If you would prefer to see this post rather than read it, you can find the video for it here.
Hello and welcome to the first episode of The Doctor’s In. This is something that has been brewing in me for a few years now, and it is now time to do something about it. I have been working to build my intellect for a while now. I have been working to build the intellect of my community have half a decade through Evangel Classical School and Comeford College which I am a part of. I’ve included the links to these below for those who are interested in learning more about a local Classical Christian school and a Liberal Arts college to compliment any education that you might already have.
So, To start, what is this channel about? In a word: books. I like books. I like the way they feel, the weight behind them. I enjoy the way they smell, nothing like the smell of an old person that you can collapse your face onto when you’re tired. Most importantly, I like what they do. I am sitting in a room lined with dead trees. On these trees, etched onto their remains, are the minds of the men of old. I can literally pick this up, flip through the pages, and spend time getting to know Plato and Socrates who have been dead for a long time. I can have a one-way conversation with them in a way that few people who are alive would tolerate. I can sit with their minds open on my desk for days as I mule through their thoughts. I can ponder them, write on them, dissect them to my heart’s content. And through the study of good books, it has changed my life. Books bring life. If there is nothing else that you take away from this, it would be to spend more time in the good books you have because you’ll gain life from them.
Everyone in America, at this point, has a history with books, whether it is good or bad. For myself, I had a slow start to my love of books. I was one of those gifted few that got to spend multiple years in kindergarten. It is the most fun class, so why wouldn’t one want to spend as much time as they could in it. For myself, I went to a public school the first year, and the second year, went to a private school that taught how to read in kindergarten. So, I had to take it again because I didn’t know how to read. Meanwhile, my younger brother was already reading because my older sister would come home and try to teach us what she had learned at school. I wouldn’t listen to her, because she wasn’t the boss of me. My younger brother had no choice because he was, I think, 3 so away she went. He was at a first grade reading level by age 4. I was at a first-grade level by age 7. Little bit different there. I didn’t care though. School didn’t interest me. It was a place to go to hang out with friends. This was kinda a bummer because in third grade, I was failing handwriting, shocker, I still suck at writing, so I had to stay in every first recess to work on my writing. It helped enough to get me to pass the class, not enough to get it legible to anyone besides myself.
4th grade is where things changed for me. From here on out, I’ll refer to my 4th grade teacher as my crazy 4th grade teacher. Knowing what I know now, I don’t agree with him about really anything politically, aesthetically, or even literature analysis. However, I own him the biggest debt of gratitude. From my memory, which as a 4th grader, I am sure is still supreme, all we did was English every day. We read Great Expectation by Dickens and were diagraming crazy hard sentences. It was way over all of our heads. And while he was crazy, he made me care about school. 5 other teachers had tried up to this point. He was the one to get through to me. So, while I don’t agree with him, I massively appreciate him. I still have not learned a new thing in English or Grammar since his class. He has taught me everything that I know, and I know I have forgotten so much of what he had taught me. It is a real shame. I wish I could go back and take his class again. I wish I could read my notes from his class. Alas, I can’t, haha. Should have learned to write better.
I made it through the rest of school not being terrible bookish, but I did care somewhat about grades and learning things now. I had full intentions on not doing any kind of white-collar work or college. My mom would often ask me what I wanted to do when I grew up and the only thing I knew is that I didn’t want to work at a desk because that would drive me crazy. Now I read for a living. God had different things in store for me.
I grew fast. I was my current height by the end of 6th grade. I got into sports, and they became a real idol for me into high school. God worked to remove sports from my life. Freshman year, I started to get sick though. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with me then and as far as I know, still don’t know what is wrong with me now. I started to slow down. Not wanting to, I pushed harder. I pushed so hard that come my junior year, I went into cardiac arrest. The doctors still aren’t quite sure what caused it. I have non-compaction in my left ventricle, which is the most likely cause of it. My heart is slightly deformed. I was dead for 40 minutes without a pulse. Here is a picture of me in the hospital. The doctors and nurses told my parents to be prepared for me to be a vegetable. 40 minutes is a long time to go without a pulse and the medical procedures they were using on me were experimental at the time. I died on March 22, 2008. I came back to life on March 23, 2008, which was Easter Sunday that year. I was out of the hospital the following Friday. 8 weeks later, I was playing at the district golf tournament. I didn’t play great since I had to take 6 weeks off, but I was there. I have sprinted 2 times since that day, both times resulting in my defibrillator going off, shocking me because my heart rate was too high. The once-athlete was now reduced to jogging at best.
This kinda reset my expectation for life and what I was going to be doing with it. I was now a different person. My identity changed. I lost friends because of this. This was all a lot for an 18-year-old to digest. I turned to religion. I started to read every theology book I had and started to buy more. Over the next few years, I read a lot. I didn’t have a lot of direction though. I wandered through books aimlessly, not having a guide. Just reading the things I had access to. I learned a lot. I also wasted a decent amount of time reading things that weren’t worth the time.
A few years went by, found a girl I wanted to marry, got married, and wanted to start a family. I was selling cars making decent money, but I wanted more stability. At 24, I decided to go back to school. I started with a Bachelor of Science in Business Management. I went to Western Governor’s University, WGU, which is a flat rate school per semester. Pay one fee and take as many classes as you could, one at a time. I jumped on this with gusto. My wife worked some during the day and I had weird shift at the dealership, so when I wasn’t working, I was reading. Eventually, I got to the point of taking one 5-credit course per week. It took me 8 months for my first degree there.
My wife and I got pregnant with our first son after I graduated. I tried to find a new job for the next few months and couldn’t find one. So, I went back to school. It was March, Becca was due in August. After my Bachelor’s, I knew I could go fast, so I got my Master’s in Business Administration in 5 months. I graduated a week or two after Jax was born.
Through this process, I learned something about myself. I was really good at learning through books.
A few years passed, and I started teaching at Evangel Classical School. I was hired on to teach science and mathematics. Two years in and one of our Omnibus teachers got pregnant with twins. She would need to be replaced. I had always liked Omnibus, our Bible-literature-history class, so I volunteered to take it over. We got Covided that year, so I finished the year at home teaching over zoom. The next year, I was slated to continue the job of Omnibus teacher.
We were also working on starting a college that I volunteered to teach at and go to school to get another degree if needed. That summer, the college board asked me if I would go and get a doctorate for the college. I said yes. So, I was teaching a high school class with lots of reading, a college class with lots of reading, and getting my doctorate. I was needing to read 500-800 pages a week and teach it. I knew that my current reading level would not be up to the task. So, that summer, I took some courses and practiced for a month to teach myself how to speed read. I went from around 125 words a minute reading speed to over 600 words a minute, 800 if I really needed to, wasn’t too tired, and focused. The next two years were a blur of books, ink, and notes as I did these things. I got my Masters-in-passing on the way to my Doctorate of Arts in Liberal Arts with a focus on Philosophy.
Through it all, I have learned a lot and would probably say that I am rather bookish now. Books are a comfort to me. They are always there, like old friends, to walk through them when I need them.
I am the kind of person that I am today because of the books that I have read and the conversations that I have had through them. Many people don’t know where to start, how to do it, or what to look for. I want to help you. I want to be a resource to learners. To students, homeschoolers, mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters, business owners, teachers, and Christians. My interests in books for vast, but my specialties would be Business, Literature, Theology, Philosophy, History, and more general STEM. I have actually read several math books, but I don’t often work through the problems as I read them.
Some filters that I look through as I read starts with a Christian lens. I am thoroughly dispensational in my theology and my approach to books. I look at the historical, grammatical, and literal meaning of books while paying attention to the genre of the book. This is truly my guiding principle when reading any book. I don’t get to dictate what the author meant by his book. I need to know the author in order to understand his book. I don’t actually care about what the book means to me. I care about what the author is trying to say. So, when I go to analyze a book, I start with the author. I look at his time period, his teachers, his location, and the men around him. I look to see who influenced him and who is influenced by him. This can tell you so much about a book. I look to see if the author ever changed his mind from his views on his work. Sometimes, this doesn’t matter as the influence of the book itself was taken out of context. I would make this argument for the works of Rene Descartes. More on him later.
In a similar vein, Mortimer Adler wrote a book called Six Great Ideas that is a helpful start to reading great books. When one starts to read, one should pay attention to what the author portrays is True, Good, Beauty, along with what he thinks about Liberty, Equality, and Justice. These are just 6 of the 109 great ideas that Adler proposes in his Great Book set. These are all lens and facets to look for and through when reading books. If what you are reading doesn’t refer to any of the great ideas, it probably isn’t a good book, let alone a great one.
Thinking about this further, this all seems very simplistic, and I think it is. Learning is not something that is complicated. It just takes time. The hard part is learning it all in order to see the connections. For example, a book I plan to go through on this channel soon is The Pythagorean Sourcebook. It is a compilation of all the writings that we have about Pythagoras, the father of the Pythagoreans. He was massively influential in the way that you think today, and you don’t even know it or him. You may remember the Pythagorean Theorem if you’re a good math student, but there is a very small matter to what bigger things they were about. Even crazier is that this book is the only place that I am found that talks about Pythagoras’ travels. He was tagged as being someone who was wise, so his city sent him on a journey to learn from all the masters of the time. This sent him down through Babylon at that time where he was tutored by the disciples of Moses. Who could this be? Judging by the timeline, it would be none other than Daniel. Yeah, the Daniel of the bible. So, Daniel tutored the father of one of the main lines of Greek though. Plato and Aristotle were both of the school of Pythagoras. Coincidence? I think not!
The thing that takes a lot of time when it comes to education is taking everything in. There is a lot of stuff to learn, which is why education is a way of life. One never gets to the point where they are educated. They might just get bored of the constant churning through books. Which I can understand. The way that academia is currently set up with higher learning is soul-sucking. The constant desire to discovery something new and not, would be defeating. Life is more than discovery. Learning is also. With learning should come a level of enjoyment. Life is more than the collection of facts. It is also the enjoyment of the thing learned about. Whiskey is good. To understand how it is made, how to get all the flavors and tones in it makes one appreciate it all the more. This Lagavulin is mastery in a cup. This is something else.
To give some direction on the kinds of books that will be covered on this channel, it will be limited to whatever strikes my fancy and also what you ask for. I want to do books that are important to me and ones that shaped the way I think. I also want to share some with you that I think everyone should read. From there, I’ll be working through books that I encounter, giving you the good and the bad. One thing that I want to be on the lookout for are current authors that can actually write. So much of what is being published today is just crap.
So to give some examples, I pulled some books from my shelf that I am going to go over first. These are books that are nostalgic to me and paradigm shifting/setting.
To start would be My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. She is a naturalist through and through, which I didn’t know when I was a kid. I loved naturalist stories growing up so I like George and Jack London’s White Fang and Call of the Wild. My mom introduced me to this book when I was around 4th grade. It was one of the first books that she read cover to cover. I read all of her books that were at my local library which turns out to not be that many of her works. Interestingly, her most famous book Julie of the Wolves, is her most deplorable book of hers that I read. There is a full-blown rape scene in the book that isn’t handled or discussed in the book. Julie never deals with it. It just happens to her and the story moves on. I’m not against sin being in children books, but it should be delt with, preferably biblically. This is a blemish on George and I’m sad that it was her popular book. Many of her other books are fantastic and I highly recommend. There Is A Tarantula in My Purse is so fun and should encourage you to get more pets into your house.
I can’t get out of my childhood without some reference to Harry Potter. The first 3 books were out when I was a kid and I have no idea how many times I have been through them. Harry has issues, but they are not normally the issues that Christians have with the books. The is that the books are morally grey. There is no set standard for what is right and wrong. Everything is up for interpretation. The key example are the 3 unforgivable curses. Is there ever a good time to kill someone? Yes, there is. So why is it unforgivable? There has to be a higher standard than all death is wrong. Murder is wrong, war is not. In book 6, the death eaters are trying to kill and the aurors are trying to stun. The good guys are at a severe disadvantage. All those death eaters are serial killers. They don’t deserve to live. Why can’t the good guys just kill them? this is something that Rowling doesn’t want to deal with in a kid’s book. I can understand that, but she is writing grown up stories, she shouldn’t handle it with kid gloves. Still, I love these books. My kids will grow up reading and enjoying them with me.
The book for me that is one of my favorites that no one has heard of is King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard. It is purely fun. Great villain in Galgool. Great hero in Allen Quartermain and Sir Henry Curtis. The Witch Hunt will cause nightmares in small kids. The final war is full of story grip. Even to this day, I can’t read it fast enough. I just want to blaze through it because I want to know what happens next. Legend has it that Haggard wrote it in 6 weeks, which is pretty impressive. He wrote it as a dare from his brother. He didn’t think it was hard to write a book like Jungle Book by Kipling, so he wrote this one. I think he won the bet. I think this book is better than Jungle Book. You should read both and tell me your thoughts.
Shifting from fiction, I would point to some books that helped to form the way that I think about the world.
I can’t start without the bible. It is the cornerstone and capstone of my thinking. It is the judge and jury of truth for me. Anything that will be called truth must stand against the wall of scripture. For example, the idea of creation evolution. Evolution on its face is a thought system in peril. It is self-defeating. The science does not back it up at all. The scientific world is not denouncing it yet because it doesn’t have something to replace it. Once it does, it will die a quick death. They are looking for a system to replace it with, but don’t have anything. For example, microbiology disproves the idea of like kind and taxonomy trees. The idea that the world is old though is hugely problematic to humanity. If man is hundreds of thousands of years old and changing, then what we can learn from history is limited. Why would we look to past generations to learn from when they were inferior beings? We have evolved from them. We are better than them. what do they have to teach us?
If the world is young and man is only a few thousand years old and is not evolving, then we can learn a lot from the men of old because they are like us. We haven’t evolved from them. we are the same. There is nothing new under the sun, as the Preacher says in Ecclesiastes. So, the bible is my starting and ending point.
From scripture, I would point to a book that does a good job of explaining how to read and understand the Bible. It is a little book that packs a huge punch. Dispensational hermeneutic by Michael Vlach. It is straight forward and clear thinking on a difficult subject of hermeneutics. I enjoy his view on it because it is simple. Anyone who can read can understand what he is saying. What he is saying is that anyone should be able to read and understand the Bible. One doesn’t need complicated systems or education in order to know what God says.
Another book that really changed the way that I look at the world is God’s Passion for His Gloryand book written by John Piper. It is a commentary on a book written by Jonathan Edward’s book The End for Which God Created the World. I really need to reread this book and look forward to going through it again for this channel. I read it when I was a fresh high school graduate, so full of wisdom. It was the hardest book that I had read at the time. I remember some of the arguments from it. I have since read a lot of books similar to it and look forward to tearing apart Edward’s arguments to better understand them. It is going to be good times coming up for me. I am hoping you’ll enjoy it too.
A few pagan books that have also shaped the way I look at the world. First is Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It is a true and refreshing look at risk and how to build a life that gets stronger as bad things happen. It looks at risk as a thing that happens, not a thing to be avoided.
Finally, Limitless by Jim Kwik. I would not have been able to finish my schooling without the lessons from Jim Kwik in this book. I own him a great debt in developing my mind. This book looks at the human brain and how to make it work better is foundational to the way that I got more function and capacity out of my own mind. It is how I learned to speed read and digest large amounts of information quickly. The mind functions more like a muscle that can be worked and stretch to accomplish more than you thought possible. It is good stuff. You can do more than you think. You just have to work hard to get it. You literally have to work on rewiring your brain.
I have been going for a while now. I am over my word quota for the day, so I am going to wrap things up. If you like what I have had to say, share it. I want to build this into something meaningful, which means I’ll need your help. If there are books that you want me to go through, comment them below. If I get enough for one book, I’ll review it sooner.
I’ve included links below to all the books I have referenced in this video. One day, I’ll have affiliate links, but at this point, it is just normal Amazon ones.
My goal is to build this into a resource for families to use, a place to go for recommendations to build your own worldviews. I then want to leverage this into a publishing company. It has been over a decade that I have dreamed of running my own publishing company. A big part of publishing is actually the marketing of the books. Here, I am building a marketing platform for books. I want my word to mean something when it comes to books. If I recommend something, I want you to trust my word. I know I have to build your trust. So here I am, laying my studied mind before you. Judge away but know this is built through hundreds of thousands of pages. Some of what I have read is crap. I have read a lot of great books though. Here is to building something. Please share, subscribe, like, and comment. Everything helps. Engagement is everything.
With that, the Doctor is Out.