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EP251: Jesan Sorrells - 10 Books Every Man Should Read · The Sovereign Man Podcast

• 0:00
  Jesan Sorrells: I've got a full life,
• 0:01
  Jesan Sorrells: and yet somehow I'm able to carve time out in my life for reading,
• 0:05
  Jesan Sorrells: for comprehension.
• 0:06
  Jesan Sorrells: The reason I'm able to do that is because I exited the matrix.
• 0:11
  Jesan Sorrells: I stopped doing scrolling.
• 0:12
  Jesan Sorrells: I very strictly monitor my consumption of entertainment.
• 0:17
  Jesan Sorrells: I don't play video games in my house.
• 0:19
  Jesan Sorrells: Sorry,
• 0:20
  Jesan Sorrells: men.
• 0:20
  Jesan Sorrells: If that's really what you want to do, you've got to fix the problem.
• 0:23
  Jesan Sorrells: You want to read more?
• 0:24
  Jesan Sorrells: That's where it starts.
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: You're a man living in the modern world in a time when men and manhood are not what they once were.
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: You live life on your own terms.
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: You're self-sufficient.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: You think for yourself and you march to the beat of your own drum.
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: When life knocks you down,
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: you get back up because in your gut, you know that's what men do.
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: You're a badass and a warrior.
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: And on the days when you forget,
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: we are here to remind you who you really are.
• 0:57
  Nicky Billou: Welcome to the Sovereign Men podcast,
• 0:59
  Nicky Billou: where we aim to make men masculine again.
• 1:02
  Nicky Billou: I'm your man,
• 1:02
  Nicky Billou: Nicky Ballou,
• 1:03
  Nicky Billou: and I have a very special,
• 1:06
  Nicky Billou: erudite,
• 1:07
  Nicky Billou: and brilliant guest today,
• 1:09
  Nicky Billou: Hassan Soros. Welcome to the show, brother.
• 1:12
  Jesan Sorrells: How you doing, Nicky? It's a pleasure to be here.
• 1:15
  Nicky Billou: Pleasure to have you.
• 1:16
  Nicky Billou: I'm blessed,
• 1:17
  Nicky Billou: and I'm grateful.
• 1:18
  Nicky Billou: You know, I wanted to bring you on the show because you're a man who reads.
• 1:24
  Nicky Billou: And in this day and age,
• 1:26
  Nicky Billou: not a lot of men read very much anymore.
• 1:29
  Nicky Billou: And I want to inspire men, encourage men,
• 1:34
  Nicky Billou: challenge men to be more like you and to start
• 1:38
  Nicky Billou: reading.
• 1:39
  Nicky Billou: I'd really love for you to talk to us about your journey as a reader.
• 1:46
  Nicky Billou: What had you become a reader?
• 1:48
  Nicky Billou: Why do you still continue to read?
• 1:50
  Nicky Billou: And why do you have a podcast that's all about conversations surrounding the great books of
• 1:57
  Nicky Billou: Western civilization?
• 1:58
  Jesan Sorrells: Well,
• 1:58
  Jesan Sorrells: once again,
• 1:59
  Jesan Sorrells: thank you, Nikki, for having me on the show.
• 2:01
  Jesan Sorrells: You've asked me
• 2:01
  Jesan Sorrells: a lot of different things in that series of questions there.
• 2:06
  Jesan Sorrells: So let me see if I can knock
• 2:08
  Jesan Sorrells: some of these down.
• 2:09
  Jesan Sorrells: My journey as a reader started very young.
• 2:13
  Jesan Sorrells: I read my Bang Through,
• 2:16
  Jesan Sorrells: my first Spider-Man comic that actually my father gave me probably when I was about six years old.
• 2:22
  Jesan Sorrells: And then from there, I leapt right into Hemingway and Steinbeck.
• 2:28
  Jesan Sorrells: I think the first book I read was of mice and men.
• 2:31
  Jesan Sorrells: And I remember crying at the end when Lenny died.
• 2:37
  Jesan Sorrells: And then move right from there until things like The Sun Also Rises and a lot of other heavier books.
• 2:42
  Jesan Sorrells: And part of the reason for that was I understood at a very young age, and this was probably around six, seven, eight years old,
• 2:50
  Jesan Sorrells: that once I could read a book,
• 2:55
  Jesan Sorrells: the whole plethora, the whole vista of things began to open to me.
• 3:01
  Jesan Sorrells: So I was probably already oriented towards reading.
• 3:06
  Jesan Sorrells: My grandmother had a master's degree in teaching.
• 3:11
  Jesan Sorrells: My father was going to school for journalism at the time.
• 3:14
  Jesan Sorrells: My mother was going to law school at the time.
• 3:18
  Jesan Sorrells: You know, we had a household that had books in it and we were bibliophiles.
• 3:23
  Jesan Sorrells: We are bibliophiles and I'm raising my children to be bibliophiles.
• 3:27
  Jesan Sorrells: Fast forward a few years,
• 3:29
  Jesan Sorrells: you ask, how did I continue on?
• 3:32
  Jesan Sorrells: Well,
• 3:32
  Jesan Sorrells: you know,
• 3:33
  Jesan Sorrells: I graduated high school in the mid 90s before video games were real,
• 3:38
  Jesan Sorrells: were as big a distraction as they are now.
• 3:40
  Jesan Sorrells: Matter of fact, I often say to my kids,
• 3:42
  Jesan Sorrells: if I had the video games now,
• 3:45
  Jesan Sorrells: back in the 1990s that you have,
• 3:47
  Jesan Sorrells: I probably would have never left my room.
• 3:50
  Jesan Sorrells: My mother was not a person,
• 3:53
  Jesan Sorrells: nor was my stepfather.
• 3:54
  Jesan Sorrells: But my parents were not people who said, you know, you can go have a TV in your room and you can go squirrel in there and you can go hang out and do whatever it is you're going to do.
• 4:03
  Jesan Sorrells: I also grew up in a time before cell phones and social media distractions.
• 4:08
  Jesan Sorrells: So I had books.
• 4:09
  Jesan Sorrells: Um,
• 4:11
  Jesan Sorrells: now that doesn't mean that I was weak or,
• 4:14
  Jesan Sorrells: uh,
• 4:15
  Jesan Sorrells: ill fit.
• 4:16
  Jesan Sorrells: Uh,
• 4:16
  Jesan Sorrells: you know, I, I got out there, I got after it.
• 4:19
  Jesan Sorrells: I got into fistfights when I was a teenager.
• 4:21
  Jesan Sorrells: I was a brawler between like 13 and 18.
• 4:24
  Jesan Sorrells: So I wasn't no Wilton Violet,
• 4:26
  Jesan Sorrells: right?
• 4:26
  Jesan Sorrells: I wasn't just,
• 4:27
  Jesan Sorrells: you know, reading a book and just hanging out and living a life of the
• 4:31
  Jesan Sorrells: mind.
• 4:31
  Jesan Sorrells: Um, I've always been a person who combines the intellect with action,
• 4:35
  Jesan Sorrells: uh, and put those
• 4:36
  Jesan Sorrells: two things together and been seeking spaces where I can best not only articulate ideas,
• 4:44
  Jesan Sorrells: but also walk out actions.
• 4:48
  Jesan Sorrells: They asked about the podcast.
• 4:49
  Jesan Sorrells: So the reason I put together the podcast starting back in late 2021 was because I had an epiphany
• 4:55
  Jesan Sorrells: of an idea.
• 4:57
  Jesan Sorrells: And the epiphany was coming out of COVID that business books had really failed us.
• 5:03
  Jesan Sorrells: Matter of fact, most business books were saying the exact same thing, just in regurgitated form
• 5:07
  Jesan Sorrells: over and over again.
• 5:09
  Jesan Sorrells: And we weren't actually getting to the core of the issue of the challenges that leaders
• 5:13
  Jesan Sorrells: face inside of organizations.
• 5:15
  Jesan Sorrells: And the core could be found,
• 5:17
  Jesan Sorrells: maybe not in yet another business book by yet another business
• 5:22
  Jesan Sorrells: book writer with a regurgitated hybridized idea,
• 5:25
  Jesan Sorrells: but maybe they could be found in books
• 5:28
  Jesan Sorrells: that existed long before business books.
• 5:31
  Jesan Sorrells: And so I began to go back into the books of my childhood.
• 5:33
  Jesan Sorrells: I began to go back into books that I had read once and maybe put down or even books I'd never touched.
• 5:39
  Jesan Sorrells: And I began to build the podcast.
• 5:40
  Nicky Billou: It's interesting what you have to say about business books.
• 5:42
  Nicky Billou: I agree with you.
• 5:43
  Nicky Billou: Most business books are complete trash.
• 5:46
  Nicky Billou: I can't stand reading them.
• 5:47
  Nicky Billou: I have a bunch of them.
• 5:49
  Nicky Billou: I can't stand reading them.
• 5:50
  Nicky Billou: There's there's and I've read a whole lot of them in my lifetime,
• 5:55
  Nicky Billou: but they just don't grab me anymore.
• 5:57
  Nicky Billou: And it's because the message is sterile.
• 5:59
  Nicky Billou: It's stale.
• 6:00
  Nicky Billou: and it's fake.
• 6:02
  Jesan Sorrells: While you're,
• 6:03
  Jesan Sorrells: we're aiming at,
• 6:05
  Jesan Sorrells: with these business books,
• 6:06
  Jesan Sorrells: we're aiming at the lowest common denominator reader.
• 6:09
  Jesan Sorrells: And shouldn't we be elevating people?
• 6:11
  Jesan Sorrells: Shouldn't we be elevating our leaders?
• 6:14
  Nicky Billou: Yeah.
• 6:14
  Jesan Sorrells: Yeah.
• 6:14
  Nicky Billou: Yeah.
• 6:15
  Nicky Billou: Now, I'm writing a few business books
• 6:19
  Nicky Billou: and I like to think my books are different,
• 6:21
  Nicky Billou: but nonetheless,
• 6:22
  Nicky Billou: one of the things I did
• 6:24
  Nicky Billou: with one of my business books
• 6:25
  Nicky Billou: is I wrote it in the form of a fable.
• 6:27
  Nicky Billou: I didn't even write it like a business book.
• 6:29
  Nicky Billou: I wrote it like a story.
• 6:31
  Nicky Billou: That made it so much more interesting,
• 6:33
  Nicky Billou: right?
• 6:34
  Nicky Billou: Yeah.
• 6:36
  Nicky Billou: Yeah.
• 6:38
  Nicky Billou: And on top of that,
• 6:39
  Nicky Billou: the books I enjoy reading the most are good fiction.
• 6:44
  Nicky Billou: There's something powerful in a story.
• 6:47
  Nicky Billou: And if you're a man,
• 6:49
  Nicky Billou: listen to this podcast and you're a seeker,
• 6:51
  Nicky Billou: you're the kind of man
• 6:52
  Nicky Billou: who's looking to grow,
• 6:54
  Nicky Billou: looking to get better.
• 6:55
  Nicky Billou: Here's what you want to do.
• 6:57
  Nicky Billou: Okay.
• 6:57
  Nicky Billou: You want to find a bunch of really good fiction books.
• 7:02
  Nicky Billou: You want to read them because those fiction books are going to teach you lessons that you won't learn in any goddamn business book.
• 7:12
  Nicky Billou: They're going to teach you about life.
• 7:14
  Nicky Billou: They're going to teach you about yourself.
• 7:16
  Nicky Billou: A brilliant writer of fiction can open you up,
• 7:22
  Nicky Billou: as you said, to a whole new vista,
• 7:24
  Nicky Billou: whole new world you didn't even know existed.
• 7:26
  Nicky Billou: existed and can make you better,
• 7:29
  Nicky Billou: stronger,
• 7:30
  Nicky Billou: smarter.
• 7:31
  Nicky Billou: And that's what I love about reading
• 7:33
  Nicky Billou: fiction.
• 7:34
  Nicky Billou: And I don't read highbrow fiction.
• 7:38
  Nicky Billou: I read middlebrow and lowbrow fiction because
• 7:43
  Nicky Billou: those books are better written and they're easier to access and easier to read.
• 7:49
  Nicky Billou: When you and I first met, I told you I love Mickey Spillane.
• 7:53
  Nicky Billou: Mickey Spillane is a great writer
• 7:56
  Nicky Billou: And his books have similar themes,
• 8:00
  Nicky Billou: but all the themes are about the primacy of the individual,
• 8:05
  Nicky Billou: standing up for what's right,
• 8:07
  Nicky Billou: standing against what's wrong,
• 8:11
  Nicky Billou: and believing in and loving people.
• 8:13
  Nicky Billou: And in particular, the people that you are close to, your family,
• 8:18
  Nicky Billou: your friends,
• 8:19
  Nicky Billou: your significant other.
• 8:21
  Nicky Billou: What's there not to like about books written along those themes?
• 8:25
  Jesan Sorrells: right right exactly look look if you are a person who likes mickey spillane if like nikki here if
• 8:32
  Jesan Sorrells: you're a person who resonates with tom clancy if you're a person who resonates with jack carr um
• 8:39
  Jesan Sorrells: if you're a person who resonates with stephen king early stephen king maybe not later stephen king
• 8:43
  Jesan Sorrells: but if you're if you're a person who resonates with uh what would be called in the traditional
• 8:51
  Jesan Sorrells: book publishing world,
• 8:52
  Jesan Sorrells: popular authors,
• 8:55
  Jesan Sorrells: popular fiction.
• 8:56
  Jesan Sorrells: Look,
• 8:57
  Jesan Sorrells: I have nothing to say against
• 8:59
  Jesan Sorrells: popular fiction.
• 9:00
  Jesan Sorrells: I really don't.
• 9:01
  Jesan Sorrells: Now,
• 9:01
  Jesan Sorrells: with that being said, I will say I struggle going into Barnes
• 9:05
  Jesan Sorrells: and Noble and looking at all the popular fiction that has been published these days and realizing
• 9:09
  Jesan Sorrells: tragically that most of it is for women and children and it is not for grown men.
• 9:16
  Jesan Sorrells: Nope, not at all.
• 9:17
  Jesan Sorrells: And this observation drives my wife absolutely crazy.
• 9:20
  Jesan Sorrells: But you're right.
• 9:21
  Jesan Sorrells: But it's true.
• 9:23
  Jesan Sorrells: And then I have to go to the back of the store to,
• 9:26
  Jesan Sorrells: quite frankly, the classics,
• 9:27
  Jesan Sorrells: quite frankly,
• 9:28
  Jesan Sorrells: to modernist works.
• 9:30
  Jesan Sorrells: You asked about my show.
• 9:31
  Jesan Sorrells: We typically don't read anything on the show that was published after 1970.
• 9:37
  Jesan Sorrells: We typically that's our cutoff.
• 9:39
  Jesan Sorrells: Right.
• 9:40
  Jesan Sorrells: And the reason why is because the field of publishing,
• 9:45
  Jesan Sorrells: just like the fields of academia and media and even nowadays sports,
• 9:52
  Jesan Sorrells: well, has been taken over and has been moved in the direction of appealing to women and children.
• 9:59
  Jesan Sorrells: And what is a grown man to find in books written after the 1970s?
• 10:03
  Jesan Sorrells: Well, you're going to find defenstrated masculinity.
• 10:06
  Jesan Sorrells: You're going to find LGBTQ themes.
• 10:10
  Jesan Sorrells: Now, those may be all fine and well and good for those people who are in those demographics.
• 10:16
  Jesan Sorrells: But if you're looking for something that's masculine, if you're looking for masculine
• 10:20
  Jesan Sorrells: communication styles and masculine temperaments,
• 10:23
  Jesan Sorrells: you're not going to find a lot of that in
• 10:25
  Jesan Sorrells: books written after the 1970s,
• 10:27
  Jesan Sorrells: at least in my opinion,
• 10:28
  Jesan Sorrells: that are in the popular fiction
• 10:30
  Jesan Sorrells: space.
• 10:31
  Jesan Sorrells: Again,
• 10:31
  Jesan Sorrells: once again, and I know I mentioned Stephen King,
• 10:33
  Jesan Sorrells: early Stephen King,
• 10:34
  Jesan Sorrells: not late Stephen
• 10:34
  Jesan Sorrells: King.
• 10:36
  Jesan Sorrells: And there will be people who will nitpick on this,
• 10:38
  Jesan Sorrells: but I will tell you,
• 10:40
  Jesan Sorrells: I have gotten an understanding of masculinity from The Sun Also Rises,
• 10:45
  Jesan Sorrells: from Jack London, from Call of the Wild.
• 10:48
  Jesan Sorrells: I've gotten an understanding of masculinity from Victor Hugo and Les Miserables.
• 10:53
  Nicky Billou: Amazing.
• 10:54
  Nicky Billou: Victor Hugo is a stud,
• 10:55
  Nicky Billou: man.
• 10:56
  Jesan Sorrells: A stud.
• 10:57
  Jesan Sorrells: I've gotten understandings of masculinity from G.K.
• 11:01
  Jesan Sorrells: Chesterton.
• 11:02
  Jesan Sorrells: And interestingly enough,
• 11:04
  Jesan Sorrells: I've also gotten an understanding of masculinity from Francis Bacon and from Shakespeare and from, I'm going to name a female author here that everybody knows, Jane Austen.
• 11:14
  Jesan Sorrells: Okay,
• 11:14
  Jesan Sorrells: great.
• 11:15
  Jesan Sorrells: We live in a time where men and women both have more access to more information and knowledge
• 11:23
  Jesan Sorrells: about each other than ever before in human history.
• 11:26
  Jesan Sorrells: And yet we know less about each other than at any point in time in human history.
• 11:33
  Nicky Billou: Well, look,
• 11:34
  Nicky Billou: there's a reason for that.
• 11:35
  Nicky Billou: OK, well, of course,
• 11:36
  Nicky Billou: there is a reason for that.
• 11:38
  Nicky Billou: This didn't happen by accident.
• 11:39
  Nicky Billou: So in 1917,
• 11:41
  Nicky Billou: a very terrible calamity befell the human race.
• 11:45
  Nicky Billou: The first communist government was installed in Russia.
• 11:50
  Nicky Billou: They murdered the czar and his family,
• 11:54
  Nicky Billou: and they installed a communist government whose objective was to turn the entire world communist.
• 12:03
  Nicky Billou: One world communist government.
• 12:04
  Nicky Billou: That was Marxism-Leninism.
• 12:06
  Nicky Billou: So Marx was not about turning the whole world communist, but Lenin absolutely was.
• 12:10
  Nicky Billou: He was a revolutionary.
• 12:12
  Nicky Billou: Then he decided that he was going to do this by sending provocateurs,
• 12:17
  Nicky Billou: agents provocateur,
• 12:19
  Nicky Billou: into the West, in particular the United States,
• 12:21
  Nicky Billou: using the very openness of the society against
• 12:24
  Nicky Billou: itself.
• 12:25
  Nicky Billou: And his orders were for them to penetrate the major institutions,
• 12:30
  Nicky Billou: in particular,
• 12:32
  Nicky Billou: academia,
• 12:33
  Nicky Billou: media,
• 12:33
  Nicky Billou: storytelling,
• 12:35
  Nicky Billou: and start to turn these against the values of the country.
• 12:40
  Nicky Billou: And they succeeded.
• 12:41
  Nicky Billou: It took them 80,
• 12:43
  Nicky Billou: 90 years to do it, but they succeeded.
• 12:45
  Nicky Billou: And even though the Soviet Union is no more,
• 12:49
  Nicky Billou: and ironically,
• 12:50
  Nicky Billou: Russia is no longer communist,
• 12:53
  Nicky Billou: culturally,
• 12:54
  Nicky Billou: the West has become quite Marxist in many,
• 12:59
  Nicky Billou: many ways.
• 13:00
  Nicky Billou: And the backlash that resulted in the election of Donald Trump is people that believe in a
• 13:06
  Nicky Billou: traditional masculinity,
• 13:07
  Nicky Billou: people that believe in a traditional Western civilization don't want
• 13:13
  Nicky Billou: to have anything to do with this Marxist woke crap, and they're pushing back.
• 13:19
  Nicky Billou: That's what's
• 13:20
  Nicky Billou: happened.
• 13:20
  Nicky Billou: And I agree with you. The publishing industry has been infiltrated by the same woke
• 13:25
  Nicky Billou: garbage.
• 13:26
  Nicky Billou: Most of the books today are crap.
• 13:28
  Nicky Billou: I agree.
• 13:29
  Nicky Billou: But there's some good writers that are still
• 13:31
  Nicky Billou: there that are still writing and publishing.
• 13:34
  Nicky Billou: Jack Carr. I love Jack Carr. Jack Carr is great.
• 13:36
  Nicky Billou: He's
• 13:36
  Nicky Billou: Warner Navy SEAL,
• 13:37
  Nicky Billou: his characters are good, his stories are good.
• 13:40
  Nicky Billou: You know,
• 13:41
  Nicky Billou: Tom Clancy,
• 13:42
  Nicky Billou: Tom Clancy, when he was still alive and writing his own books,
• 13:46
  Nicky Billou: man, there was nobody better.
• 13:48
  Nicky Billou: You know, the Jack Ryan books are great,
• 13:50
  Nicky Billou: but there's a lot of fantastic books that were
• 13:53
  Nicky Billou: written before 1970.
• 13:54
  Nicky Billou: I agree.
• 13:55
  Nicky Billou: I'm a huge fan of Ayn Rand,
• 13:57
  Nicky Billou: a woman writer,
• 13:58
  Nicky Billou: but she writes about masculinity practically
• 14:01
  Nicky Billou: better than anybody.
• 14:03
  Nicky Billou: You know,
• 14:04
  Nicky Billou: and men ought to read.
• 14:07
  Nicky Billou: But what they ought to read is they ought to read classics and they ought to read books
• 14:12
  Nicky Billou: that are written for men.
• 14:15
  Nicky Billou: The reason men don't read today,
• 14:17
  Nicky Billou: I agree with you, is because the books aren't written for
• 14:19
  Nicky Billou: them.
• 14:20
  Jesan Sorrells: Well, when you think about a book like,
• 14:22
  Jesan Sorrells: so Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is going to
• 14:25
  Jesan Sorrells: be coming out in July,
• 14:26
  Jesan Sorrells: right?
• 14:26
  Jesan Sorrells: And he's getting a lot of backlash for the casting and for all that, right?
• 14:30
  Jesan Sorrells: And I'm not going to get into that.
• 14:32
  Jesan Sorrells: What I'm going to say is this.
• 14:34
  Jesan Sorrells: If you don't like what Christopher Nolan,
• 14:38
  Jesan Sorrells: if you don't like the translation
• 14:39
  Jesan Sorrells: that Christopher Nolan used to build
• 14:44
  Jesan Sorrells: the script for the Odyssey,
• 14:46
  Jesan Sorrells: right?
• 14:46
  Jesan Sorrells: If you don't like that,
• 14:48
  Jesan Sorrells: and you don't like what that translator
• 14:50
  Jesan Sorrells: is trying to do with the Odyssey,
• 14:53
  Jesan Sorrells: the Odyssey has been around for,
• 14:55
  Jesan Sorrells: good Lord,
• 14:55
  Jesan Sorrells: 2,500 years,
• 14:57
  Jesan Sorrells: something like that.
• 14:58
  Jesan Sorrells: Go find a translation from the 19th century.
• 15:00
  Jesan Sorrells: Matter of fact,
• 15:01
  Jesan Sorrells: on my,
• 15:01
  Jesan Sorrells: If you were to visit my home,
• 15:04
  Jesan Sorrells: on my bedside table right now,
• 15:06
  Jesan Sorrells: I have a Scribner and Sons
• 15:08
  Jesan Sorrells: translation of the Odyssey from 1953 that I'm working my way through,
• 15:12
  Jesan Sorrells: just to re-familiarize
• 15:14
  Jesan Sorrells: myself with the story.
• 15:15
  Jesan Sorrells: Very masculine themes,
• 15:17
  Jesan Sorrells: very masculine language,
• 15:19
  Jesan Sorrells: very masculine coded communication.
• 15:22
  Jesan Sorrells: So all of this stuff is just laying around for us.
• 15:25
  Jesan Sorrells: You don't have to surrender to the woke.
• 15:30
  Jesan Sorrells: You don't have to surrender to a Marxist worldview.
• 15:34
  Jesan Sorrells: There's no law that says you have to bend the knee.
• 15:37
  Jesan Sorrells: We just surrender because we don't want to either do the work of actually going out and
• 15:43
  Jesan Sorrells: finding the alternatives or even worse,
• 15:46
  Jesan Sorrells: we want to do the work,
• 15:48
  Jesan Sorrells: but we don't quite know
• 15:49
  Jesan Sorrells: what the questions are we should be asking.
• 15:52
  Jesan Sorrells: We don't quite know the direction we should be going in.
• 15:55
  Jesan Sorrells: And we don't have the internal confidence to judge and to aggregate and to curate.
• 16:02
  Jesan Sorrells: The other thing we'll legitimately say is, man, and this is a legitimate thing.
• 16:05
  Jesan Sorrells: And by the way,
• 16:06
  Jesan Sorrells: I've got four kids.
• 16:08
  Jesan Sorrells: You know, I've run businesses.
• 16:10
  Jesan Sorrells: You know, I've worked for other people.
• 16:12
  Jesan Sorrells: I've had side projects,
• 16:13
  Jesan Sorrells: hobbies.
• 16:14
  Jesan Sorrells: I do jujitsu.
• 16:16
  Jesan Sorrells: I've got a full life.
• 16:17
  Jesan Sorrells: And yet somehow I'm able to carve time out in my day.
• 16:20
  Jesan Sorrells: I'm able to carve time out in my life for reading,
• 16:23
  Jesan Sorrells: for comprehension.
• 16:25
  Jesan Sorrells: And we talked about this in a different sort of context, but I'll say it early now.
• 16:29
  Jesan Sorrells: The reason I'm able to do that is because I exited the matrix.
• 16:34
  Jesan Sorrells: I stopped doing scrolling.
• 16:36
  Jesan Sorrells: I don't watch nearly as much Netflix.
• 16:39
  Jesan Sorrells: I very strictly monitor my consumption of entertainment.
• 16:44
  Jesan Sorrells: I don't play video games in my house.
• 16:47
  Jesan Sorrells: Sorry,
• 16:47
  Jesan Sorrells: men.
• 16:47
  Jesan Sorrells: If that's really what you want to do,
• 16:49
  Jesan Sorrells: you got to really upend your house.
• 16:51
  Jesan Sorrells: If you're walking into your house and the cable TV is on blasting 24 seven.
• 16:56
  Jesan Sorrells: So you don't have to have silence.
• 16:57
  Jesan Sorrells: So your wife doesn't ask you some question or your girlfriend doesn't ask you something
• 17:00
  Jesan Sorrells: that you can't figure out the answer to,
• 17:02
  Jesan Sorrells: or your kids don't bother you.
• 17:03
  Jesan Sorrells: You got to fix the problem.
• 17:05
  Jesan Sorrells: You want to read more?
• 17:06
  Jesan Sorrells: That's where it starts.
• 17:07
  Nicky Billou: Wholeheartedly agree.
• 17:09
  Nicky Billou: Wholeheartedly agree.
• 17:11
  Nicky Billou: I'm not going to watch Christopher Nolan's interpretation of the Odyssey.
• 17:15
  Nicky Billou: I think it's ridiculous that he's done what he's done.
• 17:19
  Nicky Billou: I also think that as men,
• 17:22
  Nicky Billou: we need to surround ourselves with other men,
• 17:26
  Nicky Billou: you know,
• 17:27
  Nicky Billou: and masculine coded conversation will not happen in society as a whole right now.
• 17:35
  Nicky Billou: It only happens in masculine only spaces.
• 17:38
  Nicky Billou: One of the reasons I run Sovereign Man or I do this podcast is because I want to have straight masculine conversations with other men.
• 17:46
  Nicky Billou: This weekend,
• 17:47
  Nicky Billou: we went to a men's overnight retreat.
• 17:51
  Nicky Billou: There were nine men there.
• 17:53
  Nicky Billou: It was fantastic.
• 17:54
  Nicky Billou: It was fantastic.
• 17:56
  Nicky Billou: We built a fire.
• 17:58
  Nicky Billou: We had great conversations.
• 18:01
  Nicky Billou: We cooked and made meals together.
• 18:04
  Nicky Billou: We laughed.
• 18:04
  Nicky Billou: We joked.
• 18:05
  Nicky Billou: We had fun.
• 18:06
  Nicky Billou: Men don't have this today.
• 18:08
  Nicky Billou: and one of the reasons I do what I do
• 18:10
  Nicky Billou: is because I want to encourage men
• 18:11
  Nicky Billou: to band together with other men.
• 18:13
  Jesan Sorrells: So let me ask you a question,
• 18:15
  Jesan Sorrells: Nicky.
• 18:15
  Jesan Sorrells: Really important.
• 18:16
  Jesan Sorrells: Let me ask you a question here.
• 18:18
  Jesan Sorrells: I'm going to turn the tables a little bit
• 18:19
  Jesan Sorrells: on you on your own show.
• 18:20
  Jesan Sorrells: I'm going to ask you a question here.
• 18:22
  Jesan Sorrells: Why do you think more men
• 18:25
  Jesan Sorrells: don't set up these kinds of things,
• 18:28
  Jesan Sorrells: these kinds of circles?
• 18:30
  Jesan Sorrells: Why aren't men who can see the problem?
• 18:34
  Jesan Sorrells: And by the way,
• 18:35
  Jesan Sorrells: if you get three or four men together,
• 18:37
  Jesan Sorrells: We'll all joke about it and we know what the problem is.
• 18:40
  Jesan Sorrells: But why is it that none of us are doing anything to,
• 18:44
  Jesan Sorrells: or not anything?
• 18:46
  Jesan Sorrells: Why is it that so few of us, there we go, are taking action to create these kinds of spaces?
• 18:52
  Jesan Sorrells: Why do you think that is?
• 18:53
  Nicky Billou: They don't want the blowback.
• 18:54
  Nicky Billou: They don't want the blowback.
• 18:55
  Nicky Billou: They don't want to deal with the blowback.
• 18:56
  Jesan Sorrells: Okay.
• 18:57
  Nicky Billou: That's the bottom line.
• 18:58
  Nicky Billou: They don't want to deal with the blowback.
• 19:00
  Nicky Billou: But a lot of these men, once they find out these kinds of spaces exist and they experience them, they want to be in them.
• 19:06
  Nicky Billou: You know,
• 19:07
  Nicky Billou: the nine men that were at this overnight retreat can't wait to get to another one,
• 19:14
  Nicky Billou: you know.
• 19:16
  Nicky Billou: And I got I got my gun license here in Canada.
• 19:20
  Nicky Billou: And,
• 19:22
  Nicky Billou: you know, it's a lot harder to do than it is in the US.
• 19:24
  Nicky Billou: I don't think you actually need a gun license,
• 19:26
  Nicky Billou: you know, because you're second.
• 19:27
  Nicky Billou: The beautiful.
• 19:29
  Jesan Sorrells: It is a beautiful.
• 19:30
  Jesan Sorrells: Well, as Dave Chappelle once infamously said, I got to got to put this in here.
• 19:34
  Jesan Sorrells: This plug for Dave.
• 19:35
  Jesan Sorrells: He did an interview, let's say it one time,
• 19:37
  Jesan Sorrells: that Second Amendment is there in case that First Amendment don't work out.
• 19:42
  Jesan Sorrells: That's why we got this.
• 19:43
  Jesan Sorrells: That's why we got the Second Amendment.
• 19:44
  Jesan Sorrells: Go ahead.
• 19:46
  Nicky Billou: It's a beautiful thing.
• 19:47
  Nicky Billou: It's one of the greatest things ever created,
• 19:49
  Nicky Billou: the Second Amendment.
• 19:51
  Nicky Billou: And I'm excited to go shooting with my butts.
• 19:55
  Nicky Billou: You know what I'm saying?
• 19:56
  Nicky Billou: To go shooting with my butts.
• 19:58
  Nicky Billou: Like there's gun ranges.
• 20:00
  Nicky Billou: You can rent guns there.
• 20:02
  Nicky Billou: You have your own gun.
• 20:03
  Nicky Billou: If you have a gun license and go in there, you can do some shooting.
• 20:06
  Nicky Billou: That's masculine shit.
• 20:08
  Nicky Billou: You know,
• 20:08
  Nicky Billou: you were in one of my meetings.
• 20:10
  Nicky Billou: You saw how we talk to each other.
• 20:12
  Nicky Billou: We don't treat each other like dainty wallflowers that are about to crumble if you speak to them harshly.
• 20:18
  Nicky Billou: Right.
• 20:21
  Nicky Billou: We treat you like you're a man.
• 20:23
  Nicky Billou: And if you're a man who can't handle that,
• 20:26
  Nicky Billou: well, we're going to keep talking to you that way until you either can't handle it or you leave.
• 20:30
  Nicky Billou: And both of those are good as far as we're concerned.
• 20:32
  Jesan Sorrells: Well, we also have challenges with, and I know you've probably talked about this on your show before,
• 20:39
  Jesan Sorrells: the line of succession,
• 20:42
  Jesan Sorrells: right, from fathers to sons,
• 20:44
  Jesan Sorrells: the traditions that would tell sons they have graduated to becoming men.
• 20:51
  Jesan Sorrells: We've broken those traditions in the West.
• 20:54
  Jesan Sorrells: They've been broken for quite some time.
• 20:59
  Jesan Sorrells: Men are optimized ever since World War II.
• 21:02
  Jesan Sorrells: the man in the gray flannel suit. Men have been optimized for industry and for work,
• 21:08
  Jesan Sorrells: not just at a philosophical level, but also a social level.
• 21:11
  Jesan Sorrells: I mean, the first great break
• 21:13
  Jesan Sorrells: came when the first generation of men came out of World War II and went right into the suburbs.
• 21:20
  Jesan Sorrells: Those were men who had been raised on farms. Those were men who understood what it was to be men,
• 21:25
  Jesan Sorrells: but they could not.
• 21:26
  Jesan Sorrells: Their first great spiritual battle was the battle of how to get manhood
• 21:32
  Jesan Sorrells: from what was called the silent generation at that point and the World War II generation,
• 21:36
  Jesan Sorrells: how to get manhood from there to the baby boomers.
• 21:40
  Jesan Sorrells: And that was the first great break in the chain where that did not get transferred down.
• 21:46
  Jesan Sorrells: Now,
• 21:47
  Jesan Sorrells: the baby boomers had just enough of it left to keep masculinity sort of kind of
• 21:53
  Jesan Sorrells: maybe on life support,
• 21:55
  Jesan Sorrells: but they didn't have enough to pass on to my generation,
• 21:57
  Jesan Sorrells: your generation, the Gen Xers,
• 21:59
  Jesan Sorrells: right?
• 21:59
  Jesan Sorrells: And we didn't have enough because our generation was small to pass along to the millennials.
• 22:04
  Jesan Sorrells: And now we're in a situation where men in their 20s and 30s are in a state of arrested development,
• 22:09
  Jesan Sorrells: a state of infantilization and looking,
• 22:13
  Jesan Sorrells: searching desperately for tools that will help them raise up out of that infantilization.
• 22:19
  Jesan Sorrells: And I fundamentally believe the books can do this.
• 22:22
  Jesan Sorrells: I fundamentally believe that reading can do this.
• 22:24
  Jesan Sorrells: Now,
• 22:25
  Jesan Sorrells: Andrew Tate,
• 22:26
  Jesan Sorrells: infamously enough,
• 22:27
  Jesan Sorrells: has gone on and on about how people, but he's like one of those wrong clocks that,
• 22:33
  Jesan Sorrells: you know, is eventually right, at least once a day.
• 22:40
  Nicky Billou: There's a lot that he says that's fucked up,
• 22:43
  Nicky Billou: but yeah, he does make one or two good points.
• 22:46
  Jesan Sorrells: And one of the points he makes is that if you're constantly reading, constantly consuming,
• 22:49
  Jesan Sorrells: but you're not acting,
• 22:51
  Jesan Sorrells: then you're no good.
• 22:53
  Jesan Sorrells: And he's fundamentally correct.
• 22:55
  Jesan Sorrells: So if I'm reading the Odyssey and I'm looking at that entire sequence in the beginning where Telemachus and Penelope are dealing with the suitors in the house,
• 23:09
  Jesan Sorrells: I should be thinking I should be making notes.
• 23:13
  Jesan Sorrells: I should be looking at this situation and I should be saying,
• 23:16
  Jesan Sorrells: how does this resemble how I was raised?
• 23:19
  Jesan Sorrells: How does this resemble what's going on in my house?
• 23:22
  Jesan Sorrells: What are the things that this text is telling me that I can correct?
• 23:27
  Jesan Sorrells: Because I'm Odysseus in this text.
• 23:29
  Jesan Sorrells: If you're a grown man with kids in your house and a wife,
• 23:32
  Jesan Sorrells: if you're a grown man with a girlfriend and obligations,
• 23:36
  Jesan Sorrells: you're either down the path to being Odysseus or you are Odysseus.
• 23:41
  Jesan Sorrells: How are you going to take from this text?
• 23:43
  Jesan Sorrells: What are you going to take that's actually applicable?
• 23:46
  Jesan Sorrells: What actions are you going to take?
• 23:48
  Jesan Sorrells: And you're the only one that can apply that to your life.
• 23:51
  Jesan Sorrells: And then you can get into a group of men and you can start,
• 23:54
  Jesan Sorrells: as it says in the Bible,
• 23:55
  Jesan Sorrells: sharpening other iron,
• 23:57
  Jesan Sorrells: right?
• 23:58
  Jesan Sorrells: You can begin to push these ideas and to talk about them and to challenge them.
• 24:05
  Jesan Sorrells: C.S. Lewis did this with Tolkien back in the day.
• 24:08
  Jesan Sorrells: G.K.
• 24:09
  Jesan Sorrells: Chesterton did this with H.G.
• 24:11
  Jesan Sorrells: Wells, who we fundamentally disagreed with,
• 24:13
  Jesan Sorrells: you know, because Wells was a socialist and Chesterton was not.
• 24:17
  Jesan Sorrells: And they sparred with each other.
• 24:20
  Jesan Sorrells: They shot barbs at each other,
• 24:22
  Jesan Sorrells: but they did it in person.
• 24:24
  Jesan Sorrells: They didn't do it over Twitter,
• 24:25
  Jesan Sorrells: Twitter,
• 24:26
  Jesan Sorrells: social media.
• 24:27
  Jesan Sorrells: This is not a substitute for getting in person with men,
• 24:30
  Jesan Sorrells: as Nikki has demonstrated.
• 24:33
  Jesan Sorrells: But the books are the beginning.
• 24:34
  Jesan Sorrells: They're the door.
• 24:36
  Jesan Sorrells: They're the door.
• 24:37
  Jesan Sorrells: The door that has to open.
• 24:39
  Jesan Sorrells: But the only way you can do that is by putting down other things.
• 24:41
  Nicky Billou: Amen.
• 24:43
  Nicky Billou: Men want in person.
• 24:44
  Nicky Billou: Men want in person.
• 24:46
  Nicky Billou: One of the men at this overnight retreat said that the best thing he got from the overnight retreat was being in person with other men.
• 24:55
  Nicky Billou: There was a lot of other men who said they got a lot of other powerful,
• 24:59
  Nicky Billou: valuable things.
• 25:00
  Nicky Billou: But that stood out for me out of everything everyone said.
• 25:03
  Nicky Billou: Because I agree with them.
• 25:03
  Nicky Billou: The best thing about that overnight is that we were together with other men in person.
• 25:08
  Nicky Billou: Yeah.
• 25:09
  Nicky Billou: So,
• 25:10
  Nicky Billou: hey, Salma,
• 25:10
  Nicky Billou: man.
• 25:11
  Nicky Billou: What are 10 books every man should read and why?
• 25:16
  Jesan Sorrells: Lightning round,
• 25:17
  Jesan Sorrells: baby.
• 25:17
  Jesan Sorrells: Lightning round.
• 25:18
  Jesan Sorrells: Lightning round.
• 25:19
  Jesan Sorrells: Wow.
• 25:19
  Jesan Sorrells: 10 books every man should read and why.
• 25:22
  Jesan Sorrells: Okay.
• 25:23
  Jesan Sorrells: Probably the number one book on that list should be the Bible.
• 25:26
  Jesan Sorrells: You should absolutely read the Bible,
• 25:28
  Jesan Sorrells: whether you believe in a transcendent God or not,
• 25:31
  Jesan Sorrells: whether you believe in Jesus or not,
• 25:34
  Jesan Sorrells: whether you think you know the story or not,
• 25:37
  Jesan Sorrells: the Bible should be number one on that list.
• 25:40
  Jesan Sorrells: It is the foundational book of Western civilization.
• 25:44
  Jesan Sorrells: And if you want to protect your civilization,
• 25:46
  Jesan Sorrells: if you want to know what it actually stands for,
• 25:48
  Jesan Sorrells: starting with the family first,
• 25:50
  Jesan Sorrells: and then moving out into concentric circles
• 25:52
  Jesan Sorrells: to other areas in our lives,
• 25:56
  Jesan Sorrells: if you want to know what's wrong with our world,
• 25:58
  Jesan Sorrells: read the Bible.
• 25:59
  Jesan Sorrells: And there's no excuse.
• 26:00
  Jesan Sorrells: Bibles are everywhere.
• 26:01
  Jesan Sorrells: They sell 80 million of them a year.
• 26:04
  Jesan Sorrells: The best-selling book in the history of humanity.
• 26:08
  Jesan Sorrells: Just go get it.
• 26:09
  Jesan Sorrells: Then after you've read the Bible,
• 26:11
  Jesan Sorrells: that's number one.
• 26:12
  Jesan Sorrells: Then number two, I would say is, we've already talked about this, is the Iliad and the Odyssey.
• 26:17
  Jesan Sorrells: You should read both of those back to back.
• 26:19
  Jesan Sorrells: The Iliad comes before the Odyssey,
• 26:21
  Jesan Sorrells: but either way, read both of those.
• 26:24
  Jesan Sorrells: They are the foundational text of Greek thinking,
• 26:27
  Jesan Sorrells: which rabidly and actively informs what we do here.
• 26:32
  Jesan Sorrells: Then you should move into some of the Greek plays.
• 26:38
  Jesan Sorrells: These plays of Sophocles,
• 26:39
  Jesan Sorrells: the Oresteia.
• 26:41
  Jesan Sorrells: These plays are interesting.
• 26:42
  Jesan Sorrells: They're all built off of Iliad and they're built off of the Odyssey.
• 26:47
  Jesan Sorrells: They're built off that core idea and then they take it and they go in other places.
• 26:51
  Jesan Sorrells: I'd recommend all of those.
• 26:53
  Jesan Sorrells: That'd be four and five.
• 26:55
  Jesan Sorrells: Then I'm going to move you ahead a few hundred years,
• 26:58
  Jesan Sorrells: and I'm going to recommend Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare.
• 27:02
  Jesan Sorrells: Now, Fellow's good.
• 27:04
  Jesan Sorrells: Macbeth is good.
• 27:07
  Jesan Sorrells: You know,
• 27:07
  Jesan Sorrells: all of Shakespeare's plays are good.
• 27:10
  Jesan Sorrells: But Julius Caesar,
• 27:11
  Jesan Sorrells: you want to know what it's about being a man in charge?
• 27:16
  Jesan Sorrells: And there's a great scene in that play where his wife,
• 27:21
  Jesan Sorrells: Calpurnia, is trying to get Caesar
• 27:23
  Jesan Sorrells: to not go to the Senate because she knows he's about to be killed or she suspects that something's
• 27:27
  Jesan Sorrells: about to happen to him.
• 27:29
  Jesan Sorrells: She's had a dream.
• 27:30
  Jesan Sorrells: And he looks at her and he says, always everywhere I am, Caesar.
• 27:34
  Jesan Sorrells: And he goes out and he's slain.
• 27:36
  Jesan Sorrells: I'm always a man everywhere,
• 27:38
  Jesan Sorrells: even unto my death.
• 27:39
  Jesan Sorrells: Why are we fooling around?
• 27:41
  Jesan Sorrells: If you don't understand that, that's because you're not a man.
• 27:44
  Jesan Sorrells: You don't understand what it means to be a man.
• 27:46
  Jesan Sorrells: That would be number six on my list would be Julius Caesar.
• 27:52
  Jesan Sorrells: And moving forward a few more years,
• 27:55
  Jesan Sorrells: I would read Candide by Voltaire.
• 27:57
  Jesan Sorrells: Now,
• 27:58
  Jesan Sorrells: Voltaire was an atheist and Voltaire had a problem with the Catholic Church.
• 28:01
  Jesan Sorrells: And Voltaire came along at a time when revolutionary fervor was beginning to build in France.
• 28:09
  Jesan Sorrells: And he was a skeptic.
• 28:10
  Jesan Sorrells: But Candide is probably one of the better eviscerations in fiction of all of the skepticism that has surrounded people and that has surrounded humanity in the course of civilization.
• 28:27
  Jesan Sorrells: I would definitely recommend that one.
• 28:30
  Jesan Sorrells: That'd be number seven.
• 28:31
  Jesan Sorrells: Now we're going to do eight, nine, and ten.
• 28:33
  Jesan Sorrells: Okay.
• 28:34
  Jesan Sorrells: So number eight,
• 28:35
  Jesan Sorrells: I would strongly recommend Ben-Hur, A Tale of the Christ by Lou Wallace.
• 28:40
  Jesan Sorrells: If you don't know who Lewis Wallace is,
• 28:42
  Jesan Sorrells: you need to go back and read your American history.
• 28:45
  Jesan Sorrells: Ben-Hur was probably the greatest selling Christian novel of all time.
• 28:50
  Jesan Sorrells: It made Lew Wallace a ton of money,
• 28:53
  Jesan Sorrells: the equivalent of $210,000 a year in royalties back in the 1880s.
• 29:00
  Jesan Sorrells: We're actually going to be covering this book on our podcast coming up in June.
• 29:04
  Jesan Sorrells: It is,
• 29:05
  Jesan Sorrells: and if you go and look at the life of Lou Wallace and who he actually was,
• 29:09
  Jesan Sorrells: the man was a union general.
• 29:12
  Jesan Sorrells: The man was at Shiloh.
• 29:14
  Jesan Sorrells: The man was a diplomat.
• 29:17
  Jesan Sorrells: He was a governor of the New Mexico Territory, if I remember correctly.
• 29:22
  Jesan Sorrells: All kinds of things about him.
• 29:24
  Jesan Sorrells: He was a generalist in a world where specialization hadn't come around yet.
• 29:30
  Jesan Sorrells: And he was a romantic,
• 29:32
  Jesan Sorrells: which means he cared very much.
• 29:34
  Jesan Sorrells: about not only writing, but he cared about the power of creativity and the power of art.
• 29:39
  Jesan Sorrells: Pick up Ben-Hur.
• 29:40
  Jesan Sorrells: Then number nine,
• 29:42
  Jesan Sorrells: you're going to want to read Ernest Hemingway,
• 29:45
  Jesan Sorrells: and you're going to want to pick up The Sun Also Rises.
• 29:47
  Jesan Sorrells: The Sun Also Rises is probably the best
• 29:51
  Jesan Sorrells: example of masculine communication and masculine behavior in a post-World War I context.
• 29:57
  Jesan Sorrells: World War
• 29:58
  Jesan Sorrells: I was probably the most tragic war that ever occurred to the European civilization.
• 30:04
  Jesan Sorrells: And it created the situation.
• 30:06
  Jesan Sorrells: It created the knock-on effects.
• 30:09
  Jesan Sorrells: Nikki was talking about communism.
• 30:11
  Jesan Sorrells: Communism would not have been as effective in Russia if World War I hadn't happened.
• 30:15
  Nicky Billou: No.
• 30:16
  Jesan Sorrells: It wouldn't have worked.
• 30:17
  Jesan Sorrells: Not at all.
• 30:18
  Jesan Sorrells: Not at all.
• 30:19
  Jesan Sorrells: You also wouldn't have had the Spanish influenza.
• 30:21
  Jesan Sorrells: You also would not have had World War II,
• 30:23
  Jesan Sorrells: which everybody knows.
• 30:25
  Jesan Sorrells: I mean,
• 30:26
  Jesan Sorrells: you know, everybody knows.
• 30:27
  Nicky Billou: The start of the death of Western civilization in Europe.
• 30:30
  Jesan Sorrells: Oh,
• 30:31
  Jesan Sorrells: yeah.
• 30:31
  Jesan Sorrells: And,
• 30:32
  Jesan Sorrells: you know, it really put Western civilization across the globe back on its heels.
• 30:38
  Jesan Sorrells: And we've never really fully recovered from that.
• 30:41
  Jesan Sorrells: Every single pathology that we suffer from in the West came out of World War I.
• 30:47
  Jesan Sorrells: And we still haven't dealt with that war successfully.
• 30:49
  Jesan Sorrells: Well, guess what?
• 30:51
  Jesan Sorrells: One of the writers that we've covered on our show that was struggling to get his
• 31:00
  Jesan Sorrells: around was Ernest Hemingway.
• 31:03
  Jesan Sorrells: He couldn't really deal with what he had seen and experienced by an ambulance driver,
• 31:08
  Jesan Sorrells: part of the lost generation in Paris.
• 31:11
  Jesan Sorrells: But Read the Sun also rises.
• 31:13
  Jesan Sorrells: It's got bullfights.
• 31:14
  Jesan Sorrells: It's got wine in the afternoon in Spain.
• 31:17
  Jesan Sorrells: And it's got the problems that you have when a man tries to communicate with a woman and he can't.
• 31:23
  Jesan Sorrells: Sun Also Rises should be on your list.
• 31:25
  Jesan Sorrells: And then finally,
• 31:27
  Jesan Sorrells: I'm going to give you a book that was turned into a Western.
• 31:33
  Jesan Sorrells: And I have talked about this a little bit on our show, but we covered it on our show as well.
• 31:37
  Jesan Sorrells: My final book, my top 10 final book would be True Grit by Charles Portis.
• 31:43
  Jesan Sorrells: A book that was made famous by John Wayne's portrayal.
• 31:47
  Jesan Sorrells: in the 1960s.
• 31:49
  Jesan Sorrells: But the book itself is an amazing little tone.
• 31:56
  Jesan Sorrells: Charles Portis, by the way, is a
• 31:58
  Jesan Sorrells: writer,
• 31:59
  Jesan Sorrells: lived out the writer's dream.
• 32:01
  Jesan Sorrells: He went and became a newspaper columnist,
• 32:04
  Jesan Sorrells: told everybody at
• 32:05
  Jesan Sorrells: the newspaper column that he was going to go off and write a book.
• 32:08
  Jesan Sorrells: And he did. And he became famous.
• 32:10
  Jesan Sorrells: And he stayed in Arkansas for the vast majority of his life.
• 32:14
  Jesan Sorrells: Almost no one knew that he was a great
• 32:17
  Jesan Sorrells: writer and True Grit was his greatest book.
• 32:22
  Jesan Sorrells: The character Maddie Ross,
• 32:24
  Jesan Sorrells: she is rock ribbed,
• 32:25
  Jesan Sorrells: she is traditional,
• 32:27
  Jesan Sorrells: she is moral,
• 32:29
  Jesan Sorrells: and she has masculine temperament coming out of that 16,
• 32:34
  Jesan Sorrells: 17-year-old girl.
• 32:35
  Jesan Sorrells: She's handling herself in such a way that she can get other men not to work for
• 32:40
  Jesan Sorrells: her,
• 32:40
  Jesan Sorrells: but to help her,
• 32:42
  Jesan Sorrells: to help her advance her mission.
• 32:45
  Jesan Sorrells: And this is an example of true leadership without men being reduced to niggling nubs,
• 32:53
  Jesan Sorrells: as Tony Soprano might say.
• 32:55
  Nicky Billou: That's a great list.
• 32:57
  Jesan Sorrells: Was it 10 books?
• 32:58
  Nicky Billou: Yeah, 10 books.
• 32:59
  Nicky Billou: I mean,
• 33:00
  Nicky Billou: the Bible,
• 33:01
  Nicky Billou: funny you should mention that.
• 33:04
  Nicky Billou: I just finished 2 Timothy,
• 33:08
  Nicky Billou: and I've got about another 75 pages to go before I finish my Bible.
• 33:13
  Nicky Billou: It's the first time I'll have read it from cover to cover.
• 33:16
  Nicky Billou: I've never read the Iliad and the Odyssey.
• 33:19
  Nicky Billou: You said the number four and five were Sophocles and the Orestia?
• 33:23
  Jesan Sorrells: Yes,
• 33:23
  Jesan Sorrells: Orestia.
• 33:24
  Jesan Sorrells: Yep.
• 33:25
  Jesan Sorrells: Or you can pick any of the other Greek plays.
• 33:27
  Jesan Sorrells: You can pick plays by Aristophanes.
• 33:31
  Jesan Sorrells: You can pick,
• 33:33
  Jesan Sorrells: oh, I'm thinking of,
• 33:35
  Jesan Sorrells: well, any of those plays,
• 33:36
  Jesan Sorrells: any of the Greek plays in there would be good.
• 33:39
  Jesan Sorrells: Antigone, any of those would be good.
• 33:41
  Nicky Billou: I never read Julius Caesar.
• 33:43
  Nicky Billou: I read a bunch of other Shakespeare's works in high school.
• 33:48
  Nicky Billou: I haven't read Candide.
• 33:51
  Nicky Billou: I haven't read Ben-Hur.
• 33:52
  Nicky Billou: I don't think I've read The Sun Also Rises,
• 33:56
  Nicky Billou: but I have read True Grit.
• 33:57
  Nicky Billou: Great book.
• 33:58
  Nicky Billou: Spectacular book.
• 34:00
  Nicky Billou: So I'm going to go get the rest of these books and read them.
• 34:04
  Nicky Billou: I think that's a fantastic thing to do.
• 34:07
  Jesan Sorrells: Can I say something else?
• 34:08
  Jesan Sorrells: One more thing about the Bible.
• 34:10
  Jesan Sorrells: So I'm actually in my off year.
• 34:13
  Jesan Sorrells: So once every on year,
• 34:15
  Jesan Sorrells: every odd year for the last,
• 34:18
  Jesan Sorrells: oh gosh,
• 34:18
  Jesan Sorrells: 15 years,
• 34:19
  Jesan Sorrells: I've gone through
• 34:20
  Jesan Sorrells: the Bible in a year.
• 34:22
  Jesan Sorrells: And yeah.
• 34:23
  Jesan Sorrells: And so every time I do that, I find more in there.
• 34:27
  Jesan Sorrells: Every time I do that exercise,
• 34:29
  Jesan Sorrells: I take more notes and my prayer life becomes richer and my family life becomes better.
• 34:38
  Jesan Sorrells: How I think about who I am and my identity becomes better.
• 34:41
  Jesan Sorrells: My discipline becomes better.
• 34:44
  Jesan Sorrells: In my off years,
• 34:45
  Jesan Sorrells: like this is an off year,
• 34:47
  Jesan Sorrells: I'm a little bit,
• 34:48
  Jesan Sorrells: quite frankly,
• 34:49
  Jesan Sorrells: off,
• 34:50
  Jesan Sorrells: right?
• 34:50
  Jesan Sorrells: And don't get me wrong, it's not that I'm not reading the Bible,
• 34:53
  Jesan Sorrells: but it's not my focus,
• 34:54
  Jesan Sorrells: right?
• 34:55
  Jesan Sorrells: It's not where I have my laser focus because I'm letting things lay fallow right now.
• 34:59
  Jesan Sorrells: Sure.
• 35:00
  Jesan Sorrells: One of the interesting things,
• 35:02
  Jesan Sorrells: by the way, that I've noted,
• 35:04
  Jesan Sorrells: though,
• 35:04
  Jesan Sorrells: in this fallow year,
• 35:06
  Jesan Sorrells: is that the Book of Judges maps very nicely onto what has happened in America over the
• 35:15
  Jesan Sorrells: last 50 years.
• 35:16
  Jesan Sorrells: So if you go back to the Book of Judges and you read that, you'll sort of begin to have
• 35:22
  Jesan Sorrells: an understanding,
• 35:23
  Jesan Sorrells: not only at a spiritual level, but also a psychological and an emotional level
• 35:26
  Jesan Sorrells: of what exactly it is that's going on in the United States,
• 35:30
  Jesan Sorrells: because the parallels to us
• 35:32
  Jesan Sorrells: and Israel at that time are tremendous.
• 35:36
  Nicky Billou: Yeah,
• 35:37
  Nicky Billou: I'm looking forward to getting to the book of
• 35:39
  Nicky Billou: Judges. I'm not quite there yet.
• 35:41
  Nicky Billou: So I'm putting together some of my books,
• 35:46
  Nicky Billou: and they're very
• 35:46
  Nicky Billou: different from your books right now and i'm doing it on the fly um so my number one book that's
• 35:54
  Nicky Billou: had the biggest impact on me is uh a novel uh written in 74 called the eagle has landed by
• 36:02
  Nicky Billou: jack higgins um in 74 i read the book in 75 i was eight years old um that book i've read it so many
• 36:13
  Nicky Billou: times it blew me away because it's a fictional story of a german paratrooper unit under the
• 36:22
  Nicky Billou: command of a german colonel kurt steiner who was anti-nazi and who was given an assignment to
• 36:31
  Nicky Billou: go and kidnap or kill winston churchill in the country countryside and i want to have it be a
• 36:39
  Nicky Billou: a spoiler alert,
• 36:40
  Nicky Billou: but the,
• 36:42
  Nicky Billou: um,
• 36:43
  Nicky Billou: the integrity of this man, the honor that he held and the
• 36:49
  Nicky Billou: unbelievably powerful character who had a code that he lived by right and wrong caused him to,
• 36:57
  Nicky Billou: uh, give up the chance to succeed in his mission without any casualties to his own men.
• 37:02
  Nicky Billou: And I looked at it and I go and went to myself,
• 37:06
  Nicky Billou: if he hadn't taken this one step and his men who
• 37:09
  Nicky Billou: had been his men and trained by him and and inspired by him hadn't taken that stuff because i i don't
• 37:14
  Nicky Billou: want to give it away because it's such a part of the story uh i i read it to go through that again
• 37:20
  Nicky Billou: and again and again because it made me it made me glad to be a man every time i read it i go yeah
• 37:24
  Nicky Billou: this is you know like this is this is what what it's about uh that's my number one book on the
• 37:31
  Nicky Billou: list um number two three and four are all by the same author uh the fountainhead anthem and atlas
• 37:37
  Nicky Billou: shrugged by Ayn Rand.
• 37:40
  Nicky Billou: I don't know if you've ever read Ayn Rand's books,
• 37:42
  Nicky Billou: but I think she is
• 37:46
  Nicky Billou: perhaps the greatest novelist that I've ever read.
• 37:50
  Nicky Billou: And her themes all extol the strong,
• 37:55
  Nicky Billou: masculine,
• 37:55
  Nicky Billou: individual man.
• 38:00
  Nicky Billou: Very powerful.
• 38:01
  Nicky Billou: Very, very powerful.
• 38:03
  Nicky Billou: All of those books.
• 38:04
  Nicky Billou: The next two are The Cardinal of the Kremlin and The Hunt for Red October,
• 38:12
  Nicky Billou: both written by Tom Clancy.
• 38:16
  Nicky Billou: And these are early Tom Clancy books.
• 38:20
  Nicky Billou: And my God,
• 38:22
  Nicky Billou: is Clancy ever a phenomenal writer?
• 38:28
  Nicky Billou: And the characters he created there,
• 38:31
  Nicky Billou: Jack Ryan,
• 38:32
  Nicky Billou: were unbelievably masculine.
• 38:34
  Nicky Billou: unbelievably masculine,
• 38:36
  Nicky Billou: unbelievably patriotic,
• 38:38
  Nicky Billou: and all about right and wrong.
• 38:42
  Nicky Billou: You know,
• 38:42
  Nicky Billou: really,
• 38:43
  Nicky Billou: really powerful stuff.
• 38:46
  Nicky Billou: The character in the Cardinal of the Kremlin is a Russian colonel who fought in World War II.
• 38:52
  Nicky Billou: And again,
• 38:53
  Nicky Billou: this was a man that did the right thing,
• 38:57
  Nicky Billou: according to his code,
• 38:59
  Nicky Billou: at great personal cost to himself.
• 39:00
  Nicky Billou: And I just fucking admire the fuck out of men like that, you know?
• 39:04
  Nicky Billou: I absolutely love reading about them.
• 39:10
  Nicky Billou: The seventh book on my list is The White House Years by Henry Kissinger.
• 39:17
  Nicky Billou: Henry Kissinger was a national security advisor and secretary of state to probably the smartest man to ever become president of the United States,
• 39:28
  Nicky Billou: Richard Nixon.
• 39:30
  Nicky Billou: And this book is brilliant.
• 39:33
  Nicky Billou: in terms of showing how the Nixon White House engaged in its foreign policy with the Soviet
• 39:43
  Nicky Billou: Union.
• 39:43
  Nicky Billou: And it's so good,
• 39:45
  Nicky Billou: so fabulous.
• 39:47
  Nicky Billou: I absolutely love this book.
• 39:51
  Nicky Billou: You know,
• 39:51
  Nicky Billou: I haven't fully read the Bible,
• 39:53
  Nicky Billou: but I'm going to put it on the list.
• 39:57
  Nicky Billou: I'm going to put it on the list for all the reasons you said.
• 40:02
  Nicky Billou: I'll be done with it very soon.
• 40:04
  Nicky Billou: My ninth book will be a biography,
• 40:08
  Nicky Billou: an autobiography,
• 40:09
  Nicky Billou: actually.
• 40:10
  Nicky Billou: The Autobiography of President Reagan and American Life.
• 40:12
  Nicky Billou: I love Ronald Reagan.
• 40:14
  Nicky Billou: He is my favorite president,
• 40:16
  Nicky Billou: my favorite leader.
• 40:19
  Nicky Billou: Quintessential, awesome,
• 40:20
  Nicky Billou: masculine,
• 40:22
  Nicky Billou: American.
• 40:24
  Nicky Billou: American man.
• 40:26
  Nicky Billou: just just absolutely freaking brilliant brilliant and the 10th book on my list is the 12th angel
• 40:37
  Nicky Billou: it's written by aug mandino in fact i could have probably put aug mandino on this book with on this
• 40:45
  Nicky Billou: list more than once but aug mandino uh started his career as a writer in the 60s he wrote a very
• 40:53
  Nicky Billou: famous book called uh the greatest salesman in the world that um in a very biblical way told a
• 40:59
  Nicky Billou: powerful parable of success based in biblical times but i don't think that's his best book even
• 41:05
  Nicky Billou: though it's his best-selling book his first book and his best-selling book the 12th angel is his
• 41:10
  Nicky Billou: best book and the 12th angel has to be read to be believed but it is the story of a man who
• 41:19
  Nicky Billou: moved his family to the uh to new hampshire and he was a high-flying business executive
• 41:29
  Nicky Billou: when something very tragic happens and again i want to give away the plot and he's on the verge
• 41:35
  Nicky Billou: of giving up and wanting to die and he's introduced to the 12th angel and it's it's a brilliant book
• 41:41
  Nicky Billou: it's a beautiful book it makes me cry just thinking about it you know so
• 41:48
  Jesan Sorrells: So all of the books that you've mentioned, and I wrote down all of them,
• 41:53
  Jesan Sorrells: I'm going to pick up The Eagle Has Landed.
• 41:56
  Jesan Sorrells: Obviously,
• 41:56
  Jesan Sorrells: I have seen the movie The Hunt for Red October.
• 41:59
  Jesan Sorrells: I think I read the book.
• 42:01
  Jesan Sorrells: There's a there's a bell ringing in the back of my head.
• 42:03
  Jesan Sorrells: I think I better read the book years ago,
• 42:06
  Jesan Sorrells: probably when I was in my late teens,
• 42:07
  Jesan Sorrells: early 20s.
• 42:09
  Jesan Sorrells: The Cardinal of the Kremlin.
• 42:11
  Jesan Sorrells: I believe I started that and I didn't finish it.
• 42:13
  Jesan Sorrells: So I need to go back and I need to go back and restart that again.
• 42:18
  Jesan Sorrells: the White House years, the autobiography of Ronald Reagan, the 12th angel, and of course,
• 42:24
  Jesan Sorrells: all of Ayn Rand's books.
• 42:27
  Jesan Sorrells: There's a theme that runs through your selection, just like there's
• 42:30
  Jesan Sorrells: a theme that runs through mine. And tell me if I've caught the theme.
• 42:35
  Jesan Sorrells: You value books that are
• 42:39
  Jesan Sorrells: about, you value themes that focus around honor,
• 42:42
  Jesan Sorrells: success,
• 42:45
  Jesan Sorrells: commitment,
• 42:46
  Jesan Sorrells: clear communication,
• 42:49
  Jesan Sorrells: sacrifice,
• 42:50
  Jesan Sorrells: loyalty.
• 42:52
  Jesan Sorrells: Am I picking up on the theme correctly?
• 42:54
  Jesan Sorrells: 100%.
• 42:56
  Jesan Sorrells: Why is it then?
• 42:58
  Jesan Sorrells: Not why.
• 42:59
  Jesan Sorrells: What are the things?
• 43:01
  Jesan Sorrells: What question is better than a why question?
• 43:03
  Jesan Sorrells: What are the things that we can learn as men,
• 43:08
  Jesan Sorrells: not even learn,
• 43:08
  Jesan Sorrells: what are the things we can apply as men to our daily lives from these books?
• 43:14
  Jesan Sorrells: Because this is one of the things I'm challenged by every time I bring a book to my audience,
• 43:19
  Jesan Sorrells: right?
• 43:20
  Jesan Sorrells: I'm challenged.
• 43:20
  Jesan Sorrells: I challenge myself internally to think about when I bring Ben-Hur or when I bring a Eudora Welty book or when I bring a book by Katherine Ann Porter
• 43:32
  Jesan Sorrells: or when I bring a book,
• 43:33
  Jesan Sorrells: when I bring Shakespeare,
• 43:35
  Jesan Sorrells: what are the ways that this,
• 43:38
  Jesan Sorrells: the themes from this
• 43:39
  Jesan Sorrells: book or this play or this poem,
• 43:42
  Jesan Sorrells: what are the things that can be applied to people's real
• 43:45
  Jesan Sorrells: lived lives where people really live? And I'm, I'm constantly churning on that,
• 43:49
  Jesan Sorrells: trying to,
• 43:50
  Jesan Sorrells: trying to make this real for folks,
• 43:52
  Jesan Sorrells: right?
• 43:53
  Jesan Sorrells: So it's not intellectual pie in the sky,
• 43:56
  Jesan Sorrells: so that it's tied to action,
• 43:58
  Jesan Sorrells: so that we can actually move this whole,
• 44:02
  Jesan Sorrells: you know,
• 44:03
  Jesan Sorrells: Western civilization experiment forward,
• 44:06
  Jesan Sorrells: right?
• 44:07
  Jesan Sorrells: Just an inch of a step at a time.
• 44:10
  Jesan Sorrells: What are the things that people can get from, that men can get from this,
• 44:16
  Jesan Sorrells: from these books that you've selected?
• 44:18
  Nicky Billou: I think every man ought to understand what is it that makes a man a man.
• 44:23
  Nicky Billou: And the first thing is his word,
• 44:26
  Nicky Billou: his honor,
• 44:27
  Nicky Billou: his integrity,
• 44:28
  Nicky Billou: the things he stands for.
• 44:30
  Nicky Billou: If you read these books and they inspire you to be a man that's that sort of man,
• 44:34
  Nicky Billou: that's a beautiful thing.
• 44:36
  Nicky Billou: That's first and foremost.
• 44:38
  Nicky Billou: And I think the right sort of man's loyal,
• 44:40
  Nicky Billou: right sort of man will sacrifice.
• 44:43
  Nicky Billou: You know, in the Bible, it says a man has no greater love than to lay down his life for his brother.
• 44:51
  Nicky Billou: That speaks to my core,
• 44:54
  Nicky Billou: man.
• 44:54
  Nicky Billou: It speaks to my very core.
• 44:56
  Nicky Billou: And I also think man's job is to provide.
• 44:59
  Nicky Billou: So success is very important.
• 45:01
  Nicky Billou: To provide for yourself,
• 45:02
  Nicky Billou: for your family,
• 45:03
  Nicky Billou: for the world,
• 45:04
  Nicky Billou: really.
• 45:04
  Nicky Billou: And the kind of man that does that is a committed man.
• 45:07
  Nicky Billou: A committed,
• 45:07
  Nicky Billou: you know.
• 45:08
  Jesan Sorrells: These are the things that sort of like,
• 45:13
  Jesan Sorrells: I remember Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men.
• 45:19
  Jesan Sorrells: These are things that have become punchlines to people who,
• 45:25
  Jesan Sorrells: deep down in places they don't want to talk about at cocktail parties,
• 45:28
  Jesan Sorrells: need and want men that exhibit these kinds of traits.
• 45:34
  Jesan Sorrells: But they only want them on their terms.
• 45:37
  Jesan Sorrells: They want them tamed when they want them tamed.
• 45:39
  Jesan Sorrells: But when they want to release them out of the cage, they want them to go do bad things and then go right back into the cage.
• 45:44
  Jesan Sorrells: And this is the tension that has been exposed in the last, I would say,
• 45:51
  Jesan Sorrells: really sharply in the last 25 years.
• 45:54
  Jesan Sorrells: This is the tension that men are living in.
• 45:56
  Jesan Sorrells: So,
• 45:59
  Jesan Sorrells: and this is what happens when,
• 46:01
  Jesan Sorrells: like I said, the great chain of being going all the way back is broken.
• 46:06
  Jesan Sorrells: When men don't have other men to tell them how to balance this tension.
• 46:10
  Jesan Sorrells: And I'm going to make this personal.
• 46:12
  Jesan Sorrells: So my parents divorced when I was 12 for a whole variety of reasons.
• 46:18
  Jesan Sorrells: I didn't see my father again after that.
• 46:22
  Jesan Sorrells: My mother,
• 46:22
  Jesan Sorrells: yeah, my mother remarried to a very blue collar guy, my stepfather.
• 46:29
  Jesan Sorrells: She was married.
• 46:30
  Jesan Sorrells: She was married to him actually longer than she was married to my father, which is interesting.
• 46:33
  Jesan Sorrells: He just died last year.
• 46:36
  Jesan Sorrells: This was a guy who broke his back,
• 46:38
  Jesan Sorrells: right?
• 46:39
  Jesan Sorrells: Broke his body laying concrete in Louisiana.
• 46:43
  Jesan Sorrells: Not a well-educated man,
• 46:45
  Jesan Sorrells: not a reader,
• 46:46
  Jesan Sorrells: not by any stretch of the imagination.
• 46:49
  Jesan Sorrells: Not stupid,
• 46:50
  Jesan Sorrells: but not a reader,
• 46:51
  Jesan Sorrells: right?
• 46:52
  Jesan Sorrells: Not that kind of guy.
• 46:54
  Jesan Sorrells: And the challenges I had with my stepfather and the challenges I had with my father,
• 47:01
  Jesan Sorrells: I had to figure out in the course of my 20s and 30s how to integrate all of that stuff,
• 47:10
  Jesan Sorrells: how to integrate all of that,
• 47:12
  Jesan Sorrells: those emotions,
• 47:13
  Jesan Sorrells: all those ideas, all of those thoughts,
• 47:16
  Jesan Sorrells: how to put them in the appropriate boxes and then construct a model of masculinity for my sons.
• 47:22
  Jesan Sorrells: I had to commit to doing things that my father didn't do and commit to being present for my kids
• 47:31
  Jesan Sorrells: in ways, both my sons and my daughters,
• 47:34
  Jesan Sorrells: in ways that my father or my stepfather were not for me.
• 47:39
  Jesan Sorrells: I'm not unusual.
• 47:40
  Jesan Sorrells: There's a lot of men who've had to reconstruct
• 47:42
  Jesan Sorrells: their own masculinity with no outside help.
• 47:45
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 47:46
  Jesan Sorrells: The books help.
• 47:48
  Jesan Sorrells: The books help.
• 47:49
  Jesan Sorrells: They do.
• 47:50
  Jesan Sorrells: They're not the whole thing.
• 47:51
  Jesan Sorrells: They're not the whole thing,
• 47:53
  Jesan Sorrells: but they are something.
• 47:54
  Jesan Sorrells: So when I read the Hakagure,
• 47:59
  Jesan Sorrells: right?
• 47:59
  Jesan Sorrells: which is a book about the Bushido Code,
• 48:03
  Jesan Sorrells: right?
• 48:04
  Jesan Sorrells: It's the basis for the movie Ghost Dog
• 48:08
  Jesan Sorrells: that I can't remember the actor's name,
• 48:11
  Jesan Sorrells: Frederick, oh,
• 48:12
  Jesan Sorrells: it'll come to me in a minute.
• 48:14
  Jesan Sorrells: Ghost Dog, The Way of the Samurai.
• 48:15
  Jesan Sorrells: Anyway, it's based on the book, The Hakagurei,
• 48:17
  Jesan Sorrells: and it's a book about Bushido,
• 48:20
  Jesan Sorrells: the book about the code of honor,
• 48:23
  Jesan Sorrells: describes what the Bushido Code is.
• 48:26
  Jesan Sorrells: When I read that book first,
• 48:27
  Jesan Sorrells: when I was probably 22 or 23,
• 48:33
  Jesan Sorrells: you know, I was at a transitional moment in my life,
• 48:35
  Jesan Sorrells: right?
• 48:35
  Jesan Sorrells: 9-11 had just happened.
• 48:37
  Jesan Sorrells: I was making some decisions about my life
• 48:39
  Jesan Sorrells: and what I was going to do
• 48:40
  Jesan Sorrells: and where I was going to go
• 48:41
  Jesan Sorrells: and who I was going to be.
• 48:43
  Jesan Sorrells: And this book was a tiny brick
• 48:48
  Jesan Sorrells: that went into that wall.
• 48:50
  Jesan Sorrells: Now,
• 48:51
  Jesan Sorrells: that brick wasn't disconnected
• 48:54
  Jesan Sorrells: from the brick that my father had put in a wall
• 48:57
  Jesan Sorrells: Where he told me years ago that,
• 49:00
  Jesan Sorrells: and Nikki, you actually said a variation of this today,
• 49:02
  Jesan Sorrells: a man does what he says he's going to do.
• 49:05
  Jesan Sorrells: So you don't commit,
• 49:06
  Jesan Sorrells: you don't make promises unless you can keep them.
• 49:09
  Jesan Sorrells: So you don't make promises,
• 49:10
  Jesan Sorrells: period,
• 49:11
  Jesan Sorrells: unless you can keep them.
• 49:13
  Jesan Sorrells: That and then the code.
• 49:15
  Jesan Sorrells: And now I got to find the gaps,
• 49:16
  Jesan Sorrells: right?
• 49:17
  Jesan Sorrells: I got to figure out where this fits.
• 49:19
  Jesan Sorrells: I got to figure out how this works.
• 49:22
  Jesan Sorrells: How do those two things come together?
• 49:24
  Jesan Sorrells: And outside of other men,
• 49:26
  Jesan Sorrells: it becomes very hard to do that.
• 49:28
  Jesan Sorrells: You can do it if you have the internal will.
• 49:32
  Jesan Sorrells: But outside of other men, it becomes very hard to do this.
• 49:35
  Jesan Sorrells: And so I sought out male-only spaces.
• 49:37
  Jesan Sorrells: This is why I got into the martial arts.
• 49:38
  Jesan Sorrells: This is why I played rugby for many years.
• 49:41
  Jesan Sorrells: This is why I got into those spaces,
• 49:43
  Jesan Sorrells: because guess what?
• 49:45
  Jesan Sorrells: That's where you discover how to close those gaps between what you read in the book
• 49:50
  Jesan Sorrells: and your life experience that you're walking around out here with.
• 49:54
  Jesan Sorrells: that's the practical thing
• 49:56
  Jesan Sorrells: I think for folks
• 49:56
  Jesan Sorrells: listening to us today
• 49:58
  Nicky Billou: it's been a great conversation
• 49:59
  Nicky Billou: man
• 50:00
  Nicky Billou: spectacular
• 50:01
  Nicky Billou: really enjoyed it
• 50:02
  Nicky Billou: love the list
• 50:03
  Nicky Billou: 10 books
• 50:03
  Nicky Billou: I'm going to pick up
• 50:04
  Nicky Billou: all the ones I don't have
• 50:05
  Nicky Billou: and read them
• 50:07
  Jesan Sorrells: as am I
• 50:08
  Jesan Sorrells: I want to get
• 50:08
  Jesan Sorrells: I want to get this book
• 50:09
  Jesan Sorrells: The Twelfth Angel
• 50:10
  Jesan Sorrells: in particular
• 50:10
  Jesan Sorrells: I'm extremely curious
• 50:12
  Jesan Sorrells: about this now
• 50:12
  Jesan Sorrells: you've got my
• 50:13
  Jesan Sorrells: you've got my
• 50:14
  Jesan Sorrells: you've got my antenna up
• 50:16
  Nicky Billou: he wrote practically
• 50:17
  Nicky Billou: all of his books
• 50:18
  Nicky Billou: with Christian themes
• 50:20
  Jesan Sorrells: interesting
• 50:20
  Jesan Sorrells: okay
• 50:22
  Nicky Billou: either overt
• 50:22
  Nicky Billou: or
• 50:23
  Nicky Billou: or covert
• 50:26
  Nicky Billou: his most famous book is nowhere near his best book okay the 12th angel is his best book but
• 50:33
  Nicky Billou: the second best book is called the christ commission and it's a story about a man who
• 50:40
  Nicky Billou: is taken back in time to the time of christ and he's given a commission to find out if jesus christ
• 50:48
  Nicky Billou: really rose from the dead and the protagonist is skeptical that it happened interesting it is very
• 50:59
  Nicky Billou: interesting i'd heard about this book for 20 years and i just said yeah i don't want to read it i
• 51:03
  Nicky Billou: don't want to read it then one day i just said you know what they don't read it and i read it in one
• 51:10
  Nicky Billou: sitting 265 pages in one sitting and i was like wow this is good this is really really good
• 51:19
  Nicky Billou: And I started to realize how much of a committed Christian Ogmandino was.
• 51:24
  Nicky Billou: I didn't know it before then.
• 51:26
  Nicky Billou: Even though I'd read all his books, I'm like, oh,
• 51:28
  Nicky Billou: yeah,
• 51:28
  Nicky Billou: this dude's a Christian.
• 51:32
  Nicky Billou: But a man like him wouldn't make it in today's publishing world,
• 51:36
  Nicky Billou: unfortunately.
• 51:37
  Jesan Sorrells: Yeah.
• 51:38
  Jesan Sorrells: Yeah.
• 51:39
  Jesan Sorrells: Well, I want to end on a high note.
• 51:40
  Jesan Sorrells: I want to say this.
• 51:42
  Jesan Sorrells: There are a lot of good self-publishing.
• 51:46
  Jesan Sorrells: I would encourage folks who are listening to this podcast to,
• 51:51
  Jesan Sorrells: if you have a comment section or you have the ability to leave comments,
• 51:53
  Jesan Sorrells: please leave comment on the episode of what books it is that you're seeing that you're reading that are on your list,
• 52:00
  Jesan Sorrells: right?
• 52:00
  Jesan Sorrells: I would challenge folks to do that.
• 52:02
  Jesan Sorrells: That's a great idea.
• 52:04
  Jesan Sorrells: Yeah.
• 52:04
  Jesan Sorrells: Great idea.
• 52:06
  Jesan Sorrells: And even include books that are in different genres.
• 52:10
  Jesan Sorrells: So I know that there are some men who would listen to both of our lists and would go,
• 52:14
  Jesan Sorrells: none of that interests me.
• 52:15
  Jesan Sorrells: I really like science fiction or I really like military or I really like political or I really like thrillers.
• 52:22
  Jesan Sorrells: That's fine.
• 52:23
  Jesan Sorrells: I'm not being lowbrow,
• 52:25
  Jesan Sorrells: highbrow,
• 52:26
  Jesan Sorrells: whatever,
• 52:26
  Jesan Sorrells: middlebrow.
• 52:28
  Jesan Sorrells: That's not the point.
• 52:30
  Jesan Sorrells: The point is the kinds of books that men want to read.
• 52:34
  Jesan Sorrells: There's an entire back catalog in Western history where we could pull from.
• 52:38
  Jesan Sorrells: And if we want to read new themes and new books, I think that the future is in self-publishing.
• 52:44
  Jesan Sorrells: I really do think that that's where it is.
• 52:46
  Jesan Sorrells: So I would encourage all those folks
• 52:47
  Jesan Sorrells: who are listening out here,
• 52:48
  Jesan Sorrells: all these men who are listening out here,
• 52:50
  Jesan Sorrells: if you have a story inside of you,
• 52:52
  Jesan Sorrells: Nikki's published books,
• 52:54
  Jesan Sorrells: right?
• 52:55
  Jesan Sorrells: I've published books.
• 52:56
  Jesan Sorrells: If you have a story that's living inside of you,
• 52:59
  Jesan Sorrells: you have a book that has to get out,
• 53:01
  Jesan Sorrells: there's no better time than now,
• 53:03
  Jesan Sorrells: even with as degraded a culture as we may live in,
• 53:06
  Jesan Sorrells: there's no greater time than now
• 53:09
  Jesan Sorrells: than to put pen to paper
• 53:11
  Jesan Sorrells: or pull out your computer and start typing it up.
• 53:14
  Jesan Sorrells: and go out there and self-publish it.
• 53:16
  Jesan Sorrells: I'm not going to name platforms.
• 53:18
  Jesan Sorrells: You can figure out what those are.
• 53:20
  Jesan Sorrells: I'm not going to tell you how you can get paid
• 53:21
  Jesan Sorrells: or how you can get money for any of that.
• 53:23
  Jesan Sorrells: You'll figure all that out.
• 53:25
  Jesan Sorrells: The tools exist for anyone to publish now.
• 53:29
  Jesan Sorrells: And you can absolutely go out and do that.
• 53:30
  Jesan Sorrells: And there's a lot of men, by the way,
• 53:32
  Jesan Sorrells: who are doing that.
• 53:34
  Jesan Sorrells: Amen.
• 53:34
  Jesan Sorrells: And I'd love to see some of those suggestions
• 53:38
  Jesan Sorrells: in the comments below the show notes for this episode.
• 53:42
  Jesan Sorrells: Amen.
• 53:43
  Nicky Billou: My man, it's been a blast.
• 53:46
  Nicky Billou: Thank you very much.
• 53:47
  Jesan Sorrells: Mickey, always a great conversation with you.
• 53:50
  Nicky Billou: Absolutely,
• 53:50
  Nicky Billou: man.
• 53:51
  Nicky Billou: And that's a wrap.
• 53:54
  Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to the Sovereign Man podcast.
• 53:57
  Speaker 4: If you're ready to take charge of your life and become the man you've always wanted to be,
• 54:02
  Speaker 4: we invite you to join the movement at SovereignMan.ca.