Have you ever wondered why the most productive people catch the most flak? Open your mind to fresh perspectives as we navigate through last week's headlines about controversial public figures like Elon Musk and Doug Wilson. We'll be dissecting the power of persistence, focus, and dedication towards work, shedding light on the types of people who orbit around effective doers - the posers, haters, and the fearful.
We'll provide insights on the complex relationship between the mainstream world and the outcasts; the ongoing tensions between the "experts" and the people doing the actual work. So, buckle up, and let's stride forward in productive action, undeterred by mainstream opinions or critics... even if they do have a fun new insult to use.
Have you ever wondered why the most productive people catch the most flak? Open your mind to fresh perspectives as we navigate through last week's headlines about controversial public figures like Elon Musk and Doug Wilson. We'll be dissecting the power of persistence, focus, and dedication towards work, shedding light on the types of people who orbit around effective doers - the posers, haters, and the fearful.
We'll provide insights on the complex relationship between the mainstream world and the outcasts; the ongoing tensions between the "experts" and the people doing the actual work. So, buckle up, and let's stride forward in productive action, undeterred by mainstream opinions or critics... even if they do have a fun new insult to use.
So what do Moscow, idaho, elon Musk and the Kansas City chiefs all have in common? Welcome back to another T-Rex Top episode. This one is kind of topical because all of these things have been in the news over the last week, but it's also an excuse to talk about something that I've been thinking about for some time. I think these are really good analogies for a really important point that, hopefully, is helpful to all of us. So quick recap for those of you who have not been following the news and all these different spheres you probably did see the Elon Musk interview or clips of it, or people who were shocked that went interviewed about Disney and various other large corporate advertisers pulling out of Twitter. Elon Musk was very blunt and direct in telling them to go get lost. Not exactly the words that he used. He used extremely strong language and people pushed back against that. Meanwhile, however, there was also something that was going on in the church space. A whole lot of modern evangelical writers are criticizing a Presbyterian pastor named Doug Wilson, who lives in Moscow, idaho, for his tone and mood. And then there was a sports rider over at Dead Spin who was attacking a small child for wearing blackface at a Kansas City Chiefs game. That one's kind of interesting because it shows just an incredible desire to just double down on things. So the sports rider posted a picture of this kid and you could see that his face was painted black and he was wearing ceremonial headdress of a Plains Indian tribe. And then when people pointed out that this was an extremely misleading photograph, because half of his face was painted black and half of his face was painted red not because of cultural appropriation but because those are literally the Kansas City Chiefs colors they actually doubled down and said no, it's still not acceptable, it's still racism, etc. Etc. And then when people pointed out that this kid actually is an indigenous child himself and his dad is one of the tribal leaders well, dead Spin doubled down again. So I want you to remember that, because we'll come back to that towards the end of the episode. Let's get back to Elon Musk.
Speaker 1:What all of these different incidents have in common is that they are really focused on the form rather than the function of the conversation. They're really focused on the flavor rather than the substance, and they also have this in common a lot of criticism that you see not just today, but a lot of the criticism that you see in general, even in past, even in history, is people who are actually doing a thing. The doers are often criticized by the thinkers and the talkers and the commenters, and often for reasons that have nothing to do with the substance of what they are doing, but only the way that they are doing it. And this is a great opportunity to talk about something that I have been thinking about for a while and have discussed on a couple of occasions the difference between specialization versus generalization, sort of the experts versus people who actually are getting the experience. Now I will point out that specialists have the opportunity to develop stronger strengths, but generalists can sometimes have fewer weaknesses, they have more context and can be better, more well-rounded.
Speaker 1:But this is a pretty common refrain right now in today's culture, even though it is common for the non-doers to criticize the doers, there seems to be a lot more institutional protection these days. You can see it across the board in a bunch of different areas, like mainstream authors ganging up on and criticizing self-published authors, especially self-published authors who outsell them by a pretty hefty margin. They're not real writers, they say, because they haven't been through all the gatekeeping of the big publishing houses, so what they have to say, doesn't count, even though, technically, people enjoy their books more and buy more of them. Academics often criticize hobbyists. There's just sort of this appeal to authority that is extremely common now. It was very common in 2020, when we were supposed to just trust the experts, and there's this institutional sanctity that is bestowed upon experts.
Speaker 1:And oftentimes in today's world, right now, this very minute, there's a strange tension that exists. I'll give you another example. Google and Facebook are kind of being sued by a conglomeration of newspapers. I'm not sure that's actually become an actual lawsuit yet, but it is being discussed that the newspaper industry is owed something like $26 billion by Google alone because Google News shares so much of their content. And yet there is this weird dependency, this codependency that they have. Google News is only valuable because it has New York Times content to share, but the New York Times is only relevant anymore because people can read it on Google News. So, even though they're locked in this kind of conflict, they also need to mutually support and hold each other up as twin pillars of the institution of modern journalism.
Speaker 1:And you know, the mainstream has certainly turned on Elon Musk, and it's been really fascinating to watch that happen, because at the beginning of his rise to fame, the entire mainstream media was on his side, and the academics and the politicians. He used to be the darling of the entire progressive crowd because his electric cars were going to save the environment. His rockets were the literal embodiment of science itself. Until you know, dr Fauci came along. He was so important and so great and so valuable that Disney sent Robert Downey Jr to go hang out with him in preparation for the Tony Stark role in that first Iron man movie and they gave him a cameo in Iron man 2. But now Disney is actually leading the charge to pull all the advertising from Twitter to do no business with Elon Musk's company, because you know he's a terrible, terrible person.
Speaker 1:And so last week in this interview he accused Disney and others of blackmailing him with advertising dollars and I also, I would say, in some ways, was very level headed about it. They were saying people want to advertise with you and he said, fine, they don't have to. And then he followed it up with some strong language. He asked if Bob Iger were in the audience and then he directed strong language directly at Bob Iger, which outraged the entire mainstream media because he was so uncouth and he was so crass and this was so incredibly uncalled for. But again, they were talking about the word that he used, not the sentiment, not this idea of blackmail or this idea that a guy who owns a company can decide whether or not he wants to buy advertising in another company and a guy like Elon Musk can decide whether or not he's going to tell advertisers to go fly a kite.
Speaker 1:And there's a couple of reasons that the mainstream not just the media, but academia and politicians and folks in general were angry at Elon Musk. Firstly, it's much easier to be angry at him for using the bad word than to really engage on this deeper argument. But the second is that they genuinely are afraid of Elon Musk. He can no longer be deplatformed in the way that they have traditionally deplatformed people, and this is because he's more than just a talker. He's more than just a commenter, he is an actual doer.
Speaker 1:In the 21st century, we are used to celebrities being created out of nothing. There can be a viral video here or there can be a viral video there, and suddenly somebody has 50 million TikTok followers and they command a huge amount of attention in the mainstream media and they can get an awful lot of money for being an Instagram influencer or whatever. Those big publishing houses that I mentioned before can find somebody, publish their book, trot them out onto late night talk shows and turn them into a celebrity, a person of great importance, overnight. And these people never really offer any type of threat to these institutions because they can be deplatformed just as easily overnight. And there's been a little bit of that with Elon Musk, see Iron man 2. But what a lot of people are starting to realize is there's actual substance. There's more that he brings to the table than being lauded for inventing electric cars. Yes, he invented electric cars. He was the first one to ever do it. I read that several times. Not only does he have the courage to not care about what the mainstream thinks or says about him, but he actually has some substance to back it up, which I will get to also a little bit towards the end of the article.
Speaker 1:Now let me talk a little bit about Doug Wilson. Doug Wilson, many, many, many years ago, was the pastor of a small church in Moscow, idaho, a reformed Presbyterian, and he wrote some books and he did a bunch of stuff. And over the decades Doug Wilson was conspicuously absent from a lot of other Presbyterian conferences and his books were conspicuously absent from large religious publishing houses. But he published his own books. He continued to teach his own people and now, decades later, he can no longer be ignored and so he is being attacked.
Speaker 1:Doug Wilson is not one of these flash in the pan, instant overnight success celebrities. Occasionally he will have a video clip go viral or people will stand up to Criticize him, and that actually gets him more attention than if they had just left him alone. For example, this past week, kevin DeAnne wrote an article about him and what he is built in Moscow. That was, again, largely critical of mood and of tone. It wasn't quite as critical of the substance, but it also didn't differentiate between the two very well and, to be honest, I actually thought that that article had some significant value. This is the kind of thing that I believe Ministry leaders should do one to another. They should sharpen each other like iron sharpening iron. There should be a level of collegiate, brotherly, constructive criticism.
Speaker 1:However, that is not how the internet interpreted that article and, for contextual reasons, they may have a point. But, that being said, most of the Führer on social media was Pointless instead of thoughtfully reading the article and waiting for these two guys who have many, many decades of ministry and experience between them, to talk through some different points of theology and Application. There was just this giant bandwagon that developed, and you know, the internet is messy. It's hard to tell if people on Twitter are angry At Doug Wilson because they hate everything that he stands for, or whether they have a couple of interesting observations to make about tone. And it's exactly the same with Elon Musk. People were outraged, but it was very difficult to tell whether people were outraged Because he said a bad word or if they were outraged because his comments prove that he was an actual, literal fascist, because you know, after all, only a Nazi would be critical of the Walt Disney corporation.
Speaker 1:But I want to bring up these two examples because I think that this is helpful for us to think about how we do things In internet arguments inside of the firearm community on the internet, making it very clear what it is that we are actually talking about and whether it is an in-house debate between two Presbyterian theologians or whether it is an all-hands-on-deck call Elon Musk, the next Donald Trump Sort of bandwagon. One other quick example I recently sold my car, which was a fantastic 2003 Crown Victoria police interceptor. And not everybody liked that car. Some people didn't like that car because they preferred the later generation. Some people didn't like that car because they preferred the Marquis Marauder version. Some people didn't like that car because they prefer the Dodge charger. And some people don't like that car because they're hardcore eco fascists who hate anything that burns gasoline. So one good takeaway is to try to be extremely clear with people in these kind of conversations online Conversations who is actually criticizing what and who is actually arguing for what. And then the other thing is Kind of the main point of this particular episode this conflict between doers and Non-doers.
Speaker 1:Once doers begin doing a work, they will attract a bunch of different people. They will attract other doers who want to be a part of the work, but then there's some people who want to look like they are doing and they're attracted to a place where they can pitch in and Appear as they are doers as well or kind of posers. But the problem is, once they show up, they get shown up and it becomes obvious that they're not really doing. Then there are the haters people who know that they should be doing, but it's an awful lot of thankless work to be a doer and so they kind of tear down whatever doing the doers are doing so that to just to prove that it's impossible and not worth the effort. And oftentimes those people will team up with the disenfranchised posers and they will get together and they will attack the doers. Sometimes these people are thinkers and Academics who are trying to protect to their institutional bona fide. Sometimes they're just lazy. There can be a million different reasons, but doers represent a significant threat to a lot of different groups. A Fearful people will like the security of centralized systems and large institutions that they can abdicate their responsibilities to, because those guys will maintain the control. There's always a way to shame and de-platform people who are part of these types of systems.
Speaker 1:But Elon Musk is a little bit different. He has actual assets and in a bunch of different ways. You may have heard him talk about the fact that Tesla isn't actually a car factory. It is technically a factory factory. The idea behind Tesla is not just to make electric cars that exist on government subsidies, but to experiment with and develop new manufacturing technologies and new production technologies. I've been reading a little bit about how the big car manufacturers Ford, General Motors etc. All spun up new factories and retooled their existing factories to make bombers and fighters and tanks during World War II. And I don't know that these particular car manufacturers would be able to do that today, certainly not with the same type of speed that they did back in the 1940s. But I kind of think that Tesla could, because they are doing this kind of really reactive, experimental work in changing all kinds of different manufacturing technologies and experimenting with ways of producing really complex things in large quantities in places where there isn't enough infrastructure to theoretically be able to do that.
Speaker 1:And in addition to a bunch of amazing engineers, he also has a ton of lawyers. My brother, noah, pointed out that the Cybertruck goofy and ridiculous as it looks, is the first production car to have a completely drive-by-wire steering system, which means that an entire army of Elon Musk lawyers had to fight a bunch of regulatory battles with the United States government to get that done, and that's something that they've done with a lot of their different cars. So in addition to these factory factories and these engineers and these lawyers, he also has his rocket company. And even if people will not do business with his rocket company, he will still put his own satellites into space and sell internet. He will control enough internet that he can't be de-platformed from the social media company that he bought. Yeah, he has assets, unlike probably any other person on Earth right now.
Speaker 1:I think this is why a lot of academics and the people in the intelligentsia and other tech world people are afraid of Elon Musk. They don't have any real good control over him anymore, and I think that that's why the large evangelical institutions of Christian America are afraid of Doug Wilson. They don't have any levers for him and he has some pretty significant assets. He's not rich or famous like Elon Musk, but after decades of rather thankless service inside of Moscow, idaho, preaching at his local church, there are now thousands of Christians that go to multiple churches and have started multiple schools and colleges and businesses right there in Moscow, idaho. This community is so vibrant and so flourishing in so many different ways that it is impossible for the conversation around Moscow, idaho not to get out, and so you've probably seen on the internet a lot of conversation about Christian nationalism. I don't actually think that Christian nationalism is a phrase that originated inside of Moscow, idaho, but it certainly is something that has been attached to them afterwards, and a whole bunch of people are talking about this.
Speaker 1:Another thing that happened last week was that James Carville, who I haven't seen in forever, was on the Bill Maher show and he told Bill Maher that Christian nationalists were a bigger threat to America and probably the world than Al-Qaeda. And a lot of extremely respectable evangelical leaders said, oh no, this is damaging our respectability. Doug Wilson and his followers have gotten us called another name, but Doug Wilson doesn't care. His followers don't care and, to be honest, I don't care either. I've been called way worse things by James Carville in the past. A lot of Christians have been called fascists and zealots and racists for the last several years, so I don't actually see how this thing is supposed to have any significant sting to it.
Speaker 1:But if you remember, there's a whole lot of very highly placed Christian evangelicals. They are attached to these large publishing houses and they have a lot of prestige that comes with it and a lot of that prestige comes from the larger mainstream world and that absolutely is at risk sometimes. I remember this conversation happening decades ago when Christopher Hitchens was one of the preeminent atheists in the world. He and Richard Dawkins always had best-selling books and they were always doing the lecture circuit and they were always being lauded as these incredibly intelligent guys who spent most of their time attacking Christianity. Well, doug Wilson and Christopher Hitchens got together to do a little lecture circuit tour themselves, a debate tour, and a lot of Christians were extremely concerned about this. Some of them, I think, just didn't want Doug Wilson to be the guy representing Christianity in this debate between one of the most prominent atheists and the church. And then there were some other people who were really concerned that Doug Wilson wouldn't actually have the chops to stand up to this guy Because he's just this bearded backwards Idaho bumpkin. But I think that a lot of people were more concerned that Doug Wilson would actually win, that he would actually bring presuppositional apologetics to bear like Bonson did and dismantle some of these arguments, and then they would be really embarrassed, because a lot of these big evangelical leaders I think really enjoyed being interviewed on NPR, occasionally having an op-ed piece run in the New York Times, being invited to the White House prayer breakfast, and their desire to hang on to this level of approval got in the way of them approving what turned out to be a really cool thing. That happened and there's a neat documentary about it, and Christopher Hitchens and Doug Wilson actually really hit it off, and I think that their conversations that they had together were fascinating, but that's a topic for another day.
Speaker 1:The point that I want to get back to is people who do stuff are gonna be threatening to people who don't really do stuff, and I realize that I'm coming off as too harsh, so I started off by saying that people who specialize do, in fact, have incredible strengths. I do appreciate theologians who sat and thought deep thoughts and think big things and wrote books about them, and yet, when it comes to theology or building large technological advances, there's a huge amount of value in being a generalist Mastering a topic, certainly, but being able to do more than one thing. Some of the most useful practical books that I love are not from specialist theologians, but from guys who were in the trenches. They were practically applying everything that they learned and taking all the lessons from real life back to their other studies, and I think that's one of the things that is true of Elon Musk as well.
Speaker 1:I read a fascinating comment from someone who said that the secret power that Musk has it's not just that he's very intelligent and weird, although that probably helps, but it is the order in which he learned different things, because his dad was a very talented mechanical engineer. He already had all these mechanical engineering shelves in his brain when he went to become a software engineer, and once he mastered software engineering, he went on to master mechanical engineering and then, from mechanical engineering, he has gone on to master manufacturing engineering, and these are disciplines that anybody within reason could take on. But the order in which he learned them built shelves and foundations for the other skills so that he has a very specific, unique capability when it comes to taking on these gigantic projects. The fact that he was able to get a lot of business knowledge by being involved in that PayPal startup, I think also is a huge part of his DNA. It's one of those things that makes him a very effectual doer, and this very effectual doing is one of the things that is drawing a considerable amount of fearful criticism.
Speaker 1:So I've got a couple of homework assignments for you, but first I wanna get back to that child who was enjoying supporting his team, the Kansas City Chiefs, because there's an element here that I think is really important. Not only did the dead spin, people continue to double down on this kid as they learned more about him, rather than apologize. When they realized that he was in fact an indigenous person and appropriating no culture other than his own, they reached out to other tribal leaders to try to get them to turn on one of their own, and they got some kind of boilerplate response that said we don't really endorse people wearing things in specific places like this, and they are running that as some kind of accusation of this child. They would rather create disunity inside of this tribe of indigenous peoples that they claim to support than just say, hey, we're sorry. They would rather create division and acrimony inside of this tribe than just say, oh, our bad, and let the story die. No, no, no. The facade of this journalistic institution must be upheld, and its desire to protect indigenous peoples is so great and unquestionable that they will try to destroy this community rather than let their own motives and veracity be questioned.
Speaker 1:So let's get to those homework assignments. Again, I don't want to throw experts and specialists out completely, but I do want to point out that there is the tendency for experts to have great theoretical knowledge and completely miss the practical application of the thing that they are theoretically experts in. So the first homework assignment is not to get caught up in some of these arguments emotionally and then end up on the wrong side. And the second homework assignment is to be a doer. I believe that we are at a specific time in history when we have not enough doers. I don't know that we actually have too many experts and specialists, but we certainly have too many posers and too many haters, a lot of sour grapes going around.
Speaker 1:People told Elon Musk that if he wanted Twitter's policies to be different, he should just buy it himself. They didn't think that he was actually gonna do that. And when people told Doug Wilson that they wouldn't publish his books and they wouldn't invite him to their conferences, they didn't know how effective he was going to be just doing his regular work in Idaho. If you can ignore the trends and the flash and the pan celebrities and just do the work, you don't have to care what Bob Iger says, and you don't have to care what James Carville says. And what you do, even though it isn't going to attract a whole lot of positive attention from the intelligentsia, is going to eventually be effective. So get out there and do. Don't stop thinking, don't stop reading, don't stop writing, but do An. I'll see you in the next video.