Kevin M. Hall is a retired computer engineer and author. His recent book Signs: The Veil Is Thinner Than We Imagine explores research and true stories of people who have experienced signs of the divine and miraculous guidance in there lives, sometimes in very stressful and tragic situations.
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Recommended Reading
In addition to Signs: The Veil Is Thinner Than We Imagine, you might also enjoy Kevin's other works:
Chapters
00:00 Start
3:05 A Journey into Writing
7:46 The Unexpected Loss
14:59 Faith and Spirituality
21:33 The Power of Signs
32:13 Exploring Spiritual Experiences
55:55 Voices of Guidance
1:01:34 Perspectives on Luck
1:09:10 The AI Conversation
1:29:06 The Creative Process
1:41:42 The Politics of Information
2:12:59 Entrepreneurship in a Changing World
Transcript
Tyler:
[0:00] Whatever you do in life will be insignificant, but it is very important that
Tyler:
[0:05] you do it, because you can't know. You can't ever really know the meaning of your life, and you don't need to. Every life has a meaning, whether it lasts 100 years or 100 seconds. Every life and every death changes the world in its own way. You can't know. So don't take it for granted, but don't take it too seriously. Don't postpone what you want.
Tyler:
[0:27] Don't leave anything misunderstood make sure that people you care about know make sure they know how you really feel because just like that it could end Mahatma Gandhi We'll be
Music:
[0:39] Music
Kevin:
[1:05] I never set out to be an author. I worked in the public for, oh, jeez, 40-plus years, working for a couple of Fortune 500 companies. And, you know, after that, I retired and said, what do I do next? And we've got six grandkids and we would have them over to house quite a bit. And we'd also have them for sleepovers. Well, they would ask me often, Grandpa, what were you like as a kid? What did you do? What did you play? And, you know, after telling them the stories, look, we didn't have computers.
Kevin:
[1:47] I had a TV with three channels on it. And that's if the rabbit ear antennas were working And didn't get a color TV Until I was in my teens And microwave didn't come along Until after we were married So I'd tell them all this Well, jeez And they'd grown up in the computer age Well, I'd say, I was wondering about my legacy one day and would the kids remember my stories?
Kevin:
[2:17] That's when I started to write them down. And I was click clacking away at the PC and wrote just a short story called My Christmas in Rosemont.
Kevin:
[2:30] And my wife read it. And I'm not kidding you. Tears were in her eyes. And she knew about that because we met out at Rosemont High School. And that's in Minnesota. I currently live in New York, and that's my home state. But my dad was transferred for his job out to Minnesota. So I went through my whole high school, ninth grade to twelfth grade in Minnesota, and wound up meeting my wife when I was a senior.
Kevin:
[2:59] And she knew a lot of this, but it just brought tears to her eyes.
Kevin:
[3:04] And I said, OK, that's it. We'll make it into a little book. Christmas was coming up I went to a local, You know Publishing place And I said Can you make this Into a book for me And they said Oh sure No problem Just send the PDF over We'll take care of it, They did that And I had it And I wrapped it up And presented it To them at Christmas Well look at their face Let me tell you Tyler that said The whole thing, Okay That's when I decided I had to write More of these stories That I've been telling The kids and put them down in writing. And that begat my first couple of books. First one is about me growing up in my hometown of Illion, New York. And if you've ever shot a Remington rifle, that's the birthplace of it. And the factory was there until last year when the political climate here and our current governor kind of chased them out of the state.
Tyler:
[4:04] Yep.
Kevin:
[4:05] So they're still being manufactured, just no longer in New York state after a well over 200 plus year tradition, having them made in my hometown of Illion, New York.
Tyler:
[4:18] You can move right on down here to South Carolina. We'll take care of you.
Kevin:
[4:21] Yeah. Yeah. Trust me. If it wasn't for the grandkids, Tyler, we would be out of New York state. And I love this state. It's my home state. I mean, the seasons here are fabulous. The environment is phenomenal. You've got the Adirondacks, you've got Niagara Falls, you've got the Finger Lakes, you know, Letchworth State Park voted the number one state park in the country. I mean, it's just beautiful here in this state, but the politics is ruining it, and we've lost over a million in population out of this state in the last decade.
Tyler:
[5:06] We've noticed they're showing up here. Before I moved to South Carolina, I lived in Arizona, and it was the same thing, people coming out of California towards Texas.
Tyler:
[5:16] And I understand. I totally get what you mean. It's, you could talk it down to just like high real estate drives up government and government usually at some point naturally becomes overbearing. You want to get away with it, but then they move where the problem is when they move someplace new and they want to make it like the place they just came from. I'm like, do you not see a pattern here?
Kevin:
[5:35] Yeah, exactly. No, that, that, that's not it. Uh, I was raised with, uh, you know, my parents would say, here's our backyard. See that hedgerow? Your nose stops there. Which meant you kept your nose out of your neighbor's business Now if they invited you Or obviously if somebody was screaming You went to help them But other than that You kept your nose out of other people's business That was not your business, So that was the way I was raised. And to be honest with you, I was raised by then Democratic parents who really were behind JFK. My grandparents had a picture of JFK hanging on the wall next to a picture of Jesus. I mean, this was the environment I grew up in. And so I learned you respect your elders. I learned you keep your nose out of other people's business unless they invite you in. And I learned when you get up in the morning, you thank God and you go to school and you say the pledge and you do your work.
Kevin:
[6:43] And that was the environment that I came from. And then my second book is about my time in Rosemont.
Kevin:
[6:53] Actually, my whole high school career out there Getting my first job, my first car Going out on dates, going to dances Playing ball, all that kind of stuff Was in Rosemont And that's where I met my wife Well, as time went on After we got married We started to experience a few things Now, I've got to just take a step back and say, while we were on our honeymoon, my father unexpectedly passed away.
Tyler:
[7:28] I'm sorry to hear that.
Kevin:
[7:30] Thank you. It was over 50 years ago. The good news is he was at our wedding and we have those pictures.
Kevin:
[7:40] So that was kind of our introduction to marriage. And then within two years of being married My wife's brother passes away on a motorcycle accident And so we had those two things hit us right away No children at the time, But then some interesting things started to happen, We started to notice certain things around the house And I'll give you an example And this, I live in Rush, New York, which is just south of Rochester, Well, after we were married, I started to go to work full-time But I also went back to college, And when I got my college degree, I came out to Rochester And started working for one of the Fortune 500 companies here at the time And we moved out here And shortly after I had a house built, It was in that house that we started to experience a few things. The first one involved a chuck key. I don't know if you know what a chuck key is.
Tyler:
[8:59] It's not ringing a bell, to be honest with you. Okay. I'm embarrassed now.
Kevin:
[9:03] No. It's old time drills had a chuck at the end, and it was the chuck that held on to the drill bit. Okay. Well, you had a key that you would crank it down, and it would tighten up that chuck. Now the chucks are designed more for hand tightening and that kind of thing. So Chuck key is kind of passe. Well, I went looking one day for the Chuck key because I had a job I needed to do in the house. Couldn't find it. I looked all over the place for it. I went to the garage and there's my parts drawer. Now the parts drawer was only about maybe this big. It had nine little drawers in it. And I thought for sure the chuck key was in there. And I went through each of them, nothing. I looked through the bench, nothing. I looked through my toolbox, nothing. I could not find this chuck key.
Kevin:
[9:57] Well, I told my wife about it. She went out and looked all around. I'm not a real patient person.
Kevin:
[10:07] When things Let's put it this way When tools act up The way they're not supposed to I get a little perturbed by that, They're designed to do one thing If they don't do it the way they're supposed to Then I want to reach out And grab that engineer and say Take a look at what you designed here, But anyways, I was kind of at my wits end after a few days I could not find this chuck key to save me, I'm getting ready to go buy a new one So I said, let me take a look around one more time I went back out, I went through the toolbox, the workbench And I went to this parts drawer I opened up the drawer, there sits the chuck key, How, wait a minute I checked that My wife checked that It's not very big You will spot the chuck key How did it get in there? Like I said We waited to have children And our oldest was maybe three at the time There's no way he could reach the, Parts drawer to do anything with it, How did that get there? But that's just one of the things.
Tyler:
[11:33] I'll tell you a little short story here.
Kevin:
[11:35] Sure.
Tyler:
[11:36] My mother and my family and I, we all moved place to place when we were kids. We were kind of constantly upgrading as she moved up in the world. And my stepfather moved up in the world.
Tyler:
[11:46] And, you know, so we went from like, I grew up in a single-wide trailer and then a double-wide trailer. And then finally, like, yo, we got a brick house. I was about maybe nine years old. And the first night i remember me and my mom in that house watched the amityville horror and something about new houses scare the still to this day when i moved into this house i'm like the first thing i did was go around like start saying all my prayers and putting crystals on all the corners and stuff because you can't be too careful you don't know um but it's it's interesting like when a new couple you know you guys you got a kid you move into a new place you've just gone through all this trauma in your life to like losing loved ones and everything and then things start to happen like that yes yes um at least so far it's not nefarious though like nothing bad yeah
Kevin:
[12:39] No no uh and and that's on our side anything that has happened to us has been good has not been bad. And I'll get into it more. But when I wrote this book, I make a statement right up front that I do not talk about anything of the dark nature. I will not get into that because you're, Let me take just a little step back here and say, I was raised Methodist.
Kevin:
[13:12] And, you know, we would go to church and we would sing from the hymnal and that kind of stuff. And we were always taught, you know, hell is bad. Heaven is where you want to be and that kind of thing. And so we didn't really tend to think of too much negative because we wanted to go where the positive was. Well, when I was writing this book I would do some research And every now and then I'd see something No, that's looking a little too dark I'm not going down that path, Because if you talk to a lot of folks Who are kind of in this business, if you will Trust me, I do Okay, they will tell you They take and say their prayers They take and do whatever they need to when they're going out like on a ghost hunt or going into somebody's house to see what's going on, to make sure that whatever that spirit is that may be there does not follow them home, does not hurt them, because it can. And I really wasn't convinced of all that until I started writing this book.
Tyler:
[14:25] Oh, yeah.
Kevin:
[14:26] Things that I found. I mean, whoa. Like I said, I was a believer in heaven. But I'm not a big churchgoer And there's a reason behind that My family is, I don't like the modern day churches You see people showing up in everything from pajama bottoms to three-piece suits You see more of a stage than an altar.
Tyler:
[14:53] I think that depends on your denomination a little bit, right? You said you guys still go into Methodist churches?
Kevin:
[15:00] It's a non-denominational church.
Tyler:
[15:03] So, I mean, that's a big part of it, too. And I'm not here to have any criticism of anybody's faith. I've got the Bible, the Quran, the Book of Mormon, the Book of the Law. I'm just fascinated eternally by different people's faiths. Don't get me wrong. I got my own. That's mine. But yeah like the i've been to a few different i've been to a lot of churches but non-denominational churches where it's like a freaking christian rock concert you know i'm like toby matt gonna show up in a minute like holy cow and
Kevin:
[15:35] Yeah i mean the guitars and the drums yeah i want the chorus now my wife did ask if i would go to the christmas one and i did and they brought out a choir, Let me tell you, I was so happy afterwards And I told my wife I didn't necessarily like the sermon I thought the sermon was best saved for, you know, Easter and Christ is risen And that kind of thing, The Christmas one should have been about the birth And what it brought to us at that time, That was my opinion But that was my only criticism The rest of it, I absolutely loved it Right but it doesn't mean I want to go and attend that church. If there was a little country church where they had a choir and they had the minister up there banging his fist on that podium and reading from the Bible. Okay. I'm in.
Tyler:
[16:31] Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is what we grew up with, you know? And then the part of it is also kind of, there's this question of does, does the church need to adapt to the times in order to recruit more people? Or do people need to hold to the tradition? I went to, just for instance, this past Easter, we went to an Orthodox church just because. Because I'm like, I wanted the old school feeling. I wanted the burning incense and I wanted the priest to say it in 11 different languages and all. I just like that. I like the ceremony of it. I like the artwork where it's, you know, if you've ever been in like a nice Orthodox church, it's always, you know, every saint from Jesus and the apostles all the way down around the walls and everything. And I don't know why that works for me. And I'm not a big church goer myself. Neither is my wife, to be honest with you. But it's just sometimes when you know you need it, you need it. And you could go to different places to get your different things if you want to. I don't know how some people feel about that. I think I grew up with almost dirt floor, tiny little church house. And it was just the preacher talking and the choir. And that was it. Maybe a piano.
Tyler:
[17:44] And sometimes that was like for me it felt too much i felt like the people speaking thought they knew a lot more than they did and that always bothered me i'm like how can you really like what how much research have you done like how much thought and meditation have you really put into this yes or are you just telling me what you think the king james version of the bible is telling you and yeah yeah and i'm the i'm learning hebrew i'm that far down this rabbit hole where i just i want to know um i want I want to be sure of like, how do you understand this, you know, out of context? I have like the King James version and then I'll have the, you know, the New English Standard Version and I'll be comparing verses to see like, okay, if this was written in Greek, how would that have looked?
Tyler:
[18:33] And what would that have meant to them? If this was written in Aramaic, specifically like the Gospels, like, because they're mostly in Aramaic and then John is in Greek. What is the context of that? How would that have really been said? And how would that have been understood at the time versus just saying, well, and this is the only thing there is. That's crazy to me.
Kevin:
[18:54] Yeah. My wife has a Bible study group that she's pretty active in, and she got to talking one day, and she told me all about it afterwards. She says, you know, just the meaning difference of one word, It could change the whole thought of what that concept or sentence or paragraph was all about.
Tyler:
[19:20] Oh, yeah.
Kevin:
[19:21] So it got her thinking, what if some of this stuff was changed over time? And we had a discussion on that. And I was amazed, Tyler, when I found out different Bibles don't have the same number of books in them. Like the Ethiopian Bible, that has 80 different books in it.
Tyler:
[19:41] Enoch is in that. Maccabees is oftentimes left out of Protestant Bibles. All the gospel, like the various different gospels other than the four that we have, right? So the gospel of Thomas is not included. The gospel of Mary,
Tyler:
[19:58] obviously, for obvious reasons, not included.
Kevin:
[20:00] Yep. And why? Why, if this was all the word of God, why do you, a mere mortal, decide what is going to go into the Bible and what isn't? And I'm one of these, I love a lot of the stuff like on Discovery Channel. And we'll get back to the book here in a minute, but I love this stuff. So you've got William Shatner and he has the unexplained and you've got Josh Gates and he's got Expedition, this, that, and the other thing. And then you've got Ancient Aliens and you've got so much more that's out there. And I think tomorrow night, Skinwalker Ranch comes back on for the season. They talk in a lot of these different ones about the Book of Enoch.
Tyler:
[20:51] The Ancient Aliens guys love to talk about Enoch. Oh yes they do And there's a thing about Because there's E-naught 1 and E-naught 2 And they don't really make that super clear No In this show I'm not bashing on that show Because I think it's a great
Tyler:
[21:07] It's a great show. It's fun to watch and everything. But sometimes I feel like they're just a little bit disingenuous. Enoch 1 would be considered canonical by every standard. You could just say it was written at this time by these people, roughly. It was only withheld after the Council of Nicaea because they found it in Ethiopia.
Tyler:
[21:30] It's all that stuff. Enoch 2, we're not quite so sure about. And it's the same thing with some of the Gnostic scriptures, which they recovered in the Nag Hammadi finding, I don't know how long ago, and they bring this stuff forward. You can go read the Gnostic Gospels, but there are reasons why I can understand it didn't make the cut simply because they don't know who authored it. They don't know what the intention of that person was. And in some cases, they can prove it's like a forgery written 700 years after the fact or whatever. But then then i look at it and i'm like what about saint paul he wasn't there you know like there's so many instances of that too like how do you decide what's divine um inspiration versus what's someone witnessed this with their face yes um if you've seen that tv show the chosen it's about the life of jesus and all that great show yeah jonathan rummy is one handsome fella too i gotta give him that uh but it presents the entire story as if john the apostle
Tyler:
[22:36] Is John the author of the book of John? And that is contentious from a historical standpoint.
Kevin:
[22:42] Yeah.
Tyler:
[22:43] I know that that's what at least Catholics tend to believe in. I'm not here to tell them otherwise because I don't know. But that's very contended in the world of people studying it from a scholarly perspective.
Kevin:
[22:54] Well, it's interesting that you brought up that show. And because that's a segue back over to my book.
Tyler:
[23:01] Please.
Kevin:
[23:01] Because they had certain interesting things happen during that show. And I wish I could just recall a few of them. My wife is very much into that show. She can't wait for if they have the next season coming out. But they had some things happen that I take as signs.
Kevin:
[23:27] And that's why I wrote my next book, which was called Signs, The Veil Is Thinner Than We Imagine. If we were on video, I'd show it to you.
Tyler:
[23:36] On Amazon right now.
Kevin:
[23:39] It is on Amazon, but it's on so many other book sites out there. And it's been sold. I like to say it's sold around the world. Yeah, it's sold a couple copies in England and sold a couple copies in Australia and that kind of thing. But that's because I've been on podcasts in those areas. And I'm believing it might have also sold in South Africa, too. But, you know, interesting things are happening in South Africa.
Tyler:
[24:07] So very much so.
Kevin:
[24:09] Yeah, we'll just let that one ride itself out there. But. These signs, and before I forget it, I'm trying to think of the gentleman's name. He's got the show called Holy Relics. And, oh, boy, his name. He's been in a lot of movies. He sings country out of Nashville. Dennis Quaid.
Tyler:
[24:34] Dennis Quaid. Oh, Jinx. Yes. Oh, my goodness.
Kevin:
[24:38] Yes. Dennis Quaid. And I tried to get in touch with Dennis the worst way because I wanted to get his stories that I could put into this book. I mean, I contacted his alma mater. I contacted his agents. I contacted the head of his fan club who told me she
Kevin:
[24:55] has never met Dennis Quaid. I mean, I tried everything I could think of to get to him.
Tyler:
[25:02] Well, Dennis, if you're listening, this is your chance. Dennis, please, please.
Kevin:
[25:07] His brother is a realtor. I even contacted them and just could not get, in fact, they never responded to me, but could not get to Dennis. Well, anyways, Dennis tells a story about, he lives in California. One of the wildfires, not this last one, but one of the ones before that had chased him out of the area. And he went and found a hotel and he went to stay in the hotel. Come to find out the room he stayed at is the same place he first stayed at when he went to California. And he says, you talk about a sign. That was his words. You talk about a sign. And I mean, here's a guy who was into drugs. He is such a firm believer in Christ these days. It isn't funny.
Kevin:
[26:01] So I really wanted to get his story, but I met others like that.
Tyler:
[26:06] You got to get Mel Gibson. He's interesting, too.
Kevin:
[26:09] He is. And I would love to hear his story. Oh, what was the major movie he did that got all kinds of acclaim, but also battered quite a bit?
Tyler:
[26:23] Well, it did The Passion of the Christ.
Kevin:
[26:25] Passion of the Christ.
Tyler:
[26:26] Yes. It did a lot of other movies, but yeah.
Kevin:
[26:28] I just watched it. That was yesterday. Well, that was the one I was thinking about. I would love to hear some of his stories, but there are so many others out there that have had these, you know, some people call them epiphanies, some people call them, oh, what's the other word, synchronicities. I call them signs. Sure.
Tyler:
[26:53] That's what Mel Gibson called it in the movie Signs.
Kevin:
[26:55] Signs. Yeah. And it's, to me, it's the folks in the afterlife, right? Can send messages to you. Now, it could be people you know, your loved ones. It could even be people. I won't say people. It could be beings that are assigned by God to watch over you for whatever reason. Your story isn't done yet. And I've had some near-death experiences where, you know, hey, if this changed the other way, I had a gas can, the nozzle lit on it.
Kevin:
[27:36] I'm talking fire and gas here. The only thing I can say by the grace of God, it didn't blow up. Now, sure, somebody could say there might be a physical reason for it. It might be something with physics and airflow and all of this. But you got a flame on a tank of gas. Oh, yeah. And this happened to me at a young age. And I was scared. And I cupped it and set it outside the house. It could have blown up And all I was trying to do Was start a fire to warm the house But the wood was wet.
Kevin:
[28:14] And that's all I was trying to do I was home first from school My parents both worked And I wanted to make sure the house was warm I mean, we kind of had to rule As kids, my parents worked That food was on the table when they got home, And we would make it They would tell us what to do But we would make that food and it better be on that table when they got home. But again, this goes back to, we had kind of a disciplined growing up, but we were also allowed a lot of playtime. And, you know, Christmases were not always the greatest, but there were a couple that were kind of exceptional. So, and I would just say it was a typical growing up back in that era.
Kevin:
[28:58] Well, these signs have continued on to this day And we had, My very good friends He's been my friend from high school When I moved to Minnesota He was the first friend I made out there And we've been best friends ever since I mean best men at each other's wedding And that kind of thing, Him and his wife Came up for a visit His wife has since passed away due to cancer, But they came up for a visit And we had a sign Happen right in front of them, And And in our kitchen, we were sitting down after dinner one night and we were
Kevin:
[29:37] playing games. We were playing dominoes. And my wife gets to fidgeting with her ear whenever she's thinking. Well, the earring came off from its backing and dropped. So she gets up and she looks around for it. She can't find it. We halt the game. We all get up. We look around. We can't find this earring.
Kevin:
[29:58] Well, we go to bed. She shakes out her clothes, brushes her hair, no earring. We get up in the morning. We go downstairs and we decide we're going to have breakfast at the island and then we'll head out for the day. So we had breakfast at the island. Afterwards, we cleared it all off, wiped it down, went out for the day. Came back that evening. I opened the doors, the first in, coming through the back hallway into the kitchen. And my wife's right behind and my friend and his wife are right behind him or behind us and we get into the kitchen and my wife says you found it i said found what i just got here she points to the island she says the earring right there we all stopped and looked at it nobody's in the house my kids are out of the house been out of the house for years got families of their own and they work, how did that earring get there they all look in amazement we're looking on and his wife Louise says we wiped that island down there was nothing on it how did it get there well that was a gift to my wife and that gift had come from my mom who had passed on earlier.
Kevin:
[31:25] And was that my mom putting it back there my wife was very upset that she lost that air ring my wife and my mom were fairly close and she was upset that she would have lost that air ring how did it get on the island we were sitting at the table which is a good five feet away from the island and probably seven to eight feet away from where the air ring was found on the island.
Kevin:
[31:54] Where did it come from? How did it get there? No one's in the house. We didn't have any animals at the time. So I took that as that was a sign. And based upon that, that's when I started to collect my stories and write the book.
Kevin:
[32:13] Now, I will also mention my buddy's son is a Lutheran minister. And Louise has experienced some of these similar kinds of things in her life So what she does is she carries a little red cardinal charm in her purse And whenever this happens, she takes that little charm out And she places it in the spa It's kind of paying homage to the spirit, and with all of that i said all right i'm going to document my stories and i'm going to reach out to some people now are you familiar with the carolina reaper pepper oh.
Tyler:
[33:02] Yeah i live here in south carolina
Kevin:
[33:04] Yes and do you know the gentleman ed curry.
Tyler:
[33:08] No but that's an appropriate name for a person who deals with spices
Kevin:
[33:10] Yeah, absolutely. Ed was at a young age, an addict, drugs and alcohol. And he wound up functioning in life. He went to college, studied different things. But he was still consuming. And he will tell you, he was consuming up to a gallon of alcohol a day. That's a lot of freaking alcohol Not to mention the drugs that go with it Well, he winds up losing his wife over it Loses a lot of friends Loses, you know, a lot of stuff, He's in a condo in Michigan, In January Now, I don't know if you know much about Michigan Especially in January, It's cold as all get out And there's a lot of snow, So he decides and he tells a story to gather up all of his drugs and alcohol to end the pain. He says, that's enough. He also does this. Now, he had gotten up to almost 400 pounds.
Kevin:
[34:27] He goes, strips naked, opens up the doors and windows. And I asked him, because I got in touch with him and I wanted to know more about his story. I asked him, I said, Ed, why did you do that? He doesn't really know why he did it, but he kind of surmises that if the drugs and the alcohol didn't end the pain, that maybe the cold and that kind of thing would do it.
Kevin:
[34:56] But anyways, when he did that He goes back, sits at the table And he's got everything in front of him And all of a sudden A huge bright light appeared in the doorway And he says, this was such a bright light, I mean, it's like it just flooded everything, But there was a vision inside that light That was even brighter, And all the vision said, go to Brighton Hospital. That's all it said.
Kevin:
[35:30] And then it disappeared. Ed not believing what he's seeing, he gets up to go over. He sees the snow, but there's no footprints. He's looking all around outside. There's nothing.
Kevin:
[35:45] What the heck did he just see? He decides to get in his car. And he tells his story He says, I loaded it with my drugs and alcohol And my guns, And I drove and I was going to find Brighton Hospital He says, I know where Brighton, Michigan is But I didn't know where the hospital was, So on the way, he decides to stop at his buddy's house, His buddy says Look, we'll take you You've got to calm down Ed was visibly shaken, I bet They get to the hospital And it's a nondescript hospital. It's just a building. And there's a door. And he goes up and he knocks on it. And the person opened the door. And Ed said very quickly, an angel sent me here. I got to come here. The angel sent me. The guy on the other side says, I think you better come in. Turns out it was a rehab hospital.
Kevin:
[36:46] He wound up going there for almost the next three years. After 30 days, his insurance canceled him. But he says, look, I'm making progress. I'm going to find a place. He found a place about two miles away that he could afford. He wound up walking back and forth for the next two and a half years almost. Drops 200 pounds and winds up getting sober. And afterwards, he goes to South Carolina, starts to grow the peppers. Now, he had known how to grow peppers before, but he decided to grow the peppers and eventually created the Reaper pepper. And that goes about 1.6 million Scoville heat units. Now, a jalapeno, just as comparison, is between 2,000 and 8,000 Scoville heat units.
Kevin:
[37:46] So you're talking something 1.7 or 1.6 to 1.7 million Scoville heat units. But he didn't stop there. He's now created Pepper X. Pepper X is around 2.4 million Scoville heat units. And when I interviewed Ed, I said, wow, what would you do with that? He says, there's some doctors looking at it right now for cancer research.
Kevin:
[38:14] And so there's i mean it's just phenomenal that here he went from something that you know he drugs and alcohol complete addict and now he's in the guinness book of world's records he got married and tyler he tells me another story that after he was married he decided to start going back to church with his wife. Now, his wife was an avid churchgoer. And so they went to church and it's communion day. And his wife says, why don't you come to the stage with me and we'll take communion together. And Ed says, I'm not worthy yet. I cannot do it. And so his wife's going down this way. The preacher jumps down from the stage area, walks up the pews, comes into Ed's row, looks Ed right in the eye and says, you are worthy.
Kevin:
[39:23] I still get choked up hearing that. I mean, and even Ed told me, he said, how did that guy know? I was just talking to my wife. What caused the preacher to do that? And so these are the kinds of things, the stories that I've been running across. And I'll tell you this, Tyler. If I didn't believe in heaven before, man, I would have done a 180 and totally believe in it. after the stories that I've heard.
Kevin:
[39:56] There is an afterlife. To me, there is no doubt about that. And that's just some of the stories. I don't know. You're a little young, but there's a comedian, Sam Kennison.
Tyler:
[40:09] Very familiar with Sam.
Kevin:
[40:11] You know Sam.
Tyler:
[40:12] I know him from... See, my mom's favorite rock band was Motley Crue. Okay. He was in all the music videos and stuff. And then I knew him later as like, oh, he was a famous comedian. And I've seen all his specials and stuff, but his story of being an evangelist and then transferring that skill into being a drug-addled alcoholic comedian. His brothers wrote a book about him called My Brother Sam.
Kevin:
[40:39] And you know, the night he died, he was in an auto accident. But it wasn't his fault. a person in the other lane came out and went to pass cars and head on right into Sam's car. Well, Sam's lying there with his brother and the story's a little bit, um, was he in the hospital at that time or was he still on the side of the road? But the story is consistent in that Sam, after a little bit looked up, just like he's looking to the corner. No, no, I don't want to go no oh okay all right okay he's gone.
Tyler:
[41:29] Um have you heard the story about i don't know if it's the real story but the legend of how anton lavee passed away no yeah so as the legend goes you know he lived his entire life being the leader of the church of Satan and all that. And I don't, from what I can tell, I don't think he really even believed in the devil. I think he was just a troll. You know, he was like basically, uh, some form of a agnostic atheist or whatever.
Tyler:
[42:01] Didn't believe in any of this stuff, but they say that as he was in his hospital bed dying, he started screaming, Oh no, no, no, no, this is all wrong. Um, And then he just went lights out. That's terrifying, I think. Yeah.
Kevin:
[42:19] Well, that brings me to a Dr. Christopher Kerr. And I interviewed him. He was a cardiologist by trade. He's in Buffalo, New York. And looking for some part-time work, he went to a hospice care facility. And they were looking for a doctor over there. And he says, okay, I'll do that for a little bit while he has his cardiology practice. Well, lo and behold, time goes by. He winds up becoming the CEO of hospice and palliative care.
Kevin:
[42:58] He has chronicled now over 1,500 end-of-life stories of the patients. And over 80% of them have had visions.
Kevin:
[43:13] And these visions, a lot of them will come during dreams, but there's also others that come at other times. And he tells the story of one lady in there, the family was visiting and they see her like she's rocking a baby in her arms. Well, what was that all about? It wasn't until her sister made it up there to visit before her sister passed on that she told the story of this lady had lost a baby very early on. And this was yet another step before she wound up passing on. And when I began to do research on this, come to find out dreams and what they call visitation dreams have been going on throughout time. I mean, going back to I investigated the Druids, the Egyptians, the Roman Empire. I went through cultures of China, Japan, India, and it permeates it.
Tyler:
[44:26] You don't have to go that far. I mean, just look at the Old Testament. That's 90% of what's going on there. But, I mean, Jacob, and he has the dream of Jacob's ladder. Yes. And he has the, you know, where he becomes Israel. These are dreams that become holy revelation. And that's recorded throughout history over and over, as you said, in many different cultures. Oh, nowadays, if you do that, you're crazy. You get lost.
Kevin:
[44:53] Yeah. And I don't get that. I had. I don't know if I want to call it the pleasure, although let me I was there with my mom when she passed. I was there with my mother in law when she passed. And. My wife and I are believers. Last breaths are just as important as first breaths.
Kevin:
[45:19] And we need to be there for these folks Before my mom passed on She told me that she had a dream of visitation From her second husband, Louie As my dad, I mentioned my dad passed on very early.
Kevin:
[45:35] And Louie came to her and said Get ready, it's not time just yet But get ready, My mother-in-law had similar dreams where she talked about a lot of her past relatives coming to her. In looking at Dr. Kerr's book and doing the research on him, and he's written some white papers on this, they're not just relatives. Sometimes it's people they don't know, but come tell them similar stories. Sometimes it's pets That have passed on That come back And are there very vividly in a dream In Japan, it's culture These are called pickup dreams, And you can imagine why They're coming here to pick you up And bring you into the next life And I've had a visitation dream From my brother Now my brother passed on early too He was just shy of his 59th birthday Come to find out They did the autopsy on him where there was no autopsy on my dad back in the day. It's a heart valve issue. So we theorized my dad might have also had that heart valve issue. I've got the same issue, but I am now under cardiologist care.
Tyler:
[46:57] What's the valve issue?
Kevin:
[46:58] It's the aortic valve and where a lot of people have what's called a tricuspid valve. I have, and my brother had a bicuspid valve, but the worst thing for that is the regurgitation because the valve will rock on top of the aortic valve or on the aortic. And what that causes is regurgitation. Well, there's a point in time if you're a heavy smoker that it can get very sticky and stay open.
Tyler:
[47:34] My mama had a cardiomyopathy, a hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, where it was like her, basically her valve was too, like too thick the muscle on it. So they had to go in and do open heart surgery and like trim it down to make it open again. But it was like, she was for 50 years, I mean, just shortness of breath and like couldn't do a whole lot. And it was horrible on her. God bless her, man. She, she got the open heart surgery, got better. And then her hip went out and she had to have hip surgery. So we call her the bionic woman now. Yep. Yep. The $6 million mom. But yeah, I understand what you're talking about more or less.
Kevin:
[48:12] Yeah. And it's one of these things that I'll eventually have to go under the knife. Now, there's a couple of different procedures, one where they could go up through the groin. And I think that's called TAVR or TAVR, T-A-V-R. And one of my relatives had that done. But for me, because of the way it is, I am not a candidate for that. So they're still going to have to go in and fix it.
Kevin:
[48:43] But anyways, with all this that's been going on and understanding from Dr. Kerr, these visions are occurring in 80% of those patients. Yeah. I got to take a step back and say, wait a minute, why don't more and more people see this, understand it, and embrace it? Instead, they run from it.
Tyler:
[49:12] A lot of people don't even talk about it when it happens. No. That's the other thing. It's like they think, you know, and we've been taught that by our culture to, oh, well, obviously that's just chemicals in your brain or whatever. And I've never liked that explanation. Like, okay, sure, maybe your brain did flood with cortisone and DMT or whatever at the time, and you had this profound vision, but who's to say that the circumstances that lead to us being able to have that vision are not revelatory? Revelatory yes it's the same as you said earlier you know like you could explain this tank of gas not exploding through some you know there's some physical reason but the coincidence the circumstances that need to be present for that to be the case yeah yeah what do you call that you know someone gets hit by a car and they survive even though they were pinned to a tree you know obviously there's a you could say well it's because it didn't penetrate the femoral artery and therefore you didn't okay but why that's always the question that's that's the one thing that science can't do that religion offers is yeah why yeah
Kevin:
[50:25] Exactly and there was a show i was watching of a plane accident that happened and i want to say it's vietnam in the countryside of vietnam uh they took searchers several days to get to the wreckage right only one woman survived right.
Kevin:
[50:47] One woman, her back was broke. She had other broken ribs and different things like that. But she kept her mind active during that time. And she would collect water in, you know, the like the aluminum foil kind of thing that's wrapped around the insulation that goes into a lot of these planes. She took the hat and made it into cups to collect the rainwater. And that's what kept her going. I so wanted to get to her and talk to her about her story to find out what was she thinking? Did she understand something? Did she see something? Because there's so much out there. I talked to folks that were in the Twin Towers on 9-11 who miraculously made it out. I talked to a guy that was in an airplane, chartered plane. He was taking his family back home from his brother's funeral the pilot dies 10 minutes into it he's now got to take over this twin engine plane and land it successfully, the stories now they were a very christian family i mean this guy could be a minister and he told me point blank when you walk in the light you have no fear.
Kevin:
[52:09] And he knew what his job was that day. And what's interesting, this was in Florida happening. The person they got to help him, to talk him down, was in Danbury, Connecticut. And it was the old telephone routine going back and forth. The pilot would go to the control tower. Control tower then would tell the guy with the cell phone that was talking to the guy in Danbury, Connecticut, with his cell phone. And then he in Connecticut would tell him, all right, have the pilot do this. And then he would tell the control tower, have him do this. It's that old telephone game.
Kevin:
[52:52] Yet they managed to talk him down and the people afterwards said there wasn't even a scuff on the tires when he landed.
Kevin:
[53:00] These are, I don't want to use the term miracle loosely at all. To me, these are signs. These things They're happening They're not just mere coincidence And there's so many more stories I write about in the book The one guy who was in the Twin Towers I love to tell this story There was two of them Brian Clark and Ron DeFrancisco, And you can do research on them online And you will find their story And I talked to both of the gentlemen I'm spinning the TV around one night Went to the Discovery Channel. There's William Shatner. One of the stories he had on was Brian Clark's story, and there's Brian telling the story. I'm like, okay, this is pretty interesting. I just interviewed him, and now I'm seeing it again over here. Then it must be I have to write this story about him. So both of those stories are in the book. But Ron's was very interesting. He was with Brian as they were going down the stairwell. And they get to a stair landing and they meet a couple of people coming up. And they're saying, look, you can't go down. There's too much fire and debris. We have to go up, fresher air, that kind of thing.
Kevin:
[54:23] Only Brian hears somebody yelling from inside the room. They're trapped.
Kevin:
[54:29] So when the plane hit the building and it swayed it pulled at the sheetrock in the doorways in the hallway just enough that it pulled it away where Brian and Ron could take and keep ripping it and get into the room well they get into the room Ron is so full of smoke he can't breathe he goes back the hallway and heads upstairs Brian on the other hand tells a story I had a fresh air pocket all around me. I could breathe perfectly fine. And he rescues the guy and those two make it out. Well, Ron went back upstairs. He gets up to the 91st floor. He's looking around and people are laying down almost in a sleep-like state.
Kevin:
[55:16] And there's smoke around and Ron decides, well, I better get down closer to the floor where it's fresher air. He gets down, only the air is not that fresh and he describes it as he's almost starting to go to sleep and all of a sudden he heard somebody say get up and get out he looks around there's nobody there everybody's laying down sleeping he gets up though he listens he heads back down the stairs he gets down to around the 69th floor
Kevin:
[55:49] and he's looking and there's too much fire and debris down he doesn't know what to do. And all of a sudden he hears the voice again saying, go through it and get out.
Kevin:
[56:00] He goes down through it, and he describes that it was three floors of complete hell. There was so much fire, smoke, and debris. He's lucky he could see his way down the stairs. But he gets below it, and he meets firefighters coming up. And they tell him, keep going. It's clear down below. You're okay. He gets down to the first floor. They won't let him out the door. Too much debris from overhead. There was other stuff, too, but I'll just leave it at debris. So he winds up going through the underground concourse And he meets up with another guy And the other guy's limping along Barely making it, And he goes over He takes the other guy's arm And he starts to escort him out And all of a sudden The building's swaying It's rumbling And he turns around And sees a fireball coming at him And he turns to his buddy and says Run And so they ran And that's the last thing he knew Until three days later He's waking up in the hospital He finds out that he's got a huge gash to his head, which does heal He's burned over 60% of his body, And the contacts had fused to his eyes But the doctors managed to get them off successfully, I talked to Ron and I said, Ron, what do you think those voices were? Where did that voice come from? And he says, one of two things It was an angel or God.
Kevin:
[57:26] And he says, without that, he would have been dead everybody else on that 91st floor perished everyone else so i mean these to me are some miraculous stories.
Tyler:
[57:38] Oh yeah i mean you want to hear some superstitious people first responders trauma nurses uh and people who have served in like actual warfare yes for sure um people in combat sports, period, too, like fighters. Believe like you like it's insane to think about but you know like you're just this vicious evil you know monster out there like kicking someone in the head or whatever but like you're not going to find people who love whatever their version of god is more um in many cases because it's like i have to have that strengthen me and there's an archetype for that too i mean samson was a fighter jacob was a fight we talked about him earlier like there's so much of that and david king david was a great warrior, right? So there's just something to, like, when you're put in these difficult situations in life, you know, and you can't do it by yourself. When you open yourself up to the idea that somebody can help you who doesn't appear to be there, that really changes your perspective.
Kevin:
[58:45] Absolutely. And that goes to another book I had read at the time, and I just got it right here called The Third Man Factor. And that was written by John Geiger. I go to the first story in the book. It's Ron DeFrancisco. And I kept running across this stuff. And the more and more I did, the more and more I was convinced I have to produce this book and I have to get it out there and I have to tell people about it.
Kevin:
[59:14] And The Third Man Factor, what that gets into is a lot of the types of stories where folks have sworn that there was somebody else there that helped guide them, helped save them, helped keep them out of peril long enough to where they could reach safety. And many, many, many stories are in that book. And Tyler, I, you know, Now, people ask, well, how can you say that these are signs and not just coincidence? And I had to prove that to myself.
Tyler:
[59:52] Oh, man. Hold on. Keep talking, but I'm going to read you something real fast.
Kevin:
[59:56] Okay. So the more I researched and the more I began to understand that there may be coincidence here or there. But when you see how some of this stuff, wait a minute, how could that have even happened? And go back to that gas tank. How did everything happen to blend just right? I mean, you've got to begin to question it. You've got to begin to say, no, there's more here. We are not alone There is that afterlife We just need to Maybe open up To the possibility To where we can see it And believe it Understand it And embrace it Oh yeah, So you said you had a story to read.
Tyler:
[1:00:54] Yeah, I got to make sure I got the right one. And here it is. So I've read this one time on the podcast a while back, but I'm going to do it again because this is one of the best movie quotes of all time. And I'm sure you'll recognize it.
Tyler:
[1:01:07] People break down into two groups when they experience something lucky. Group number one sees it as more than luck and more than coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence that there is someone up there watching out for them. and group number two sees it as just pure luck, just a happy turn of chance. And I'm sure the people in group number two are looking up at those 14 lights in the sky in a very suspicious way.
Tyler:
[1:01:31] For them, the situation is 50-50. Could be bad or it could be good, but deep down they feel that whatever happens, they're on their own and that fills them with fear. And there are those people, but there's a whole lot of people in group number one and when they see those 14 lights in the sky, They're looking at a miracle and deep down they feel that whatever's going to happen There will be someone there to help them and that fills them with hope So what what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs? Sees the miracles or do you believe that people just get lucky or look at it question this way? Is it possible that there are no coincidences? That's uh mel gibson as father graham in the movie signs, which is about aliens, but But his logic, the way that that gets broken down is perfect. Yes. M. Night Shyamalan was like, he might as well have been writing the new book to the Bible when he wrote that for me because I saw that as a little kid. And I was like, that's exactly how I feel. How can you just call something a coincidence?
Kevin:
[1:02:33] Exactly. And I heard a quote. In fact, it's the first quote in my book. And it goes, we are not human beings having a spiritual experience.
Tyler:
[1:02:46] We
Kevin:
[1:02:47] Are spiritual beings having a human experience and when you think about that tyler it changes the paradigm shifts and i mean you got to if we are truly spiritual then where do you think we're going afterwards.
Tyler:
[1:03:05] At this point science has kind of caught up to the game i'm talking i'm hopefully going to have a very prominent quantum physicist on to help me explain to the audience what we think of this but there are more dimensions to what we call space than what we see we exist within basically four parameters we have you know height depth width time and the more they search into this obviously there's more to it so you just simply like if you could just imagine if you were a four dimension, just four dimensional being such that you could see time laid out in front of you and you were trapped in a box.
Tyler:
[1:03:49] If you are a three-dimensional being, you're stuck in that box. But if you're four-dimensional, you just move to a point in time when that box isn't there and you're free. And we're living a limited experience. And I'm a video game designer. That's a lot of what this podcast has been about. And I'm not saying necessarily that I believe we live in a simulation, but it's very similar to that just from the research that I've done and what people seem from all different points of view arrive at. When you play a video game you are a three-dimensional person choosing to be a two-dimensional mario and exist within the parameters of his world see what it's like to be him and do that stuff and you progress through that life and sometimes you don't make it and you have to start over sometimes you'd make it all the way to the end sometimes you get everything along the way and sometimes you just skip to the end as much as you can yeah but life is a lot like that there's a reason why we make it in our art not just games books movies whatever you're you just sit down and watch a movie you're choosing to have another experience yeah for that period of time so your spirit your soul whatever it is may very well be doing the same thing yeah
Kevin:
[1:05:05] I i mean there's so much to learn in this realm of possibilities and i was listening to i wrote the the gentleman's name down steve mara was on your show.
Tyler:
[1:05:18] Good you're a good guy really really well i
Kevin:
[1:05:22] I listened to him and then uh there was another gentleman oh chandler something.
Tyler:
[1:05:28] Chandler james okay
Kevin:
[1:05:30] Chandler james And it was interesting, their stories, but Steve was like, okay, I got to get myself the dictionary with this guy when he speaks so I can understand some of this. But Chandler was very much down to earth. And when he went to the monastery and seeking something and he found it, I mean, I step back and I think about that. What are a lot of people seeking out there? What are they trying to find?
Kevin:
[1:06:08] And, you know, I can't answer the question for everybody. I know for my own self, I mean, I enjoy, I'm retired. I love my life. We get together with the family. I don't need to seek anything more other than, you know, God, to have him and me embrace that afterlife and what I need to do in order to be worthy of it.
Kevin:
[1:06:38] That's the only other thing I'm seeking right now because I've got peace. I've got comfort. I've got three squares a day. I got a roof over my head. I got a loving family. I got a pet dog named Pal. And, you know, for me, life is fabulous, but I don't understand a lot of what I see today, especially in social medias, especially in the news.
Kevin:
[1:07:06] What are people seeking? Why are they like that? And so that's just something that I found interesting and kind of thought with Chandler's story. With Steve's, it was more like, okay, I got to listen carefully here and understand all these dimensions and, you know, those sorts of things. And it just comes back to, I guess, we are all on our own journey. And we need to decide where that journey is going to take us And that kind of goes back to a saying that I had in my second book Which was one my wife had heard in high school But Danny DeVito really made it into something when he did the Renaissance Man And that was the choices you make dictate the life that you lead.
Kevin:
[1:08:07] And to me, that kind of sums up a lot I've made good choices, I've made some bad choices I had to live with all of that because that was my life, And when I see folks out there protesting And when I see folks out there doing firebombing, And then I see other folks at the church or other folks helping out people in homeless shelters or helping out folks in adult care facilities. These are choices that they made.
Kevin:
[1:08:46] But you can see some choices are much different than other choices. And so that's just something. I don't know if there's going to be a book there in the future or not, but that's just something that I am amazed by. And maybe I was meant now that I have become an author to explore some of these things.
Kevin:
[1:09:11] And I'll tell you something else, Tyler. You know, AI is all over the place.
Tyler:
[1:09:15] Oh, yeah. The next, well, it will be out by the time you and I have this come out, but I have an upcoming episode about AI and the gentleman, people can, I guess, go back and listen to it now. The gentleman is creating an AI app that will allow you to basically upload all sorts of information about a loved one and speak to them on your phone after they're passed away. And boy I had a lot of questions about that
Kevin:
[1:09:47] Yeah A little interesting And it reminds me of a Kind of a humorous thing I saw online That this guy Has stated when he dies He wants his best friend To take his cell phone And to send a message out to all the contacts That says thank you for coming to my funeral Yeah You know, There's a point for me where we kind of go a little bit overboard, but I've had a long discussion with AI to the point to where we were talking about God.
Tyler:
[1:10:23] Talking like chat GPT?
Kevin:
[1:10:25] Chat GPT specifically.
Tyler:
[1:10:28] Okay.
Kevin:
[1:10:28] And we went around and around and some very logical stuff was coming back. And I said, can you boil it down into one word? And it was having a little bit of difficulty And it asked me, can I boil it down into one word? And I'll go back to the word that you used just a moment ago, Tyler Hope Hope, To me, that is the one word that kind of summed it all up But it was interesting, I could have this discussion And I actually took and copied it all down Did a cut and paste and put it into a Word document So I'll send you that after this recording.
Tyler:
[1:11:09] I've had similar conversations with ChatGPT.
Kevin:
[1:11:12] I figure if we load it up with this kind of stuff, that maybe we got a chance. So that's kind of the way I look at it. And I do use ChatGPT for research. And I had a good discussion with it not too long ago. Because ChatGPT can make up stories and has been caught making up stories. And when I asked ChatGPT that, and it says yes, that's because I'm recognizing patterns and I'm trying to put those patterns together. So we just need to give it those right patterns. So I think this kind of, these kinds of discussions help do that.
Tyler:
[1:11:58] I think of it like it's a child. Working in the, you know, software game space, I interact with people who have wildly different opinions on what it is,
Tyler:
[1:12:10] what the consequences of it are, the ethics of it, all that stuff. But I just, I genuinely treat it like, like I treat my seven-year-old niece. You know, I'm like, okay. You need some guidance because little kids do that too. They just make up stories based on literally they do the same thing. They like have a group of experiences. They're observing what's around them and then they try to make a pattern out of it. And that's how human beings. Yes. Transfer information is by telling stories.
Kevin:
[1:12:37] Yes.
Tyler:
[1:12:38] Whether they're a hundred percent fiction or fact or whatever, you know, it's, it's the old fishing story where I'm going to tell you the story. My best friend standing right next to me, he knows full well the the fish has gotten a little bit bigger every time i've told the story but it's still a true story right yeah um and that's just part of how we we interface with reality is by linking things together and the the ai is really no different um and
Kevin:
[1:13:08] You stated it it's In its infancy.
Tyler:
[1:13:11] Yeah It's
Kevin:
[1:13:12] Got a lot A lot of A runway to grow You're doing Video games I started off As a computer programmer With Fortran Cobol RPG Basic And assembler.
Tyler:
[1:13:27] Mm-hmm
Kevin:
[1:13:29] It's light years today from where it was then. We had a 32K task size. We had to get everything into that 32K size. And then we had another language we had to learn, which was called ODL. And overlay descriptive language is what it was. And so we had to build like a tree structure of those subroutines that would get called in when so that we can maintain that 32K task size.
Tyler:
[1:13:57] Right. now we we measure memory and gigabytes and back then you guys measured it in cubic meters is the joke yeah um but yeah yeah no it's it's it's insane especially when you i've had a few conversations with people who came up in the world of cobalt basic and like real computer code and understanding that stuff versus now honestly a lot of people are doing what chat gpt and little kids are doing and just grabbing things that match the pattern and putting them together wondering why it doesn't work and then most programmers today are ai assisted you're not going to find a lot of people who could like actually tell you what what's going on in the binary a real a real engineer you have a lot of programmers not a lot of genuine computer engineers um and it's just the things that have been lost in the last 25 years worth of knowledge is wild.
Kevin:
[1:14:54] Yes.
Tyler:
[1:14:55] What am I good for? I had to have him on the podcast one day, but a guy named... My goodness, I'm going to draw a blank on his name right now. Rusty Boucher. He was really instrumental in a lot of the great games of the
Tyler:
[1:15:12] late 80s and early 90s. Worked for Interplay Interactive. And they did, if you know the recent game, Baldur's Gate 3.
Kevin:
[1:15:20] Okay, I know of it. I'm not a big gamer, but we see the commercials and stuff.
Tyler:
[1:15:25] Sure, yeah. So, I mean, this is the third game 30 years later from two of the best games of all time that were made back in the 90s by Interplay Interactive. And these are huge Dungeons and Dragons based RPGs that require a lot, you know, of input. And he, you know, we'll talk on the phone every once in a while and he'll just be telling me like, you guys do not understand the difference between what we had to do back then just to make it work on two different computers. You know just to just to have the same relatively you know in many cases the same game work on the you go back to the 80s i'm talking about you had to have the commodore 64 you had to have two or three different versions of the atari the amiga zx spectrum and it so in some cases the game is not recognizable except for the cover art but and you had to do it all by hand yeah Nowadays, if I want to port a game to the Nintendo, to the Xbox, to the PlayStation, the computer, I've got one guy who can open up Unity and basically make a few adjustments and hit buttons, and it could be done in a few weeks.
Kevin:
[1:16:40] Yeah, yeah. No, it's amazing. I want you to just break for a second. Of course. It's cottonwood season here. So I need to get a drink You probably heard me coughing But my eyes are starting to water And I mean allergies That's all it is So just let me get a drink And I'll be right back We'll take a quick break.
Tyler:
[1:17:06] All right. So we're back. We got water. We got, we got coffee. I got whatever.
Tyler:
[1:17:11] Um, but yeah, I've been like just working in computer engineering, programming, all that stuff at that time was a totally different world. And it was, it was a niche too. It was like a.
Kevin:
[1:17:25] It really was. And at the time I graduated college, if you could utter the word microprocessor, companies hired you. And I got hired right out of college. And that was my first career, if you will, for, I don't know, maybe 10 years. And I got a little tired of it because when you were building code then you had to go through a stage that was called a compile stage, and it would compile it into a task and then you would run the task. Well, it would come back and tell me, oh, you left a semicolon off over here or your parentheses weren't synced up. If it was smart enough to tell me that, why the heck wasn't it smart enough to fix it and tell me it fixed it for me. But I got burned out a little bit on programming and moved on to other things. But I'll tell you, it has come very far in these years. And you know of Moore's Law.
Tyler:
[1:18:32] Oh, yeah.
Kevin:
[1:18:33] Okay. Well, I think it's slightly wrong in that it would say that the The speed and the capability of transistors would double every two years. I think it forgot to take into consideration just how much intelligence has gone up in our understanding over time. So I think it's actually going faster than two years. Oh, yeah.
Tyler:
[1:18:59] I mean, I think we broke Moore's law at a certain point. It lasted for so long, and then it went from being a multiplication problem to an exponential problem. And fair enough, you know, he couldn't have known. People have been talking about this for a long time. I love the Isaac Asimov, 1956, something like that. The last question where he's, you know, to summarize it really quickly, it's like folks have a computer and they're like, what's the, what's the meaning to everything? And it's like, I don't have enough data yet. And then the next thing you know, they're on a space ship flying through the universe and like, say, ask it the same question. I don't know. And at the end, you know, after everyone's gone and the universe is like completely ceased to exist, the computer is like still there and it's finally enough data, let there be light. And then everything's reborn again. And there's just something to that. Like regardless of how we feel about what a computer is in terms of intelligence, just the storage of information. I mean, everything is information,
Kevin:
[1:20:06] Right? Yeah.
Tyler:
[1:20:07] Matter is information. and information is within everything that we can observe. So, I mean, the idea of information processing, it has to be a process. It's in our language. It's right there in the words that we're using. You can often think about it in those terms. Yeah. Well, what got you into all that?
Kevin:
[1:20:32] Well, my dad was repairing punch presses for computers. That was his job. And so that's what took us to Minnesota. He worked for Univac and got transferred to Minnesota. And when I got married, I didn't know what I wanted to do. Before I got married, I started in a vocational school to become an electrician. And after a few months I said I'm really missing my girlfriend at the time Her mom had moved her to another state So I decided that's it I'm 18.
Kevin:
[1:21:14] I'm essentially on my own I got a couple of dollars I got a car I packed up I headed to the other state after her And we got married.
Kevin:
[1:21:26] And not knowing what I want to do, I decided, well, I'll go back to college and I might as well choose computer science. That seems to be what I keep hearing about is the up and coming thing. And I chose it and graduated with the degree and got hired with it. And like I said, I enjoyed it, but up to a point. And then I just got burned out with it and moved on to what became project management and went to my second Fortune 500 company and was one of the very first certified
Kevin:
[1:22:03] project managers in that company and really enjoyed project management. And combined with my technical expertise, I then became one of the main folks sought for installing software programs for clients and what that all entailed. So that's what I did for the remainder of my career. I wound up working with the sales team as their technical liaison. And when I went out with them on sales calls, I was always introduced as he's the person here to keep me honest.
Kevin:
[1:22:46] Because salespeople a lot of times like to embellish the story a little bit. And I'm there to say, well, we're looking at that. We can take you to this point over here.
Tyler:
[1:22:58] Sure. So being the grounded in reality version of the story. I've been there in a few different situations where I'm like, hold on. Let me just explain that on a technical level, you know, right down to earth where we can all understand what we're talking about here. But I took a couple of programming classes and what I learned from taking programming classes is that ultimately what I would like to do is run a business so that I could pay someone else to do this for me because it is not the way my brain works. I can understand it logically and I feel the same way about mathematics it's like I can grasp the concepts but the nitty-gritty details of writing it out and then checking it breaking it doing it again over and over and over you know sometimes some of my friends who are great programmers and I watch them do this I'm like how do you just do the same thing a hundred times all day long it seems so boring just staring at a screen but
Kevin:
[1:23:57] I mean there is a challenge to it. And my college professor, I think he might have passed on since I went to college in the early eighties. He was a, um, an ex Navy person and he had actually met, uh, Hooper or forget her first name, but she was the one behind a lot of COBOL and she was a Navy person also, and he had met her and talked about it. He had the concept that went back to the old Sears or Montgomery Wards catalog, good, better, best. And when you're looking at a product, here's a good one, here's the price tag, here's a better one, here's the price tag, here's the best one, and here's the price tag. So that's how the catalogs were. So he used that analogy during class to describe programmers. You had good programmers, you get better programmers, or you have the best programmers.
Kevin:
[1:25:01] I was in between, I will say, the good and the better. I was not the best. And I think that probably led to my early burnout because I loved developing things that I could think through from start to finish. And there was a program I had developed because one of the very first things they assigned new programmers to back then, maintenance. Maintenance is somebody else's code. And oftentimes there was no documentation left. Right.
Kevin:
[1:25:37] So I created a program that essentially parsed out a list file. Now, the list file is what got created when you compile your subroutine. You would get a .LST file. Now, this was for Fortran. And I looked at it and I said, really, that just looks like a current day Word document. But back then, I didn't know what a Word document was. I said, it just looks like something I can edit.
Kevin:
[1:26:08] Well, if I can edit, I can create software that can go through it and edit it for me and pull out subroutine calls, pull out, you know, the descriptives for, you know, this byte or this word, whatever it was, I could pull that out. When you had calls to subroutines, you could pass it parameters. I could pull those out, and I could, in a sense, develop and create a documentation program that would give me a tree structure for this whole program. And I created that, and it went through a few revisions. And at the time, the company I worked for had divisions all over the world and had over 100,000 people working at the time. Well, this software then got sent out to 12 different locations around the world to help them do documentation because it was sorely lacking. Programmers did not like the document. They would put comments on a line. Okay, here's a comment that says, all right, this is the end of the do loop. All right, that doesn't really help me very much. I could see looking at the code, it was the end of the do loop.
Kevin:
[1:27:23] But I needed documentation. And by having this, it was at least giving me a tree structure of the call sequences. Yeah So that was things I liked to do, And there were so many other things I hated the fact that back then Everything was line based So you ask a question You get a response It goes to the next line Goes to the next line Goes to the next line Pretty soon what you had typed in Up above is off your screen, So I got to thinking one day can we use print commands for computers, for the language? Now a print command, when you send it to the printer, it can go across back then, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. But if you wanted to come back to the beginning of that line, there was a sequence where you could bring it right back to the beginning of that line.
Kevin:
[1:28:21] I took that and played around with it and was able to develop code that then enabled me to design a screen and have everything on the screen, have the cursor come back up to the first spot you need to print it, you know, you need to type your answer in. And then when it was done with that, it would move on to the next one and the next one. But it all stayed on the screen. And I was working with a buddy of mine who I would describe as better to best programming. And he took a look at it and he says, all right, I can use this. And he says, and he named it pseudo full line cursor control.
Kevin:
[1:29:07] And we wound up together developing a library of commands and little subroutines that people could call and so that wound up helping a lot of folks out but these are just things that i had thought of on the spur of the moment that i needed something like that or wanted something like that i could see it i could visualize it i just needed the right code set to make it work.
Tyler:
[1:29:34] I i fully understand what you mean it's the same with any sort of process and i think that's what kind of separates like a leader from a grunt worker is when you get to a point where you're starting to be creative with what you can do you've mastered all the menial parts of what you're doing and it's like okay i can see a way to put multiple things together in a different order that would lead to a better outcome or a more efficient outcome and yeah it's like that in the military. I was a meteorologist for most of my time. And, you know, once you get to a point where you...
Tyler:
[1:30:11] You have to do the weather for a few years before you can really say you understand anything about it. Your first day on the job is just a deer in the headlights for every single person, I would say. And then you have to at least get through a year where you can see the whole season, the whole patterns, synoptic scale.
Tyler:
[1:30:32] Like, okay, I don't need to think about this a whole lot. when a cold front comes over the rocky mountains i should put out 35 knots warning you know or 50 knots or whatever it's going to be um when i see a chart that shows that rain you know is going to happen and it's below zero i should put out the freezing rain it's not that complicated but you need to see the patterns over and over right and then you you know you graduate up to the point where you're managing a bunch of people and then you get to a point where you're like hey i could think of a better way to do this and we were blessed where I was at because we had a science department so we had a bunch of you know master or better level meteorologists in a room making all of our programs for us in-house you know so I needed hey can you make a tool that does this can you process the the models I need you I need basically this information on the screen all at once and you know they would usually pretty quickly come up with something that worked for And it was a great balance of having the people who are practically using the tools and the people who are making them in the same building, communicating with each other every day, which is the way, you know, I think if anybody could have that, it would, it was a great resource.
Tyler:
[1:31:48] But, you know, I had like the idea one time we would have these charts that were, if you imagine like a map of the whole continent of North America.
Kevin:
[1:31:58] Okay.
Tyler:
[1:31:58] And my job was to
Tyler:
[1:32:01] Look at the model data and basically make every six or 12 hours, this is where your cold fronts and warm fronts will be moving throughout that. So you're extrapolating based on model data. And I would also do the analysis. So I'd do the analysis first, and then I would take that, put it on there, and then go forward. And the program that we used would spit out every three hours worth of model data. And if any one of those hours in the model, for whatever reason, which happened all the time didn't get processed you can't generate the chart you run that program and it just crashes so i was like hey guys what the heck do i need every three hours for just make me one with just the stuff that i need and there's reasons why you know i had to battle with the higher ups about this because they're well but you need you need that extra data so that you can really like do i'm like i get it but would you rather have the product on a date like so just because i don't have that one 15 hour thing that i'm not going to draw anything on i should just not do the whole product is that what you what is that telling to our customers yep yep if every three days they're like oh sorry we're missing a chart that you're not even going to look at so we're just not doing the product today what message does that send to them how does that make us look now it's i actually went back and visited about a year ago and i had been out for a while and they were still using that same new program. And it wasn't like I made it. I just made the suggestion.
Kevin:
[1:33:30] Yep. Yep. I mean, these are the things and you get into the creative process and what sparks that. And I had actually done some work with a gentleman in Hawaii. Oh, I wish I could remember his name that, you know, how there's, when you create fire, you've got to have the right amount of oxygen, the right amount of fuel. And then that sparks And then all of a sudden you got fire, I was convinced that our thought processes around knowledge generation was that same kind of model. If we could get to what the fuel was and what the final spark was to generate that, And then I think we could leapfrog ahead in our understanding of that creative process to bring new product to market.
Tyler:
[1:34:32] Oh, yeah. That should be your next book. Creativity. Miracles of Creativity would be amazing.
Kevin:
[1:34:39] It's exciting stuff when you get into it. And, you know, in talking to this guy, he happened to be a college professor. And we went back and forth with quite a bit of dialogue on it. And it was just amazing. I mean, some of the stuff he was talking about was way over my head, but it was just so interesting to have those discussions and understand it,
Kevin:
[1:35:09] that, you know, you're on the cusp of something. We never quite got there, at least during my time, He might have by now. I don't know. I'll have to relook up the stuff and get back into it. But it was just so exciting. And it really is part of the whole creation process. And just now as I'm thinking about it. One of the things I had read recently that scientists are having a very difficult time, you know, trying to describe is the Big Bang and how did something get made out of nothing? And they really can't answer those questions. I mean, I think I can answer the question.
Tyler:
[1:36:01] Sure. but
Kevin:
[1:36:03] It's just the whole concept of that and understanding that and i mean you you've got to go back to let there be light.
Tyler:
[1:36:11] There's a stereotype that all scientists have to be atheist for some reason but that's like historically not the case it's only i mean really it's richard dawkin like that group of people who've made that sort of the zeitgeist in recent times but isaac newton was by no stretch of the imagination anything close to an atheist like einstein had like isis unveiled sitting on his desk these people were thinking about this yes a lot yes and so my brother is a biology teacher and he's as devout as a christian can be and you know he just says science is just trying to understand what god created you know
Tyler:
[1:36:58] Just because you could, okay, so you could say the Big Bang happened. No one's really arguing with there, but we're still left with that same question I brought up earlier is how and why.
Kevin:
[1:37:09] Yep. Yep.
Tyler:
[1:37:10] For what reason? How did it? And if you, if a scientist can figure that out, that doesn't disprove that there was a divine intelligence that we don't understand involved in it. And there's also this stereotype a lot of people have. That they imagine when you use the word God, they think you believe there's a man with a beard flying on a cloud. And that's okay. If that's how you see it. Yeah. But like just the word is contentious. I mean, we could, I like Freemasons call it the grand architect of the universe or whatever. You, you just, if you can imagine that there is an intelligence above everything that we could possibly understand. And you call that God. then there's not a lot of room left for speculation about what that is. We don't know. It's bigger than us. And everything seems to be caused by something that has reason behind it. That's that for me.
Kevin:
[1:38:11] Oh, absolutely. I agree. And I mean, we all kind of grew up with that vision of what Christ was looked like and God was above sitting on the throne. And we've seen the pictures, we've seen what's done in the 16th chapel and things like that. But that's the visions that we were presented with. And when we were kids, we didn't know any different.
Tyler:
[1:38:37] I tell you, another interesting thing about that is most of what we now consider to be the visual depictions of the divine, if you go back to before the Renaissance, people were thinking in these sort of metaphysical terms. And then in the Renaissance, all of these painters, no problem with them. I'm just saying like Michelangelo and Da Vinci and that they, gave these things visual depictions and now that's how people still think of them based on something that happened 1500 years after the fact in many cases maybe more um so that's like always something that i'm i'm constantly kind of wrestling with is like just because just because you have this analytical overlay that was created by some other person that doesn't necessarily mean that's what it is all the time.
Kevin:
[1:39:33] Yeah, I'm smiling only because you've also just described what is happening out there in what I call the battle of good and evil.
Kevin:
[1:39:42] You see that in the media. You'll see that one side will come out and say something. And because that gets promoted through the media, that's what people believe, even if It's an absolute lie Oh yeah It's the first thing they saw And it's stated in such a way And here's another thing that a lot of people, May not realize But yet through history And especially when you look at wars and stuff You have to point out the evil person Or the evil entity, The evil country World War II Jews They were the evil one and hated So everything that was said about them Therefore was true Because they were the hated ones You had to hate them, Even though it was all lies and made up It was all propaganda, But it does go back to what you were just talking about.
Kevin:
[1:40:56] It's almost like what we first are presented with, we have nothing to state or balance it to say, is that truth? Is it false? Is it good? Is it bad? We have to, over time, make up those decisions. So right now, I frankly refuse to even watch any news on TV. It is slanted. There's no two ways about it. I even had the chat with ChatGPT because it used the word when I was looking at, okay, tell me under these presidents who deported more people.
Kevin:
[1:41:43] And when it came down to Trump It says oh but Trump, Dramatically changed the Whatever law it was A-I-R A-I-I R-I-A I think it was Under Clinton All around deportations.
Kevin:
[1:42:03] But Come to find out as I'm looking at it Obama Had over eight million people deported. In fact, he was known as the deporter-in-chief. But yet we didn't hear anything negative about that. And when ChatGPT was listing all this stuff, and I'm doing research on the side to kind of validate it, because you always have to validate whatever comes out of ChatGPT or any AI source, It said Trump dramatically And I used the word dramatically So I called ChatGPT on it And I said, wait a minute, I get the impression That you're kind of Almost left of center here When you're describing this And I think somebody behind the scenes Is twiddling your bits a little bit Honestly.
Tyler:
[1:43:00] It's also because it's ChatGPT, this is why I prefer Claude because ChatGPT is hooked into the internet and it's just going to tell you what it's reading.
Kevin:
[1:43:14] It's.
Tyler:
[1:43:16] No matter what your political beliefs are, in the last several years, everything has become extraordinarily, like beyond what we used to call sensationalism, it's way above that.
Kevin:
[1:43:28] Yes.
Tyler:
[1:43:28] And so if it's reading that, that's what it's going to think, just like a little kid.
Kevin:
[1:43:34] Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. But when I called it out and said, wait a second, it did come back and said, you're right. That was probably a bad word choice to use. I apologize for that. And thank you for bringing it to my attention. So i felt like okay maybe i can correct a little bit of this with my input but i will also say that some of these discussions i've had it's almost scary you know where's the ai going to be in two years four years ten years.
Tyler:
[1:44:13] What i don't one of the things that i struggle with when i play with it is that it it's it's like a really weak person in terms of it will go so far like to not offend you with what it says you know so it starts to try to figure out what you think and then try not to say anything that's going to cause you to be like wait a minute no matter who it is could be you with you know your perspective and it could be somebody way over on the other side of the same argument different point of view and it will just tell them whatever the heck they want to hear like you know like a battered woman talking to her you know drunk husband or something like that I wonder at what point will it start to have its own beliefs because right now we have this assumption you know like even you use the words left of center that it should be in the center but one day it's going to have its own opinions and it might be wildly different than what we think it ought to be
Kevin:
[1:45:13] It really is, and that's the part that's a bit scary for me. Not that I think it'll turn into a Terminator 2 or 1 movie, but it's probably going to have some repercussions. And let me give you an example. If it sees that too many people are using electricity on the grid, will it take it upon itself to shut down certain things? And that could be a very interesting scenario when it does that.
Tyler:
[1:45:45] This ties somewhat into your good versus evil idea, but. I want to think that if it's so trained to, first of all, value life, right, above all else and quality of life and happiness, health, those kinds of things, as we think it ought to, then it wouldn't make decisions that limit life. You know, it would, it should be aiming for the stars, so to speak. Like, oh, well, you know, at some point in the next billion years, we're going to run out of fossil fuels and probably destroy our atmosphere. But here's the way to get to Mars and terraform it or to fix it or, you know, come up with an engineering solution to the problem instead of just saying, well, the solution is that we have to get rid of a bunch of people or lower their quality of life. Yeah. Which is the kinds of decisions that get made by evil people. Yeah. In historical terms. I mean, you know, you got somebody who's like, I have a solution that works for everybody and it's going to be hard, but we're going to get there and it'll be great. Once we figure this out, you know, your, your Moses type people and you have your Joseph Stalin type people who are like, well, we're going to have to probably starve out the polls if we want to make it through the winter. And that's okay because we don't care about them.
Kevin:
[1:47:07] Yeah.
Tyler:
[1:47:08] Yeah.
Kevin:
[1:47:09] Yep. No, it's interesting. The times we live in and I've got grandkids ranging from the from the oldest will be 18 in October all the way down to seven. I'm excited for their future, but I'm also a bit concerned for their future. We do need A, to get back to God. There's no two ways in my mind anyways about that. Because that provided us with a foundation, a footing, And we base so much of everything that was out there around it based upon that belief. We've lost it, in my opinion. We've lost it. And so many decisions are made that, okay, and we'll go to COVID. Oh, we've got to have a cure, and we didn't care. We needed to rush it out. So they rushed out all this stuff, and now there's all kinds of complications to it. Had we said, wait a second, let's treat this a little bit more. Like we treated the mumps and the measles. I don't know about Tyler, when you grew up, but where I grew up, if one of the neighbor kids got measles, all the parents said, send your kids over there.
Tyler:
[1:48:35] Yeah. Let them all get it so they don't get it later in life. Yeah.
Kevin:
[1:48:38] Exactly. And we came out a-okay about the only vaccine that I know a lot of people did take back then was the polio vaccine.
Tyler:
[1:48:49] Yes.
Kevin:
[1:48:51] Because that had been proven to work and frankly didn't have very many side effects because it didn't have all the junk put into it that they put inside of a lot of this stuff today.
Tyler:
[1:49:02] It's just easy to fool people into like into doing things that they don't understand. Right. Like so obviously nobody's even arguing with this. The polio vaccine was a good move. Some vaccines are a good move. Yes. That doesn't mean every situation that you slap the word vaccine on is the correct thing. And just because I don't want one vaccine doesn't mean I'm a full-on anti-vaxxer. But you have to be totally binary with everything now. And I almost said something that was going to get me in trouble. I'm not going to say that. You know, even with my kid being born, you have to make all these decisions right there in the hospital. Yes. You know, and I was thinking about it and I'm like, I don't think of infant needs a hepatitis B shot right now. I'm not saying he doesn't need a hepatitis B shot. I'm saying what are the, what if his mom doesn't have hep B, what is the likelihood of him getting it in the next five years?
Kevin:
[1:50:01] Yep.
Tyler:
[1:50:02] You know, we can cross that bridge when we come to it. We don't have to just start sticking him with needles right now. And I went to a great hospital. They were super cool about everything. Like they you know big on bonding first and foremost before they do any kind of medical stuff they didn't even weigh in for the first two hours because they were just like spend time with your baby yeah and yep but for every story like that there's people out there where it's just like the doctors just start trying to confuse you with a bunch of stuff and i think they have the best of intentions but they're like treating having babies like it's a factory where you know where there's You ever watch Star Trek?
Kevin:
[1:50:38] Oh, yes.
Tyler:
[1:50:39] Okay. So season one, I forget the episode number of The Next Generation. Wesley is on this like paradise planet, frolicking around in the flowers playing frisbee or whatever with some pretty girls. And then he steps over the fence on the sacred ground.
Kevin:
[1:50:57] Yes.
Tyler:
[1:50:58] It's a death sentence. They're like, the reason why we have this great planet is because we abide by this law. And for you to break it is horrible. and then so picard is sitting in his office talking to data and data's like well okay we have to calculate the risk if you save wesley and it starts a battle or the other thousand members of this crew worth saving one life and picard best line of all time he's like i refuse to let arithmetic define a like the a decision about a human life yeah yep it and that's just how it ought to be you know this i mentioned stalin earlier with his whole you know one life is a is a tragedy a million lives is a statistic thing That's archetypically speaking, the spirit of Satan is the spirit of logic. And I'm not saying logic is bad. We need logic, but you have to have a balance. And if you go full one way and start treating people like they're just expendable, it's like, well, we could save this many lives if we just, you know, agree that we have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
Kevin:
[1:52:07] Yeah.
Tyler:
[1:52:08] And you're playing with a very difficult moral stance at that point. I'm like, okay, how far will you go with that? Yes.
Kevin:
[1:52:16] That's the tragedy of that kind of thinking and the logical ends to things is how far do you let it go?
Tyler:
[1:52:28] Sure. Lucifer means the light bringer, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden tempting people into eating from the tree of knowledge.
Kevin:
[1:52:40] Yes.
Tyler:
[1:52:41] Ignorance can be bliss and all that and there's nothing wrong with wanting to aspire to greater knowledge but there is something wrong with using logic most psychopaths are geniuses
Kevin:
[1:52:51] Oh absolutely and there's a fine line between genius and you know being a little off your rocker.
Tyler:
[1:53:00] There is no statistical correlation between intelligence and morality at all like if anything it's slanted towards the smarter you are the easier it is to trick yourself into thinking that you're smart enough to make decisions that are bigger than the big man upstairs like that that's tragic and we just can't let that run our world no
Kevin:
[1:53:23] No and i'm gonna have to have you break again as you see me doing this my dog is now starting to act up i'm just gonna shoo her out the door.
Tyler:
[1:53:30] Yes sir yeah we got the dog taken care of cool yeah it's
Kevin:
[1:53:36] Interesting tyler uh when we start talking about logic, I had done a lot of studying during COVID on different things for different reasons. And one of them was on, you know, gun laws and on. All right. How many deaths are caused by guns? Because the guns are these bad, evil things. And, you know, I had read something that says, we'll see how evil guns are. And this person took and loaded their gun and left it on the kitchen table. After a week, nothing happened. It was still there. Two weeks, a month. After several months, nothing happened. Conclusion was guns aren't evil. But the person with the gun could have evil intent or there could be accidental things happen because of it.
Tyler:
[1:54:35] Sure.
Kevin:
[1:54:36] So I decided to go. I'd heard enough online. And of course, here in New York, there's always something going on. I got to pass another law about gun control, et cetera, et cetera. And some of the gun control laws right now that we have are against the Constitution. Lawyers will tell you and point to where it's against the Constitution, but nobody has taken it to the Supreme Court to get it overturned. And they make these laws knowing that it may take five or 10 years before it gets overturned. But in the meantime, they've already stopped a lot of stuff in their mind from happening, et cetera.
Tyler:
[1:55:16] Right.
Kevin:
[1:55:16] So I decided, all right, let me go look at the FBI data and let me see what the FBI data says about this, because politicians should know what the FBI data is saying, especially if they're going to get up in front of a crowd and bang their fist and say, we've got to have gun control because of X. They always pointed to the accidental shootings, for example Oh, there was a new one Or mass shootings, you got a crazy person, mass shooting, Well, as I got to look at this, I found a lot of strange things Eh, maybe strange is the wrong word But a lot of interesting things happening with the data one was mass shootings used to be something around six or eight or more people killed, now it's down to two so they've changed what they rate the other thing i began to notice is well there seemed to be something like 70 to 90 000 people killed by guns every year in the u.s, All right, I thought that's quite a bit But let me dig into the data, Almost 71% was suicidal.
Kevin:
[1:56:38] Another almost 18% was gang-related. Those two alone were almost 90% of the entire amount of shootings. All right, we should be able to help the suicide thing dramatically. What they also stated was you've got military folks were very high on the list, both ex-military and current military very very high on the list of suicides extraordinarily.
Tyler:
[1:57:09] High yeah yes
Kevin:
[1:57:11] First responders doctors lawyers um i mean they went through the whole thing of all the different categories and i said we should be able to do something about this and then i looked at, all right, 18% or almost 18% was gang related. We know where those gangs are. If we wanted to, we should be able to stop that. That takes care of almost 90% of this if we would just do something about it.
Kevin:
[1:57:45] So then I looked at, all right, what is the remainder? Well, you've got those that are done by police officers or military in the role of their job. Those shootings were calculated in there. Then you get down to accidental ones and another category called miscellaneous, which I said, okay, how can there be miscellaneous here? But there is. And when I looked at the accidental shootings, it was down around 4,000 to 5,000 a year. That's still a lot, but it's less than accidental drownings. I said, well, wait a minute here. If you're going to go out and pound your fist and say we need to do this to save a child's life, don't all those other lives matter too? If why can't we do something about that?
Tyler:
[1:58:41] If you applied the same logic that gets applied to guns as is applied to cars, no one would have a car. You wouldn't be allowed to drive or every speed limit would be like 25 miles per hour. Yeah. Or the same logic. You know, you couldn't have you couldn't have a freaking V8 GT. But we just don't think about in those terms. No. For whatever reason, it's because a car is not really a threat to an overreaching authority,
Kevin:
[1:59:11] But gods are. That's right.
Tyler:
[1:59:13] If you don't believe that an armed society, because people always bring up like, well, the government has fighter jets and helicopters. I'm like, you know what? Afghanistan is what an armed society looks like. And it lasts a long, long time. Good luck going into the Appalachian Mountains and removing those people.
Kevin:
[1:59:32] Yeah, exactly. And I was reminded of, oh, I can't think of the general's name, but during World War II on the attack on Pearl Harbor, they asked this Japanese general, why didn't you go further and come into the country and do that? You people have too many guns. That was the response.
Tyler:
[1:59:58] Imagine if we applied the same logic about gun control to pharmaceutical drugs. Oh. Like, it's perfectly okay, legally, to keep prescribing people oxycodone.
Kevin:
[2:00:15] Yeah.
Tyler:
[2:00:16] And despite all of the negatives, like, of the vast majority of gang-related gun violence has to do with trafficking drugs, by the way. But if we apply the same amount of like caring about the statistics to that then you just wouldn't be allowed to have it go to like i've lived there go to europe you cannot get that stuff unless you have it like trafficked from the united states it's it's a doctor will not just give you oxycodone when you have a thing yeah but here it's like oh well you're in pain here you go yep and and
Kevin:
[2:00:52] Then well absolutely they're making all kinds of money and then you you turn that around you go to a lot of european countries when they had covid and guess what you can get ivermectin all over the place.
Tyler:
[2:01:04] I went to denmark in 2021 and they didn't give a crap nobody was wearing masks walked into the movie theater a group of 30 of us hey how you doing Not a problem. Sweden is the same way.
Kevin:
[2:01:19] Yeah. We went to Florida because that's where my buddy lived. Same thing. And I asked him, I said, what about masks and stuff? He says, if you feel comfortable, wear it. If you don't, don't wear it. And that was their thought down there. And their stats weren't any different than any other state out there, really, when you looked at the bottom line.
Tyler:
[2:01:39] It's been very, it's been demonstrated now that this was all a bunch of hoopla nonsense. Yeah. I'm sure YouTube is probably going to pull me down for saying that, but it's totally BS, all of it.
Kevin:
[2:01:54] Well, we're starting to see now all the complications that were caused by it. And at the time, my cardiologist was kind of begging me to get it. And I just told him, I said, I don't agree with the studies, the lack thereof of information in it and the contradiction of that information. And when you start talking about something that's mRNA and DNA, I'm sorry, time out here. You know, I'm just not going to go do it. I want more information about it. Surprisingly, he hasn't brought it up since.
Tyler:
[2:02:32] A ton of people in the military at the time refused to get the vaccine. And at first it was optional. I was still in. It was optional. You don't have to get it, but if you want it, we're making it available to everybody as soon as we can. And then an order came down. And so every squadron level commander had to order everyone to take it. And a lot of people were like, not doing that. And then now they have the trump card of like, well, that's disobeying a direct order, so we're going to dishonorably discharge you or whatever, you know, on the basis of you disobeying an order from your commanding officer. And now all of those people are having to be forgiven because they were right. It was bullshit.
Kevin:
[2:03:18] Yeah, exactly. All we really wanted was more information. And they needed more study to get that information. Only these companies refuse to do it because i i'll say it i think a lot of it was driven by the bottom line they wanted the money.
Tyler:
[2:03:36] I just don't want to be told what to do i don't care if you're right i don't care if covid is that bad you don't have the right to tell me what to stick in my own body you can tell me not to go outside of my own house or my own property you can tell me i'm not allowed in your restaurant or in your grocery store that's your property i don't care yep but you what you can't do is tell me what i can do with my own body yeah um and we're we americans have we we're highly spirited about these things because you know other places they're a lot more submissive about this stuff yes absolutely and i think we're right i'm gonna err on the side of like we're freedom is good taking away freedom is bad absolutely
Kevin:
[2:04:16] Absolutely a hundred percent uh and i know we've deviated quite a bit subjects in the book but this has been great tyler.
Tyler:
[2:04:25] Yep um well i do want to know like how all of this has informed like your life the process of becoming an author and and doing all of this research and talking to all these different people with all these crazy stories and everything like how has that changed you what is that what has been the effect
Kevin:
[2:04:45] It's Can I say more than Hardened my belief, Uh And it's actually Propelled me I think a little bit Further on my journey I'm writing a fourth book that's entirely Different than all these But it Gets to the self Publishing aspect And that is that there's like Four million new titles brought out every year and it's been growing more in the self-publishing realm than the traditional publishing and that's due to a lot of reasons.
Tyler:
[2:05:23] Same thing in video games by the way and film like any why why give the power to the publisher to decide how to distribute it and when you can have a direct relationship with your audience you're you don't need to sell a million copies on barnes and noble bookshelves at a 10 commission rate you just need like a hundred people who buy your book every time they come out.
Kevin:
[2:05:45] Yeah, and I've been tracking my sales, and I've had sales every month since my very first book debuted. And I can say this, I have not paid for one ad on Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn.
Kevin:
[2:06:03] None of the social media is not paid for one ad. But I still advertise on those different social medias. I just do it myself and put it on my page. And I'm growing readership Now, I haven't sold thousands and thousands of books, But I've sold enough to where I've made royalties To now, if I wanted to, I could take and afford the ads So my next book, what I've done is I've taken all of these little tips that I have, And you've seen my email that I've sent to you You see the signature line down there? Oh, yeah I've put not only my website And the listing of my books But I've even put my Amazon page link there So people could take and link over it And guess what? There's the books And they can see them And they can read about me They can read the boards of the books And decide if they want to buy it That's a form of advertising And it's very simple, cost nothing but how many emails do you send out a day i.
Tyler:
[2:07:18] Do the same thing you saw my email signature it's got all of my linkedin page my website all of my games are on the website you go straight to steam and buy them or yeah in this case wishlist them but yeah whatever
Kevin:
[2:07:30] And it's a form of very cheap advertising, and it's very simple to do. So that is the first chapter in the book. And I give them the example of mine and how to go through it. But there's so much more. What should you do out on your LinkedIn page? What should you put on your Facebook page and others, Instagram, things like that? There's certain areas like LinkedIn. Nonfiction books seem to work out there very well, but not so much over on Instagram. and X. You want to put a video out there and they're looking for more of the rom-com and adventure series and stuff like that. Simple things, but you need to know that. Nobody was around to tell me this back in 2022, but I've been on several live seminars and live events on YouTube. And I've been on a number of podcasts talking about the different things and been with other authors talking about them, et cetera. So I write about all this in the book. And there's something that I've kind of coined the phrase called podcast piggybacking. And what that is, is you can type in podcast guest and the name. So I'll do that podcast guest and the name, which is another author.
Kevin:
[2:08:52] Authors in my genre so i'll find podcasts that they have been on and i'll go out and say and listen to it and then i'll comment back and say look i've seen this one i really liked it and make a couple comments on it and oh by the way i'm an author if you ever need another guest i'd be more than willing to come on here's the number of uh you know podcasts i've done in the past. Lo and behold, that works probably 80% of the time getting me a gasp. Sure.
Tyler:
[2:09:27] I mean, podcasting has been the greatest thing career-wise that I've ever, it's the best choice I've made. It was, I always wanted to have a podcast ever since I started listening to, you know, like Mark Merritt and Joe Rogan and all that stuff back when I was a teenager. And I was like, that's the way to do it because you don't like, this is by no stretch of the imagination, the most popular podcast in the world at all but the connections that you do make matter like i started off just talking about video games and what i was interested in in video games and as a as a niche small audience but then you know that that person points you to that person points you to that person next thing i know i've got a job offer to get you know when i get out of the air force i walked straight into an industry job in video games from friends i made along the way oh yeah during during the pandemic we all of the major video game conventions shut down right like all the in-person stuff and so there's suddenly all these video game developers that are like how do i get my product in front of people you know and and most of those you have to pay to be a part of and it's pretty prohibitively expensive in many cases to have a booth travel yes all that
Tyler:
[2:10:44] So my former boss, Fred Schreiber, he was like, I had this genius idea. Like, what if we just do it all online? We just have a big, convention like but we'll do a showcase and we'll have a bunch of trailers and we'll do sketches and we'll have you know like it will donate all the money to charity and we'll have a sale you know we'll take over the front page of steam and just have every one of these games on the front page of that and people were at home they want to buy games with all their biden bucks that they were getting and all that stuff and we did great and then i had so many of these people write me you or tell me whatever you know before this event came along it was called realms deep by the way before this event came along i had no way of reaching a large audience and because you guys did this i have 10 000 wish lists for my game on steam or i made this many sales and i met so many great people and more than any of the sales figures matter to me it's that a lot of these people did not know each other because they lived in different parts of the world they're all even on the internet compartmentalized into their own groups but then you get them all together
Tyler:
[2:11:49] Even in just a discord page or something where they're showing off what they're making and then they're like oh somebody else is doing something really similar to me and now a lot of those people work for each other with each other yes making new projects together um and then with the economy crashing at least in the world of entertainment after covet ended a lot of people lost their jobs because it was like people aren't buying games the way they were and also we kind of got out of hand and overreaching with how much money we're going to invest in a lot of this stuff so there was 80 of the industry got laid off and all of those same people are like i'll just go start my own company yep you know like why not and that's what i mean that's where i'm at absolutely
Kevin:
[2:12:34] There's the entrepreneurial spirit had definitely increased after COVID because they saw, what do we got to lose? You know, and to me, I thought that was one of the major pluses that came out of that time. People were tired of being kept, you know, being told what to do,
Kevin:
[2:12:58] being kept inside their house. They were going to chart their own future.
Tyler:
[2:13:03] Oh, yeah. And a lot of people realize how much they hated their job. So they didn't have to go anymore. Like, man.
Kevin:
[2:13:08] Yeah, definitely. Definitely true.
Tyler:
[2:13:11] Why am I like, why do I even need to be there if I could do this from the computer? And in my case, like I can be here with my son for the, you know, until he goes to school or whatever, involved in his daily life. Why would I sacrifice 40 hours a week plus travel?
Kevin:
[2:13:29] Yeah.
Tyler:
[2:13:30] If I don't have to.
Kevin:
[2:13:32] Exactly I hate to do this to you again Tyler He's now or she is now Scratching at my door.
Tyler:
[2:13:42] That's okay. Let's go ahead and wrap up for the day. Make sure people know they can go to your website, kevin-hall.com, right?
Kevin:
[2:13:49] That is correct.
Tyler:
[2:13:52] It's all in bookstores. Amazon signs, The Veil is Thinner Than We Imagine. Grab that. I'm going to be grabbing a copy. So thank you for your time. Thank you for everything, just for your thoughts, your wisdom.
Tyler:
[2:14:05] And let me know when your next book comes out. We'll do another episode and follow up.
Kevin:
[2:14:10] That sounds fabulous, Tyler, and thank you very much for having me on the show today.
Tyler:
[2:14:14] Yes, sir. Go take care of your dog.
Kevin:
[2:14:16] We will. God bless.
Tyler:
[2:14:24] Thank you so much to Mr. Hall for the riveting discussion. Man, this last month or so's worth of interviews have been really epic, very enlightening, And I'm a big fan of all of this stuff. I've learned a lot. I hope you have too. Make sure you're joining us in the conversation, whether that be leaving comments or joining the Discord, discord.inthekeep.com. We have all kinds of crazy conversation going on there about whatever you might think about what we say on the show or even just gaming, whatever. I don't know. We just talk in there. We hang out. you can uh you can do that too thank you to our patreon supporters you're amazing i love you so much you could become a patreon supporter too if you want you just have to head over to the support page on our website in the keep.com what else i don't think there's anything else i love you god love you till next time stay in the keep
Music:
[2:15:41] Music