BEARDED BAD DAD: Hey, welcome back to Coffee with Bearded Bad Dad. Today, my guest, friend of the show, and author, John Bliss. How are you doing, man?

JOHN BLISS: Doing good. I’m doing really good today.

BEARDED BAD DAD: That’s awesome. And I hear you’re away from home today.

JOHN BLISS: I am in Dallas in some hotel, but it’s a great hotel. I have a refrigerator behind me, a full-size fridge, and a range.

BEARDED BAD DAD: That’s awesome. I was actually looking for a place like, we’re going to Chicago in two months, and I was looking for a place like that in Chicago, and I didn’t know they existed, but there’s actual hotel rooms with kitchenettes in them. I was like, that’s awesome.

JOHN BLISS: Yes, because I cook my own food. I don’t like eating the restaurant food, or, you know, the hotel food, the breakfasts that are free, those eggs are powdered. They come in boxes. That’s like prisoner food. It’s just so demeaning to eat that.

BEARDED BAD DAD: I agree. And people will eat it just because it’s free. I tell you what, that’s right. We went down to Springfield, Missouri, a couple weeks ago, and we went to, I forget the name of the place, it was a La Quinta maybe.

BEARDED BAD DAD: I can’t remember. I know it was just two weeks ago, but the place, they did a continental dinner and a continental breakfast.

JOHN BLISS: That’s interesting.

BEARDED BAD DAD: It was interesting. And then they told us what they were having, and it came with little vouchers for two free adult drinks. And we didn’t take advantage of those, but when we asked what they were having for dinner, and they said, meatballs, gravy, and mashed potatoes. And I was thinking, that doesn’t sound good at all. So, we skipped out on that. But, I missed breakfast. But, it was pretty interesting. I was thinking, man, that’s, that’s for $120 a night, free breakfast and a free dinner. That, you can’t beat that, man.

JOHN BLISS: Except, no, I’d rather pay the extra money and eat good food. I’d prefer to live a little longer and feel better.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Me too. Me too. And oddly enough, talking to people about the foods that we eat and the health problems it causes, a lot of people don’t even think about inflammation and stuff like…

BEARDED BAD DAD: If you ever struggle going to the bathroom, think about like what you ate in the couple days before. Your insides, you know, the things that you can’t see, may be inflamed and, and may be causing problems. And we make our own bread here at home. And it’s one of those things where you eat the bread and you feel better than you would have if, if you ate bread from like the grocery store.

JOHN BLISS: Right?

BEARDED BAD DAD: And, and I was thinking, what is this? Why do I feel better when I eat homemade food? And then doing some research on it, there’s so many preservatives in bread that it lasts like two to three weeks off the grocery store shelf, whereas…

JOHN BLISS: And there’s the oils too, which aren’t so good.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Yeah. And we have to make bread almost daily because it goes bad so quickly. But again, if you want to save money, you go into the store and you spend $3 on a loaf of bread, and you think that’s not bad. Well, making a homemade loaf every day, it’s like a dollar a day. I mean, it’s not bad. It, it really isn’t. You just buy the ingredients in bulk, you can get your cost down even more. So…

JOHN BLISS: Listen to this. I went, I think it was about three weeks ago, I was staying in a hotel for about a week. I cooked every meal in my room, every meal with a microwave, just a microwave and a glass dish I bought at Walmart. I had eggs every morning. I bought hamburger patties, and then I bought some vegetables, and just cooked the hamburger over the vegetables. It was incredible that I could do that, and it turned out to be a lot cheaper. I saved hundreds of dollars. Well, maybe a couple hundred dollars, you know. And it was better food, and it was, and it tasted better.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Man, that’s one thing that really pisses me off when you go out to dinner, right? And, and I’m a city kid. I grew up in the city. We grew up kind of rural, but we lived in the city. But we never went out to eat or anything like that. But when I was older, like 18, 19, 20 years old, I discovered food outside the house. And so I was like, “Man, this is good stuff. This is great.” Because it was different.

JOHN BLISS: It was different.

BEARDED BAD DAD: As an adult, I go out to dinner and it’s a disappointment. It is a big disappointment. You can go out and spend $150 on what should be a badass dinner. And you get your food and it’s like, man, we could have done this better at home. Like we could make the same thing and it tastes a lot better.

JOHN BLISS: That’s right.

BEARDED BAD DAD: And so we really go out to eat all that often. And really the only times we do go out to eat is when we are away from home and we want to try local food. I’ve never been outside the United States, but when we go down to like Dallas, for instance, I’ll eat somewhere local to Dallas so I could get a feel for what food is like there. We way prefer to cook our own food because, I mean, not only do we know what’s in it, but it tastes better.

JOHN BLISS: Yes. And you feel better. Absolutely.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Absolutely. What have you been up to, man? It’s been almost a year since we’ve talked.

JOHN BLISS: No, like maybe four, eight months, something like that. Eight months, maybe. Yeah, not that long. So, well, I’m having the hardest time. I mean I will have quit by the time this goes live, but I’m getting ready to quit. I’ve tried to quit and I couldn’t quit. It’s just such a big transition from working to not working. I ask myself, what if we don’t have enough money and all that kind of stuff? So that’s what I’m dealing with. I’m going to give notice I think next week. But I’ve spent all my time marketing this book actually.

JOHN BLISS: So that doesn’t necessarily mean going on lots of podcasts because no one really wants to talk about these topics. Not that many people are interested in philosophy. It, it’s just not the thing. They’re, they’re more interested in how do I get ahead? How can I make a million dollars? Um, how can I get all the, the girls to like me?

BEARDED BAD DAD: All the superficial [expletive].

JOHN BLISS: Well, there’s some value in having a million dollars and being popular. There’s value in that, but we don’t know how valuable philosophy and really understanding things is. I don’t, but some minds just tend towards that. And so, my, my audience is small. It’s working. So, I see that. The way I planned the books sales was to have this trajectory. I figured a 10-year trajectory and I figured I would sell, you know, very few books and then slowly more. And that’s what I’m doing and I’m seeing sales increasing and I’m, I’m pretty happy about how it’s going. Oh, just, just in case people don’t know like what we’re talking about, it’s this book: The False Paradigms of Today and the Timeless Truth of Tomorrow: Essays on Meaning.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Yes, that. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m telling you, John, philosophy is very important, very, very important, and people don’t understand how important it is because they’ve never used it to their advantage. When you figure out how the world works, it, it’s like, no, I don’t have a million dollars, but I also don’t have that drive to get a million dollars. If I sacrifice certain things in my life like family, friends, and personal time, I can get it. But it’s at what cost, man? And, and there’s a lot of people chasing these superficial things like million dollars, popularity, and all that stuff. At the end of the day, John, it doesn’t really matter. None of it does.

JOHN BLISS: And the thing about philosophy that’s important, is that we decide how the world is and how we want to live our lives, what we’re going to do. I mean, that’s really important, and that’s based on these assumptions. You’re making assumptions about how the world is and what is important, and that is what philosophy is about. Maybe you decide the most important thing is to be the, the biggest, most ripped man in the world. You want to look like The Rock. And you go and you work at it and you work at it. And by the time you’re 80, you might be on your deathbed thinking, “God, that was a waste. I wish I would have done something different than that.” You know, it is important to really think hard about what’s important and what am we going to focus on. And what do we want to do in this life. Because our time is short.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Absolutely. Absolutely. And it reminds me, like you’re, so I’m doing the opposite as you. I’m going back to the workforce.

JOHN BLISS: Oh, crazy.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Yeah. I, so I had an interview. I won’t say where, but it’s an entry-level job. But it’s a low wage entry level job. And the reason why isn’t because I need a job. It’s because I want resources. Um, I want to have, so I want to buy a couple freezers so I can store some food, just in case, because with current geopolitical environment. The things I can’t grow at home in the middle of a city is meat. So, I’m not afraid. I’m just a little worried, but I just want to make sure that we have enough to get us by. And I also need to repair a bathroom. And so, I’m going back to work. I don’t know how long I’m going to be there, but I’m pretty excited because it’s like a new thing, a new adventure for me.

BEARDED BAD DAD: If I don’t like it, I don’t have to stay. No, I’m not in a position where I absolutely have to keep working. It’s one of those things where it’d be nice to have a little bit of extra cash to do the things that I want to do. And, I’m at a place in my life where I just don’t even care anymore. The rat race is not for me. I don’t care. If I, if I make a million dollars, that’s great. If I don’t, I don’t care.

JOHN BLISS: I think the million is of value as this one guy taught me, I used to hitchhike all over Europe and the United States when I was in my 20s, and I remember I ran into this one guy, I was a Catholic, totally anti-materialistic. I thought money was evil and people who chase money were stupid. And this one guy who picked me up told me: no, you don’t understand, money is options. If you have money, you can choose not to work. You can choose to travel. You can choose to do anything you want if you have money. And…

BEARDED BAD DAD: That’s right. Yeah, I, I absolutely agree with that. It’s, it’s difficult to explain to people how I got to be where I am because I understand, I understand money from a different perspective. Those, those with power will try to control those without. And I think that’s where our current monetary system came from. And I think it’s ultimately where it’s going too. And I think that things have been the way they are now back 2,000 years ago. I said it the last time we spoke actually. The more change, the more they stay the same.

JOHN BLISS: Yes.

BEARDED BAD DAD: And history is an excellent predictor of the future.

BEARDED BAD DAD: And so I explain to people that when you understand how money works, it becomes less important. When I say that, I of course get lots of dirty looks or people say, what do you mean it’s not important? I have to have money to live. Yes, you do have to have money to live technically, but, you know, the trap is consumerism.

BEARDED BAD DAD: You’re buying stuff you don’t need to impress people you don’t like. Why do any of that stuff? Consumerism got me for the longest time. I was always wanting the newest electronics, the newest cars, the best of everything. And then I realized like these people are getting me to trade my only value, which is my labor, for worthless crap. Crap that breaks all the time. Stuff that I’m going to have to buy again, you know, to keep up with the Joneses. And it’s all engineered to take my only value, which is my labor.

JOHN BLISS: It’s not your labor. It’s your life. You’re giving your time.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Yeah. That’s what I mean, but I like the way you said it better. My life. You are trading your life for these things. A percentage of your life you’re trading for that car.

BEARDED BAD DAD: You know, it’s, it’s so amazing. It’s so awesome. And in today’s society, I put more faith in society than a lot of other people do. I, I actually believe that society as a whole is really good. And in order to see that, you kind of have to zoom out a little bit and take politics out of it. Take, take money out of it. Most people are generally good. And so I just focus my time and energy on the good things and, and then the bad things just kind of melt away.

BEARDED BAD DAD: So, how are you marketing your book now, man?

JOHN BLISS: Well, I didn’t get a publisher. I self-published. And it’s really easy to do. You should make sure it’s edited. Make sure you don’t have any typos and all that. But you can just put it on Amazon and they will print to order. There are no books in any warehouse. You want to buy my book, you order it, they’ll print it, then they sent it out. It’s so easy. And then also, I have an audiobook and AI read it. I mean, okay, I need to make some edits on the audio file. I did make edits on it because there’s footnotes and I wanted to get rid of the footnotes because AI just read them all and it reads terrible. But, yes, it’s really easy. So, what am I doing to market? Well, there’s a few things. So, one is I’m finding that in order to, to, to sell books, you need to have a lot of book reviews. You need people to read it and then review it. And so, that’s been a little tough getting people to review it. I’ve got 10 written on Amazon so far. I had another one and it disappeared. I don’t know how reviews disappear, but it disappeared. So, I had 11, but I’m trying to get 50. And once you get 50, Amazon starts pushing your book. So, I’m working towards that…

BEARDED BAD DAD: Really?

JOHN BLISS: And there are things about the publishing business, which I didn’t know. The traditional model was that you send your book to all these publishers and you hope they pick you up, right? If they pick you up, they might give you a little bit of money, an advance, which might be $1,000 if you’re a new guy, 2,000, maybe a little more, but not a lot. And then you feel like, oh, I’m important. I’m a, I’m a published author, whatever. And that money, if you don’t sell books, they’re going to ask for that money back. That’s just a loan. That’s all that really is.

JOHN BLISS: And pay you very little per book. But what’s really important about that whole old model is that they decide how much marketing to do. They decide when to market, how much money to invest in your book, and they decide when to stop marketing. And when they’re done, they’re done. They’ll stop printing it. And they own it. You can’t take it and say, “Oh, oh, I want it back. I’m going to put on Amazon because I want…” No, they own the book.

JOHN BLISS: It’s really terrible. So, I’m really glad I, I was, the indie market has, progressed to this point. It’s still not easy. It still takes a lot of time to try to market it and sell your book. But, but I, I don’t like having someone else make decisions for me. I know it’s a weird thing about me. I’m just an odd duck, but when my back is against the wall, that’s when I win. And when I have an incredible challenge and I put all my focus into it, I win. And this is an incredible challenge. My, my goal is to sell 10,000 copies. I haven’t sold 10,000. I’ve sold less than 1,000, but I, I give myself 10 years to get to the 10,000. I think I can do that. And, so, what am I doing? I’m, I’m, this may sound silly. but I sell on it Amazon, correct? But who’s going to find it if they’re not looking for it, right?

JOHN BLISS: So I’m traveling around, like I’m in Dallas right now. This morning, I went to a youth hostel. I put my books in the hostels. If someone takes the book, that’s great. That means they will probably read it.

JOHN BLISS: I go to used bookstores. If they have an outside book rack of cheap books, I just put it in the book rack. Because who am I looking for? I’m looking for young people who are lost, who are saying, “This world doesn’t make any sense. I don’t get it. It just doesn’t make any sense. Why would I want to be like these people around me? They’re all chasing stupid things. But that’s not right for me.” Well, those are the people who often don’t have a lot of money, right? They’re not working high paying jobs. And so in order to get this book to them, I’ve got to put it in front of them, which means at a youth hostel because some of them are just wandering around the country, or at used bookstores, at the cheap rack. I put them in thrift stores.I was just in Spain last week on vacation, and I was putting them in youth hostels in Spain.

BEARDED BAD DAD: That’s pretty awesome. It’s a good idea because you may think about who’s my target audience, but you don’t really think about how are they going to get my book, you know?

JOHN BLISS: That’s right.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Or how are they going to find it?

JOHN BLISS: How are they going to find it? They don’t even know to look.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Right?

JOHN BLISS: I can read Marcus Aurelius. Okay. Or I can read Alan Watts. You know, they’ve heard of these people. But, you know, the whole point of the book is to think about all these assumptions you’re making and that you’re basing your life on these assumptions. A lot of them are totally wrong. And the book explains why. I don’t tell you how to live. I don’t tell you what’s important in life. Well, I kind of do, but I kind of don’t. And but I do tell you, look, all this stuff is bull crap. It’s not real and everybody believes it, but it’s not true.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Yeah, I’m actually talking to a group. And I’ll just out them. They, they probably won’t be listening anyway, but I’m talking to this group. It’s kind of like a book club. And the author is the one running it. And of course, she’s very intelligent. She did a lot of research for these books and she’s just trying to get the word out there of how, how our society got to be the way it is now. Off the backs of rich people, the power dynamics and all of that stuff, the law changes, the corporations. She’s getting into all of that. And I’m sitting here and I’m thinking, “Yeah, but none of it really matters, you know? None of it really matters.” And I’m sitting here and I’m thinking, you know, here we are in the United States. We follow the laws of the land. Basically, all this stuff was invented and designed by rich people or those with power to control those that don’t. It’s everywhere and always has been. And, and so I’m trying to explain this to the, the group. They misunderstood where I was coming from. And it wasn’t combative. It was more like, you are wrong and here’s why. And I’m like, I don’t think I’m wrong, you know? And they’re like, well, these people are evil. I’m not disputing that. I’m not disputing that there’s evil in this. What I’m saying is none of it matters. What I’m saying is you only have to live by these rules if you want to be a part of their system.

BEARDED BAD DAD: If you want to live outside of their system, understanding it absolutely helps. But if you want to live outside their system, they can’t stop you, and they only have power over you if you allow them to. And explaining this, it just got lost. And I was like, it is what it is. And when I’m entering into conversations, I’m never entering in into conversations attempting to change anyone’s mind.

BEARDED BAD DAD: It’s just a conversation to me, just like, if you and I disagreed on something and if we could talk nicely about it, I would talk all day about things. But if we were having such a disagreement where it caused animosity, I’d be more like, “Hey, you want to switch topics? We could talk about something else. We could talk about anything else.” Because it doesn’t really matter, because none of these things really affect me to the point where I’m willing to get angry about them.

BEARDED BAD DAD: I think a lot of people when they, they start conversations, they go into them like, I’m going to change this person’s mind or…

JOHN BLISS: It’s foolish.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Exactly. I agree. So tell me why you think it’s foolish.

JOHN BLISS: Well, a few things. One is that I don’t believe that anyone, or very few people, change their minds based on logical reasons. We don’t make up our minds based on logic and rationality. We use logic and rationality to justify our decisions.

JOHN BLISS: And all sales people know that. We all know that. I look, I owned a business, so I was a salesperson. I had to sell my, my services and we know that it’s not about, look, I will prove analytically that my company is a better deal. That’s not going to do it. Instead their real thinking process may be: I like you, I want to work with you, I trust you. And then they’ll justify it with, they’re a better company, you know? That’s, that’s just how it works.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Yes, I call that cognitive dissonance. Explaining to people my cognitive dissonance is kind of like, explaining why I voted for Trump, and how I was able to do that knowing all the bad things, right?

BEARDED BAD DAD: The bottom line is that I voted for policy and I liked Donald’s policies in his first term. And then, you know, there was Joe Biden who he also kept some of policies and then he expanded upon them. And when I explain to people, foreign policy wise, Donald, Joe Biden are essentially the same guy. And they’re like, what are you talking about? And I have to explain to them like there’s certain policies that were enacted 2017, 2018, and 2019 that got expanded upon in 2021, 2022, 2023.

JOHN BLISS: Like the China stuff, the China…

BEARDED BAD DAD: Exactly.

JOHN BLISS: Trump said that China was a problem. And then Biden continued that. I was surprised he didn’t…

BEARDED BAD DAD: Actually, It was Obama who started it. Yeah. So, there was a pivot to China during Obama’s term, and I can’t remember exactly how they termed it back then, but it was a focus going from the Middle East to China. And now we’re seeing that. But the Middle East is kind of a weird thing going on right now because Iran became a proxy state of China. And when all this got started, it was just going to be the United States involved. And it turns out all of Iran’s neighbors have turned against them as well. I know how I feel about it, but explaining it to people is just like, none of this stuff really matters to me. I’m going to have to pay more high gas prices, but when we talk about the religious aspects of it and, and getting into like some of the things, like this war is being sold as a religious war. And I’m explaining to people that I don’t think it has anything to do with religion, but I think that’s how they’re, they’re trying to sell it. But it is what it is, you know. What, what are your thoughts on stuff like that?

JOHN BLISS: Well, I mentioned I was in Spain. I had some Spanish guy talking to me about it and he was really anti-Trump. He thought the war was really bad. And all I could say is I have two main thoughts. One is we don’t know if it’s a disaster or a great thing or something in between until maybe a hundred years from now. I’m sorry. We just don’t know. This is just what’s happening. That’s number one. I don’t know. It could be brilliant. It could be absolutely stupid. Really, I don’t know anything. The other part is there’s nothing I can do about it. So why should I even concern myself with it? I, this friend of mine explained this concept of circle of concern. He said, look, only those things that you can affect, that’s what you should be concerned about. Everything else…

BEARDED BAD DAD: Sounds familiar.

JOHN BLISS: Let it go. Let it go.

BEARDED BAD DAD: I’m very familiar with that concept.

JOHN BLISS: And I don’t like any killing of anybody. I don’t. I thought Trump was an anti-war guy. That was one of the reasons I liked him. But I don’t know what’s going on now. So, I don’t know anything and I don’t want to be too concerned about it because…

BEARDED BAD DAD: I agree with that.

JOHN BLISS: It just makes me bitter and angry and I don’t like politics. I don’t want to go there.

BEARDED BAD DAD: The reason why I’m diving into it a little bit is the historical aspect of it because I’d like to consider myself a historian. You know, I know a little about a lot but not a lot about anything. And I love history and I love learning things. So, when it comes to information, I take in as much information as I can and my brain sorts through it. I don’t know how it does it, but I like the historical aspect of the knowledge of just knowing what’s going on and stuff. If I was to lose my connection to the outside world tomorrow, though, I’d be fine. And I know that I, I have books here at the house. Like, there’s a bunch of books back there I haven’t read. Um, I have a bunch of books here at the house. Not only that, but I have a lot of preparing to do. I have a lot of, a lot of outside work I could be doing. And, um, so if I lost my connection to the outside world tomorrow, it wouldn’t really make that big of a difference to me. But I just like the historical…

BEARDED BAD DAD: I like understanding things. I like knowing things for the historical context because I know this stuff’s going to be important in a hundred years. I know people are going to be researching this in 100 years.

BEARDED BAD DAD: This is historic. This is more historic than Iraq. Yeah.

JOHN BLISS: I think certainly in terms of the ramifications 100 years from now, whether good or bad, I don’t know, but I think it is a lot more historic.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Absolutely.

BEARDED BAD DAD: So what is your take on, what is your take on the way, the modern publishing has changed. And I mean, we talked about it a little bit. I think that indie publishing and publishing your own work is the best thing that Amazon has done. I have a lot of bad things I could say about Amazon. Sure. But one of the best things that they’ve done is they’ve made it possible for independent people to publish their work without being taken advantage of. What is your take on that change, how it happened, and how quickly it’s being embraced?

JOHN BLISS: I don’t know enough. I’ve just been an author for less than a year, so I don’t know. But I know it’s not just Amazon. My book is on Google Play Books. It’s on Apple ebooks. It’s on Barnes & Noble. I’m also giving it away online at Gumroad. At Gumroad you can buy it or you can get it for free. You can donate any amount of money or it’s free. Whatever you want. You can get a PDF of it there. But I don’t like to read PDFs, so I don’t think that’s a good way. And also my website, I have it free. So…

BEARDED BAD DAD: Yeah, I’m actually on your website right now and there’s a button you could click and it says, download your free copy. That’s awesome, John. That is so awesome.

JOHN BLISS: Okay, so in case anyone’s listening and wants to know, it’s Skeptika Press. How do you spell it? There’s no C’s in there. It’s Skeptika with K’s. S-K-E-P-T-I-K-A Press.com.

JOHN BLISS: And then there’s also something called Ingram Spark. Um, and I don’t know much about it yet, and I’m going to do get my book on it now. The bookstores and the libraries, they buy their books not from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Apple. They buy it from Ingram. And, so you can put your book there and they also will print it to order just like Amazon.

JOHN BLISS: And if you want to do things that way, it is still hard because who am I? I’m an unknown author and I don’t remember what the number was, but I think there’s like 20 million Kindle books out there. 20 million.

JOHN BLISS: So, you know, this is one of 20 million. So, what’s the chance anyone’s going to find this one? So the way to go with Ingram Spark is you want to get book reviews from mainstream reviewers like Midwest Book Review, Washington Book Review, um, Kirkus, uh, Publishers Weekly. And those are a different kind of review. They’re like official and, and librarians and bookstore owners see those reviews and then if they, they think, “Oh. Yeah, let’s add that to the collection.” And then they would go and try to buy it on Ingram. So, that’s what I’m working on this week is trying to get my book uploaded to Ingram so I can sell that way because I just got a book review from Midwest Book Review.

BEARDED BAD DAD: That’s awesome. So, are you working on anything else? I know it took you a long time to get this one done.

JOHN BLISS: I like the way Camus did his whole thing. He would write a play, a novel, and an essay on one topic and then he’d move on to the next topic. And he wrote an incredible, if you want to read a great book, it’s called The Rebel. It’s an essay and it’s like my book. He was writing about the anarchists, which were big in Europe at the time. They were blowing up stuff left and right because they wanted to bring communist revolution, and they were the ones that started World War I. And he talked about communists and, and basically idealists in general. And his whole thing was, look, idealism leads to tyranny. You have these people that believe that they’re going to bring about paradise. It’s going to be so perfect. Except there’s these people in the way. We’ll just kill them and then we’ll have paradise. Look, if I could kill just 100 people and then all of humanity would be happy, would it be worth it? Of course it would. That’s the kind of thinking that brings about tyranny. And so he talks a lot about the French Revolution their whole idea of all this great stuff we’re going to do and then they’re all just killing each other. That guy’s an enemy of the revolution, so we have to kill him. It’s an amazing essay.

JOHN BLISS: But I wrote my essay already and my next book is going to be a novel and I started it, but I’ve never written a novel. The dialogues are easy, but I find plot really difficult. It’s like, what do you put in? What do you not put in? I know in movies you don’t see people like eating at McDonald’s and you don’t see them going to the bathroom or taking a bath, right? I mean, you only put in certain scenes and you ignore other scenes. And I am baffled about how should you show the development from he was just starting this to now he’s there? How, what do you show the in between? And that part I’m having a hard time figuring out. But anyway, my novel is about a guy who had some some mystical experiences. He talked to God. He saw God and he’s like, “Wow, this is incredible. I’ve got to tell everybody.” And so he starts, he wants to tell everybody but he doesn’t have a clue because he’s a, he’s just a mystic, you know, kind of like an artist goofball right? And so some guys around him help him to make videos. So this is, this is set in the 1980s. So they did VHS tapes. They were giving out VHS tapes, right?

JOHN BLISS: And they got someone to write about them—the articles were in like the, the equivalent of the New Times or L.A. Weekly, you know, those weekly magazines that have all the concerts in them.

JOHN BLISS: So he got in a bunch of those weekly papers and then he started doing a road trip speaking to people in those cities. But essentially what I want to have happen is, I want him to just to be who he is, which is he’s not a prophet. He’s not a Messiah. He’s just some dude that talked to God, right? You know, once or twice or three times. And people are looking for a leader and they really like him, but he’s, he’s just a goofball and the people around him are manipulative. They’re good organizers, but one of them wants money and one of them wants power. And, and eventually they, they kick him out of the organization and they find someone else because he’s too goofy. He screws up. He doesn’t show up or he gets arrested for stupid reasons.

JOHN BLISS: He’s a goofball. I’m trying to very loosely base this on the Baháʼí Faith. And it’s very controversial, I’m sure a lot of people in Baháʼí will disagree with me, but my understanding of the faith was there was this guy named The Báb. This was in Persia, I think around the time of Ben Franklin, who everybody thought was a, a prophet of some sort. And he’s saying, “You know what? I’m just like John the Baptist. There’s a guy coming. He’ll come in a couple hundred years from now.” But you can follow me for now. So, he had all these apostles and writings. The Báb has a successor and then The Báb dies. The successor turns out to be, I think, a very mystical type person, very religious, mystical, and all that. But his brother is a kick-ass dude. And I mean, he’s like a marine or something, right? And he can lead people in war. He’s a man’s man. And this brother takes over and decides he’s the successor. In fact, not only is he the successor to The Báb, he’s the guy the Bab was talking about that was supposed to come in 200 years, but it’s only maybe seven or 10 years later, not 200. And so this then is Baháʼu’lláh, or I think that’s how you say the name. And the Bahai religion was based on him. They end up killing a lot of the old Bab apostles. They burn the books from The Báb. Most of them are gone. And then he writes his own stuff. And then his child is the next successor who, I don’t remember how the story goes, but every generation or the next two generations that followed, they got rid of a lot of the old books from the earlier generation. And here’s the new, this is the new gospel. And so it was just, it was just ugly. And I, I think that’s how religions start. I do. You have this special person. You have these people around them that have their own motivations, but they don’t talk to God and they, they make it work for their own sake. And that’s what I was trying to do with this novel.

BEARDED BAD DAD: That sounds amazing, John. That was a really good commercial actually.

JOHN BLISS: Yeah, it’s a lot easier to talk about than my book of essays. So before I do podcasts, I always listen to essays from the book on Audible. There is just so much information, some of which I wrote over 10 years ago. It is impossible to remember it all.

BEARDED BAD DAD: I got to get a copy of that book, bro. I got to get a copy.

JOHN BLISS: It’s on Audible. Do you have an Audible subscription now?

BEARDED BAD DAD: No, I, so I don’t, but I would rather, I’d rather read the physical copy. I tried to read a book through Adobe, like I had AI read it to me and it was awful. It was an awful experience because it kept reading the footnotes.

BEARDED BAD DAD: This is a subject that’s so close to my heart because my life has changed so much in the last 10 years, John. And I owe it all to mysticism. I can’t explain it. We talked about this the last time we were talking too. I can’t put words to my experiences and it’s…

JOHN BLISS: Nobody can. Nobody can.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Exactly. And how do you tell people you know about your experience and how it changed you? I think your book would be a great thing to be able to pass on to people, and say, “Here, read this because I can’t tell you in words what I feel and how I know these things I know. But this book will explain it.”

BEARDED BAD DAD: I, I say it all the time. It’s the difference between knowing and believing. Like I don’t have the luxury of belief in God anymore. I don’t have that luxury. I know God.

JOHN BLISS: There you go. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

BEARDED BAD DAD: I tell people that all the time. I just don’t have the words to give you.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Yes. And I talk to my brother who’s a Bible thumper. He’s one of those what we call a cardboard Christian. He lives like a devil. Lives like the devil through the week and goes to church on Sundays. And I’m talking to him about it and he keeps trying to get me to go to church and I’m like, bro, I think I’ve outgrown church and that’s the best way I can describe it to you. I can’t go and listen to sermons anymore because that’s just one man’s translation of what the book says. And I don’t think the book is a translation as well. Like when you dive into these subjects and you go into the feelings that you have and the experiences that I’ve had, the sermons don’t compute. It doesn’t compute to what I understand. And I think I’ve outgrown religion.

JOHN BLISS: I want to read you something, a quote from my book about this. There was a guy named Theodore Parker. He was a Unitarian minister. He was a transcendentalist. So, he was around the time of Emerson and Thoreau out there in Boston. And they kicked him out of the church and he became an abolitionist along with the rest of the transcendentalists. But anyway, he said, here’s the quote. “The simple stories of the biblical miracles, they’re useful for children as it suits their mentality. But, but to learn boy’s lessons and to be amused with boy’s stories, this helps the boy, but it hinders the man. Long ago we got from these helps all that was in them. To stay longer is a waste of time. Look at the men who’ve been doing this for 10 years. They are where they were 10 years ago.” And then he wrote, “rather than study the diagrams of God written on the heavens and points of fire, man is told to keep counting his fingers and all piety is wiped out of his consciousness and he hates God and God hates them.”

JOHN BLISS: He’s saying that it’s the same book and the same stories, the same sermons year after year after year. It’s like, you know what, I did that, let’s move on. Okay, let’s move on to some more advanced stuff.

BEARDED BAD DAD: So that’s a perfect way to describe what I was trying to tell my brother at that time. I don’t know how to tell you, man, in order for you to understand what I’m saying, you’ll have to have gone through what I’ve gone through. And I can’t give you that. I can’t take it from my brain and give it to you.

JOHN BLISS: You’ve got to read the book. So this is my theory in general on human beings about every quality we have like height, let’s say capacity at running, intelligence, anything. Everything is a normal distribution or in other words, a bell curve. Everything. Most people are in the middle. There’s a few that are perfect, that are great like Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods and a few that are just absolute slobs and can’t do anything right. Right. But it’s this curve, right?

JOHN BLISS: It’s the same in religion. And most people are here in the center of the bell curve and I think maybe those church lessons that are the same as what we had when we were 10, they’re good for those people. But for the people at the end, the people who are most adept at spirituality. That basic stuff doesn’t work. It doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t. And it’s boring.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Well, because you got everything out of it you could when you were 10.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Yes. So, let’s switch gears a little bit, kind of on the same topic, but when we messaged back and forth, you had mentioned a podcast that, uh, Tucker Carlson had done. And you want to talk about evil? The Epstein Files. I haven’t dove into them. I’ve listened to a few people analyze them and, and talk about it, but the more I dive into it, the more you can see that good and evil absolutely exist. And these people that Epstein was friends with, you could use guilt by association here. I believe that would be absolutely acceptable to not let these people have any control over any other person. I saw and heard people in these messages talking about eating children, and about having sexual relations with children. Just disgusting things. And I don’t know what to think about it other than wow, this is evil. And the knowledge of it doesn’t help me, but it’s…

JOHN BLISS: It’s real evil though.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Yeah. I’m not taken aback by it. I’m not surprised by it, John. And I think that’s where I disconnect from a lot of people because I’ve known these power dynamics have existed for thousands of years. I know that people have been doing weird things for thousands of years just simply because they have the power to do so.

JOHN BLISS: That’s right. Then they’re bored maybe with because they, you know, they were powerful so they already had all the women and that didn’t do it anymore. So they had to take it further.

JOHN BLISS: If you read Josephus, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Josephus. He was a Jewish writer and he was around during the fall of Jerusalem when the Romans took Jerusalem. He was there. In fact, he was one of the generals involved in the whole thing. And then I think he joined the Roman team at some point in the middle of that whole war and then went to Rome and wrote his histories from there. But he wrote one book about the war itself and it was incredible. I guess I’m diverging from your topic, but I’m not really. Josephus also wrote a book called Antiquities, which was basically a parallel to the whole Old Testament. It’s a history of the Jewish people from the very beginning all the way up, but it’s not the same. And he goes into a lot more detail of the kings of Israel and how depraved they were. This is no different than Epstein. It’s no different. And I think it’s not an Israeli thing or a Jewish thing. No, I think it is a power thing.

JOHN BLISS: The people at the top, not all of them, not Jimmy Carter, but I don’t think he was even at the top when he was at the top. He wasn’t there. But I think 20 years ago, if you told me about this Epstein, I would have been absolutely shocked.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Me too.

BEARDED BAD DAD: That’s it. I’ve always had this theory that billionaires and millionaires once they get to a certain point, life becomes boring for them. So, they have to do the most extreme thing that they can think of to have fun. Again, I don’t think it’s that simple, but I don’t think it’s much different.

JOHN BLISS: It’s not all of them. It’s probably only a small percentage of them, but they have the resources to go crazy. But I’m sure that most of them, most billionaires are just, they’re just people with a lot of money. What, what one person told me, and I totally believe it, is that money isn’t evil. What money is, is it extends you, it makes you more of who you could be. If you’re a jerk, you’ll become more of a jerk if you have a lot of money. If you’re a really nice person, you’re going to be, become more of a nice person with a lot of money because then you can help a lot of people.

JOHN BLISS: That’s all it does. It extends your personality or extends your grasp of what you can do with…

BEARDED BAD DAD: Yeah. I’ve said that if I was to win the lottery, I’d change a lot of people’s lives. And they’re like, what do you mean? I’m like, man, everybody I know would be rich. You know, like all my friends, all my family. And then they’re like, you know, a fool and his gold, they’re soon parted.

JOHN BLISS: How much do you need? I mean, you don’t need that much…

BEARDED BAD DAD: Exactly.

JOHN BLISS: $10 million. That’s more, that’s more than double or that’s more than four times what you need. So…

BEARDED BAD DAD: Exactly. And I don’t even know what the hell I’d do with that much money to be honest with you. And my wife and I were talking not too long ago about getting some land and putting a house on it. What we call like a barndominium. It’s a new craze nowadays, but it’s actually pretty smart because it’s a steel building that’ll last twice as long as a regular house. But, we talked about like a barndominium, a chunk of land, and just existing out there. You know, that would only cost maybe $500,000 at the most. At the most. And I say only, but I don’t have anything close to that number. But it would cost about 50 grand to get it all. And then you got to pay taxes on it. And then you, you think about a number like $10 million. What are you going to do it? $10 million would be not only life-changing for me, but that is enough for me to change my entire family’s lives. And, billionaires don’t really think like that. You know…

JOHN BLISS: Some do.

BEARDED BAD DAD: You’re right. Some do. Elon Musk for all his bad qualities. He does have a lot of good redeeming qualities as well. He’s one of those guys that people love to hate him, but I love Elon Musk…

JOHN BLISS: Me too.

BEARDED BAD DAD: I, I know he’s got a lot of money and power and everything, but the dude is so…

JOHN BLISS: He sleeps in the office on a couch.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Exactly. Well, he goes on that basic philosophy, own nothing but control everything. And it’s a genius tax strategy, but he does so much more good. Even building rockets the way he’s building rockets.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Okay, so we’ve blew up this giant rocket, right? But what did we learn from blowing up that rocket? That’s what he’s talking about. He’s like, man, we got to learn the tolerances. This is something new. This is something completely new. Nobody’s ever done this before. We got 50 engines on the bottom of this rocket. Sometimes they’re going to blow up. We got to learn the tolerances. And when I hear that, I’m like, “Yeah, move fast and break things.” That’s exactly how I operate. And so I understand his operation level. And when I’m talking to people I hear, “Oh, but he’s a trillionaire. Should one person have that much resources?” No, probably not. But are we going to get mad at him for using our rules to his advantage? Why would we get mad at that? Just change the rules.

JOHN BLISS: I agree. I want to talk about something that I think would interest you and that was because you talked about aliens in the past. I read a book that you might want to read. It’s called American Cosmic. Have you heard of it?

BEARDED BAD DAD: No. Well, maybe, who wrote it?

JOHN BLISS: I don’t remember. It’s a name that’s hard to remember. It’s a woman. She’s…

BEARDED BAD DAD: I’m looking it up now.

JOHN BLISS: She’s a professor of religion and…

BEARDED BAD DAD: Diana Walsh Pasulka. I’ve actually heard a lot about this book. I’ve listened to her on a podcast. Yes, I agree. I need to read this book.

JOHN BLISS: You do?

BEARDED BAD DAD: I do because, let me tell you, brother, I’ve thought about this. It’s one of my favorite things to think about. Right?

JOHN BLISS: I know it is. That’s why I brought it up.

BEARDED BAD DAD: And then you hear Tucker Carlson talk about it. And then, J.D. Vance the other day he came out and he’s like, I actually think they’re demons. And then he said that we’re going to get down to the bottom of it. We’re going to look. And I’m thinking, he’s not that far off. I don’t think they’re all demons. But  something, if you go back in history, there’s UFOs in the Bible, you know.

JOHN BLISS: Oh, I know that. There’s the pillar of light and the pillar of smoke that led the Israel, the Hebrews out of Egypt. That sounds like a UFO to me. Absolutely.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Yeah. And with my psychedelic and, and mystic experiences, I can absolutely conceptualize how not only is it connected, but it’s an explanation.

JOHN BLISS: Yeah. It’s really challenging or challenging in a good way. It’s a great book. It’s an easy read. And, well, let me just tell you one little thing in there and maybe you’ve heard her talk about it, but she was describing the sighting of the Virgin Mary in Portugal in Fatima, which is, you know, really important in the Catholic tradition. This sighting or apparition would show up every month on the same day. It would say, come back this day next month. Come back this day next month. And so then eventually crowds started showing up, but the girls never said it was the Virgin Mary. They said it was a woman in an orb. The author quotes this guy who’s a professor at the local university who went out there with the crowd to see what was going on. And he never saw any woman, the Virgin Mary, or anything. The girls saw the woman, and we’re talking to this apparition, but no one in the crowd saw this woman, but they heard this humming. He wrote, “I saw this sun. It was up in the sky, but what was different was you could look at it and it didn’t blind your eyes. And then all of a sudden it dropped really low and then the girls start talking to it or something like that.” So he said he heard this humming the whole time that the girls were supposedly talking to this apparition. And, and the author compares that vision of the virgin in Fatima with UFO sightings.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Yes. Yes.

JOHN BLISS: And how they are very, very similar and just all these different things, the humming and the thing moving down and, and all of this. And it’s like…

BEARDED BAD DAD: Oh, that is amazing.

BEARDED BAD DAD: I think there’s a lot of stuff going on with military equipment and weapons and stuff like that. I think…

JOHN BLISS: Some of it is. Yes.

BEARDED BAD DAD: I think the UFOs is a very convenient excuse to hide these things. Because the B2 bomber, I was just talking to my wife about this yesterday. The B2 bomber, a lot of people don’t know that the B2 bomber is actually really, really quiet. And you can’t hear it until it’s right over the top of you. And then when you hear it, it, it doesn’t sound like a jet. It hums. It’s a very low frequency rumble.

BEARDED BAD DAD: And so were UFOs back in the 80s. I think it’s given a very perfect cover for the United States government and other governments around the world to be able to say…

JOHN BLISS: But not in that time. I don’t know if that was the 1700s or 1800s when this Fatima thing happened.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Exactly. And then I’ve also had this thought like, how many times have we been in this exact spot in human history before in civilization? And what I mean by that is humanity is a couple hundred thousand years old that we know of. We could be even older than that. But, all the things that we have found from the past that’s 12, 13, 14,000 years old, that nothing metal would have lasted that long. And so nothing would have lasted that long other than stone. And so I think about how many times have we been in this exact spot where maybe we didn’t have airplanes, but flying things, you know, to be able to say that we could cross one continent to the other. Like how many times in history has that actually happened because we really don’t know. It’s kind of a wild thing to think about and, and I don’t really think about it all that often, but when I think about the whole topic of UFOs, it keeps coming back to religion. It keeps coming back to you know, not little green men, not aliens, but spiritual beings. And, and when I talk, I think when I talk to people about that, if they’re not on the same level as I am on the knowledge of the topic, they look at me like I’m crazy. And then I show them paintings from 400 years ago that have little UFOs on them, you know? I’m like, what is that? If you don’t think that UFOs are real, what is that? And explain that to me in a context that makes sense for 300, 400 years ago because like it doesn’t make sense unless you know, you put some kind of religious connotation to it. And like, do you think there was beings flying around in spaceships like 300, 400 years ago? People would have told us that, like it would have been written down somewhere, but instead we get these little drawings and paintings of very spiritual scenes, Jesus and the apostles up in the sky. There’s these orbs with little beings in them. And when you get up close to those little beings in, in the picture, they have these halos. They have the auras. And I’m just thinking, that what if the Bible in a nutshell is just one big UFO story? I think about it all the time.

JOHN BLISS: It’s, and something we’ll never know, but it’s totally possible.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Well, John, I think that’d be a great place to leave this conversation. Let’s keep in touch, man. Let’s do this again because I love talking to you and I’m going to actually read your book. I’m going to buy it off Amazon and I’m going to read it. And then when I do that, I want to talk to you again.

JOHN BLISS: I know every author thinks their book is really good. It’s just, when I was listening it today preparing for this because I didn’t know what we were going to talk about. And when I listened to it on Audible, I just think to myself, this is good. I could never write something this good. I just think it’s like it was a special time in my life. I’m never going to be that good again. I guess it’s like Michael Jordan looking at some of his old games and saying, “Oh man. Oh man.”

BEARDED BAD DAD: I apologize that I haven’t read it before, but there’s so many, like those books back there. Those are all books from authors that I’ve had on the podcast and I’ve read a couple of them to prepare for the podcast itself.

BEARDED BAD DAD: But because I’ve got so much going on, I can’t get to every one of them. And I try to listen to as many of them as I can. But, with yours, the topic is so near and dear to me. And we’ve had so many of those moments where you’ve had that aha moment of things that I’m speaking about and you’re like, listen to this. This is in the book. I need to get the book because I feel like that would just open up a whole new conversation for you and I. And I can talk about things that not only my personal experiences, but contents of the book. And we can maybe, this is marketing right here, right? I mean, so…I love the conversations with you and…

BEARDED BAD DAD: Like I keep saying over and over again, it’s the difference between believing and knowing. And it’s so incredible having this knowledge and I just wish to share it with everyone. And if you have in words something that I can give to people, and say, “Here, read this and it’ll explain how I feel.”

JOHN BLISS: In the whole second half, every chapter is pointing towards the same thing, which is exactly what you’re talking about. I go there from history, I go there from religion, I go there from logic, just from all these different starting points. And, um, It’s a dense book, in that, if you read an essay or a chapter, you could stop right there and then talk about that for an hour and a half. And there’s 13 of them. And if you read the whole book, I don’t know where to start. And that’s why it’s really hard for me to prepare for a podcast because there’s so much information, I can’t remember everything. I mean, I talk about string theory and M theory. I talk about…

BEARDED BAD DAD: Really, really now. See, I wish I would have known that because like these are the things I love, man. These topics are so near and dear, but they’re so awesome to me that I love to consume myself with these topics.

JOHN BLISS: Yeah. It’s got a critique of the view that humans are just machines and there’s a lot of people that believe that, or people believe that something is true only if science says it is. If we can test it, then science can decide whether it is true. But we can’t test if God exists, so therefore God must not be true. And there’s so many of us that just take that way of thinking as a knee-jerk assumption. We don’t even realize that we are so rooted in science and the whole scientific mindset that it blinds us to so many things that exist. How can you know? What do you base that on? I can’t see it. What? Let’s do an experiment. Can we repeat that? JOHN BLISS: And then I go into the whole thing about Hume and the fact that causation is not real. He used logic to disprove causation. You know, just because this happens, therefore this happens. It’s like, no, no, that might happen a 100 times in a row, but does not mean it’s going to happen 101st time. It does not.

JOHN BLISS: So anyway, it’s a dense read. That is what I’m trying to tell you. And what might be better is just to read one essay then talk. I’m serious.

BEARDED BAD DAD: That would be, that would be awesome. I would love, I would love to do that, John. And let me, let me do one more thing. Another way to explain God is the double slit experiment.

BEARDED BAD DAD: The double slit experiment demonstrates that tiny particles such as electrons or photons exhibit both wavelike and particle-like properties. Right? A concept called wave particular, wave particle duality. And when these things changed, it’s based on the observer. Right?

JOHN BLISS: The whole Heisenberg thing, right?

BEARDED BAD DAD: Yeah, that’s a great way to explain God in my opinion, is because we are all the observers. But honestly, if you, if you take a step back and you take us out of it, consciousness is the observer. Well, where is consciousness? Consciousness is everywhere.

JOHN BLISS: Right. Absolutely right. I got a whole chapter on that just on that.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Hey, let’s do this, John. I’ll make this promise to you. I’m going to get the book, right? And then I’m going to, I’m going to read, you said they’re in essays, right?

JOHN BLISS: Yes. There’s 13 of them. And well, everyone likes different ones. But there’s, there’s one on science, there’s one on, on logic. You don’t have to read them in order. And you might just want to pick one that you think would be most interesting and just read that one.

BEARDED BAD DAD: So, let’s do this. Let me get the book and, and pick an essay and then we’ll do this again, man.

BEARDED BAD DAD: Hey guys, you just heard that. We’re going to make a commitment right now. I’m going to get John’s book. And, so John’s book is The False Paradigms. This is his first, your first book, correct?

JOHN BLISS: That’s correct.

The False Paradigms of Today and the Timeless Truth of Tomorrow: Essays on Meaning. I’m going to get this book and I’m going to pick an essay and then John and I are going to hash it out right here on the podcast. But I tell you what, guys, you can get this, you can get a copy of this book for free. You don’t have to pay for it. Although we would love for you to…

BEARDED BAD DAD: What’s important is the review. Let’s get more reviews out there. Read the book. Review it. And then, he’s working on another project which is a novel. And I actually want to have you on the show to talk about the novel, too. When it’s finished, obviously. Everybody go out, grab this book, read the book and you’ll figure out a little bit about meaning of why we’re here. John Bliss, everybody. See you guys later. Bye.