Yeah

... cringey [laughs] moment.

But, um, in Isaiah 58, God addresses all of this that you're talking about when He is addressing people who act pious.

So people who act religious, they have prayer going on in the White House or, or praise or whatever, they think, oh, you know, people think, "Oh, Donald Trump, he's so great.

He's allow- he's allowing all this." And in Isaiah 58, God says, "Shout with the voice of a trumpet blast.

Don't be timid.

Tell my people Israel of their sins, yet they act so pious.

Mm.

Mm.

So self-publishing has really opened the world for publishers or, you know, for people like me who wanna get it out there, but then it dies.

There's no way to promote it.

So you're really just kind of flailing around trying to figure out how to get the message out.

But, um, I happened to be standing in an airport and I saw a billboard for Page Publishing, and so that's how I started the publishing part of it.

And, um, I just made a phone call and they have somebody they assign to you, and then you send your manuscript to them.

And then if they like it, then it goes up the chain.

Uh, but when you imagine a child holding, uh, The Tales of Rumpus, what is the one belief about themselves that you hope feels a little stronger by the time they close the book?

I'm never watching this dude again.

Yeah, I know.

I know.

But one thing that occurred to me, and I think that Mark has this too, is that when you have a certain amount of narcissism it comes through as charisma so there you it is really easy to fake an anointing from god it really is if you have a certain amount of charisma and some scripture knowledge which isn't hard to to come by if you you know study the scriptures um even though these guys only seem to know a few verses that they wield against women, that's easy to fake, but character is not.

And character is what we are supposed to be paying attention to as a body of believers.

We are supposed to be testing people's fruit.

We are supposed to be listening at the actual words that come out of people's mouths and determining if those truly sound like you know, they come from the heartbeat of heaven, or if they have an evil root that we should be aware of.

and this jp could have never done what he did if people weren't sitting and listening to a sermon like these and then coming back for more it's the being there once by accident uh okay coming back after somebody preaches a sermon like that what are you doing what's that about why do you think that that women for instance would sit and listen to something like that what what's going on there

So like, how do you know if it's good enough or if you're just wasting time.

I mean, that's, that's tricky because, um, the true, the castle in my brain is, uh, it's like a big hot air balloon.

It's round.

And the description in the book is no corners.

It's round so that nobody gets to sneak out and jump out and, you know, scare you.

It's round.

So it's, it's i have a very it's very descriptive in the book and i i just couldn't get it to translate and i couldn't get it to translate and finally i said okay it just has to be good enough because i'm hung up on this one little thing and you know and it just wasn't translating at all and so i just i said okay if the color scheme is great you know that's everything but Yeah, you have to compromise and that's what life is.

But what's been working for you?

30 years ago.

Now you have AI and chat GPT and all of this stuff that doesn't really mind the stuff in your soul.

So, you know, when I wrote it, I didn't have, there were no electronics in 1998.

We didn't even have computers.

So I hand wrote it to start with, but I wanted a colorful world that was full of fun.

I wanted to have a little bit of a lesson, but kids aren't going to read anything they don't think is fun.

And parents definitely aren't going to read it to their kids at night because they're like, oh, my gosh.

I love the fact that is, but I got to ask, when you have an epic tale like this and so many characters going on at once, how do you keep them straight? Or is this like a madhouse in your brain that you Nope.

I just wanna say, yeah, you're right about his approach.

I think it's sad that people are buying into this, and I, I think that you can do a very topical Bible study on the attributes of Jesus and the attributes of somebody who has a loud, obnoxious, arrogant, um, greedy spirit.

And you can see that there are some in the body of Christ who are truly humble servants of Christ who are trying to, uh, bring the gospel of good news and the true Jesus.

They have connected with His heart.

They truly love God.

They truly love people, and they want people to know Jesus.

You can also see throughout the body of Christ people who are shouting.

Mm-hmm