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April 30, 2020 - Louder with Crowder
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LwC's Favorite Books & Albums for Quarantine | Ash Wednesday | Louder with Crowder
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Hey, before you enjoy this installment of Ash Wednesday—or you may not enjoy it, frankly, I don't care—this is actually the last installment of Ash Wednesday that you'll see here on the YouTube, because usually it's behind the paywall for Mug Club members, and this is Mug Club Quarantine Month, so sign up at lidoofcreditor.com slash mugclub if you want these shows that you've been enjoying this month every day.
Well, you get to continue enjoying them every day.
Otherwise, you'll still get to We've got a clip here and there.
So ladderwithcredit.com slash Mug Club, enter in the promo code QUARANTINE, you'll get $30 off.
We hope that we've been here for you during this quarantine.
And as we move forward, after all of this is said and done, we hope that you join us.
Enjoy the show.
♪ Intro Music ♪ There's nothing I love more... Small miracles... than that
intro song.
Every time I'm singing it, in my head, in my heart, with my hips, all of it.
Well, you just sang it out loud.
That's the small miracles that our mics were turned off.
I know.
But see, here's the thing.
Normally, when I have not taken the seat over and kicked Steven out, I'm over there singing to myself silently.
Are you?
Yeah, I love it.
It's a great little thing.
That's why you're always so happy.
Popping around.
I love it.
So I've got the pipe here today.
We're going to be doing a little bit of a pairing.
We're going to have a couple topics.
We have gotten rid of whoever the guy that normally sits here.
Whatever his name is.
Coronavirus I think got rid of him.
So it was a really long con that I planted a disease in Wuhan and then let it come all the way over here.
And then gave it to Stephen.
Well, he doesn't know I gave it to him.
He thinks it was community spread.
Alright, tell me, do we have a pairing?
We have a pairing.
It is from Mr. Brodigan.
Four Roses, Single Barrel, with an American Rebel.
Habano Robusto.
Wow.
OK.
That sounds pretty great.
A lot of pausing.
You know, I'm going to tell you.
It's dramatic.
I have no idea whether that's a real cigar.
It sounds like someone just picked out four words in a cigar random generator name thing.
It is a cigar.
But Four Roses single barrel is excellent.
So Four Roses, the regular, the single barrel, everything they make is really, really good and a great value.
And a lot of people are looking for bourbon these days.
And they're like, oh, well, you know, I'm going to try and get Eagle Rare.
Or, you know, Steven likes Wild Turkey.
And, you know, it's for the value.
No, no, they're really good.
Don't get me wrong.
I don't know if people are like, ah, f***ing Eagle Rare!
It's the best!
It is really good.
But, now you've got Four Roses.
Excellent stuff.
So, let's jump right into our first topic.
First topic is, what was the last book you finished, and what are you reading now?
Mmm, where do you want to start on that?
All right, so we know Gerald can't read.
Oh, come on!
Cooked on Phonics worked for me.
Oh, excellent.
How do you say a silent Q?
Good work!
He's hooked on it.
I thought I was going to get him.
We're going to go best to worst here on books.
That's definitely Wade.
We're going to start with Audio Wade.
Audio Wade, purveyor of the English language.
What are you reading right now?
Right now I'm reading Dracula.
It was my first time reading it.
I'd never gotten into it.
One thing that I've really picked up on is how well paced it is.
A lot of times when you go back to a lot of classics you sort of They don't have the same kind of end on a question kind of chapter structure and that kind of thing, but it's so well-structured and so well-written.
It's written from all these different perspectives, and it's basically a bunch of journals.
It's written with the structure of being a collection of journals at the end of this kind of saga that happens.
So it's been really, really good.
It doesn't at all feel like there's...
Sometimes when you read a classic, you can feel like you're having to traverse, like, a river every time.
I have to read ten or twelve pages in order to even get into this thing.
To get a chapter of good.
Yeah, but this one, tone-wise, I've also been really struck by how, really, how Christian the book is.
I hadn't really thought about it before.
It was actually recommended by Doug TenNapel, a friend of Mr. Garrett's here, and he had told me that that just really Yeah, I don't want to sort of, I mean obviously it's...
You can just spoiler alert your mom.
Yeah, spoiler alert.
Turns out he's just a sock puppet. Is that the end of it?
Or, you know...
Really, there's a lot of religious imagery in there that I wasn't expecting.
And it was a real treat.
You know, this reminds me of something people often talk about.
We may have talked about this a little bit here on the show, I think we have, which is, you know, people would criticize the creator of the Doom video game series to say, oh, it's celebrating demonology and Satan, etc.
But the guy who actually created it was like, um, have you played the game?
All you do is kill demons.
Those are the bad guys, I don't know.
It's because we're on God's side.
Wait, so you're saying you're not into killing demons.
Yeah, if you walked away from that with like a pro demon stick, I don't think you were paying attention.
If you start shooting the other good guys in Doom, there's something wrong with you to protect the demons.
Yeah, exactly.
How dare you?
It's not their fault.
Now, I do understand the question and concern.
I think whether it's reading or video games or any type of media, you have to expose children in an appropriate way and in an appropriate context.
So, I definitely understand that point.
But, again, in terms of pro or anti-demon, I think both Dracula and Doom fall clearly on the anti-demon side.
Have you read Dracula?
I have.
So, no sock puppets.
Okay, I'm excited to get to the end.
I really am.
You're going to like it.
I'm loving it.
Yeah, so good stuff.
Well, alright, so who else reads here?
Okay, I'll go.
So the last book that I finished was 21 Rules for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari.
He has three books that deal kind of with the beginning of humanity.
It's called Sapiens, and then he has a couple other books as well, but this one talks about a lot of really important things that are affecting the world right now and have been affecting us recently.
Including the rise of biotechnology and AI, and kind of how is the world going to deal with it?
And I really found it to be not just, you know, your page turner is the imagery, like every page is a new idea.
Paragraph to paragraph is new and interesting ideas about how we will think about the time in which we currently live.
Because people will say, oh, you know, you ask a question, oh, how many years from now will it be until a vehicle is deciding whether or not to kill a human being or not?
People will say, oh, one year, five years, ten years.
Some idiots will say 20 years.
But it's actually already happened.
It happened in 2019.
A vehicle chose to kill its own occupant rather than go on a sidewalk to avoid a collision where it would have hit some other people.
And so we're already in this world, and it's talking about, you know, what are we going to do when we have a class of individuals who are not trainable to keep up with the changes in technology, and how will we deal with that?
So it's a really fascinating book.
I've only kind of more recently gotten into a lot of nonfiction books and a lot of things that are more forward-looking.
I don't know, it's probably because I'm old.
Gerald, how long have you been reading boring books?
I reject the premise, sir.
So, yeah, I tend to read books that are like that too.
I love learning about things that I don't really know anything about or have just some, you know,
something that's just kind of a fun thing and I dive into different categories for a little while.
And then I'll pop back out and read somebody like Joel C. Rosenberg who writes these really great
fiction novels that have a lot of Christian kind of threads through them.
Obviously talking about end time stuff or whatever it may be.
He's got a new one coming out really soon, so I'm very excited.
He's the guy that I read in three days.
As soon as his book drops, I'm just reading it all the time.
Recently, I read The Problem with Socialism, which was a fantastic book.
If you needed examples of why socialism sucks, this gives you great ones, but you shouldn't need them.
It's pretty obvious why it sucks.
But this one gave you a lot of great information on why socialism doesn't work for people.
Not just on the economic side, but what it does to you as a person.
And so, that was really good.
Yeah, do you remember the author name?
The author, yeah.
I've got it on my phone.
Sorry, I just don't remember all these things.
Thomas DiLorenzo.
Which, that was a lot of fun.
So, is there any counterpoints in there?
Are there like any moments where like, yeah, you know, socialism is great, but only if you were at the very top of the food chain.
Well, it doesn't just make the case that socialism is bad.
It talks to you about what socialism does and in some ways lets you go, okay, do I want that or do I not want that?
But then it says, well, these are the consequences of doing that.
And you do walk away knowing, okay, well, if socialism happens, I need to be at the top.
It's like a multi-level marketing scheme is good as long as you're at the top, you're fine.
If you're somebody else down on one of those leg things that they talk about, it sucks.
And then the next one, so it kind of follows right in this one, is called Wealth and Poverty by George Gilder, which is a new edition for the 21st century, so there's some updating to it.
And it's great, like fundamental economic principles, but also talking about some of the current things that we've seen.
So I'm in a financial kick right now for some reason.
George Gilder also has a great book called Life After Google.
Yes, I read that too.
That's where I came across this one.
Top notch.
Really, really good.
It was Life After Google and he did one more that was like a life after thing.
I can't remember what it was.
Life After Television.
Television was the earlier one, right?
Yeah, so essentially he basically predicted the move of entertainment and news away from TV and back onto the internet.
Fascinating, fascinating stuff.
George Gilder is top notch.
So where's it going after that?
Life after AI.
Life after Google.
Yeah.
So basically what he predicts is that they'll move away— Spoiler alert.
Very much so.
If you want to read the book.
He predicts that companies will move away from the free service but paid advertising model, so like interruption ads, or moving more towards subscription services, which is basically what Mug Club is.
That's what's happening.
And YouTube Premium and stuff like that are the models for life after Google.
You heard it first here.
Mug Club.
Media of the future!
I've got to say this because our conversations off-air have been a lot about the forgotten depression.
It's really funny because I'm scrolling back through and I think about a year and a half ago I read a book by James Grant called The Forgotten Depression all about 1921 and what happened and what didn't happen.
Did you realize it was in that moment that Audie Wade was just cribbing that book and having conversations?
No, he was quoting somebody else.
Like in Good Will Hunting where he's like, and then you're going to quote this page, 682.
Yeah, exactly.
The Commonwealth of Virginia.
Agrarians.
Nice.
Yeah?
Is that it?
No, it's not it at all.
Which one of you had the apples?
No, I didn't.
I didn't.
All right, so, Quarter Black, tell us what you're reading.
Currently right now, I've started rereading The Lord of the Rings.
Oh, wow.
Nice.
I'm just in the first, you know, Fellowship of the Ring.
I haven't gotten too far in it.
Sure.
But yeah, I'm just getting through all those songs.
Is this the second time?
That's kind of through, or multiple times?
Multiple times.
Okay, gotcha.
The one I recently finished was, recently last year, Lord of the Flies.
Just because I wanted to go back.
I wanted to go back and read some of the ones.
Lord of the Dance is next.
It goes downhill from here.
Listening to a lot of Lord.
But yeah, I like that book a lot.
It's very interesting, kind of how he breaks down the psyche of a boy.
I heard that they're remaking it and making it all about girls, but it completely destroys the whole theme of it.
Are they going to be bitchy?
I don't know.
I don't know, but yeah, like how we have the society that we live in it almost like
You know all the right now Corona stuff ish It's like you take these elements of society out and then
they they try to create the society themselves And then it slowly deteriorates and yeah, yeah, and then
the way the book in spoiler alert is they get The whole island gets set on fire like all the kids are
killing each other they're chasing each other and they chase the lead all the
way down to the beach and There's a military ship. Yeah has found them and he shows
up and he's just like oh you kids you kids are crazy let's you know, I'm trying to save you and it's kind of
like The adult looks down on the kids saying like you you're
having this crazy battle Everything is destroyed. But really they're they're an army
and Their society is also doing the same things as the little
kids are doing So I don't know, I thought it was a... It's very interesting.
A lot of symbology.
Symbolism?
Symbolism.
Symbolize.
That's a Boondock Saints reference.
I love Boondock Saints.
THERE WAS A FIREFIGHT!
Wow, he's seen the trailer.
I saw the movie in college, but it was still like a cult B movie.
Now it's everywhere.
Yeah, exactly.
Now it's spread just like viruses.
Hey, can I ask like a follow-up question?
Absolutely, I've got one too.
Like what would be, and I have one to answer this question because I wanted to recommend this book, but I thought it'd be cool to hear.
I do have another question.
Okay, so I'll be very quick.
What would be a great recommendation for somebody to read?
Maybe your next book or a book that you've read in the last year or two that you're just like, man, one of my favorites that I've read.
Very interesting, very cool book for people to read.
So one is that same author you all know, Harari.
He wrote Sapiens.
It's going to challenge your beliefs, especially a Christian, in our interpretation of where In our understanding and belief about where humanity came from.
I have the book, I haven't read it yet though.
There are a lot of things in there where I am equally, so every morning I'd read first websites that are of beliefs that typically are the ones I don't hold.
And I start from there and then I go to the other side.
Right, yeah.
I'm reading Teen Vogue.
You don't believe Teen Vogue?
Why not?
I don't believe in teens.
I don't believe in voguing.
I don't believe in any of it.
No, I mean, I read Slate.
I'll read CNN.
You know, CNN is, you know, if it has anything to not do with politics, I'm fairly okay with taking CNN at face value.
If it has anything to do with politics.
Even a whiff of politics.
I'm right there, just, you know, buckets of sodium.
I literally go get a pretzel from down the street at a cart and I eat the pretzel and I lick the salt off and then I read CNN.
So reading Sapiens was in a similar way because there are some very interesting sociological points but also just from a biological standpoint and going through what I consider to be easy to read, straightforward, full of citation, Position on the history of sapiens, of homo sapiens and the other types of human life.
And hetero sapiens.
All types.
All types.
Everyone in between.
It was an okay dad joke, yeah.
What about you guys?
Oh wow, we've got a train pulling through the studio.
Incredible, I like that.
Is this Mr. Rogers and we have a little train coming?
It is.
It's the train to your imagination.
Everyone put your car to get on.
Nice.
I actually had a follow up question as well, but I also want to hear the answer if anyone
has one on.
Go ahead.
You want to go, Gerald?
So one of my favorite books that I've read was A Man for All Markets by Edward Thorpe.
I don't know if you guys have ever heard him.
If you've seen the movie, what is it, the blackjack thing where the guy comes up with how to beat blackjack?
Counting cards, 21.
Yeah, 21, but it was based on a guy who released a book called Bringing Down the House, I believe.
And I believe that was Edward Thorpe who did that.
And just like phenomenally gifted person when it came to numbers and the markets and everything else.
And so it follows his life doing all these.
Like that would have been good enough, like you could just sit back the rest of your life
and be like, I beat Blackjack.
You know, like I brought down the best game in Vegas.
I'm done.
And he just kept going from there.
And he went up from there and the things that he did.
But he also, it didn't have that kind of circle back where he fails and it's horrible
and like he ended up losing his family and his house blows up or none of that happened.
And so you're like, oh, it's kind of a happier ending.
Like he kind of went off into the sunset doing this the rest of his life
and it walks you through all the stuff he did.
Really interesting, very cool book.
How come you didn't say spoiler alerts?
I didn't.
You're a terrible person.
I'm just realizing it now.
On air.
Let me ask an alternative question.
Thank you for that recommendation, Edward Thorpe.
When you mentioned earlier that you had read Lord of the Rings multiple times, are there, I want you guys to think and I'll give you mine, books that you've read multiple times?
And I will tell you one of the books that I've read multiple, multiple, multiple times is Ender's Game.
So I've read almost every book in the entire series and I've read Ender's Game now north of 26 times.
Didn't they make a movie about that?
They did make a movie, which I have not seen.
You haven't seen it?
I haven't seen the movie.
I'm scared to see the movie.
I thought it was interesting.
I'm scared to see the movie.
Sure.
Didn't do well.
My imagination of what is happening in that book... Right, yeah, it's probably going to let you down.
Nothing is going to trump that.
So, do you guys have any other books that you're reading that you've read multiple times that you would recommend?
So there's a book that I'm basically always reading.
The Bible.
It's a book called Orthodoxy by G.K.
Chesterton.
G.K.!
In case anyone wasn't listening closely, you had your audio down, which is wise.
There again, we've got Gerald hitting slash slapping his own chest meat.
chest meat. That's what that sound is. Yeah. I'm gonna have bruises. Like two mating gorillas.
All right. So anyway. Go ahead Chesterton. So yeah, GK Chesterton was a journalist. He
wrote the, he wrote the Father Brown stories. A lot of people know him from
that. But yeah, Orthodoxy is basically, it's a book, yeah, it's a sort of book
where when you read it the first time you underline everything because it's
all like perfect.
Every sentence you go, wow, I never thought about anything that way.
And then you go back to it later and you don't remember any of it because everything was so brilliant that it basically just washes over you and you forget all about it.
So it's the sort of thing that you have to reread.
I've found that with Chesterton a lot.
But yeah, I'm pretty much always reading that one or always listening to it.
It's one of my favorite books ever.
Amazing.
I'm gonna have to go get it.
I love it.
Excellent.
All right, so we do have another topic, so we're gonna move on to that one.
And our next topic is, if you could only listen to two albums for the rest of your very short coronavirus life, what would those two albums be?
Ooh.
Gerald.
I know.
Alright, so, uh, Def Leppard, uh, Pyromania.
Nice.
It's a pretty good one.
They have, I mean, like, five or six of their best songs were on that one.
Yeah, yeah.
So, very, very good.
And then, I don't think, and somebody correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think Coldplay has, like, a greatest hits album that I know of.
I'm sure.
I would do that.
If that was out, I would do that.
Maybe they do, and I just have never seen it, but if not, I would pick Rush of Blood to the Head.
Someone's got some, like, mixed USB out there with all the... Well, I've made one, but I'm saying, like, mass marketed.
So, it would be those two.
Coldplay is like, you know, I got my 80s stuff, which for some reason I love, even though I didn't love it when I was, you know, in the 80s.
I went back and started liking it, so it's kind of funny.
But he learned to like it.
And Coldplay, as we know, is the greatest rock band in the world.
As the movie yesterday said, it's not Coldplay.
It's not Fix You.
Ladies and gentlemen, in an effort to contain the Coldplay virus, I will be locking the doors and burning this entire studio to the ground.
Yeah, it's probably safe.
We'll take precautions.
Thank you, and God save the Queen.
Gerald, seriously, you have equated yourself terribly here.
Okay, if they're not on the list of the top ten greatest bands in history, what criteria are you using?
Good criteria.
I get if you don't like them and that's fine, but I don't like the Beatles and I know they're a top ten band in history, okay?
Look, I'm gonna tell you Gerald, I have terrible taste in everything, but I have better taste in people.
At least you know Coldplay!
Their first album's pretty good.
I'm not saying they're a bad band, I'm saying I hate Coldplay.
And in fairness, this is your own personal hell that you have to live in the rest of your life by picking these two albums.
I mean, Nickelback.
Oh gosh, no.
What the hell's the matter with you?
If the choices are between cutting yourself and listening to Nickelback, I'm gonna probably cut myself.
But some people might choose Nickelback instead, right?
I'm gonna end it.
They'll choose Nickelback and then cut themselves.
There's no sweet without the sour.
Nickelback is the sour.
Alright, audio away.
Two albums.
Racist.
It's hard to narrow it down to two.
If I had to...
That literally is the premise of the question.
You do have to.
Were you listening?
I have to.
Probably Paul Simon's Graceland.
I think that's got to be number one.
And then maybe it would either be another side of Bob Dylan, one of the early Bob Dylan records, and Jackson Brown I don't know.
That's kind of my stuff.
It would be really hard to choose between those three, but something like that.
You're a sweet guy, we're gonna let you have three.
You've earned it, you've earned it.
In this fictional universe, you've earned a third album.
Alright, Quarterblack, tell us all about your two.
As everybody knows, I love Cody and Cambria, so In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth 3 is one of my picks.
And my second would be, I can't I don't remember the name.
I think it's Texas Flood by Steve Ray Vaughan.
I know they have the song, but I think the whole album was named that.
If not, just The Greatest Hits by Steve Ray Vaughan.
No rap?
I'm curious.
Gerald, every time I think there's no way that Gerald can become more racist, then all of a sudden I imagine that... There's a 25% chance!
I just imagine that little music video where... I mean, I can't even remember what the song is now, but I think it's Lil Jon.
Where there's a dancing Asian guy and he's humping the air so hard he slams through the ground and the whole video is like people dancing even more and slamming through more floors of this apartment building down and down and down and down and that's you.
It is.
On Racism.
It is.
It is.
Stopping me.
If I could only listen to two albums with my terrible taste.
Tupac.
The first one would be, a little cheating here, Creedence Clearwater.
Okay.
Greatest Hits.
Greatest Hits is still fine.
They have a Greatest Hits.
It's an album.
It was offered.
It was real.
It wasn't a mixtape.
Yeah.
I like it.
There are so many songs that every time they come on, I think, man, I'm in a good mood.
Yeah.
Some really amazing stuff.
A lot.
And here's the thing that came to my mind when I was thinking about this criteria is There are a whole range of emotions that music helps to either bring you into or to help you out of.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think there's a broad variety of music on that particular album.
My second album would be Jagged Little Pill, Alanis Morissette.
Really?
Yes.
This is a lot of emotion.
It's like rain.
A lot of emotion.
Her early album?
Yeah, the first one.
The 90s?
Yeah.
That was, yeah.
1998?
I think her first commercial success one.
Isn't it ironic, I guess?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's the song that was the lead.
Yeah, you ought to know.
Amazing stuff.
Gerald, would you go down on him in a theater?
Wait, what?
That's one of the lyrics.
Oh my gosh.
You guys are terrible.
I knew the lyrics, but I chose not to.
So here's sub-question, sub-question.
When I was in college, I worked at a company that was in the firearms industry, and I had a gentleman who I worked for in a particular department who told me he had been given... It's very vague, all of this.
A particular company and a gentleman in a particular department.
I'm just going to let it ride, aren't you?
I had a lot of respect for him, and I thought he had really good focus at work, etc.
And I just asked him, I was like, hey, what are you always listening to every day?
Are you listening to certain music?
And he said, I'm listening to this one album called December, and it's just instrumental Christmas and hymn music from the winter holidays and Christmas holidays.
And he's like, here, let me give you a copy.
And I still have the same copy that he gave me, though I've now downloaded to put it on my phone.
But whenever I need to crank out work, I put on this instrumental Christmas music all year round, and I just get in the zone.
Like, if I had a montage, instead of Eye of the Tiger, it would be this December album.
Well, but that's the thing.
Sometimes you need your brain.
Classical music is a great thing to work to.
For me, it's Coldplay.
I used to listen to Coldplay, no lie, counting cash.
Because I used to run a racetrack up in Ohio, and I would count $20,000 to $30,000, and it would take like seven or eight hours to allocate it to the right places.
Drug money is what it sounds like, I know.
But I would listen to Coldplay, and so now when I listen to it, it doesn't distract me at all.
I can do whatever work or whatever focus that I need to, so that's my version of yours.
I will say, though, Gerald, as a lawyer, I'm not your lawyer, but I would recommend that you not talk about your money laundering.
I deposited all of it.
I filled out all the paperwork.
I walked into a bank one time with $100,000 in a duffel bag and they're like, can you come around the counter please?
I could have been hit like easily and the money taken from me.
Okay.
Um, let me grab a pen.
What racetrack was this?
I was a part owner of Lorain County Speedway up in Ohio, right out of college.
It was a three eighths mile asphalt, high banked racetrack, NASCAR sanctioned, one of a hundred in the country.
Yeah.
Did you race?
I didn't race, but I jumped in a car every once in a while just for fun when the track was not going.
Gotcha.
You were the Belichick, not the race.
Yes, exactly.
But I did compete in a demolition derby, which was all kinds of fun.
That was fun.
Yes.
We won.
Our team won.
Incredible.
I like it.
So those are our topics for the day.
Super excited to hear all the different comments we could have from people, so go ahead and post at S Crowder.
Tell us about your albums that you're listening to, and if you had only two that you could listen to, go ahead and tell us all here at the show.
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