Where in our lives are we creating evolution? In this episode of The Science of Superpowers, host Tonya Dawn Recla and guest Perry Marshall discuss how creation and evolution can work together. Perry Marshall is one of the most expensive business consultants in the world. He launched the $10 Million Evolution 2.0 Prize at London’s Royal Society, with judges from Harvard, Oxford, and MIT. His mathematical formulation of the Pareto Principle as a fractal law of nature was published in Harvard Business Review and is taught at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs at the California Institute of Technology. Listen in now and enjoy a conversation on creation with Tonya and Perry.
Hello everyone and welcome back to the Science of Superpowers. I am so incredibly excited about this conversation today. For those of you who follow me from SuperPower Up! and Disrupt Reality and now, into Science of Superpowers, you’re very familiar with this gentleman that we’re talking with today, and then you’re just as excited as I am. Because when Perry comes on the show, we have some really phenomenal conversations, and we get to dive into worlds that I can’t even express how much I appreciate the fact that he moves in these spaces.
For those of you who’ve moved into this synergistic collaborative space, you fully appreciate when people are fully in their brilliance and are doing what they’re here to do because then you don’t have to. You get to have the benefits of it. You get to glean it. You get to see the advancements of it. You get to walk alongside it. You get to compare notes. The gift in that, for those of us with eyes to see and ears to hear, is that we just know and we’re able to sync up in those spaces and go, “Okay. Yes. What are you doing? Is it connected to mine? No? Maybe not, but, okay, cool. I’m going to sit back here. I’m going to love you from afar and just appreciate your work.” Right?
Because we see that it’s all building and walking us toward the same place. That to me is at the heart and nature of why we’re here, of the collaborative aspect of it. Plus, if you’re into religionism or spiritualism at all, some of us feel like we have some pretty clear directives to figure out how to get along together and to figure out how to be nice to each other and maybe work together, right? Some of us have such lofty aspirations. When we encounter people who are willing to step into those spaces with us, it really does light us up, and I believe in the exponential power of that, and Perry is absolutely no exception. In fact, I would say that he tops that group of people, in my book, which is why I keep inviting him back on my shows because I love talking to him.
Today we’re going to talk about creating evolution. Not only is Perry brilliant, but he’s also divisive and he’s willing… I wouldn’t say divisive. What was it? Dissident, he’s willing to disrupt. He’s not afraid to create some friction in order to produce results and really well-founded, I think, in the heart and soul of doing good in the world. That’s really important in our world. To that end, he just recently got a paper accepted, which for those of you who blog and write articles and all these other stuff, to get a journal paper accepted or approved of in terms of any sort of status in the scientific community, is huge in our work because otherwise, it’s all empirical evidence or esoterically, at best.
His paper biology transcends the limits of computation, is all around this concept of we’re creating an evolving meetup, where creation and evolution appear to be at odds on the surface, but really are part of the same thing. That’s the basis for our conversation today. Obviously, I’m very excited about it, but I’m going to go ahead and bring on the man of the hour, Perry Marshall. Thank you so much for joining us.
Hey Tonya, it’s great to be here. Thank you so much.
You are so welcome. So happy to have you here. Here in Science of Superpowers, we ask the question, what are your superpowers and how are you using them for good right now?
Well, I have a list of six. I probably wrote these down years ago. I deconstruct, invent, write, teach, encourage, and evangelize. Those are the six things that Perry does. I look at my daily activities, at any given time in the day, I should be combining at least three of them at one time, ideally three, four, five, or six. I bet we’re checking off four or five today, so I’m really delighted to be on the show.
Thank you so much. I think you should have a rating system, a six superpower day, a five superpower day. We could get really creative and gamify it. You have five SP days. We could have fun with it. You could get little stickers that you can put on your desk and then you would know. You could accumulate it, like kids in school.
Yeah. I tell my clients, the areas where you’re checking off most of those boxes, are that’s your $1,000 an hour work, or your $10,000 an hour work, so to speak, literally, sometimes. Everybody needs to be doing that. Everything needs to be shedding the stuff that is baggage, because…
You’re so funny. I’m obviously cut from that same cloth and I don’t understand not wanting to. I don’t understand the resistance. Ultimately, you finally figure out that resistance isn’t just futile, it becomes really painful. It’s just not necessary. I tend to run through those spaces too. You and I can talk all day long about walking this walk and living this life. I’d reached out originally, talking about faith because one of the things that I’m most fascinated by is our hesitation to say that that matters. Our hesitation to say, but what if we’re forgetting maybe the most pivotal element? Maybe in our questing to deconstruct the world, we’re missing an essence that isn’t captured in the way that we’ve leaned into, or maybe abdicated too, to show us proof. It doesn’t mean an either-or, right?
To me, that encompasses this quest that you’ve been on to find where evolution and creation meet up. Do they meet up? What happens when they don’t? What happens when they do? How are both possible? How does it work? As I sat in that space, I’m curious about maybe along the trajectory for you, how did you reconcile the faith walk, with the science walk, with the mathematics walk? You’re so in sync with it now, but I’d imagine it wasn’t always that way.
No, no. Well, the story starts when my brother and I grew up together. We were pastor’s kids and he went to seminary and became a missionary in China, basically. I went into engineering and business and entrepreneurship. I went to visit him. I knew that he was struggling with a bunch of big questions because the answers they gave him in seminary were fraying at the edges. So we had these.
That’s a very delicate way to describe it.Â
Yeah, yeah. That’s a good way of saying what you just said. We were tussling a little bit about this stuff, but when I went to visit him, I suddenly realized, he doesn’t even believe this anymore. He has really gone over the waterfall. His political views are already changing. A lot, a whole bunch of things are just switching around. I was very unsettled by this and it wasn’t just about him, it was also about me because he is really smart and I can not ignore a good question. If something doesn’t make sense, I can’t just sweep it under the rug and go “Well, I’m just going to believe that anyway, that’s what faith is.” A lot of people think faith is believing something that is manifestly and obviously untrue. That is not what faith is.
Faith is going beyond what you know, to what might be true and then working off a set of assumptions that you’re always hoping to improve. I was really troubled by a lot of his questions myself and I was feeling a little threatened. I go, “Brian, look at the hand at the end of your arm. This is a nice piece of engineering. I should know because I’m an engineer. You don’t think this is an accumulation of random accidents, do you?” Now, before I go further with the story, I think that at that time, if I had a question like, so is the world a purposeful place? All I had to do is look down at the end of my arm. I’m like, “Yep, end of the story.” Okay?
Brian challenged me. He’s like, “Hey, wait a minute. He came back with, “I think everybody’s heard the whole Darwinian evolution. Hey, you don’t need any designers and you don’t need any intentionality, you just need this mindless process to go on for millions of years and natural selection will produce a hand.” I thought, “Well, I’m really not sure that I buy that because I’ve never seen that actually work in engineering and I’ve done a lot of things, but I know a bunch of biologists would totally agree with him and not agree with me. They can’t be that stupid. Do they know something I don’t know? I’m going to go home and I’m going to find out.” For me, it wasn’t a question of creation versus evolution. I had already sort of come to the conclusion before that, that it was really, is it billiard balls banging around in the universe or is there a purpose?
I was fine if… Hey, if evolution is how it comes to be, that’s okay. But what Brian was saying is, there’s not even a purpose in evolution. It’s just finding a way mindlessly and that really got my goat for two reasons. First of all, I had a very primal religious instinct, it just didn’t sound right. But then also as an engineer, I was like, “Okay, I have never seen anything work that way in my professional experience. In my professional experience of designing speakers for Honda Civics, or Jeep Cherokees, or industrial networks in the next career after that, or websites and e-commerce and everything else I’ve ever done, I don’t see mindless blind, purposeful processes doing anything. What’s going on here?”
My decision at that point was I am going to follow the evidence wherever it goes. If I can find out that there is a legitimate principle behind this, that nobody taught me in engineering school, but I guess it’s probably going to change my whole conception of engineering and the world and everything. But if this makes me an atheist, so be it.
Wanting to know over wanting to remain attached to the outcome?
Yes. It was scary.
Of course.
I was nervous. I was more than nervous. I was like, “Well, am I going to end up like Brian?” Because he was actually at this point, he was angry about the whole thing.
You feel duped, I think. I think people feel foolish and like they bought into something that they should have known better. That fear then keeps us from stepping out on faith again and trusting again.
Yes. Brian felt duped. Most atheists I’ve met feel like they were duped. Well, is my wife going to go to church without me and take the kids?
That’s right.
Are we going to have arguments about that? What’s Thanksgiving dinner going to be like? All of these things. It was terrifying.
I love that you’re being so candid about that because that really is in our experience, what ends up happening, through our clients and through the thousands of interviews I’ve done at this point, with people who have accomplished quite a bit of actualized success in the material reality. That is a big part of what keeps us from moving into any sort of growth phase as it butts up against us, because we are afraid of what it means about us and what it’s going to mean about our relationships, and what it’s going to mean about our worldview. Yet, undeniably, there’s this, you called it this primal, religious element, but there’s this compulsion to continue to seek. When we hold both, we find ourselves at odds with that.
I want to dive into this more deeply. We need to cut to a break right now. Perry, where can we go, for the folks who want to find out more about you?
Go to evo2.org. Evolution 2.0.
Brilliant. Well, thank you so much. For those of you who are interested in what we’re doing over in the superpower space, you can always go to superpowerexperts.com. There are instructions there, episodes you can listen to, and videos you can watch. It’s our gift to you. We just ask that you open yourselves up to the conversations and look a little broader than perhaps you were looking at yesterday. Stay with us. We’re talking to Perry Marshall about creating evolution. We’re going to be right back after this break.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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