Sunday Service: A Little Weird

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is His good, pleasing and perfect will from Romans 12. What does that mean? Does it even apply to you and your life? That is what we will explore today. Welcome to the Sunday service. You know some things you just know they they just resonate with you. It clicks with you. You get it. And maybe this is you too. But for me, it was the idea of non conformity, and this was, of course, during my teenage years, because that’s when I believe that most of us have that punk rock, non conformist Rage Against the Machine. Your parents are dummies, kind of thing. But maybe not everybody feels that way. As I get older, no longer in my teenage years, I have such a deeper appreciation, which sounds really dumb, but have such deeper appreciation for how different each of us is, and while there’s certainly a lot of preferences and we can all agree on certain things, certain people feel dramatically different than I do. So I don’t know if you went through a phase like that, or if you that’s just your existence of being somebody who feels like you don’t fit in and or you’re not interested in fitting in. We’ve got all these different sayings that person marched the beat of his or her own drum. You’re cutting your own path, so on and so forth, charting your own course. There’s, there’s, there’s lots. Because we human beings come in lots of different shapes and sizes, but our desire to fit in the The in group out group dynamic is one of the truest, if not the truest, polarities and dynamics that has existed in human history. You it, and in a lot of ways, that has defined the human story is this person is one of us, or they are not one of us, or this person is a stranger. I remember reading years ago how every good story starts that way. Stranger comes to town, and when that happens, we don’t know what that person’s intention is. Do they intend to make a good life here? Do they intend to steal all of our stuff? Do they have malicious intent? What? What is going on? We just don’t know. And so that’s what makes for a great story. So why talk about this. Why? Why be thinking about this? Well, because, in our in our political landscape, the world of politics right now, we’ve got one side calling the other side weird, which is so funny. It’s so funny that that grown ups call each other names. And I am not necessarily interested in pointing fingers at whose fault any of it is, because I certainly know that that former President Trump has a a history of making up names for people and calling them names. So it’s not one side does it and one side doesn’t do it, but this one, this one kind of stands out for me and and just sort of struck a nerve that you would be calling people weird. They’re just weird. I think that that’s weird. I think that is unusual. What does weird even mean? I think that we all understand it means it’s maybe abnormal or off the beaten path, or just, you know, kind of weird, but the definition is of strange or extraordinary character. Okay, so weird. I don’t know what you think about weird, but I do not think that I ever minded being called Weird. I have always resisted, very much resisted being categorized, and along with the desire and the human tendency to focus on in group, out group, good, bad, polarities. We also have the tendency to to focus on on wanting to put things into a bucket. Oh, that’s so and so he or she is. This or That. He’s Republican, he’s a Democrat, he’s a Yankees fan, he’s a Mets fan. He is an engineer. He is a lawyer. It just helps us to organize things in a very chaotic world, helps us simplify things. We have so much coming at us all the time, and so much that demands our attention or is desirous of our attention. And so when we’re able to something new comes in, we can categorize it and put it in the appropriate container. So I get that, that being said, I just I don’t like it when people do it to me or try to enlist my help in categorizing me, just because, like you, I there’s just a lot going on. I’ve got varied interests, but there’s probably more going on than that, beyond the scope of our conversation today, but weird means of exchange or extraordinary character. Got a couple of quotes that I wanted to, wanted to to throw at you as well today. The first one comes from JFK. He said the conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself. The opposite of courage is not cowardice. It is conformity. Who There you go, for me, is the jailer freedom, the enemy of growth. So everybody’s the same, and everybody’s doing the same thing, gonna get a real similar result, and it’s a status quo kind of a thing. So if you think about it, more of a conservative idea than it is a progressive idea. So the idea that you would dislike something weird would be more of a conservative viewpoint than would be a progressive viewpoint. Such an interesting thing. Here’s another one that comes from Mako ko mama. Mako honana, I’m 100% sure that I just brutalized that person’s name. My apologies. Most people do not have a problem with you thinking for yourself, as long as your conclusions are the same as, or at least compatible with their beliefs. There you go. Powerful. So conformity is a tendency to change our perceptions, opinions or behaviors in ways that are consistent with group norms. Norms are implicit, specific rules shared by a group of individuals on how they should behave. So being non normative means that you’re acting in a way that’s outside of our group. You’re a weirdo, you’re acting strangely, you’re you’re you’re you’re doing weird things, and it’s throwing us off. So there is, from a sociological perspective, something called the conformity theory of social acceptance, and that just means that each of us has a desire to fit in. I think that it is probably people are outliers that go their entire lives not wanting to fit in necessarily. And there’s certain parts of our lives where we do want to fit in, we need to fit in, and then there’s certain parts of our lives where we want to do our own thing, wanna let our freak flags fly, or whatever it is. So it’s never as simple as you know as this person is completely different than all other human beings on planet Earth. We all go along, get along in certain areas, and then do our own thing in other areas. So but conformity serves as a way for individuals to avoid social rejection. It helps us get social approval and form community bonds. And at the very nature of finding community means that we have certain things in common. We share a common belief in an ideal, we share common values, and so long as we share those common values are through lines, then we’re perfectly capable of being individuals, and that’s really what this comes down to. From my perspective, I believe in the power of the individual. I believe in the importance of the individual, individual thinking, individual feeling, individual ideas. I think it’s critical, like JFK was talking about, if you are going to get what you want out of your life and your existence, you must cut your own path. That doesn’t mean it’s contrary to what everybody else is doing. Share the same values, assuming that we share the same values, we can still be individuals. You. We can still maintain our autonomy. I

think that that’s what this is all about. I don’t want everybody to be the same, like that would be terrible. It would destroy art. Would destroy music. It would destroy athletics. It would destroy capitalism. It would destroy everything. If everything was just, you know, monochrome, if everything was just black and white, same, same. You’re probably familiar with Friedrich Nietzsche. I quote him fairly frequently. He has a little known work. Well, if you’re a Nietzsche fan, you’re probably like no dummy. We all know about this one, but he has a little known work to me, and perhaps you as well. It’s his meditation on the tragedy of conformity. And I’m just going to read it to you, or read a portion of it to you, because I think it’s, it’s, it’s of immense value, and encourage you to seek it out. But if you decide that you don’t have enough time to do that, I totally get it, which is why I’m going to read it says a traveler who had seen many countries, peoples and several of the Earth’s continents was asked what attribute he had found in men everywhere. He said they have a propensity for laziness. To others, it seems that he should have said they are all fearful. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions. In his heart, Every man knows quite well that being unique, he will be in the world only once, and that there will be no second chance for his oneness to coalesce from the strangely, very variegated assortment that he is. He knows it, but hides it like a bad conscience. Why from fear of his neighbor who demands conformity and cloaks himself with it? But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd and have no joy in himself. Modesty, perhaps in a few rare cases, with the great majority it is indolence, inertia, in short, the tendency to laziness of which the traveler spoke, he’s right. Men are even lazier than they are timid and fear most of all, the inconveniences which would unconditionally honesty and nakedness would burden them. Artists alone hate this sluggish prominating In borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions, and they reveal everyone’s secret bad conscious the law that every man is a unique miracle. They dare to show us man as he is, uniquely himself to every last movement of his muscles, more than in being, thus strictly consistent in uniqueness, he is beautiful and worth regarding and in no way tedious. When the great thinker despises mankind, He despises its laziness, for it is on account of their laziness that men seem like factory products, things of no consequence and unworthy to be associated with or instructed. The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily. Let him follow his conscious conscience which calls to Him, be yourself. All you are now doing, thinking and desiring is not yourself. Powerful. So powerful think that way too many of us are carried along by the currents of life. We fall into predictable patterns and habits and we stick to them. We have social groups that that we remain with forever, and that that could be a good thing or could not be. It’s the way we do things, and Nietzsche outlined it perfectly, but it’s reality that I think that we all should consider what assumptions, what systems Am I living under now that covid caused us to be asking a lot of questions and thinking lots of new thoughts and interrogating why it is that We do certain things, in fact, many different things. And right now we’re going through a period where, from my perspective, we we as a culture, were somewhat complacent to let things be and now we’re seeing that that that’s no longer the case, and people are asserting themselves a little bit more, but we all live under again, so many different systems and assumptions, and those are systems and assumptions that are familial in nature. So what your family did? If your dad was a shoemaker, your mom was a shoemaker, maybe you’re going to be a shoemaker as well. And if you believe that real estate is the best way to gain wealth, and probably what what you’re going to focus on doing, or that’s what your family did, or entrepreneurship, whatever it might be, or maybe you all went to the same school, you go to the same church, go to the same place for breakfast, you understand what I’m saying. And while some of these are very, very, very good. Just depends, depends on whose terms you’re living under. On whose terms are you living under. Conform. Fall in line. Do it like everybody else does it. And to Nietzsche’s credit, to JFK credit, it’s not necessarily the best way to do things. And I don’t know how long it’s been going on. It’s probably been going on for a really long time, but this idea of identity politics is, I think it’s such a corrosive and super silly and basic thing. In fact, I think it’s the most basic thing in the world. What could be more basic than simply your immutable characteristics of I’m a man, a woman, I’m black, or I’m white, or I’m gay, or I’m straight, and because I fall into that category, that basket or bucket, we’re going to vote as a group together, or just because I’m this thing that means that I think a certain way, or I share the same hive mind as everybody in my group. I think it’s preposterous, maybe the most preposterous thing in the world. Certainly think it’s offensive, and me being the non conformist that I am, reject that wholesale. Nothing about that that I agree with, nothing about that makes sense to me so but what about you? What do you think one of my favorite people, Henry David Thoreau, argues that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, what is called resignation is confirmed desperation. It means that those of us who simply conform, who go along with the status quo and fail to question whatever society tells us is the correct path, and they’re really only resigning ourselves. What we’re doing is resigning ourselves to a life that will never ultimately be fulfilling, because we won’t be choosing our own path and making the most of our time based on what we think is right. That makes us desperate and unhappy. By the common wisdom that we must work hard in order to acquire more, and then we must continue to work so that we can maintain what we’ve acquired, and then pretty soon, all we do is work, become slaves to our possessions. There’s all that. But Thoreau argues that non conformity. He argues that conformity is such a negative and advises non conformity so that each of us can have the most possible amount of time to do whatever it is that we love. So the unexamined life is not living. Most of us lead lives of quiet desperation. What a sad thing that is. Most people lead lives of quiet desperation because we’re just falling in line because we’re not being weird enough. I guess that that’s the big takeaway. I think that we should all be a little bit more weird. We should all let that freak flag fly, whatever it is, and that’s maybe too, too much. We should all try to be more of ourselves, which is simplistic advice, and from my perspective, one of one of the hardest things to do, because when we’ve spent lifetimes conforming and lifetimes living under somebody else’s watch, living under somebody else’s terms, we’ve got really far away from who we really are, if we can even remember that person at all, but he or she is still there. They’re still in there, and we just need to invite them out. Invite them to be a little bit weird. Invite them to pursue whatever lights them up. Pursue what lights you up. Pursue. It is fun, and we’re not saying just stop doing everything. Throw the baby off the bath water, saying, just find your opportunities a little bit at a time to do the things that you really enjoy and that you want to be doing, think the thoughts you want to be thinking, do the work you want to be doing, do the hobbies that you’re interested in doing. It’s music or sports or whatever, dance, yoga, i. Don’t care. I don’t think you’re weird.

Well, maybe I will, and maybe that’ll be awesome. It’ll certainly be intriguing, and I will be interested in seeing or hearing about it. So as always, do your part in doing your best. You.

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.