How the American Dream Got Hijacked with Dr. David Gruder

In this thought-provoking podcast episode, Dr. David Gruder takes us on a journey from their childhood visit to the United Nations to their experience at Woodstock in 1969, providing a unique perspective on the transformative impact of the ’60s counterculture. 

Drawing parallels between the era’s cliches of “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” and deeper societal drives, Dr. David Gruder explores the quest for authenticity, connection, and impact. The narrative weaves through the influence of technology on human connection, emphasizing the role of consciousness in shaping its impact. 

Dr. David Gruder introduces a framework for navigating humanity’s future based on authenticity, connection, and impact, offering a lens through which to analyze societal well-being and individual freedom. Touching on topics like conscious capitalism, the guest critiques the prevailing versions of patriotism and capitalism while sharing insights from their e-book, “Hijacking Humanity,” which delves into the spells affecting happiness, health, prosperity, patriotism, and problem-solving. 

The conversation concludes with a discussion of the hijacking of the American Dream, tracing its roots to post-World War II economic concerns and its subsequent impact on societal values and debt-based consumerism. Dr. David Gruder prompts reflection on the potential futures of humanity, advocating for a pivot towards a version characterized by individual self-sovereignty and collective well-being.

 

Highlights:

{03:00} David’s journey and motivation

{08:30} When the world stops connecting.

{16:00} Conscious Capitalism vs human-centered Capitalism

{19:00} Hijacking Humanity

{24:00} The American Dream has been Hijacked.

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Dr. Gruder Bio:

Across the 43 years since developing his first training program in 1972, Dr. David Gruder has created programs on over 100 topics, has architected certification and train-the-trainer programs, and has delivered keynotes & training programs in seven countries on three continents. His specialty is transforming an enterprise’s values into skills and procedures that enable you and your people to make those values profitable.

His books have won awards in the unusually diverse areas of politics, social change, business, leadership, health & wellness, mental health, psychology, and self-help. Radio & Television Reports dubbed him America’s Integrity Expert in 2008, and in addition to having provided many hundreds of media interviews, he has been featured in Forbes 18 times and counting. That’s because he makes complex concepts practical.

Who is he? Dr. David Gruder: the clinical & organizational development psychologist whose expertise is sought by a broader range of individuals and organizations than probably any psychologist you’ve ever run across; from leaders in governance, business, healthcare, education, and nonprofits, to providers of personal, relationship, financial, and executive development services.

 A book publisher wrote that Dr. Gruder could “one day be viewed as the Sigmund Freud of the 21st century.” Yet, despite his breadth of experience, accolades, and requests, you won’t find a speaker, trainer, or trusted advisor who is more joyful, approachable, humble, collaborative, and teachable than Dr. Gruder.

With this in mind, consider the upgrades you would be wise to make to fully become the leader your venture needs you to be for it to succeed. And consider the productivity & collaboration procedures your people most need for your venture to reach its full potential.

If you see how you could benefit from engaging a business and leader peak performance psychologist with a range of expertise and experience that’s as surprisingly broad as Dr. David Gruder’s, you owe it to yourself to find out what he can do for you and your enterprise.

Connect with David

Website:   https://www.drgruder.com 

Welcome back to the show, my fellow extraordinary Americans. For today’s guest, we have Doctor David Gruder. 

Doctor David Gruder is a 12-time award-winning, multi-best-selling integrative psychologist and TEDx speaker named America’s integrity expert in radio and TV interviews. 

He founded Integrity, Revolution, and the Center for the Enlightened Self-sovereignty and hosts the reimagining of humanity’s future and yours. In addition to coasting two podcasts as a board chair, level advisor, keynote speaker, trainer, and facilitator, Dr. Gruder equips leaders, influencers, executives, and concerned citizens worldwide with spiritually aligned inner mindsets and our skills to make integrity, profitable society healthy and governments capable of, according to personal self-sovereignty and societal well-being.

Doctor Drew’s groundbreaking work revolves around catalyzing the next evolutionary leap in humanity, from hominins to hospitalists. This version of our shared feature incorporates timeless psycho-spiritual principles and integrates personal freedom and societal well-being to foster what he calls spiritual self-sovereignty. That serves us all. He has been interviewed by media outlets such as Forbes Inc., Entrepreneur Magazine, and CBS Radio. 

He’s certainly an extraordinary American, and I’m honored to have him on this show. Doctor David, are you there?

I’m here, and it’s a pleasure to be with you. Thanks. For having me.

Doctor David, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show. So, can you tell me and the audience a bit about yourself, your background, your story, and how you got started?

Hmm. Well, my gosh, there’s a lot to the story about how I got started, but perhaps the most relevant to what we’re going to be talking about is that when I was about six years old, give or take, I grew up in New York City.

And so, at that age, my parents took me to the United Nations in Manhattan. … Of course, I knew nothing about the politics or shadowy sides of the United Nations. All I knew as a six-year-old was that the vision was to unite humanity, and from that moment forward, in my bedroom, two flags flew. The United Nations flag represents that I am a citizen of the world, and the United States flag represents that I am a U.S. citizen and proud of it. I was a citizen of the world.

Wow, that’s awesome. I remember taking the United Nations test when I was in school, and I had the same vision as well, like all countries coming together because I’m an immigrant. And then I believe in the cross-cultures of different cultures coming. 

But, Doctor Gruder, what is your motivational factor? In going into the career that you did and liked, what was the thing from your childhood to your earlier childhood that brought you to where you are today? Like, what was the motivation and all of that?

I knew by the time I was 11 years old that I was called to impact the world, but I had no idea what that might be, except for a United Nations New Year’s card that my family received. Not around, give or take, the same time I went to the United Nations for the first time, and the New Year’s card said that greater peace will only come after the smaller peace we make with each other. And that went straight into the core of my being at that young age.

If we fast-forward to when I was 15, This is kind of a funny story. My parents sent me to Woodstock. They didn’t know what they were sending me to because nobody knew what the Woodstock festival in 1969 would be beforehand. 

I thought I was going there for the music because I was very involved in music and acting and performing growing up. I ended up going to that camp or Woodstock because I went to a camp in the summer for the performing arts. In the spring of 69, the camp director sent this note home to all the parents, saying that for the first time in the camp’s history, we would have an optional field trip to music and art. Music and Arts Festival in upstate New York. Do you want to send your kids?

So, my parents naively sent me, and I thought, like I said, that I was going there for the music, and it was really over the moon. But what I couldn’t have known beforehand and what took me a while to unpack following my experience at Woodstock was that I was there to have my entire worldview blown. I expanded and transcended because I started to understand the wisdom underneath. The cliche from the 1960s that was sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, and the wisdom underneath, has informed my entire career.

So, I’ll unpack that briefly. The wisdom underneath the cliche around sex in sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. Was it that in the ’60s, we sought deeper ways to bond with each other? Other than the expectation, the mere expectation of a marriage contract.

The drug part was that we were looking for ways to be more fully who we were, in contrast to the conformity installed in the United States and around the world subsequently, during 1950.

And the rock ‘n’ roll part of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n ‘ roll was that for the first time in the history of music, lyrics were appearing in songs that were telling us that we had the power to change the world for the better. And what that did was bring it together for me. I have viewed our three core drives as human beings: our drive to be who we truly are, authenticity, our drive to bond with others’ connections, and our drive to influence the world around us, which is impact.

My work on this planet revolves around integrating those three core drives because authenticity is about me, connections are about us, and impact is about us all. To me, that’s what a whole self is: the third me, the third we, and the third us all.

So, David, it’s really interesting that you mentioned that because, as you know, today’s society is what we at least I know this, and what others notice is that there are a lot of people who, with the rise of technology, have become more isolated; they’ve put up a front, and they’re not being, they’re not authentic, and they don’t authentically connect with other people. We connect on Facebook, Instagram, and all that stuff.

But ironically, as we have become more technologically advanced, so have we. I have lost the true authenticness of connection. So, what is your opinion on how the world has changed?

A couple of things. One is that all innovation throughout the history of humanity has changed humanity in ways where initially, humanity gets intoxicated with the new development, and they overuse and misuse it. And then, hopefully, develop the right relationship with that over time, and the same is true in the work world, where there’s new innovation that comes around, and it will cause certain jobs that have been available up until that time to disappear and other jobs that nobody would have ever conceived of before that innovation to appear on the scene and become available to people.

So, my attitude is toward technology. It is neutral. And what controls the use of technology is our state of consciousness. So, technology can be used for the better or the worse. It’s kind of like my metaphor for that is Star Wars. So, with Star Wars, you’ve got the force.

I love Star Wars, yeah.

Ah, me too. So, you’ve got the force, and then you have the Jedi, who channel the force in ways that are supposed to elevate people and societies. And then you have the Sith, like Darth Vader, who channel the force for sinister motivations. And so, the force is neutral. But in the hands of the Jedi, it’s used for good, and then in the hands of the Sith, it’s used for ill.

No, I mean, that’s true. But since you’ve been called an integrity expert, I wanted to ask you. Right.

So right now, in our technologically advanced world, as we’re going through this, the world is becoming increasingly immoral, and people just do what they want. So, right now, we are in a very dangerous time as humanity as a whole because, you know, like we have, like technology, we have all this advanced stuff, like nuclear bombs, but without the right morality and right spiritual principles. This can lead to the destruction of humanity altogether, you know.

I agree. I agree. Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah. So, like, what I was going to ask you is, how do we as a collective go about becoming more, having more integrity as a society as a whole? Like, what is the process like? Are we doing it at an individual level, or is it happening more collectively?

As a change specialist, I see the best, most useful, and most durable change happening tactically from the top down and the bottom up simultaneously in integrated ways, but without a framework, without an A-frame of reference. Nobody knows what to do about that, so let me offer. 

The first ingredient is one way of understanding integrity as a guidepost for navigating an enlightened and elevated future for humanity rather than a deteriorated one. For us to recognize and appreciate that we are social beings endowed with free will and what that translates into healthy individuals and healthy societies, the part about being endowed with free will is our freedom. It’s about self-sovereignty and social beings. Part of that is that we thrive in groups; we thrive collectively.

Collective or societal well-being, plus individual freedom or self-sovereignty. It is the magic formula, and it’s the formula that. Gave rise to the United States in the first place. Let me add just one more piece, and we can certainly double back on that if you want. But the last piece ties in with what I said earlier about our 3-4 drives authenticity, connection, and impact on me; we all have authenticity. It’s self-integrity. It’s being honest with myself. 

Connection is relationship integrity. It’s integrity with my commitments to the people I love, work with, and interact with. Impact, our core drive, and our drive to make a positive difference in the world is about collective integrity and integrity with the groups we’re part of, ranging from our families to our affinity groups to our communities to our faiths. To our country, to humanity, and to planetary well-being. Loyalty, or nested patriotism, and at the level of integrity with the groups we’re part of because we’re all part of multiple groups.

So, it’s that picture of integrity—our three core drives and integrity with us being designed as social beings. Endowed with free will, that gives us a framework for decision-making about navigating humanity’s future in a way that supports integrity and makes integrity profitable in businesses.

No, totally part of strong America itself was, you know, no part of the reason I started exploring America was like there’s the thing about doing business.

Then there’s capitalism, the dark side of capitalism in Star Wars. And then there’s capitalism with morals, ethics, and values. Where do you go? Like a fair exchange, or you do an abundance exchange. Like things work out, it’s only like capitalism, for instance, and businesses get a bad need where businesspeople are like people see them, others doing criminal or partial. And then that’s what creates the bad rap altogether.

What I noticed is that business is based on self-interest. We have to create a kind of enlightened self-interest to create a healthy economy, and it has to be based on morals, ethics, and values. So that’s part of the reason I started Extraordinary America.

Yes, that’s the basis of conscious capitalism, and it’s a version of capitalism that, very sadly, has very few people. Understand or know about because the version of capitalism that most people have been exposed to, think about, and talk about is the dark side of capitalism, what I call sociopathic capital. Realism. And if they think that’s what capitalism is, they’re missing the forest for the trees because that’s only one version of capitalism. And you’re right; that is Sith capitalism returning to the Star Wars metaphor.

Yeah, and David, so, yeah, yeah, you talk about conscious capitalism.

So, for the audience, is there a particular difference between conscious capitalism and Andrew Yang’s human-centered capital? Because, you know, there’s something like capitalism. There’s a different version of capitalism coming out where, you know, some people are saying, like, it should be based on a human-centered approach, and others talk about conscious capitalism.

So, in your opinion, what would it be like? Are they the same, or are they different? Like subtle differences between the two.

I view them as variations of the original version of corporate social responsibility that emerged in the late 1990s, which referred to the triple bottom line of profitability. People and the planet profit, meaning that what we produce is what we sell. It must be good for the people working for us and helpful, good, and positive for our customers or clients. 

The part about the planet is that what we’re providing is not harming society, humanity, or the planet’s well-being. And profit is that we’re still profitable in the things we bring to the marketplace; that triple bottom line is the cornerstone. Socially responsible capitalism and conscious capitalism are all variations on a theme.

No, I mean. You’re right about that. It’s just that, like many people, they hear about capitalism, and it’s like a negative term for them. But it’s necessary because, like, that’s how humanity does exchange, as long as you have an abundance of exchanges. 

And you care about people like it’s not as you would say. Like sociopathic capitalism. You know, people need to know the difference between the two. 

So, Doctor David, I know you wrote this e-book called Hijacking Humanity. Can you tell the audience a little bit more about the premise of this book and what it is?

The way I see it is that, especially since the 1950s, and what I’m about to say started before then, but just to start in the relatively recent past, starting in the 1950s, we had our notions of well-being and happiness. That is what the United States was founded on. A faulty happiness formula, and out of that faulty happiness formula, several other formulas emerged.

So, the hijacking of humanity is about the spells we’re under, individually and collectively. And of those spells that I see humanity being under individually and collectively, five are the most common that I’ve seen. The first is a faulty happiness formula, and the second is a faulty health formula. The third is faulty prosperity. The 4th is a faulty patriotism formula, and the 5th is a faulty problem-solving formula.

So, from my perspective, those five faulty formulas have collectively hijacked humanity into a profoundly deteriorated state that if we’re going to. If we’re going to emerge as our next elevated species of humanity, we’ve got to get back on track. We woke from those big five spells around happiness, health, prosperity, patriotism, and problem-solving.

Well, I mean, I wanted to elaborate more on this because you talk about faulty happiness formulas, right? And then America—the American identity- is about pursuing happiness.

So, from your perspective, what do you think Americans are doing? That is, going away from the pursuit of happiness, and how can they have the correct formula for happiness from your perspective?

Sure, well. We are starting with the United States Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which articulated a version of happiness. Happiness. Pursuing happiness is possible by integrating or dealing with the inherent tensions between personal freedom. And the common good. Self-sovereignty and societal well-being. And when operating at that intersection, happiness is possible because we are social beings endowed with free will.

So, if the happiness formula doesn’t include both elements, there cannot be an effective pursuit of happiness.

So, our founders, the founders of the United States, understood that well. Many people don’t even know that the United States has a mission statement because it’s not called a mission statement. It’s called the preamble to the United States Constitution; even though it’s called the preamble, it is America’s mission statement, and the mission statement is basically about creating a society that operates at the intersection of preserving personal freedom and promoting the common good, self-sovereignty, and collective. Being mandates the government to be a servant to its citizens and to that version of the pursuit of happiness, not a servant to special interests or to itself.

It’s interesting. And you say that the collective good versus the personal freedoms, right, like individual versus collective because right now is the newest in America, right? There’s been a divide for about a long time now.

And most Americans think they are losing hope in attaining. That state of happiness is on a national level because there are all of these divisions. And there’s identity grouping and grouping of identities, which is against the pursuit of happiness. I have to have a certain level of empathy for the other person to have a state of collective good. What would be your opinion on that?

Yes, I agree, and that means that what you’re referring to right now is very related to the hijacking of patriotism. The way I look at patriotism is through the image of Ukrainian-nested dolls. You know these dolls where you have them? Well, they’re often paper mâché. But you have something that looks like a doll. And the head comes off, and inside that doll is an identical, smaller doll. And inside that doll is an identical doll, but smaller still, etcetera. 

That’s what I mean by nested patriotism. When? If I make my group’s identity more important than my country’s identity, or if I make my country’s identity more important than humanity, or if I make myself more important than the groups I’m in, we’ve got things way, way out of whack.

And I consider the fundamental polarization and divisiveness in this country in the United States today to be a polarized expression. On one side, people insist that personal freedom is more important than societal well-being. And on the other side, people insist that societal well-being is more important than self-sovereignty. And both of those groups. They are equally and oppositely insane because they violate the country’s founding vision. And they don’t even know it.

No, I mean, it’s true, right? Because, like it or not, it’s become extreme on both sides, but ultimately, it’s about a balance, and it’s about going back to the vision of the nation, which I think we’ve gone away from, and that’s what’s creating a lot of the issues. 

But there is something connected to this. I know you had a TEDx talk about hijacking the American dream. Can you tell the audience a bit more about that, and what do you mean by the American dream being hijacked?

Hmm. Yes, I’m happy to do that. The place I’ll pick up in the story is 1947. 

In 1947, World War Two had just ended, and Harry Truman was president of the United States. And when he became president, he was vice president under Franklin Delano Roosevelt when Roosevelt died.

So, when Roosevelt died, he became president and had two overriding concerns. In the aftermath of World War Two, number one, he knew that the United States economy had been rejuvenated. It had come roaring back. As a result of the war, it was World War II that helped the United States recover from the Great Depression, and he wanted the economy to be able to continue to grow in peacetime rather than the economy. Being dependent on war to keep growing was his first concern, his second. 

His concern was that he wanted to make sure that the chances that what happened in Nazi Germany could happen here in the United States would be minimized to the greatest extent possible. Now, why was he concerned about that very simple answer? 

Because the Nazi propaganda campaigns that were so effective at destroying sanity in Germany for some time were fashioned by the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Yosef Gerbils. Based on his reading of the published works of an American named Edward Bernays,

I read that book and know about that story, like where global guard him. It was. It was, yeah, but go ahead.

Truman was worried because Edward Bernays was the darling of politics and business for most of his life. I mean Bernays. I was an advisor to virtually every American president, both Republican and Democratic, from Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War One through when Edward Bernays died in the 1990s, during Bill Clinton’s presidency. So, he was a darling of politics. And he was a darling of the business world.

So, he had a lot of clout and credibility in the United States among people of power. And that’s why Truman was worried. Because if Bernie’s material could get hijacked into creating Nazi Germany, then he realized it could happen here too.

So, what Truman did was to assemble a group of politicians and businesspeople and charge them. With the responsibility of coming up with a plan that would simultaneously keep the economy growing in peacetime and minimize the chances of what happened in Nazi Germany, what happened here? Why did they hatch? They hatched something that they called the American Dream.

Their version of the American Dream was installed initially in the United States in the 1950s, and because of the position and credibility that the United States had around the world then, or at least through much of the world, the rest of the world followed, and they adopted this. This delusion of the American dream and the American dream of the 1950s style. Did it completely twist the pursuit of happiness? I don’t know that they did it on purpose because they were trying to address two understandable concerns, but what they did was redefine happiness as excessive consumerism. They redefined personal freedom as conformity to a specific version of the good life that had to do with owning your own house with a white picket fence and 1.8 children.

Of course, I’m being facetious about the latest consumer gadgets and vacations. All of this stuff, and if you didn’t have all of those things, then you were being un-American, and you weren’t going to be happy.

And so, the other side of the formula, the original formula for the pursuit of happiness, Was the collective well-being side the common good side, and in place of that? We had overwork, so to fund this delusion of happiness based on excessive consumerism, the breadwinner in the family, or breadwinners in the family, had to work longer and longer hours in jobs they weren’t necessarily passionate about. For companies whose values they didn’t necessarily agree with to climb the corporate ladder to make more and more money, no matter how much money.

They made a gap between the amount of money they needed to live this version of the American Dream in the 1950s and the amount they were making, which caused consumer debt to start skyrocketing. And that’s when capitalism was replaced with a different form of economy. That is still, unfortunately, mislabeled capitalism. Still, it’s debt ISM, which is borrowing against an uncertain future to prop up the appearance of a lifestyle in the here and now in the present because that’s what we were told would make us happy.

Doctor David, you just blew my mind here because that is. That is the entire mission. The central mission of Extracting America is to get people to be financially free from debt and to understand that happiness doesn’t come from consumerism and materialism. It comes from within. 

And you have to use your finances. In a way that leads. You to greater freedom. And now I’m following what you’re telling me. It was all Truman sanctioned in the, like, all those years. Wow, this is just.

Yes. And the thing that shouldn’t be lost in this story is that Truman sanctioned it because he had these two noble concerns. He wanted the economy to keep growing in peacetime, and he wanted to minimize the chances that what would happen in Nazi Germany would happen here in the United States. So, this is an example of the best. Intentions lay the pathway to hell.

Wow, this is it. Like I always am kind. I knew this, but. I didn’t know how the American dream became the white picket fence with 1.8 children.

So now that we know that extracting America is all about people finding the right pursuit of happiness, becoming debt-free, and all that, what do you think is the right solution? To go about pursuing happiness and going about the American dream for Americans.

Well, I view us as being at a crossroads right now. I don’t know. I’m not thoroughly convinced that we’ve hit bottom yet. There’s an old saying that most people change, not because they see the light but because they feel the heat. And unfortunately, what’s true of individuals is true of societies, too. Most societies don’t change because they see the light but because they feel the heat.

So, things might have to get worse. Then they already were before. A critical mass of society wakes up enough to make the shift. I don’t know. I’m not. I’m not a foreseer of the future in terms of how long it will take or how bad things need to get for the pivot to occur. But I am very confident that we will pivot before we finish self-destructing. If we understand that there are two versions for our future as a species and as Americans, and these two versions I’m about to describe are, if you will, in a sense, in competition with each other, Only in the sense that it’s unclear about which of these two versions is going to prevail, although I think. I’ve put my money on one of these versions, which is the better.

So, the second version of humanity’s future is where we are turned into 21st-century serfs. Enslaved people, chattel commodities, where we become this. It is a bizarre hybrid between biology and cybernetics, and where we are being dictated to by a nanny state by a government that is telling us how to think and what to choose. What’s right? What’s wrong? What’s good, what’s bad? How to view various issues, etcetera, etcetera. In other words, the massive erosion of self-sovereignty serves this delusion that our collective well-being is more important than self-sovereignty rather than equally important to self-sovereignty.

So basically, like in 1984, Jar Jar Well’s version of a dystopia.

You got it. That’s exactly right, 1984. Brave New World, Lord of the Flies. I mean. Yes, there have been all these warnings long ago by science fiction authors who warned us that this was.

A possible alternative future for humanity and warned us that it wasn’t going to go well if that future emerged. I call that the future, so Homo sapiens is the species we’ve been until now, and from my perspective, the species of humanity called Homo sapiens is over. That species has ended, and one of two species will prevail.

One version that I just described is what I call **** machine-human machines. The other version I call Hemisphere Rites is human spirits, where we are conduits of higher love and wisdom in the physical universe, whereas with Homai Arena. We have the. Arrogant audacity to decide that we are smarter. Then, higher love and wisdom.

So, a small group of people is entitled to dictate what our lives should be like. That’s homomorphic. Hemisphere Rites lives at the intersection of—spiritual self-sovereignty and serving our collective well-being.

I believe in self-realization and attaining God-level consciousness through yoga and meditation.

So, in my mind, home spirit just has to win because the other one you talked about is unthinkable to me, you know? And here’s the thing: Like many people are saying right now. That cryptocurrency, and like, they’re going to use blockchain technology to enslave us. They’re planning to have, like, on a national level, national cryptocurrency. They can track everything, and this will be the beginning of, like, the so-called serfdom, and many people think that this is where technology will lead us. To you,

Yes, I’m very aware of the debate about that and the debates around artificial intelligence. But the thing about blockchain. Is that again it? Like all technology, it is neutral in beauty. At least the potential beauty of blockchain is that it is constructed to enable each of us to have financial self-sovereignty and not be controlled by a nanny state, Big Brother, or an authority. Controllers, can blockchain be abused to try to control humanity? There is no question about it, but blockchain innovation is. It is unbelievable because it gives humanity for the first time in its history. The first authentic opportunity to have financial self-sufficiency is when we aren’t beholden to banks or world economic systems to do so. The holders of our converted life energy that we’ve converted into money and other assets.

No, I mean totally, and I do hope the blockchain will be used to give greater freedom. But you know, like the state in which we’re going, for all this to happen, a greater percentage of the population, in my opinion, has to have integrity, and they have to have the greater good of other people. It’s like if we have what I call narcissism. If you have a great swath of the population being selfish and self-centered, that automatically filters to our politicians, and we will end up with it. Fascism, you know. It starts from the bottom. It starts from the bottom up. It goes all the way to the top. But that’s just my opinion, you know.

I agree with you, and what I’ll offer about that is. Freedom, personal freedom, and self-sovereignty: There is narcissism without the common good and societal well-being. And societal well-being without self-sovereignty is tyranny. It’s got to be both ends. The founders of this country knew that when they first founded it, which is why this country’s basic pillars are preserving personal freedom and promoting the common good; if we choose as a country to forget that, then we will have surrendered. Our sacred responsibility as light-bringers to the planet revolves around what enlightened governance and enlightened societies are meant to be like.

No, that’s true. So, doctor, dear, can you let me in? The audience is. A bit more about the Center for Enlightened Self-Sovereignty, the premise of it, how you started it, and all of that.

You know. I go back to Woodstock again because. I emerged from Woodstock with the beginnings of an idea about what I was supposed to do to impact the world positively. After, as I said earlier, having had a glimpse at around age 12 that I was supposed to have a positive impact, I didn’t know what that was. 

It was going to look like. As we’re recording this episode, I am a little over a month away from turning 70, so I have the advantage of 2020 hindsight over decades. Looking over the arc of my lifetime, I realize that my experiences and professional life capabilities have groomed me and prepared me to be a visionary leader.

It offers an integrated framework for individuals and groups to create spiritual self-sovereignty that serves us all—for themselves, the groups that they’re part of, and the parts of society that each of them is individual. Called to have a positive impact in their unique ways, the Center for Enlightened Self-Sovereignty combines a supportive community and a mutually supportive one. Plus, training in how to embody spiritual self-sovereignty that serves us all and how to facilitate that in the groups they’re part of.

So it’s a movement.

That is amazing. Doctor David and I would want my audience to know more about this so that we can create a better world for this, not only for our nation but for this planet as well. So, Doctor David, are there any projects you’re doing now other than this that you’d want the audience to glimpse?

Well, yeah. I mean, I do. I do wear multiple hats. And so, one of the other main hats that I wear is as a trusted advisor, trainer, mentor, and facilitator for businesses, and what I do in the business world is—making integrity profitable and helping businesses translate their high intentions into action step by step. Psychologically savvy procedures. Because here’s what most people experienced in the business world know but don’t know what to do about it, which is that businesses lead well. Let me put it this way: leaders of businesses. Build businesses at the level of their self-development limitations despite their highest intentions.

And so, my work in businesses is around the psychological side of business success, executive development, C-Suite health, the collective health of the executive suite in a company culture, architecture, and brand integrity. All those things combined to make integrity profitable, I work with the psychological end of what makes impact-oriented, socially responsible businesses profitable.

That is also Dr. David. And so, doctor, how can our audience connect with you and learn more about you and your work?

Sure, there are a couple of ways. If you’re interested in the business end of things, you can get a hold of my two most recent business books, The Nimble C-Suite and The Nimble Company. And you can find out about those, and you can find out about the Center for Enlightened Self-Sovereignty and all of the others. Hats that I wear and things that I’m involved with, including. The podcasts I co-host my show and things like that through my main website, doctorgruder.com. You can click on any of them. I’m involved with things that interest or are useful to you, and you also have a way to be in touch with me.

Thank you, doctor. David, we appreciate that, and I am honored that you took the time to do this show with me and share your wisdom with all of us. I appreciate that. And I would want to have you on this show later.

Well, thank you. It will be my joy to return. I think it’s clear to both of us that the work you’re doing on this show and my mission are very aligned and overlapping. So, I’m happy for us to support each other this way.

This show is prohomospirit, you know. I don’t want the other side because we want to create a spiritually better place, you know? 

So, I want to conclude this show by letting my fellow Americans know that, hey, look, there’s something extraordinary within every one of us. We must awaken it and unleash it. 

Until next time, bye for now.

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In this podcast episode, guest Martin Saenz shares his journey from meeting his wife in 2003 to achieving financial freedom and success in various entrepreneurial ventures. Initially realizing that corporate America was not their path, Martin and his wife pursued education through Robert Kiyosaki’s books and created a roadmap for financial independence.

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and young girls.

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