Welcome to the Brandt & Sherry Podcast sponsored by MetaShare. To order Brandt's latest book, the men we need, or to find out more about the show, go to Brandhanson.com.

Okay, I'm a nerd and I admit it, especially culture, history, anthropology, kind of a nerd. I love that stuff.

So there's a tendency to always go, you know, we don't live in unique times as it's happened before. Generally, that's true.

But we do live in unique times. What I mean by that, we have never had a culture in the history of the world where the idea was you got your identity from yourself.

You go into yourself to decide who you are. That's never been done.

What has generally been the thought process? It's from the outside. It's based on your family relationships. That's maybe your relationship to God.

Your community or your... Yeah, it's all baked in from the outside. So I know who I am. I'm son of this person, the father of that person. That's humans. That's humans to this day and every other culture except the West. No one's ever done this before.

Very lonely because the other way connected. Yes, exactly. It's lonely. It's anxiety-producing. Please know your identity comes from the outside. It comes from the fact that you're totally loved by God. Completely loved. That's the starting thing. There's your rock solid identity.

Okay, so producer Sherry's all worried because she gave me a piece of slang and a kid's name. I didn't give it to you. I was just telling you. We listened to a song and I was telling you what kids would say, what my nieces would say.

But I asked, yes. And then what was the other one? It's a Bob. It's a Bob. A B-O-P. Yes. Yes. Cool. But you're hitting a P too hard and I just want to make sure that you're not going to use it in conversation.

If I do it, I think I'll make it sound cool. No, I don't think you would. No, you're like, yo. I see no to yo. Hey. Everything's not for everybody. Please don't do that.

We have some breaking animal news. It also concerns humans. Okay. So if you're in the animals, maybe you'll still stick around. Yeah, you still need to know what's happening.

The pet food quality cut back is the headline. Okay. I wonder is it are increasingly opting for lower quality pet food as premium dry dog food. So a 2.9% drop in the market share, the recent quarter, the rising pet food prices have gone up 11%. Oh wow, that's a lot. Yeah.

It's hard to explain to your dog why the food just got worse.

Now, because inflation is hard, I get to show like supply demand. A lot of humans don't understand inflation rather than the finances that they're experiencing. Right.

It's so great that the challenge for me with cozy is like, yeah, I know it doesn't taste as good. Yeah. Did you use charts, graphs, PowerPoint?

Try explain it. Okay. Like the more money is put into the system, talked about federal reserve. Yeah. Yeah. You feel like she over all understood. She walked away.

Let me guess. You're busy. Right. Am I right? Is that pretty good? Yeah. I nailed it. I think it's true. You are. I can guess that because everybody is busy. All time. Yes. How you know? I'm really busy. Okay. It's fine. So in the midst of that busyness, I do think this is true.

If you just turn your heart, it's a little bit your attention to God and thank him. There's a lot of value in this.

And I remember reading that quote from Brother Lawrence about that and getting some questions going, well, it's just a slight.

You sure? God just wants us to. Yeah. In the midst of your busyness, you do something like that. And the best example I can think of that is my wife loves it.

If we're in a crowded room and I just like I'm talking to people, she's talking to people and she sees me turn and look towards her and smile or make eye contact.

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