My Summer Vacation: A Conversational Highlight

While on vacation with my extended family on Lake Michigan, I’ve been having a few very challenging conversations and a few real breakthrough ones. I had one memorable conversation the other day… there was a guy — an accomplished executive with a great family — and so he came over to the cottage one day and came up to me and said, “Foster, can we talk?”

He said, “For the past several summers I overheard you saying some bizarre but very compelling things and you know when I check them out, it turns out that they seem to be true and so,” he said, “I wanted to have an in-depth conversation with you.” He’s a very good person — a committed liberal — just very much in the (Project Mockingbird) CNN, New York Times, Washington Post bubble.

He said, “I wanted to talk to you because I thought that you, of all people, might see a way out of this political polarization.” He said, “I’m so fed up with the conversations that are going on in my family, in my workplace, online… just sniping at each other and it’s not deep, it’s not kind, it’s not useful. What do you make of this political polarity?”

I said, “You’re diving in the deep end here, but I really appreciate your coming over here and asking me so directly.” I said, “Have you seen my movies?”

He said, “Well, years ago I started on THRIVE but I quit.”

I said, “Well you know this may be further motivation for you to go back and check them out because we did those in order to save people time on exactly this type of question. If you don’t understand what we call the ‘Global Domination Agenda’ then it doesn’t make any sense that people are being so mean to each other — even if they love each other — over ridiculous things.” Then I said, “You know that families are being broken apart, workplaces are being broken apart and more power is just going into the fight for who gets the ring of power. If you don’t understand that, that’s exactly what the global domination perpetrators want. Everything will seem crazy, but once you understand that that’s their agenda, all sorts of things will start to make sense.”

Then he wanted me to break it down so we went into banking. We went into extraterrestrials. We went into media and he was asking great questions and really wanted to see how the pieces fit together and then we talked about what conspiracy really is and how the term was invented by the CIA after the Kennedy assassination to suppress inquiry into the Warren Commission.

Finally he said, “This is, on the one hand, scary as hell, but on the other hand it’s finally making sense.” He paused for a moment and then said “OK. Well, now if I assume for a moment what you are saying is true, then I want to hear what you see in 10 years, 15 years, 25 years from now. What do you see our world looking like?” He’s got young kids and he’s genuinely and understandably concerned. His wife runs a wonderful paradigm-breaking regenerative farm so they’re already doing their absolute best with their current knowledge base. They’re doing fantastic things.

So I said, “Well you know this is going to surprise you maybe even more than the shock of the things that I just told you because knowing all that I know, I’m still probably the most encouraged person that I know about the future of the world right now.” He said, “How can you make sense of that?”

I said, “Kimberly talks about, in THRIVE, that unless you’re willing to get an accurate diagnosis you’re going to have a lot of difficulty curing the disease.” I said, “What I’ve been talking about is the diagnosis and it’s not good news. The good news is that once you know it then you can start looking beyond it, and you can create real solutions based on the principles of truth and freedom rather than trying to fool, bribe, or threaten people into political power.”

I said, “For the first time in history, I believe that when the exoskeleton of the corruption on an international scale —  when that all comes crashing down, particularly the international central banking, which is behind all the rest, I think we will have the option for each individual and families and communities to just go to existing holistic solutions in every sector — alternative education, truth media, honest digital currency, regenerative farming like your family is doing — and so on. I said, “In the past when an empire has collapsed, then there’s always been panic and everybody runs around scared and bends their knee to the next authoritarian regime.

“I think we actually have enough on the table in terms of genuine viable alternatives that are already working — at least to some scale — to actually simply go there and organize our communities — from local to global — around natural and moral and scientific principles like truth and freedom and balance rather than just around who’s got the biggest club and the biggest gang and trying to use their power over everyone else.”

It was moving to see his face because he left a more relaxed and excited person. Probably a bit confused — but also with a glimmer of grounded hope. I don’t know what the heck he went home and told his wife. They were leaving the next day, but it felt like a real start and that’s a microcosm of what I think the Thrive Movement has been offering the world.

I had a couple of conversations where I was told the usual, “We’re going to need to agree to disagree, because I can see neither of us is going to learn anything from each other.” Or just the “get up and leave the room” type of non-interaction. I used to see a few of those every summer too, but I must say that my family and friends are making slow but really steady progress in staying with the discomfort and moving in the direction of truth seeking and telling, so it’s been an encouraging vacation as well as a fun and restful one.