Hello everyone, this is Tonya Dawn Recla, your Super Power Expert. And I’m super excited for this conversation today. We’re having back on this show, Perry Marshall. If you all recall back in the day, I don’t remember how long ago it aired now, but we talked to him about personal development and the business benefits of personal development specifically. And in that Perry and I realized that we have some other common intersections of an evolutionary sort. And so, we wanted to talk about his book, Evolution 2.0. It’s not just a book. Dare I say it’s a movement. It goes way beyond what you see as the words on the pages, and he’s just the embodiment of somebody who’s obviously standing in his gap and doing his work in the world. And so I’m really excited about bringing him on so we can talk about what that journey looks like, how that’s been for him, some of the things. Maybe he’ll actually give us some insights into things that have happened for him since the publication of the book.
But in prepping for the show today, the idea kept coming to me of God 2.0. I want to be really clear what I mean when I say that because I think it can be easily misinterpreted or, or interpreted, I guess, by your preference and perception. The idea of, not necessarily that we would have the audacity to think we could improve upon God, but certainly our perceptions altar. You hear his talk on the show a lot about frequencies and dimensionalities and awareness levels. As those layers peel off, we just see things very differently. You’ve heard people talking about a Bible verse or a quote or something that they thought they understood and then, 5, 10 years later after some different development, they’re like, oh wait, that’s what it really meant. And then you read it again later. I think I’ve read like 15 times. There are just these nuanced layers that are undeniable.
And so, what happens if we take the conversation of God outside of the nice little boxes that we like to put it in, and apply it in things like science, and technology, and development, and personal development? A lot of times it gets left out of that conversation. If we use that as a foundation, how does that alter things? And so, we’re going to talk with Perry today about that. But if you first want to join me in welcoming him back to the show, please do so.Â
Hi Perry! Thanks for joining us again.
Hi, I’m really excited to be here. This is going to be fun.
Awesome, awesome. Well, first of all, I just personally want to thank you for the contributions that you’re making in the world. I have an appreciation for being willing to live divergently. I know a lot of us to think divergently. Obviously, we’re attracted to show about superpowers. But to live it, to embody it, to walk it, that’s an art and a science all wrapped up into one. It takes a hell of a lot of courage in a world that is okay convincing us otherwise. To you, thank you. I love your work, so I appreciate you.
Thank you. It means a lot.
Absolutely. Well, I’m so glad. If you haven’t had a chance to check out Perry’s book, I absolutely recommend it. All of his stuff is great. He’s brilliant. You get him talking about the topics that light him up, and you see it, it exudes. And so, if you have a chance to pick up Evolution 2.0, I highly, highly, highly recommend it. But we’re going to jump into this deeper conversation with it. Perry, can we give them a quick backstory as to what the impetus was for why you even approached that concept in the first place?
I used to avoid evolution. It’s kind of like gay rights, immigration, gun control, abortion, immigration, you know?
Yeah, you don’t talk about the polite company, right?
Right, right. Yeah, I think I’m going to go to a wedding and talk about that. The funny thing is, now I can go to a wedding and talk about evolution, and everyone would be sitting forward going, really? Nobody ever told me that. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This started when my brother went to a very conservative seminary and got a Master’s degree, and moved to China. He was a part-time missionary in China. He’d been trained to be a pastor. I’m over here, I’m running my business, I’m doing all this stuff. Brian’s always been the most conservative one in the family. And then, a couple of years into his living in China, he starts asking me all these questions, and she’s really starting to have a lot of doubts. This whole infrastructure that got built up in seminary starts falling apart for him.
I think he was really starting to think for himself for the first time in his life, and he wasn’t thinking what other people told him he was supposed to think.
I think he was really starting to think for himself for the first time in his life, and he wasn’t thinking what other people told him he was supposed to think. All these things started unraveling. And so, we’re both pastor’s kids. I certainly was still a Christian. I just, I wasn’t as conservative like him. I was a little more freewheeling. I thought I had answered lots of tough questions from lots of tough intellectual people, but you have never had a deep theological dive until you’ve done it with a guy with a master’s degree in theology, who knows Greek and everything else. Okay. I was finding myself over my head, but maybe keeping my head above water at least. And then, I went to visit him in China, and I immediately realized he’s done.
He’s not asking questions anymore. He is no longer a Christian. He has thrown this out the window, and he’s done. And boy, I don’t know, I think Thanksgiving dinner might get interesting. And so, I was feeling very upset about this and very unsettled in, not so much because of how it changed the family dynamic, but as well, I don’t know, what if he’s right? I’m kind of drowning in his questions myself and maybe I’m wrong about a bunch of stuff. We’re riding this bus and I said to him, “Brian, look at the hand at the end of your arm.” I said, “This is a nice, nice piece of engineering, and I know because I’m an engineer. You don’t think that’s an accumulation of random accidents, do you?? And he goes, “Hold on.” He just comes right back at me with an explanation that probably everybody’s heard.
“Well you know, all you need is random changes in DNA and millions of years, and millions and billions of creatures and the inferior ones die out, and the ones that are left keep getting better and better, and you don’t need a designer, and you don’t need any of that.” And I just stopped right there and I thought, okay, I have my engineer’s way of assuming thing the world is, but I know that I don’t know everything. I know a bunch of biologists would agree with him and not me, and they can’t be stupid, I don’t think. So what? What do they know that I don’t? I just decided to stop arguing with Brian right now. It wasn’t helping our trip anyway. I’m going to stop arguing, and when I get home from China, I will buy every book, every scientific paper, anything I need. I am an electrical engineer, I am scientifically illiterate. I know how to pick up scientific literature and figure it out. Here we go. I just plunged myself into the void. The real question that I was trying to ask is, is the world purposeful, or is the world purposeless?
I would look at the hand at the end of my arm, and I would go, it is obviously very purposeful, duh. I don’t know any engineer that can make this. Anybody ever took a good look at a prosthetic arm? Would anybody like to compare it to a real one? Right? To me, it was just a no brainer. But I thought, well maybe there’s something I don’t know. I don’t know hardly anything about biology. So maybe my entire conception of engineering is going to change. But I’m going to follow the evidence wherever it leads, and I’m not going to build a wall between my religious beliefs and the empirical engineer’s side of my brain. I can’t live with the tension anyway. I can’t live in some kind of hypocrisy. If all the science and engineering tells me, no, actually we don’t live in a purposeful universe and it’s not what you think, then I was willing to follow that to its conclusion. So there I was, and it was terrifying, but I had to do it.
Well, and I even quoted that, I even wrote down in my notes here that you said, “I’m going to get to the bottom of this even if it costs me everything.”
Yes.
Like I shared with you before we started talking, I’m such a kindred spirit in that. I sense that if you’re going to ask questions, you better be ready to hear the answers no matter what the answer is. What we’re talking about, divides into family units. We’re talking about a career. This isn’t small stuff. This isn’t like do you like chocolate or vanilla ice cream?
No.
And so, when we start to look at those things, isn’t that the terrifying piece though? I remember the moment I realized I was holding contradictory beliefs about something like evolution. I never stopped to think about the fact that I actually believed both, but both couldn’t be true in the way that I understood them. And of course in my world, rather than look at the beliefs, what we look at or I’m just fascinated with the internal machinations. It’s like, wait, how can this happen, and where are the contradictions, and how the complexities of it all versus going into the details of the opinions I was holding. I was fascinated with the human behavior behind it. Like, wait for a second, how can I be doing this? Regardless of setting out to prove it, which I didn’t get that far with it so kudos to you. But it was like, how do I even, how am I holding these?
I never stopped to question how I’m holding contradictory viewpoints.
And I never stopped to question how I’m holding contradictory viewpoints. I think that’s true of so many of us. But you dive in to see, well wait, do I want to believe these things? And, I do think we can hold contradictions. I think that some of the wealth of this information, it is recognizing the intricacies and the complexities, and everything else. But what you’re talking about goes way beyond what we believe as individuals because the implications to our societal fabric are impacted. You know, conversation. We debunked Newtonian physics decades ago, but most people still operate as though that’s the prevailing theory. We build around it.
Including biology.
Exactly. It’s like, how is this possible? When are we going to let our lives and our realities be informed by what we’ve quote unquote proven through scientific methods?
Yeah, I call it the laboratory-
It’s kind of an interesting quandary.
It’s the laboratory of reality, which is what I like to call it. It exists everywhere. Like my dear friend Tom Houbara used to say, there’s burning bushes everywhere.
That’s the thing, either everything’s miraculous or nothing is.
Right, right. There are all kinds of things that we’re not paying attention to. So I said, “Well I have to have to pay attention to this.” And so for a while, I was just stark raving, terrified and desperately confused as well. I started buying all these books across the whole spectrum of the argument on the left and the right, and everywhere else. And I quickly figured out, for example, that I wasn’t going to get too far until I dug into actual scientific literature because most of the popular books were just, they were too surface level to actually come to any conclusions. And then eventually, I started hitting some bedrocks like, oh well so here’s a stake I can drive in the ground. I can be certain of this. And where that first point was, was that I was trying to understand how DNA worked and what a DNA mutation was.
 And I was looking at these diagrams and I thought, hey wait a minute, I’ve seen this before. I know what this is. It was the first time I ever felt that way about biology. What it was, was DNA is digital code, and it obeys all the rules of digital code. And I wrote an ethernet book in 2002 in a previous career. I looked at, okay so here’s data in an ethernet packet that goes into your computer, which is carrying the sound we’re talking on right now. Right? And here’s a gene in a strand of DNA. They’re basically the same. Wow.
Wow.
Wow.
I’m going to pause you there. I’m going to pause you there because that’s a great cliffhanger, and we have to take a quick break. Folks, you are not going to want to miss the rest of this conversation. I don’t know about you, but we’re tapping into some matrix-type stuff here. So stick with us. We’re talking to Perry Marshall and his website is evo2.org. We’re talking God 2.0, science and spirituality. Where does all that fit in together? So don’t walk away. We’ll be right back.more on God and Spirituality.Â
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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