some faxes that came in. We've got some emails from the website coming in every day. Call these people and figure it out.

I recruited a sales channel. I got reps. I got distributors. I knew enough, from my scars from being a rep. I would listen to my boss schmoozing the manufacturers to keep them on board and then working both sides of the equation. I would go see a rep and I would say, "You know what the biggest problem in your life is? You spend 18 or 24 months building a huge account. You get the order, and then they go direct and they cut you out. That's your biggest problem." They're like, "Yes." Yeah, I know this because I was a rep. So here's the deal: "I'll fire you for not being successful, but I will never fire you for being too successful. That is my commitment to you." They were like, "Wow, somebody who actually understands what it's like to be a rep." And they would give me disproportionate market share. I was the smallest company on their line card, but I probably got number three or number four level of attention instead of number 12, because they knew that I would not screw them.

And so Synergetic was great fun. We never had any money, but at least I was not going deeper into debt anymore, and I was having fun every day. I'm writing these magazine articles, and I'm just trying stuff. And I've got this direct marketing education with all these marketing gurus, and I'm taking pieces of what they're teaching me and deploying them. And it was fun.

Yes. And so I remember one of our reps took us into one of the biggest distributors in Detroit, and this distributor was courting us. I remember coming home from that trip and going to my wife's parents' house in Nebraska. And I'm like, I'm 28 years old, and the biggest distributor of automation equipment in Detroit, they're buying me lunches and giving me the dog and pony show and wanting me to appoint them. We didn't actually sign them up; we ended up doing somebody else. But wow. I was so used to pounding the phone, pounding the pavement, being a pest, annoying people, finding any possible way I could. "Hey, I'm going to be in [inaudible], could I stop and shake your hand," and all that nonsense. It was just awful. And I lived that for so long. It was dreadful. It was so painful.

And maybe part of it, John, is I decided, well, my wife's going to be a stay-at-home mom, and we're having a family, and I'm just going to figure this out. It was kind of a burn-the-boats kind of thing. You better figure it out or else you're going to go home with your tail between your legs. You're going to move back to Nebraska, in the farmhouse next to your wife's parents.

I remember just before I took the job at Synergetic, it was literally a week before, you guys didn't know that I had gotten fired from that job between the job interview and saying yes to the job. And I was riding in a pickup truck with Brett, my brother-in-law, and his son had also majored in electrical engineering. He was seven years younger than me. And he goes, "So Perry, it doesn't seem like you guys are really doing all that well. Is it going to be there for my son? Because he's getting the same degree you got." And I'm like, "Well, Brett, I've taken a lot of detours in my career. I think it's going to be just fine for your son." Well, he ended up taking a job in a nuclear power plant. He's doing just fine. He never went into sales. He never got dragged by a car down a highway.

Well, I'm metaphorically speaking.

You know, the sales guy getting dragged behind the chain. I will say, knowing...

A week earlier. Well, Mike was great. Yeah, that was a lot of fun.

A major, major figure-it-out moment was, I took an acoustics class in engineering school, and I decided to write a term paper on something called a transmission line speaker enclosure. So when I was 12 or 13, I got ridiculously fascinated with stereo equipment. I wanted to understand all about how it worked. I didn't just want the formula out of the book. I really wanted to understand it, which eventually led me to engineering school. And there was this type of speaker enclosure. It's like a pipe, and you put the speaker on one end, and it's not done very often. And there was no satisfactory formula for how to design one of these things. And I decided to figure it out and derive all the math. I'm literally starting with Newton's law and working out the wave equations and doing the differential equations. And I really did figure it out.

It was the experience of taking a really simple principle like force equals mass times acceleration and then rolling it forward to a very complex system and working it out. I would run a simulation on my Hewlett-Packard calculator, and it would plot the little points, and it would run my equations, because I didn't have a computer at the time that would do that. And I figured it out, and I had the embodied experience of what today I call touching the bottom of the swamp. I now know what it feels like to understand something all the way down to the bottom. And then when I hit future things, I would look for that sensation.

So when I was deprogramming myself from Amway, there was about six or 12 months where I really wasn't sure, are the naysayers right, and this is really legit, or is this just a scam? Because there were arguments going both ways. And what I did was I put the whole thing on an anvil, and I invited people to speak up, like, come explain this to me. I'm not going to go into exactly how I did that, but Amway did not stand up. It was a big bag of smoke. There was a whole bunch of stuff they were not telling you. It was not what they told you it was. You did not own a business. You didn't have a title to anything. It didn't have a unique selling proposition.

Later, I did the same thing with Christian faith. If I put this on an anvil and I pound on this as hard as I possibly know how, is it going to stand up or is it going to break? And in marketing, it's like, okay, I'd just been through five or six years of pink Kool-Aid, and I found out that a whole bunch of this was an illusion. So what's the bottom of the swamp with marketing? Well, it was things like having a unique selling proposition, or entering the conversation inside the customer's head, or tracking a conversion: I put this much money in, I got this much money out. In fact, that's how I figured out that Amway didn't really work. Instead of shoe leather, I said, I'm going to make this into envelopes and mail pieces instead. Instead of prospecting people by going to the mall or talking to waitresses or something, and I found out that the return on investment was like one out of ten. Oh, this is impossible. A mail order business is possible. This is impossible. It's disguised by shoe leather, but it's really the most inefficient business I've ever seen. But I didn't know it until I applied a bottom-of-the-swamp principle. I'm like, this doesn't work. Okay, I can be done with this, and now I can move on. And I can take the stuff that I've now learned and find stuff that does work.

Then I learned a whole encyclopedia of ways to figure out which stuff works, which stuff doesn't, why it works, why it doesn't. And so I just kept doing this and kept doing this and kept doing this. So I get to China, and my... "I'm not a Christian anymore, I'm not going to be a missionary anymore, I don't believe any of this stuff anymore," and we're both pastor's kids, and we get in to argue about evolution. I go, I'm going to take that bottom-of-the-swamp thing, and I'm going to go study evolutionary biology, and I'm going to put it on an anvil, and I'm going to pound on it, and I'm going to see what happens. I have done that a whole bunch of times, and every time you do it, you get faster. It gets faster and faster and faster. It only took me a week to figure out the usual story in most textbooks about evolution, not true. It took me two years to figure out, but evolution is still true. And there's this whole other set of reasons why that the average guy never hears anything about.

So I take the manufacturer's rep job, and now I'm going all over the Chicago area trying to sell connectors and sensors and stuff to people. And one of our manufacturers came in, and we did a dog and pony show at the Ford assembly plant in the south side of Chicago. And one of the engineers at our manufacturer had brought a device-level network, which meant that the controller that runs a machine is not just straight wires that go into an input. It's talking through a network. And networks were pretty new to most people at this time. The production manager came walking through, and he saw that this network had a feature that if a sensor broke, it would tell you which sensor broke. You could pinpoint exactly where the problem was and fix it in five minutes instead of going through a computer program and figuring out where it stalled out. And he flipped out. He goes, "I want that."

Well, this was one of the few things on our line card that I could understand. I didn't understand it, but I had the capacity. The other reps at our company didn't really, they weren't geeks. They weren't engineers or anything. And I'm like, okay, I'm taking a cue from that. And so I started learning about these networks. Now, honestly, I probably would not have been interested if I didn't have a wife and a baby at home and all the economic pressures. I had a bunch of motivations. You've got to figure out something you can sell. All right, I'm going to sell that. And so I started learning everything I possibly could about these networks, and I started going around and doing more dog and pony shows and doing missionary work. And the problem was we just were not in a position to economically make that work, given the manufacturers I had and all the rest.

So I became a local Chicago expert on this brand new technology that people were just starting to use. I really went to school on it. But it wasn't really possible for me to make a living selling this, which many times in sales you only find out by trying. The market's not really ready for this, or you could make a living selling to the whole country, but you couldn't make a living just selling in Chicago. And so after lots of pain and suffering and soul searching and everything else, I figured I have to sell something that only an engineer can sell, and it has to be viable. And I understand these networks, and it turns out that this company in Chicago that sold all over North America needed somebody, and I was a perfect person, and so I just stepped right into it and started working right away. And again, the sense of relief, because we were probably only a few months away from major, like, moving or doing something.

So I got interested in these networks, and then I came to work at Synergetic, and now I was in a company that would support me, which was really important. They supported what I sold. And so now I'm educating all these engineers. There's five or six networks you can choose from. Which ones do you choose? How do you make these decisions? And it got really interesting. It's like, well, I have a communications background, but it's analog. But now I learned the digital part. So that's interesting. And then the analog part gave me a lived experience, a kinesthetic sense of noise and bandwidth and all the things that anybody dealing with communication does every day. So I instinctively understood a lot of things. And then I added a lot of education to this. And then I started writing magazine articles about it.

Then a guy liked my magazine articles and asked me to write an Ethernet book. I didn't know anything about Ethernet. But he goes, "Well, listen, if you're willing to learn Ethernet, you can write our Ethernet book, because I like your writing." And I said, "Well, okay." So it's another "I will go figure this out." I'll figure it out. So I attended a workshop, I bought a bunch of Ethernet books, and I said, well, I'm going to write the Ethernet book I would want to read. I think most of these books are dreadfully boring. They're horrible.

So my process has seven steps, and here they are. Dilemma, deconstruction, symbiogenesis, reinvention, depth, cannon, canon.

So, dilemma. I think everybody can understand what a dilemma is. What we're doing right now does not work. We are going to have to do something else. Second is deconstruction. Take it apart. Disassemble it into its component parts and figure out how all the parts work and what all the parts are. Get them all out on the table. Three, symbiogenesis. That's a term from biology, which is a merger. An example of a modern symbiogenesis is taxi plus smartphone app equals Uber. You take something and something from somewhere else and you put them together and you get a third thing.

Yeah, so I take these parts over here and these other parts over here that never were put together, and you stick them together. Okay, then it's reinvention. So Uber, once they had this, reinvented the industry. And reinvention is not the same thing as symbiogenesis. So, for example, I sold my car six or seven years ago. Uber. Now, if I need to drive a long way, take the kid's car or the wife's car. I don't own a car. Most places I go in town, I take an Uber. You would have never done that with taxis ever. It would make no sense. It makes sense now. So there's a whole economy, there's a job market, all that. So that's four, reinvention.

Five, depth. That's, hey, this is really deep. This isn't just this interesting thing. This has implications that go all over the place. So like 80/20. When I realized that 80/20 was fractal, oh my word. This takes us miles in directions that nobody's ever been. Six, cannon. I shoot it out of a cannon. I evangelize it. Wow, everybody, this is the coolest thing. That's canon with two Ns. Step seven is canon with one N, which is like the body of literature. Make this a part of the knowledge that everybody who's starting from the beginning ought to learn. This is my creative process. I taught it in the Truth seminar six years ago. That's basically what it is. But those are the seven steps. It's how I do everything.

I got a call from a technical publisher, and he said, "Will you write an Ethernet book?" And I said, "I don't know anything about Ethernet. Can I write a DeviceNet book?" And he says, "Nobody's asking us for a DeviceNet book. But if you want it, we need an Ethernet book. And if you'll write it, I'll give you the job." And so now I knew what it was. There was an Ethernet cable in every office, and I knew that it was hot. It was growing. It wasn't quite real yet on the factory floor, but it was getting there. And so I referenced all my marketing gurus, and I thought, well, if I'm the first guy to write an industrial Ethernet book, that's like first-mover position. That's a really good idea. It means I'll be an [inaudible], which means more opportunities and sales will come my way. So if it takes me six months to figure out Ethernet and then write a book about it, it's probably worth the trouble. So I said yes.

I spent the next six months buying Ethernet books and reading through them and figuring out how to write the book that I would want to read that would actually be a little bit interesting. And that's what I did. And then that book came out, and that was about the time that I left Synergetic. And guess what? Having written that book, there were a couple other companies that were like, "He wrote an Ethernet book, and he's a marketing consultant. He's going to do our marketing." It was fall-off-the-log simple for them to hire me. Now, it didn't make them hire me, but it got me in the door. And then we had a conversation like, "Yeah, we like you, and you're hired." And I probably got a quarter of a million dollars of business from those clients over a period of, I don't know, three or four years. Not bad. I mean, maybe that book sold a grand total of a thousand copies. I still get a royalty check every six months for like $82.

Well, I went to see Brian. I took my daughter with me. She was eight at the time. And I knew that he had faith questions and existential questions. We'd had emails going back and forth. But I was very unprepared for him saying, "So Perry, I don't believe this anymore. I'm done. I'm going to move home in a couple months. I'm quitting my missionary job. And I've pretty much already made up my mind." And this totally blindsided me, and I found this very upsetting. Also, we had already been having a conversation about this for a year or two, so I already knew what his questions were. And you have not had that conversation until you've had it with a guy with a master's degree in theology. He knows Greek and Hebrew, and you've grown up together, and he's very, very, very good at getting to the bottom of the swamp and asking tough questions. And he's like, "No, man, I'm done with this."

So I had serious questions about maybe my whole belief system is wrong. Maybe Brian is right, I don't know. And I reverted to engineering instinctively. I go, "Brian, look at the hand at the end of your arm." And then we get in this argument about evolution, which I don't know anything about. I just have my engineering instincts. Like, well, I'm pretty sure there's a lot of engineering going on here. I'm pretty sure this isn't random accidents. But wait a minute. I know a bunch of biologists think it is random accidents. So since he's already pushed me to the edge, I'm going to go home and I'm going to let science figure this out for me, because I know all about theology. My dad was a pastor. The truth about theologians is they can do shell games forever. You can't do shell games with Ohm's law. You can't do shell games with F equals MA. And I thought, you know what? I don't care what anybody told me growing up. Theology is squishy and engineering is not. So I am going to let engineering make this decision for me. And if this turns me into an atheist, okay, so be it.

Now, that's terrifying. I could be arguing with my wife about taking the kids to Sunday school and what we're going to read at bedtime and whether Dad's going to go to church at Thanksgiving dinner and all the rest.

Yes, she knew that. And she, yes. That's a [inaudible]. There wasn't a damn thing she could do about it. And she's like, "Well, okay, here we go." That's the thing. So I start buying books.

Well, it didn't take long. I had a massive epiphany. Before I get there, biology is about 100,000 times more complicated than electrical engineering. I'm not kidding. I think the most sophisticated thing that is going on right now at ChatGPT or OpenAI or Google or you name it, Tesla, is nothing compared to one cell, nothing. I don't even think we know 5% of how biology works. We're barely at the foothills. But man, this stuff was complicated, and it wasn't linear. So I was lost for a while. But I was trying to understand DNA, and one day, bam! I've seen this before. I have absolutely seen this. This is digital communication. This is just like Ethernet. A DNA strand gets turned into RNA, which turns into amino acids. Encoding, decoding. DNA is copied from one cell to another. That's just like sending an email. It's the same thing. The math is the same, and I'm already at the bottom of the swamp.

It took two weeks. It took me two weeks to figure out DNA as code. And it works by all the rules of everything I did at Synergetic and wrote in that Ethernet book. When you have an epiphany like that, it is intensely pleasurable. It's like all these circuits in your brain suddenly connect. Oh, well, it doesn't make me a cell biologist, but I now have a place to start. I can start with this. I have touched the bottom of the swamp. Everything anybody tells me has to fit this, because this is a fundamental principle of the world, and it is. You go to Claude Shannon and all those guys, they figured out all the math of communication, and it's correct. And so now all of a sudden I have some confidence. I can start chiseling away, chiseling away, and figuring it out.

Yeah. So this is 2004. What that means is I've been teaching Google ads for a year. I've been deeply immersed in marketing now for about five or six years. I have a reputation as a marketing expert with Google ads that is really just starting to take off. And all the Internet marketing people like me.

Yeah, well, this really was a burning existential question. I really want to know, is the hand at the end of my arm really a purposeful thing, or is that just an illusion? This is an extremely important question. And so I'm trying to figure all this out. And so I decided to put my science beliefs and my religious beliefs on a public anvil, a little like what I'd done a couple, three years before that with Amway. Amway had caved in. This is not real. Okay, how about my science ideas? How about my faith ideas?

So I put together a couple of websites. The first one was called Coffeehouse Theology, and I had this email series called Seven Great Lies of Organized Religion. And then once I had this code stuff figured out, I had this other website called Cosmic Fingerprints, which has now turned into Evolution 2.0. And I had this email series: where did the universe come from? It started with a big bang, and it went through the fine-tuning of the universe, and it ended up with DNA as code. All of the other codes are designed, so this sure looks like DNA is designed. Can anybody poke a hole in this? And because I was a Google advertising expert, because I was now making good money, I made this my tax write-off. For about five years, I spent $2,000 to $3,000 a month buying clicks for $0.01 to $0.10 a click, driving people to these websites, and I would answer every reasonable question that anybody asked me. I would do this late at night. All right, it's like 10 o'clock, the kids are in bed, I'm doing this until midnight. And I would sit there and I would answer questions. And I was like, is anybody going to poke a hole in the basic Christian story? Is anybody going to poke a hole in my DNA as a code? All the other codes are designed. Therefore, we have an inference to design. Can anybody poke a hole in this stuff?

I answered probably 20,000 emails. I am not kidding. And I talked to every kind of person you could possibly imagine, from Jehovah's Witnesses and Jews and Mormons and Muslims and Hare Krishnas and Buddhists and everything you can imagine. I had conversations with all these people. And so on the faith side, what it did, it kind of 80/20'd my theology. It was like, 1% of this belief system is 50% of what you need to know. And that's the stuff that matters.

And then on the evolution stuff, it was not only a search for scientific facts, but it was also a question of how do you explain this to people? Given how complicated biology is, how to reduce this to something that people can comprehend. And that's especially tricky if you're arguing about a complex topic. It'll just go round and round and round in circles. So I had to figure out how to simplify it. This is basically why I ended up with a $10 million prize, because if you could get people to agree that the prize had been correctly defined, then it only comes down to, did anybody win the money or not? And that makes one of the most profound questions in the history of science reducible to a Homer Simpson: did they get the money or did they not get the money? Did they solve this? Did they not solve this?

They have to pour chemicals in a bathtub and get an encoder to send messages to the decoder. And they have to show that it encoded and decoded something properly. And if they can get that to work with five bits of information, then they win the prize. So they just need to get communication from point A to point B to happen without anybody cheating. It's not really that complicated, but nobody's even come close to solving it. And I found out pretty quick, nobody has any idea where the genetic code came from. Now, you'll find lots of hand-waving explanations.

And this was the thing, this really, really pissed me off. It really pissed me off that you could spend a hundred or two hundred thousand dollars to send your kid to university, and that school will give them a papier-mâché answer to some of the most important questions and not even tell them that they're giving them a papier-mâché answer. Because when I really got inside the field and saw what was going on, I was appalled. I can't believe the intellectual slop that passes for science in evolutionary biology.

Now, I'm not saying evolution is a fraud. This is the twist in the story that's really interesting. I came to the conclusion, yes, things really evolve. Things do evolve. You can prove it. It happens in the lab all the time. But it happens through a system of mechanisms that is so astonishingly sophisticated. It's beyond anything. A teaspoon of bacteria is more sophisticated than a building full of Google engineers. And nobody is properly explaining this. What is going on here? So I just got more and more intrigued.

Yeah. Well, why don't you elaborate on that?

Yes. And in fact, Megan Macedo, who helped me figure out those seven things that I told you about, one time we were at a bar in London and she goes, "So Perry, you know that story about your mom and your dad and the psychiatrist and the church demoting your dad?" I go, "Yeah." She goes, "You realize that's a war between science and religion story, don't you?" And I go, "No, not until you just said it now." Now it's bloody obvious. And so, yes, I've been recapitulating the church story, but now I'm doing it in science, because here's what's going on in science.

So back to where I grew up. I had a charismatic lead pastor. He's got 3,000 people, which is a lot of people in [inaudible]. And they're all yes sir, no sir, following the yellow brick road. And there's a little man behind the curtain stuff going on. And Dad gets demoted, and he stands up to the guy and kind of does the man-behind-the-curtain thing and straightens him out. I get into science, and I find out scientists in science are just as religious. They're just as metaphysical as the Catholic Church or a Hindu or a Muslim or anybody. They have a sacred set of beliefs, and you start poking at those and people get defensive. People start calling you names. People start yanking your funding. They start threatening you. And you find out there's not nearly as much freedom of speech as you really thought there was. There's a whole bunch of people quietly laboring in huge levels of frustration, and they're not doing the real work. They're pretending to do the work. All over again.

I was sitting, maybe nine months ago, in Boston. I was at a cancer conference in a big hotel ballroom, and I had this thought that just hit me: why does this remind me of church? Like church growing up. I'm in a large auditorium with a bunch of obedient people. There's somebody in the front giving a presentation in a language that you have to have been here to understand, because I was in a very theological church with Greek words and all that kind of stuff. There's an elephant in the room. Nobody's saying what it is. And if you say certain things on that stage, a little hook will come and pull you off. Oh, I am perfectly prepared to be here.

Well, when we were married maybe a year or two, I remember it was a cold winter morning, and we were riding in the car, and we're in college, and we're in our 20s. [Inaudible] foster care on the radio, and my wife goes, "I want to do that." I'm like, "You want to do what?" Foster is the worst of all, like the kids are with you and then they leave and then there's another kid. Well, her dad was adopted, and she kind of wore me down over the next, what, 15 years?

And we had some neighbors who fostered three kids, and we got to know them and we had conversations about that. And at one point, this is when I worked at Synergetic, we agreed to take a temporary infant foster child, and we had her for two and a half months. It was about six months before Kyler was born. Laura was pregnant with Kyler, our second, and we got a call: "We've got a week-old drug-exposed baby from the west side of Chicago. You want to take her?" And Laura calls me at work. I go, "Okay, here we go." And so now we're taking care of this little black girl named Drea. And then a few months later, the social worker calls. She goes, "Her paternal grandmother wants to take her. Thank you very much." And we hand her off.

Two weeks later, we get another phone call from the same social worker. And she says, "The grandmother would like you to be her godparents. Would you be interested in that?" So we trucked over to the Old Ship of Zion Church of God in Christ on the west side of Chicago, where we were the only white people. And they had this christening in the storefront of this church on Chicago Avenue in the Austin neighborhood. And we became her godparents. And then she had three older brothers that were from the same biological parents who lived with their grandma also. We went over to their house, and we basically became their cousins from the suburbs. And I took those kids to church for 10 years. And we still know them. I picked up one when he got out of prison about 10 years ago. So we have this whole relationship with this family. So we did that for two and a half months. And then we had our kids. And when we were done having four kids, we decided we're going to adopt a child from China.

Well, yeah, good point. Like what Laura always intended: that if she had the bandwidth, she would take in a child that otherwise would not get a home. And so we adopted Zalen in 2011. She was 19 months old. She had a problem with one leg where she had a deformed foot and a missing fibula when we got her. She didn't walk, she didn't crawl, she didn't sit up or feed herself, and within a few weeks she was doing all of the above, with brothers and sisters. And she's done great. She's an...

Yes, she's in wheelchair basketball. She's really good. Right now, as we're filming this, the Paralympics are going on in Paris, and she knows some of the Paralympians that are in Paris right now. She knows all these people. She's 14. And then we have ZJ, and he's 19. We adopted him when he was nine and a half, which was three years after we adopted Zalen. So we have four standard issue [inaudible].

Yeah, exactly. So Mama Laura gets most of the credit, has done most of the work. She's incredible.

Extremely bureaucratic.

Oh, yeah. For both adoptions, we had to take, I forget the amount, it was thousands of dollars of cash at the adoption, in addition to all of the other, like, it has to be in Chinese renminbi notes, and they do with it whatever it is they do with it. But on top of all the other fees and everything. So it took four and a half years to do the first adoption and a year and a half to do the second adoption.

Well, there's a phrase or an acronym in the adoption community. It's called RH. It stands for reluctant husband. This kind of scared me to death for all kinds of reasons. I was afraid my wife might emotionally disappear for who knows how long. I was afraid that, I mean, anybody doing an adoption ought to know that sometimes it can be very rough. It's not Little Orphan Annie, where they are, "Oh, thank you, Daddy Warbucks, you're so amazing." There can often be, in adoptions, kind of a "no good deed will go unpunished" way that kids treat the parents, because adopted kids have an embodied experience of, "I apparently was not good enough and I got rejected." And they have that in their memory no matter how early that happened. That is a belief, and their system is wired to reinforce that belief. So they will push you away. You can expect that.

And there's a whole function of the adoption community to help parents deal with kids who respond to stimuli differently than the biological kids do. You have to handle discipline differently. You have to handle everything differently. It's a whole different universe. And so, to be honest, it scared me to death. And I had a moment, this would be maybe a year or two before we actually got Zalen, I had what I call a Holy Spirit highlighter moment. It's when a scripture jumps out of the page and attacks you in the face.

So I was reading in Isaiah, and it says: "They ask me for just decrees; they want to be near God. They lament, 'Why don't you notice when we fast? Why don't you pay attention when we humble ourselves?' Look, at the same time you fast, you satisfy your selfish desires. You oppress your workers. Your fasting is accompanied by arguments, brawls, and fistfights. Do not fast as you do today, trying to make your voice heard in heaven. Is this really the kind of fasting I want? Do I want a day when people merely humble themselves, bowing their heads like a reed and stretching out on sackcloth and ashes? Is this really what you call a fast? No, this is the kind of fast I want. I want you to remove the sinful chains, tear away the ropes of the burdensome yoke, set free the oppressed, break every burdensome yoke. I want you to share your food with the hungry and provide shelter for homeless, oppressed people. When you see somebody naked, clothe them. Don't turn your back on your own flesh and blood. Then your light will shine like the sunrise. Your restoration will quickly arrive. Your godly behavior will go before you, and the Lord's splendor will be your rear guard. Then you will call out and the Lord will respond. You will cry out, he will reply, 'Here I am.'"

And I read that, and what I was thinking was, how on earth are we going to keep this careening jalopy of our life on a road if we add an adoption to all of this other stuff? And the message was like, you take care of the poorest of the poor, and I take care of you. Okay, I guess that's what we're doing.

So I think anybody who didn't tell you that this is terrifying is not being honest. It's very, very tricky. I think we've been very fortunate. Our adopted kids have turned out well. It has not been without drama. There's counselors. We have a counselor named Margaret who's 88 years old. I have my list of favorite octogenarians, and she's one of them. We hit a really tough spot, and our social worker said, "You need to meet Margaret." Margaret had run an adoption agency, and in her life she had fostered or adopted 13 kids, and she, in her 80s, had two teenagers living in her house that she had adopted, which are still in her house now. She became the family counselor, and she would come over. She's met with every single one of us, some of us many, many times. And at one of the first meetings we had with her, she came over and did a family meeting, and she got everybody in the living room, and we got these issues out, and she walked us through how to all get on the same page. So we've had a lot of help.

Well, this is why the Christianity story, I mean, humanity mostly pushes God away. I think it's a very apt analogy for the way things really are. I think the way things really are is God is more loving and less judgmental than you know. And I think the fire-and-brimstone crowd has really jacked this one up. And most people are like an adopted kid.

So my wife is in different adoption groups, and one time she showed me this picture that was taken in one of her groups. A woman had gone to, I think, one of these really poor Eastern European countries with terrible orphanages, and she adopted a nine-year-old girl who literally looked like she was a year and a half. And there was a photograph of, it was one of the first times the adoptive mom had picked up the girl, and the girl was pushing her away as hard as she knew how. Well, if you can snapshot that, and you can say in your adult mind, okay, so they flew all the way to Bulgaria and they went to an orphanage and they did all the paperwork and they've got this little girl, if you can fix in your mind the perspective that this girl obviously has from all this neglect, and contrast it with what you know is the truth, that is the truth about the relationship between God and man. It's man pushing away, because we know better. And God welcoming us.

And you can't make them accept it. One of the things you learn as an adoptive parent is there's an appropriate amount of making the offer and respecting the agency of the other person, letting them work things out. I feel like I grew up in a Christian environment that just by default implicitly assumed that it's our job to control everybody's behavior. No, that is not your job. God doesn't control everybody's behavior. The Ten Commandments is a list of things on a piece of paper. It's not a hot poker stick. You don't want to do that? It's up to you. And so there's a lot to learn and discover in parenting. Of course, when I had my bio kids, you don't know until you become a parent how crazy you are about that baby. You can't explain that. You'll do anything for them.

We have this question of where did the code come from? And I think all of my research shows that consciousness comes before code, not after. And that is a reversal of the normal academic cause and effect story. I think consciousness is something fundamental in the universe and not just something that shows up eventually at some point in time. Well, consciousness is also a central question in evolution, because if you understand real evolutionary experiments that happen in real time, your next question is how did those cells know how to do that?

So I'll just give you one little example. Michael Levin did an experiment with tadpoles, and he put barium in the water, and barium causes their heads to explode because of the way that it affects the ion channels of the cells that the cells use to communicate. But then the heads grow back, and they're barium resistant immediately. Nobody has any reason to believe that there's ever been a barium evolution history of tadpoles a billion years ago. As far as anybody can tell, this is a completely new situation that's never happened in history. And it fails the first time, and then it engineers a solution immediately afterwards. This is how intelligent cells are.

And this question has been reverberating in my mind now for probably about 18 years, because when I figured out, oh, cells are smart, and there's a whole vein of literature about this, I thought, this is way more interesting than the creation-evolution people or any of the stuff these people are arguing about. This is way deeper and way more...

Oh, yeah. This is light years beyond Ethernet. And so I started becoming friends with scientists, and some of them mentoring relationships. James Shapiro has been the leading person for me. He's a wonderful guy at the University of Chicago. I think he's the best evolution guy alive. And it just became inevitable, as I got so incredibly interested in these things, that I would start having conversations with the people that are on the leading edge of these questions, because frankly, there's not that many people asking these questions. And so I started becoming friends with people, and I got judges for my prize. I got invited to the Royal Society. That kind of was like my equivalent to a PhD, I would say. It started opening doors.

Well, then James Shapiro emailed me almost five years ago, and he says, "Hey, I've got these two other guys. We want to do a cancer and evolution symposium. Will you help us organize it? Because you're a marketing guy too." And I said, "Absolutely, I'm in." And so we started organizing this thing. It probably would have been at Harvard, because one of the guys is very tied in with people there, but the pandemic pushed it to Zoom. Probably ended up being an advantage. We got all the speakers we wanted except for one, and we had about 300 participants.

After the conference, I got a phone call from a guy who attended our cancer and evolution conference. And he said, "I've been in the pharmaceutical industry for 30 years, and this is the best conference I've ever attended in my entire science career." And I said, "Why is that?" And he said, "I'll tell you why. It's because there's two kinds of people in science. They're splitters and clumpers." Splitters and clumpers? Okay. What's a splitter and what's a clumper? And he says, "A splitter is a person who subdivides and subdivides and subdivides, and they just go deeper, deeper, and by the time they're 60 years old, they only know about one thing. They know everything there is to know about the folding of some protein, and they frankly don't know anything else. And that's a splitter. And most scientists are splitters. Now, a clumper is a person who's interested in lots of different things. And at some point, they stand up in the middle of the vast cubicle farm, and they look around and they go, 'So does anybody know how this works?' 'I think the guy in department F-14 does.' And then they go to that guy and he goes, 'Well, I think the guy in E-12 knows.' And then, 'Well, I think the guy in K-7 knows.' And they find out nobody knows. And everybody just assumes somebody else knows. Almost every speaker at your conference was a clumper, because they go around and they figure out what does everybody actually know? What does everybody not know? And they ask questions that everybody else is afraid to ask."

Yes. I was the chair of the third day of that conference, and I gave a presentation of that conference. When we were in the wrap-up session, we're in the homestretch, and all the speakers came on for Q&A. And I said, "Hey, I want to ask everybody a question." Just some setup here: we had chemists, physicists, astrophysicists, oncologists, biologists, embryonic development people. We had immunologists. We had every kind of scientist in our faculty, there's like 30 people. You can go to cancerevolution.org and you can see the whole thing. I said, "How many of you, raise your hand, are reluctant to admit you really only understood about a third of what everybody else was talking about for the last three days?" And all these hands go up. And I said, "That is entirely okay, because that is the only way we can have an interdisciplinary conversation. And it has to be in plain English. A chemist and an oncologist have to be able to talk to each other in plain English. And if you can't do that, then it might mean that nobody understands even what they're doing."

And a couple of the other speakers were like, "Yes." In fact, one of them said, "You know, Perry, you're right. We bring students into universities and they're full of curiosity, and we turn them into bureaucrats. We say, 'No, stay in your lane and just study this one thing,' and they lose all their curiosity, and they become just like us." And she goes, "This was great." And I just felt wonderful about it.

And so this started something, and we started having monthly Zoom meetings, and we'd have 100 scientists showing up, and it was really enthusiastic. And it did not take me very long at all to find people who, A, were doing absolutely extraordinary work, like flipping unbelievable stuff. And they were seething with frustration. One guy told me, he said, "I hate applying for government grants. And I tell my grad students, do not let on that we're doing anything revolutionary or we'll never get a dime. Just give Homer Simpson the donuts, and we'll figure out how to do the innovation stuff in the background." Because government peer review and grant committees are so risk averse that everybody's afraid of funding something that ended up going nowhere. And so they only increment. Let's do incremental stuff, which means you're just splitting and splitting and splitting and splitting infinitely. I bet there's 10 million scientific papers on the internet, at least. And 80 or 90% of them is just splitting, splitting, splitting, splitting, splitting. And then in fields that I understand well, especially biology, this is not as true in physics or chemistry, but especially in biology, a whole bunch of them aren't even close to the bottom of the swamp. They're just somewhere in the middle.

And so I said, well, we have to find a way to fund some of this research. And so I started a 501(c)(3), which is a whole other... oh my goodness, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

But we're going to figure it out. And so we're figuring it out right now.

Yeah. Well, after a while you just figure out the pattern. Speaking as a consultant who's worked in 300 industries, almost all industries are 50 years behind state of the art. Okay, maybe the computer people are only 12 years behind state of the art. But cancer treatment is 50 years behind state of the art. Changing the standard of care is like wearing away rock.

Well, I call it the science publishing circle jerk. So scientists publish things and they need citations. Before it gets published, it has to get peer reviewed, which is sort of like citations. So anything you publish has to get through a committee first. So you write a scientific paper, it has to get through a committee, then it gets published, then you're hoping that it gets citations from other papers, which means they have to agree with it, and then you can only get funding for more scientific research if all the previous people agreed with what you were doing. And then that gets turned into textbooks, which is far out of date of what is really going on. And then the textbooks are adopted by the universities, who train the scientists, who have to start at step one and go back.

And so what happens is there's like 100,000 tiny little steps in that whole entire journey, and like 10 people are in charge of each step, which means there's like 10,000 people. And if anybody does not do their step as efficiently as possible, the chain breaks, and the people upstream or downstream get out a whip and they hit them. And so the thing has to go around in a very prescribed manner. And, you know, government funding, and we've got to get the politicians to agree to all this. And so it's an extremely bureaucratic process that punishes innovators.

Yes. And people build entire careers on theories that get cited, and the number of citations are how good of a scientist they are. And so to admit that your theory is wrong and that we need to back up and start over, most people will not do it. "It's proven science." And so I found that the problem in evolutionary biology was really a cultural problem more than it was a science problem.

But here's what's always true. No matter how bureaucratic it is, no matter how jacked up it is, no matter how messed up it is, there are people doing good work anyway. People who are truth tellers anyway. And they won't cave in. And it might only be 5% of them, or it might only be 1% of them, but they are determined to do good science. They're the biblical remnant. They are the remnant. And their papers, you know, maybe two-thirds of the papers are BS. The 5% of them aren't, I promise you. And that literature is in there. Once I knew where to start looking, once I found Barbara McClintock and James Shapiro, I was like, oh, who do they cite? And what experiments are they talking about? And you find there's this whole other world. And it's been there all along.

So you could go, well, that's terrible. Look, this is how the whole world is. This is the way it is. Hello, people, take the red pill. Most of what you read in the news isn't what happened. Most of what politicians say isn't what they're going to do or isn't what they did. A whole lot of the stuff you study in school is BS, especially if it's not an exact science. Now, electrical engineering was not mostly BS. In fact, I would say 98% of what I got in my electrical engineering degree was good. And that's true in exact sciences.

Within a certain purview.

But even that, it gave me... So I get educated in theology first, which is squishy. They told me it was exact. This was actually why Brian broke away. Brian was in China. He'd lived there for four years. Nobody could breathe down his neck. Nobody could control what he read or what website he visited. And he started figuring out that the Excel spreadsheet of exact systematic theology answers that he had been handed on a silver platter, if he changes this cell number C17, it changes B14, which is, you know, and pretty soon the whole thing's unraveled. And he figured this out. Like, well, they told me they had it all figured out. They don't have it all figured out.

So theology is squishy. Electrical engineering is not squishy. I'm going to start with electrical engineering, and I'm going to eventually end up in biology, which is squishy, but I'm going to use as much not-squishy stuff as I possibly can to figure out the squishy world. Now, here's the thing. The squishy stuff is where all the maturity is required. You don't need a lot of emotional maturity to do electrical engineering, because it's an exact science. But the reason biology is not a hard science is because it's too sophisticated for that. The reason is, I think every cell on Earth has some itty-bitty bit of consciousness, which means that it has volition, which means it has something like free will, which means you can never, ever, ever reduce biology or anything that runs on biology to exact equations. Yeah, there'll probably be a lambda. So anthropology, sociology, economics, marketing, business, biology are all soft sciences.

So let me tell you a story that I think ties some of this together. My favorite professor was a guy named Robert Knoll, and he was 67 when I was a sophomore in college. He was like the best professor at the University of Nebraska. Everybody knew he was amazing. His classes were hard to get into, and I got into one of his classes. Our first paper was on Beowulf. And instead of writing an analysis of the Beowulf story, I decided to take a chance. I wrote a story of myself, basically, but I said, "I am Beowulf. And I am going to engineer this trebuchet that's going to heave the stone, and it's going to kill the monster." And I wrote it in Middle English, sort of. And at the end, I killed the monster. And I turn in this kind of creative essay. Like, well, I hope he likes it. I hope I don't get an F.

He liked it. Well, I was walking out the door at the end of class, and he goes, "I would like to talk to you." Am I in trouble? "No, you're not in trouble. I would like you to come to my office sometime. I think I've read your papers. Come to my office sometime." So I go to his office, and he goes, "What are you majoring in?" I go, "Electrical engineering." And he goes, "Well, I am trying to figure out why you think that's interesting." I thought he was insulting me, or we were having some rivalry between the English department and the engineering department. Yeah, yeah, yeah. "No, no, no." He goes, "You understand people. Because I've been reading your papers. And I don't understand why a person who understands people is over in the engineering department studying things. Because things are not as interesting as people. What's up with that?"

So I tell him about my speaker projects and my audio, [inaudible]. He goes, "Hmm, speakers. So I'm guessing you like showing them off to people. Is that right?" Yeah. "You like their reactions, right?" Yeah. He goes, "Okay, I get it. All right, so you understand things and you understand people. Most people are one or the other. Most people are not both." He goes, "That's a gift." And nobody's ever had this conversation with me before. This is completely new. He goes, "You would be very good at technical sales." I had never heard of technical sales. He goes, "As a matter of fact, I think you'll be the president of the company. Because you need to explain things to people and people to things, processes." I was 20 years old. This was absolutely new. And that was one of the best conversations I ever had.

And very complicated things like cancer. You see, cancer cells are like people. Every time I explain cancer, I anthropomorphize it. Normally in biology you're not supposed to do that. Oh, we don't like anthropomorphizing things.

So every cell on Earth almost has the ability to re-engineer itself: cut, splice, rearrange its DNA, change its own heredity, change its own genetics, sense whatever's going on in the environment, adapt to it at high speed. And this is what makes evolution possible. And cancer is when the cells of your own body go rogue and start evolving out of control.

So let's say it's your kidneys. Used to be a great place to work, used to have good morale, used to have long breaks, used to have a nice bus. Well, now it's stinky in here, and the work hours are too long, and get me out of here. And those kidney cells literally want to leave, and they are stressed out. They feel threatened. Maybe they're not getting enough oxygen, maybe they're not getting enough nutrients. They start switching on evolutionary mechanisms to defend themselves, because they want to get out. Well, they start changing just to survive, and then a white blood cell goes swimming by. "Hey! If you give me a ride out of here, I'll give you immortality. Let's do a merger acquisition." And the white blood cell goes, "Immortality sounds good. I like that idea." And they merge together, and they go floating off into the bloodstream. And that is what we call a polyploid giant cancer cell. And that is the mother of many cancers. It's not cancer yet, but at some point it will start spilling out baby cancer cells, which will metastasize.

And those cells, those baby cells, they do not consider themselves a part of you. They consider themselves to be independent renegades, as though they were just floating around in the ocean hunting for food. And so they recruit arteries and blood vessels to start sending more nutrients our way. They start tricking the immune system and telling it things that aren't true. They start growing. They start turning on more blades of their Swiss army knife of evolutionary mechanisms. And then when you attack them violently with chemotherapy or radiation, they evolve even faster, because what that does is it causes their evolutionary machinery to switch on. So when you go for chemo or radiation, you are dumping napalm on a Vietnamese village. And if you don't kill everybody in the village, like everybody, if there's a few left over that are upset, well, here's what happens. Your sister-in-law calls you and goes, "My numbers are looking great." And five months later, she's dead. Because the few, that tiny little percentage that were left over, they come back with a vengeance, because you are fighting the evolutionary machinery that the creationists tell you doesn't exist and that the atheists don't tell you anything about, because it doesn't fit either one of their neat little stories.

And one of the reasons that cancer research has been stuck, one of the many, is because the war between the creationists and evolutionists has hid the real story about evolution. You can't understand cancer unless you understand evolution. You can't understand evolution unless you understand cancer.

So you said something like, so what could happen in, what, five or ten or fifty years if what we're doing prevails? So I think you could have a $25 test at Walgreens that you go do every year to find out if you've got stage negative one precancerous cells in your body, which are these giant polyploid cells. And there's tiny numbers of them. They're a hundred times the size of a regular blood cell, but there's maybe only a few hundred, and most people would never look for them or find them, but we have ways to find them. So you could have a test, and it could tell you not only do you have stage negative one cells in your blood, they're coming from your kidneys. So you have unhappy kidneys. So we've got to figure out what's up. Do you need green tea, different diet, more exercise, more sunlight, less sunlight, different job? Can we give you a PET scan every two months and watch it like a hawk? Maybe we can cut out that little itty-bitty corner. Can we walk this back?

I think it's very likely that we will have a way to take those cells out. I don't have time to... we already have ways of marking those cells and painting a red bullseye on them right now. There is a chip that somebody's developed at Columbia that you can insert under the skin that could detect those cells in your body. Mike Levin at Tufts University has done experiments where he induces cancer in amphibians and then gets cancer cells to revert back to normal cells. And I think some of that technology could be used to reverse early cancer cells if you catch it early enough.

Now, I'm a marketer, and I understand why early detection sounds so good, but people don't do it. And it's because it's prevention. I don't know how many consultations I've done with clients where they have a prevention... Well, could you sell a cure for like 100 times more money and then eventually figure out how to sell the prevention? Because prevention is hard to sell. If a guy's having a heart attack right now, you say, "I'll fix your heart attack for a quarter million dollars," and the guy will say, "Sold." Five years ago, you couldn't get him to ride an exercise bike. You couldn't get him to stop eating cheeseburgers. And so I think the people in the know need to put less and less and less money towards stage three and four, which is where the bleeding neck is, and put more and more into stage negative one, stage zero, and stage one. And that's why I'm working with the people that I'm working with.

Yes, I am hopeful. I think we can do this. I don't think we're lost in the woods with no compass. There's this phrase: if you need a new idea, read an old book. I think there are things that have been discovered 10, 20, 40, 60 years ago that you just plug them into the right place. I don't believe that government, insurance companies, and the medical system all by itself will solve this. And the university won't solve this, because they don't have an incentive to. You know who does? I know a lot of people who are really, really sick and tired of the medical system the way that it is. They're tired of government the way it is, and they're tired of research the way it is.

I think, you know that phrase, amateurs built the Ark, professionals built the Titanic. I think that applies here. And I'm not saying that we don't need professionals, because I have some of the best professionals in the entire field. You can go look up on the Reversing Cancer website. You can see some of them. But it also requires donors who have their heads screwed on straight, entrepreneurs. It requires volunteers. It requires people outside the system, because people inside systems don't fix systems. People outside systems. Google did not come from the search engine industry. ChatGPT did not come from Google. Bill Gates did not come from the mainframe server industry. Uber did not come from the taxi industry. Airbnb did not come from the hotel industry. And the cure for cancer is not going to come from Pfizer or the U.S. government. And I'm excited about what I'm doing because I'm working with the real people, and they're doing the real stuff. And if people want to help, there's room for help. If people want to donate, there's really good uses for that money. So who wants to help?

Well, early in the interview, David asked me, so what's your formula for how you solve problems? And I gave him a formula. I think everybody has their formula, and you have your formula, and your number one job is to figure out what your own God-given formula is. And if you're older than about 20 or 25, there's already a history that will tell you what that formula is, if you pay close enough attention to it. I think most people are not conscious enough of their own gifts, their own abilities, the things that they innately do without even trying or without even thinking about it. And I think you need to ask yourself, ask God, ask your friends.

One thing that I have a lot of my clients do is I tell them, "I'm giving you an assignment. Email your friends. Tell them that you're doing an assignment for a class. What is my unique capability? What do I do better than almost anybody? And I need your answer by Tuesday." And 10 of your friends email back, "Well, you know what? I think you uniquely do..." And you should take that and take it really seriously and sift it and sort it and figure out, that will probably tell you quite a bit about what your formula is. And then you lean harder into that, and you say, I'm going to look for jobs, careers, educational opportunities, hobbies that tie into that. I think the innate giftedness of any human being is one of the most marvelous things. And it's not selfish. It's not narcissistic. It's the only way you serve the world. You're not going to serve the world just being another person putting a hubcap on another tire if a robot could do it.

It's in there. It's baked in. It's in your history. It's in your friends. Guess what? They don't have to wait for your funeral to tell you you're awesome. They can tell you now. What a countercultural thing, to tell people how awesome they are before they're in a casket.