Hearing Business Strategies from God with Perry Marshall

In this Episode

• [00:30]Stephan introduces Perry Marshall, one of the most expensive business strategists in the world. He is endorsed in FORBES and INC Magazine and has authored eight books.
• [05:25]What is the difference between synchronicity and serendipity?
• [09:56]Perry talks about the challenges innovators have in getting people’s attention.
• [16:20]Perry tells an interesting story of how he met a woman named Vivian who delivered a message from God to him while in Mozambique.
• [21:11]Perry shares how his life evolved since he got the memo sent by God.
• [26:18]Perry gives his best practice in developing his abilities in receiving messages, signs, and guidance from above.
• [31:23]Stephan shares his divinely guided and planned spiritual journey from being agnostic to believing and experiencing God.
• [38:54]Perry points out that it’s up to us to decide whether we want God or not in our life.
• [42:55]Perry discusses the chapters in his book, Memos from the Head Office, and other books and resources for the skeptics to read and open their minds.
• [51:16]Visit Perry Marshall’s website at perrymarshall.com to connect with him, or visit perrymarshall.com/memos to get three free chapters from his book, Memos from the Head Office to discover resources for critical decisions.

Jump to Links and Resources

Perry, it’s great to have you on the show. 

 It’s good to be here, Stephan. Thanks for having me. 

Of course. Thank you for coming back because you’re on my other show, Marketing Speak, talking about pay-per-click and the Pareto Principle. That was a fabulous episode a little while ago, maybe a year or two ago. It’s great to have you back, but this time to go all metaphysical and talk about your newest book, which I have here in my hands, Memos from the Head Office. The head office is where? I know the answer already, but for our listeners who are not familiar with your book, where’s the head office?

We felt like Memos from the Head Office was a much more user-friendly and demilitarized zone term than how to hear from God or something. And also, giving people permission to not necessarily be quite sure where it comes from, but switched on to your intuition, listening to your body. You and I are both business authors, and we know there are a gazillion business strategy books—here’s how to do this, here’s how to do that. They’re coming out of our ears. 

There’s not a lot of books that talk about the fact that some of the best business strategies never came out of any book. They landed on somebody in a burst of inspiration. This happens a lot and I just don’t think nearly enough attention is given to that. We wanted to write a book about all of the different people I’ve encountered who have a story like that that often doesn’t get told.

Yeah, very important because there’s a lot of mystery and magic to this world, to the universe. If we don’t recognize it, then how do we appreciate it? If we don’t appreciate it, how do we get more of it? It’s really, really important. Understanding is part of the solution to success, but really, wisdom is the end game I would view because then you’re tapping into something much greater than yourself rather than trying to figure it out on your own doing the hard slog all by yourself.

Yes, wisdom is knowing how to use knowledge and there’s not a formula. Knowledge does not teach you how to use knowledge. Knowledge only goes so far. The people that probably you most admire, whether it’s music, film, business, needlepoint, or whatever, they’re not running on strict formulas. The art is beyond that. 

I also think that a very large number of entrepreneurs, truth be told, are really artists. I mean, they might not be painters, musicians, or anything like that, but they approach their work the way artists approach their work. That there is something very important, maybe even sacred about it. It needs to be done a certain way. It needs to be delivered a certain way. A lot of times the business systems thinking doesn’t catch that or doesn’t respect it properly.

Wisdom is knowing how to use knowledge, and there’s no formula.

One thing that is related to this concept is there’s a difference between serendipity and synchronicity. In my view, both are required in order to pull that rabbit out of your head if you’re an entrepreneur and turn that into a patent, an invention, a new process, or something revolutionary. Do you have any thoughts on the difference between the two? 

I only just recently understood what the difference is myself just within the last couple of months. I’m curious what your thoughts are and I’ll share what mine is as well based on a little bit of research I’ve done on it. 

They are two separate things. Synchronicity is when events and people align in remarkable ways that you couldn’t have planned. Serendipity is actually quite different. It’s when an unexpected situation comes up. You could even call it an affordance and you are already prepared to take advantage of that. 

The difference between the two is that with serendipity, the preparation could have happened years ago and you’ve just been carrying it all along. 

It’s like potential energy. 

One of the great tragedies is that many people reduce God to a set of intellectual propositions. In reality, we’re only dimly approximating a biblical thought. We’re not defining it. Click To Tweet

Right, it was potential energy. It wasn’t two fireworks going off at the same time all by themselves. It was this firework that went off, and guess what? I can pull this thing out of my bag and I can make this go off. I can shoot this rocket two seconds later and it converges. Those are two very different things. 

In order to actualize either one of those, your brain has to be switched on and you have to be in a receptive state. I don’t think that the super formulaic version of the world conditions people to be receptive like that.

Why do you think that is? I have my theories around this and I’m curious what yours is. Why are people being kind of put asleep or dumbed down by the structures in place in this world? 

I just had a conversation two hours ago with somebody. He was talking about the CYA mentality. He said the cover your ass mentality is, “I’m afraid of Roger because Roger is my boss. I’m going to make sure that Roger can’t yell at me. If Roger wants a 10-page report, then I’m going to give him a 10-page report even if we could have done it in 4. I’m going to dot the I’s and cross the T’s.” It’s coming from a fear perspective and it’s run by the lizard brain. 

This is how most schools work. You’re motivated by fear of the F, the C, the D, and you’re expected to check the boxes. People get trained, this is how you get the gold star, you just do this.

I’ve had this conversation with my kids a whole bunch of times. I said, especially in college, you’re going to run into a lot of situations where you have to decide, hey, I’m going to do this assignment. Do I want to learn something, or do I want a good grade? I could get a good grade by doing stuff I already know and regurgitating it to give them the right answer. If I learned something, I might make a mistake. The straight-A mentality and the perfectionism mentality.

As an entrepreneur, 80% of what I do doesn’t work out the way I wanted it to and often fails. If you want a 100% success rate or 95% success rate, you can’t take any risks. You have to shoot fish in a barrel and in it. If all you’re going to do when you’re going through your life is shoot fish in a barrel, you’re never going to come up with anything to genuinely break through. 

This is why a lot of professions are stuck. In fact, my experience from working in hundreds of industries is most industries are 20–50 years behind state of the art. Now if we’re in technology, the internet, or something like that, okay, 5 or 10 years behind. But very few people are actually hugging the edge of the very best that we can be doing. 

There’s lots of inertia. There’s lots of resistance. It’s not as hard to be innovative as a lot of people think. In fact, a lot of times, the difficulty is in when you are innovative, getting anybody to listen to you, getting anybody to accept what you’re doing. Let’s bounce it back to you. 

It’s not as hard to be innovative as a lot of people think.

What comes to mind there is the Cassandra Effect. Right. Cassandra, the Greek myth of her where she was warning the powers that be that Troy was going to fall. The curse was that she would be able to foretell the future, but no one would believe her. And of course, the Trojan horse and everything. She warned everybody, and nobody would listen, Troy fell. If you come with such innovation and rule-breaking, you’re going to get met with resistance.

Yes. I’ve been ahead of the curve long enough. Pioneers come back with arrows in their backs. I think there’s a certain art that you learn to not pull all of your ideas out of the hat all at once. Figure out what’s the next thing that I can get accepted right now. What’s some component of that thing that even if people are resisting change, there’s still something about this new thing that they don’t want to live without. That does work. I have a lot of friends and colleagues who do that.

I was talking to one friend of mine who’s a scientist once, and I said, “Well, that’s what you get for being 25 years ahead of your time. His wife was in the kitchen.” She looks over and she goes, “Thirty.” 

They get the arrows in the back, and the second in the row they claim the prize.

I think a lot of people listening to us can identify with that. My first sales job, I identified some technology that I just thought was really cool. I started promoting it, but a) the world just wasn’t ready for that then, so I was starving. Then b) even worse, the company I worked for wasn’t really equipped to support me the way that I needed them to if I was going to make a sale. What I was doing was doubly futile, which is really depressing. Okay, I was only 27 years old, and I knew even less than I thought I did.’

The way the world works is you always get to decide. God will respect whatever you choose. If you don't want God in your life, you won't find Him anywhere. Click To Tweet

When I went to a new company, they were much better equipped to support me, and they were much better equipped to sell to the early adopters. They had a nationwide audience instead of just a Chicago Metro area audience. If you could only sell to a small percentage of people, there was a much larger number of people to choose from. 

When you’re an innovator, people throw around words like ‘innovation’ all the time. Most of them don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, frankly.

There’s a lot of serendipity and synchronicity in there that people don’t recognize or respect, really. I invented a software as a service back in 2003 and it was a whole lot of serendipity and synchronicity that made that product go. It was a cost-per-click SEO platform. We used reverse proxy technology. 

I wrote the original prototype myself, then we hired a bunch of developers, and we charge on a cost per click basis. It was so much cheaper to pay our CPCs versus Google AdWords at the time that our clients were happy to have that performance-based model. It was such a game-changing and destiny-changing technology, that was why my company got acquired back in 2010 because that technology was driving the majority of our revenue instead of our agency services. 

That was serendipity and that stuff was arriving at a time where I was prepared for it. I’d figured out all sorts of things around regular expression, pattern matching, and a lot of stuff around rewrite rules, proxies, and stuff like that. 

People throw around words like ‘innovation’ all the time. Unfortunately, most of them don’t have any idea what they’re talking about, frankly.

When we’re trying to work around an issue with one of our clients—it was Kohl’s department stores—they needed reassurance that we weren’t going to destroy their site with SEO. That SEO wasn’t going to ruin their brand. I pulled their pages from their server with an automated script and then injected SEO goodness and presented them in real-time. 

I made the whole site functional so they could click around and so forth. It was just a demo, but it was a functional demo. Then I realized after that, wait a second, we could do this in a production environment. That was how that came about. 

Another serendipitous event or I guess you could also say a synchronicity too because we had another client a few months later—Northern Tool—couldn’t hit their code freeze deadline in the traditional way by doing the SEO work to their site. I figured I could use the script that I had written for Kohl’s in a production environment and they were game to give that a try. 

We were able to sneak that in before the code freeze in September. That was very serendipitous and very synchronous. That was back in 2003, and I had no idea. I did not appreciate what was happening and how the universe was conspiring to make life work for me. I just thought, I cut a good break at the time. 

I was agnostic. I wasn’t even really believing in a higher power at that point in my life. It wasn’t until age 42 that I had my spiritual awakening in India, which brings me to my next question for you is, what was your big memo from the head office that got us started on this path?

Well, it was very big. It was in March of 2003. I had read, maybe a month before, Richard Koch’s 80/20 book and it set my mind on fire. I realized when I read his book that he’s describing this as a binary thing, that there’s an 80 and there’s a 20. But actually, there should be some kind of a curve that would be like a math formula for this. I looked around and nothing that I found on the internet described what I was picturing in my mind. 

One particular day, it was March 23, 2003, I was trained to work on the math problem and I was stuck on it. I’m an engineer by training so it wouldn’t be ridiculous for me to be doing something like this. There’s something really valuable here, what is it? And I was just grinding away. All-day I was obsessing about this. 

The other thing I was obsessing about was three days before, I had had one of those—I think all successful entrepreneurs, occasionally have these caveman discovers fire moments where you did something and it made a bunch of money and you’re like whoa. This had happened to me.

I was thinking, all right, my brother-in-law has this project in Mozambique. Mozambique is the 18th poorest country in the world. They’ve got all kinds of diseases, problems, and famine. They have a church, a school, and a feeding program. How can I use some of my many newfound skills to help that? 

I was thinking about my calculus problem and Mozambique all day long. There was this music thing at church, and I went to it. There must have been 30 people there. There were some musicians just playing this Pink Floyd kind of music on the stage. I was in la-la land. I was a million miles away thinking about my math problem, and I was thinking about Mozambique. I look up and this woman is making a beeline for me. I’ve never seen her before, she’s black. I have no idea who she is. She sticks out her hand and she says, “Hi, my name is Vivian and the Lord gave me a word for you.” Now, she said that and I thought, I’ve heard of things like this. 

I’ve never had this happen to me. So I guess this is going to be interesting.

The word is fractal, isn’t it? 

I’ve never had this happen to me. I guess this is going to be interesting. She goes, “The Lord told me that you’re very good at math and you were working on some kind of formula, equation, or invention and you’re going to figure it out.“

I immediately started doing math in my head and the math was, what are the chances that anybody in this room on a Friday night is working on a math problem at all? What are the chances that she nailed the first person the first time so she really had my attention? Okay, this is weird, and then she turned to walk away. Then she spun around and she went, “Oh, and he told me something else too. You want to support missions, and God is going to bless your business so you can support missions.” 

I stared at her and I was almost on the verge of tears because now she really got me. I said, ”If only you knew.” She goes, “He knows,” and just walked away. I just stood there. I’m like, did that just happen? That just happened. A woman, a total stranger, walked up to me, read me my mail, and then walked away. Whoa.

I now have to adjust my whole idea of the world and universe because I just got a whole new data point. Like I said, I’ve heard of this before, but there’s something about when it actually happens to you, it’s like this whole other thing. 

I stared at her, and I was almost on the verge of tears because now she got me.

I thought, well, okay, so my business is going to get blessed so I guess I need to get ready for that to happen. I need to open my window wider. I need to raise my expectations. In fact, it was almost like permission to succeed was what that was. That’s really the biggest thing that I got out of that. Well, I guess I need to keep working on that math problem.

Now, I don’t think I would have. I actually had to try multiple times for the next three years before I actually figured it out. I think I would have been content to draw a picture on a napkin and say, well, it looks something like this. Well, Vivian told me this so I got to get to it. Three years later, I figured it out.

In 2018, this was published in Harvard Business Review. It’s the math of fractal 80/20 is what it is and it’s incredibly useful. If you want to see the whole business side of it, you can pick up my book, 80/20 Sales and Marketing, you can read about it, or type in 80/20 Perry Marshall Harvard Business Review. There’s an English translation that you can read.

I did figure out the math formula three years later and my business did take off. In fact, I figured out that three days before I met Vivian, a guy reached out to me and he said, “You told me I should get this guy to speak on Google Ads at my seminar. He turned me down, Perry. I think you should speak at my seminar.” And that’s how I got into the Google Ad business, which is how I became the author of the world’s best-selling book on internet advertising. It’s actually really remarkable. 

My whole business career has revolved around pay-per-click advertising and 80/20 literally for the last 18 years, and both of those things clicked into place on a Friday night at a music thing when this black lady I’ve never seen before shows up out of nowhere. My whole career turned on that. In fact, I could very easily be just another freelance guy hustling and doing projects, not a best-selling author, not published scientific papers, and stuff like that.

Your whole life can turn on a dime and so what I want to say to your listeners is, this is real. I know this is real, and you can acknowledge that it’s real before it happens to you. You don’t have to wait until after. I think it actually speeds the process up. I think you’re more likely to get a memo if you expect that one can come in anytime.

Yeah, and you could get a memo if you volunteer to deliver miracles on behalf of the Creator. I’ve been doing that. I had a miracle happen to me. I was invited into a mastermind where they were reading the book You Were Born for This by Bruce Wilkinson and sharing the miracles that were happening in their lives that they were delivering for others. That wasn’t about I want to receive miracles. No, I want to deliver miracles like the pizza delivery guy. 

It just starts with asking. Just like in Isaiah where Isaiah was at the feet of God and he’s essentially witnessing a board meeting of sorts and hearing the angels and so forth that are going to deliver some of God’s miracles and who’s doing what. There’s little Isaiah saying, “Hey, here I am. Choose me, send me. We can all do that. We can all just say, Hey, I’m here. Send me.”

Yes, and I love the book of Isaiah. There are all kinds of stuff in that book that resonates with me. It’s really one of the most beautiful ancient books ever written. I think anybody who has a posture of okay, I’m available. What do you need me to do? That’s it. It’s about as simple as that. 

I grew up, I’m a pastor’s kid, and I could go into the deep end of the pool. I could talk about theology. I’m a philosophical guy. I could do all that, and that’s fun at times. But it starts with being available and it could even be, hey, I don’t know who you are and I don’t know how this works, but I’m available. I’m listening. I’m paying attention. 

If you want to get my attention, please get it. I find that request gets answered. I can’t promise you when it gets answered. I don’t know how it gets answered. I’m not in charge of that department. Some days, I wish I was. Probably most days, I’m better off that I’m not. But yes, yes, yes.

The ways that we can receive these messages, these signs, or the download can be in different forms. They could be through clairaudience, clairvoyance, through an intuitive hit, through a chance meeting, a claircognizance, a knowing—so many ways.

I’m curious how you’ve been developing your abilities to directly receive rather than having to rely on others like a Vivian, the nearby psychic, or a medium to get your guidance.

I love the book of Isaiah. There are all kinds of stuff in that book that resonates with me.

This is the best habit I have ever cultivated, I believe. Every morning when I get out of bed, the first thing I do is go get my notebook and my pencil. I like mechanical pencils. You can use a fountain pen. You can use whatever you want. I do not recommend you use a keyboard.

I use a reMarkable tablet. Those are fun.

Great. I sit down and I free write. I write whatever comes. If I had an idea in the shower, if I just had a dream, if I’m feeling thankful about pushing the kid on the swing last night, or whatever, I just start going.

A lot of times I ask questions and then I write whatever answer comes. You do not edit. You don’t question. You don’t try to figure it out. You don’t worry about whether it makes any sense or not. You just go. Probably, most people, if they do this for 10 minutes they’re going to start feeling like, wow, this is a long time. You get in the groove of it. I usually need at least an hour. It’s the most productive thing I do all day, and I haven’t missed a day in eight years, not one day. It is literally the best practice I’ve ever cultivated. 

Everybody knows that Perry just needs to do his thing in the morning. Then, when his armor is on and he’s ready for the day, he’s going to come out and then he could do things. I think it’s one of the reasons that I can be involved in so many activities, fields, and endeavors and be productive. It’s not because I insanely work ridiculous hours and up all night. I have a pretty sane life, but it all starts with listening.

Synchronicity is when events and people align in remarkable ways that you couldn't have planned. Serendipity is when an unexpected situation comes up. Click To Tweet

What am I doing when I do this? I’m exercising the listening muscle and working that muscle. How about you? How do you do it?

What I do is a gratitude exercise. I write down what I’m grateful for in terms of blessings. It’s all a blessing, to clarify that. Even the challenges or the things I didn’t want are blessings. I write down what I’m grateful for that I want and received. I’m grateful also for the challenges, the things that I didn’t want, and things that didn’t go my way.

By documenting those, it helps me to see the bigger picture and to be grateful for it even if I’m not really feeling it at the moment. Just the recognition that there is a bigger picture and it’s for my soul’s highest and best good helps me to at least glimpse the bigger picture.

I also write down what I’m grateful for in terms of the messages. I receive messages in many different forms—clairaudience, clairvoyance, angel numbers, synchronicities, intuitive hits, visions, prophetic dreams, and lots of ways.

This is all very, very new for me. It all started this year on January 22nd because I prayed to God for a job. I watched a video of Sheila Gillette talking about her near-death experience in 1969. She was on her deathbed after childbirth and she prayed to God, please let me stay on this planet. Let me raise my kids. Just give me a job. I’ll do anything. Please give me a job. 

I wanted God to give me a job. I’ve got a successful business and all that, but that was not why I was here. I didn’t want a near-death experience in order to get it, so I got the job. He heard me and He thinned the veils immediately. 

I could see how this universe works, not in exquisite detail, but that essentially we’re living in a simulation. Not an Elon Musk-style simulation, but a simulation where the angels, the Creator, and other divine and sacred beings can rewrite the script as our movie or life plays out.

Stephan, I don’t know you hardly at all, but if I rewind to you talking about writing scripts and being a coder, I know an awful lot of people who do stuff like that. I’m an engineer and that is a very linear world.

And I’m a very linear thinker, or have been.

I’m guessing this was a stretch.

It was. It took a wake-up call in June of last year where one of my family members’ lives was saved while I was interviewing somebody for my podcast. It’s the only interview I did in a three-week time period. Again, synchronicity, there’s no randomness. Everything is divinely-guided and planned.

As an entrepreneur, 80% of what I do doesn't work out the way I wanted it to and often fails. Click To Tweet

This one interview, I squeezed into a three-week time period while I was trying to get ready to move to Florida from LA. This guy happened to be a psychic medium. The only psychic medium I’ve ever interviewed on the show.

While I was interviewing him, my wife comes in and interrupts the interview to slip a piece of paper to me that says—this person I’m going to keep who it is private for their medical privacy—is this person having a stroke? This is Mark Nelson who I was interviewing. Totally legit. He’s the real deal. He’s like, absolutely she is. If she doesn’t go to the hospital, here’s what’s going to happen.

She was not going to go. She didn’t believe that she was having a stroke or anything like that. No big deal. It took monumental convincing to get her to go. We didn’t live anywhere near her, but she did finally go. We wouldn’t have pushed it to that limit if he had not been so insistent that she was having a stroke. Indeed, she was.

That is quite worrying.

That cracked open the door around the whole psychic world for me because I wasn’t open to it before. I had not had any interest in getting a reading or going to a séance. I still haven’t gone to a séance, but none of this world was of interest to me prior to June.

You can acknowledge that something is real before it happens to you. You don't have to wait. Click To Tweet

Then I went and had a reading with him. Again, coincidentally, synchronicity hit. We live 10 minutes from each other so I was able to go and get a reading from this guy. Boy, he nailed it. He knew stuff that he couldn’t have possibly known about my mother who had passed. My mother communicated through him to me and was saying stuff that I’d even forgotten about her. That started me down this path. 

Then, of course, I interviewed Sheila Gillette. In the preparation for that interview, she channels 12 archangels. Again, she is absolutely the real deal. In the preparation for that interview is where I got that impetus to pray for a job for myself. It took a few months before I was ready, but when I was, I did it from a place of humility, gratitude, and surrender. In the middle of the night, it was instant.

Wow. Clearly, there was some preparation that you needed to go through in order to get into that spot and then it clicked into place.

It took a while, but the journey to get there from agnostic to believing and experiencing God, which happened in 2012 when I was in India and I got touched on the head by a monk. He zapped me and it was like an LSD trip. That was otherworldly for sure. Then, all these miracles started happening for me that were without-a-doubt signs for me. I’d think about somebody and pray for them. Fifteen years of no contact with this person and then they call me out of the blue on my cell phone to apologize.

I was plugged in, but I wasn’t fully receptive. I believe in this concept of the willing suspension of disbelief, but I wasn’t willing to apply it yet to the whole psychic world. It turns out, we’re all psychic. We all get the intuitive hits. We all get the knowing, that claircognizance. And some of us have the ability to see visions and to hear voices, which incidentally—I didn’t know this until recently—is usually in our own voice.

The way I like to put it is not everybody’s good at the counter. Some people are a thousand times better at accounting than other people, but everybody can do a little bit. Anybody could balance a checkbook, at least if it was a simple checkbook balance. Everybody can hear the voice. Some people choose to work the listening ear muscle, and some people get an assignment to use that muscle and they become prophetic people.

My number one thing is what I just said—journaling and listening every morning. Then another one is you become like the people that you surround yourself with. Vivian was my first one. There are more people where she came from.

Did you keep in touch with her?

What happened was that for 10 years, I had no idea who she was. I saw her one other time and then that was it. I had no idea how to find her. My 80/20 book, when it came out, the dedication at the beginning of the book says, “To the Master Mathematician and to Vivian.” 

This book is dedicated to some crazy woman that I only met. I got to find her. I went on an all-out hunt to track this person down and I finally did find her. I got her and her husband in a restaurant one night. I’m like, hey, let me tell you what’s happened in the last 10 years. It’s 10 years later. 

She’s one of my besties now. I talked to her yesterday. There’s a saying that your income becomes the average of the five people. If you just extend that, if you want to play violin, then your violin playing is the average of your five closest violin friends. If you’re working your prophetic ear, then it’s going to be the average of the five prophetic people that you hang out with. You can exercise that principle in a lot of different dimensions. I think it’s the ultimate $10,000/hour skill. I’m not reducing it to money when I say that. That’s a way of saying this is an incredibly valuable skill.

You’re talking about listening to be able to essentially have a conversation with God and not just a one-way pleading and begging for stuff to happen all the time that you want.

This book is dedicated to some crazy woman that I only met once. Finally, I got to find her. I went on an all-out hunt to track this person down, and I finally found her.

Exactly. Because if you can clear the channels enough for that to be an actual conversation, you can walk through anything. 

In fact, I heard a talk a guy gave once. He was in a grocery store parking lot when somebody started shooting. He and his girls had come to the grocery store, they were getting out of their car, they were ready to go into the store, and all of a sudden, bullets started flying. One or both of his girls got hit and they went down. He heard God say to him, “We are going to go through this together, in the middle of this insanity in the parking lot.”

I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. I know he lost at least one of those girls. I don’t know the story well, but he had a companion to go through the chaos. He didn’t have to go through it by himself. I don’t think you have to go through anything by yourself. Whether it’s glory, tragedy, or anything in between. But the way the world works is you get to decide. My experience is that God will respect whatever you decide. If you don’t want God in your life, you won’t find Him anywhere.

It’s the illusion of separation, at your request, turned up to 11 on the dial.

Yes. I think there are a lot of people who will say, “where’s God when you need Him?” You ushered Him to the door a long time ago. He left. He’s not invited in, so you don’t have that experience. I suspect that there are more people than they realize who have done that and then they wonder, why does the world seem like such a pointless place? It’s not pointless.

There’s actually a chapter in the book of Isaiah. Some of the translations call it the God who hides. It’s like, hey, you ushered me to the door and you’re not going to find me. You can invite him back, but you got to do that. It’s on you to do that.

I don’t think you have to go through anything by yourself, whether it’s glory, tragedy, or anything in between.

There’s no judgment there. There’s no well, you have to prove yourself. If you ask with contrition, humility, and love, it’s going to flood in. God is not a belief, God is an experience.

Yes. One of the great tragedies is that a lot of people reduce God to a set of intellectual propositions. In fact, I think a lot of Christian systematic theology, that’s exactly what they’ve done. I don’t really have anything against systematic theology, but you have to understand that you’re only dimly approximating something. You’re not defining it. Fascinating.

What would you tell somebody who’s very skeptical? They’re probably still not listening, but if they are, what do you tell somebody who’s skeptical like, I’ve never had a without-a-doubt sign from the Creator, my angels, from my spirit guides, or anything else like that?

There are so many people who have stories. This is a book of stories, Memos from the Head Office, story after story. I know all these people and we meticulously researched this before it went to press. Almost everybody—names, dates, places, times—you go look these people up. There’s almost no story in this book that’s anonymous.

I would first start with this, can you really be so bitter and so cynical as to discount every story anybody else tells you? Do you really distrust your fellow human beings to that degree? Why don’t you start with somebody else’s story and understand, yeah, this really happened? 

That Vivian story I told you really happened. It happened on March 23 or 21 2003—whichever is the third Friday of March in 2003. Go look it up. That’s the day it happened. It happened in Oak Park, Illinois. There are all these other stories too. 

To some degree, I wrote this book for the skeptic. There’s a chapter called, Is There Scientific Evidence for Memos? It’s a pretty short chapter, but I go through at least a dozen-and-a-half sources that you can go to. 

Go read this book. Go read the footnotes in this book. Go read the scientific papers that were written about this, this, and this. There is a large body of actual scientific literature, not happy, joy, froofy, feel-good, new-age books. Actual scientific literature, Stanford, Princeton University, Department of Defense—there’s a whole bunch of this stuff.

Do you have any of that on your website for the book?

On my various websites, you will find it. I’ll give you a Google search that’ll turn up some stuff.

Okay, here’s one, coffeehousetheology.com/miracles. Start there. There’s more in the chapter in the Memos book. There’s a book called Margins of Reality by Jahn and Dunne, which is the result of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab which ran for 28 years. 

I have a podcast interview on the Evolution 2.0 Podcast with Brenda Dunne who used to run that department at Princeton. They did oodles of experiments where they proved with five nines of statistical accuracy that people could sense the future, see objects that were thousands of miles away, and exchange messages with other human beings with only 0.0001% chance that it was luck. They can sway random number generators by concentration. They can displace falling objects with concentration.

In most cases, these were only small differences. It wasn’t like hailstones were falling out of the air and then they were going back up. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about small but measurable abilities to affect certain things. There’s a lot of literature about this. It’s not acknowledged in the mainstream media. It’s not acknowledged in most scientific journals, but you can go read all of that research for yourself.

This research actually has higher standards of proof than most research because it has to because there’s so much skepticism against it. If you go look up the repeatability of scientific experiments—by the way, I am a published scientific author. I am on panels of peer-reviewed journals. I know the science world. Go look at my science career because I have one that’s going on right now.

Most scientific experiments are not even repeatable. There are all kinds of medical studies where they do it a second time and it gets a different result. The paranormal research I’m referring to—at least some of it—is of a higher grade than a lot of standard medical research. Speaking to the skeptic, this is real. You can verify it. I want to remind you of something. If only one of these stories is true, then there’s another dimension that most of us weren’t educated about.

Yeah. There is a matrix we haven’t seen.

It’s not like this is new. This is the oldest idea in the world. It’s older than the oldest profession in the world because human beings have been spiritual for as long as we have an archaeological history of anything resembling a modern human.

There’s a great book, by the way. It’s called The Penultimate Curiosity by Roger Wagner and Andrew Briggs. Andrew Briggs is an Oxford physicist. I know him, and he wrote this book. It’s an anthropomorphic logical exploration of the last 100,000 years of humans’ quest for religious meaning. He correlates it to the scientific questions that have been dancing with the metaphysical questions all along. The subtitle of the book is How Science Swims in the Slipstream of Ultimate Questions.

Is Proof of Heaven a book that you’d recommend as well by Eben Alexander?

I don’t remember that, but there’s a book called Heaven is For Real.

Is there a movie based on that?

Yes, there is a movie by that title as well.

Awesome. I know we have to wrap up, but one thing I wanted to leave our listeners with as a to-do is for them to go and ask their family and friends for an example of a without-a-doubt sign or something that has defied logic, randomness, or something. 

I’ve heard so many stories once I started asking my family and friends. One had an out-of-body experience they never shared with me. This is a family member I’ve known for decades. Another family member told me that she was able to predict with the tarot the winner of the Kentucky Derby this year. A friend of mine told me that she saw an angel last year, and this is a hardcore business lady who I never would have guessed.

This stuff is happening. They’re just not telling you about it because who wants the ridicule, the derision, and all the negative judgment?

You won’t have to look far to find it, I promise that.

Where does our listeners or viewers go to read the book, to learn more from you, to follow you, and all that good stuff?

Memos from the Head Office is on paperback, Kindle, and Audible. You can go pick those up on Amazon or wherever you want to buy the book. If you go to perrymarshall.com/memos, you get three free chapters and you get on our notification list. We have live memos calls that we do from time to time. You actually get on and get a memo if you respond to it quickly enough to get on the call.

Awesome. All right. Thank you, Perry, and thank you, listeners. We’ll catch you in the next episode. This is your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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About Perry Marshall

Perry Marshall is one of the most expensive business strategists in the world. He is endorsed in FORBES and INC Magazine and has authored eight books. At London’s Royal Society, he announced the world’s largest science research challenge, the $10 million Evolution 2.0 Prize. His reinvention of the Pareto Principle is published in Harvard Business Review, and his Google book laid the foundations for the $100 billion Pay Per Click industry. He has a degree in Engineering and lives with his family in Chicago.