Warren Mainard: Hello and welcome to the IMPACT Players Podcast. My name is Warren Mainard. I'm the Executive Director of IMPACT Players and I'm here today with my good friend DeCruz. DeCruz is an IMPACT Player. He's been a part of some of our ministries in the past, but he's been a friend of mine for the past several years, and has just a great mind and insight on so many things. But I'm excited to have you on the podcast today and, DeCruz, maybe just give us a minute to introduce yourself: who you are, where you're from, and what you're doing now.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah, so my name is DeCruz and I live in the Pacific Northwest. I've been living in the Seattle area for a long time. And I have to say, Warren, I'm looking at your background and I feel like I need to put up a guitar and do something else with this 'cause this is... my background is very boring, so if you were to rate my room, it would be at best a one out of five, but you get a five out of five for your background there. That's great.
Warren Mainard: Alright, so let me take a quick timeout and give it full disclosure on the background. And for those that are listening and not viewing this podcast, I'm recording this from my daughter's bedroom. So behind me, I've got her photos. I've got a blue guitar, a red guitar, and a giant multicolored sheet that she's pinned up against a wall. She is the Pinterest queen in our family and she has executed it to perfection in her room.
DeCruz Pulikottil: That's great.
Warren Mainard: But yeah, it's the one place that I can get away to record this podcast. So, yeah, continue.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah, so my day job is I work for International Justice Mission and I'm in charge of basically raising funds for the work that they do around the world. If you don't know about IJM, it's a global anti-slavery, anti-trafficking organization. The focus is really on violence against the poor. So in many parts of the world, there are people that don't live under the rule of law. So, for example, you and I, we live in the US and if something goes wrong, we can call the police. We call 911 and something will happen. There's over a billion people around the world who don't live under rule of law in the sense that they have no way of knowing that if they call for help, that someone will actually help them. And most often it's poor and it's also the, you know, women and children that are most affected. So our work looks like, for example, in India, it's against bonded labor. So somebody could get a loan for $5 and the person would charge a thousand percent interest. And it's in such a way that the loan is never paid off and they're forced to work in making bricks or as a farmer or something like that. And if they have kids, their kids are born into slavery. And so it just continues for generation. It's illegal, but it happens and so that's kind of what our goal is. And so I work for them here in the Pacific Northwest. And then my other job, my night job, is I do a podcast called "Big Brown Army." And we've been... we started during the pandemic as many, many podcasts did. And, I'm pleased to say that it's grown into, we have a small community of listeners, thank you, Warren, for listening and for others. And we just debate. We talk through issues of the day. We usually take politics and stuff that's happening in culture, and then kind of take a critical look at what's happening and try to present different sides of the same argument. I believe that unfortunately in the media, in public news settings or whatever, there's always an agenda, which I'm okay with. I'm okay with people having agenda. I don't know that objectivity exists, really. I don't think that's a real thing, but I just want people to be upfront about it. Just say, here's what I believe and here's what really drives me nuts. And so I don't pretend to be objective on my show. I have a view and I'll say it, and I just want... my biggest thing, especially in light of recent events, is that I want to be as accurateas possible, as far as I know, just to be as truthful as possible. and that's what I try to do.
Warren Mainard: Yeah, that's great. And again the name of your podcast is "Big Brown Army." I am a subscriber. It's one of the few podcasts that I listen to faithfully, and especially this past year, it's been such a great resource to me personally. And to be quite honest, a a big reason why I wanted to do this podcast with you was just to talk about it a little bit. In fact, I was telling someone the other day that, to me, the sign of a great podcast is when someone's listening to it, they just want to pick up the phone and start talking to you about it.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah. I appreciate that.
Warren Mainard: They feel like they're a part of the conversation.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Right, right.
Warren Mainard: DeCruz, there's been a number of times where I've actually been midway through the podcast and I've just said, forget this, I'm calling DeCruz myself. Now, I know not everybody has the luxury of doing that, but yeah. It is, it's a great resource. And for me especially, just to give you a little bit of my perspective with some of this, I'm... for my own wellbeing, I don't watch a lot of news.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: I just can't take it. It just... it wears me down. So I don't watch a lot of news, but I at least want to know what's going on. And as you said, it's so hard to get the straight facts with the news and just to be able to say, okay, I want to just hear what's going on and try to get some perspective on this in a way that's healthy, in a way that's balanced. As someone who is a believer in God and believes the Bible just like you. I want to be able to understand what's happening from that kind of a framework.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: So you kind of already talked about this a little bit, but when it comes to really learning how to process the news and process world events, how do you go about doing that? Like, where's your starting point for really thinking about what's happening in our world? What's happening with the politics, with the elections? Earlier this year, what was happening in Seattle...
DeCruz Pulikottil: Right.
Warren Mainard: ...with CHAZ/CHOP? All those things, you've been able to really provide some commentary on that. What's your kind of approach for thinking about that rightly?
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah, that's a great question. So, for me, one of the things about me is that journalism was a passion of mine early on. And so, in high school, I did journalism and I went into college with the expectation of being in journalism. And then God had other plans and here we are. So, but for me, I always look at it from a perspective of not only what's happening, but who gets to benefit from what's happening, right? And for me, I, based on the historical sources that I've read, I feel like we are in a position in America which is just unique in its history. I think we're facing cultural splits, political splits. That even with the Civil War, I mean, guaranteed Civil War split the country, literally. I think we're facing something that's a split. And I don't know that it will end in a war, but I just feel like we're in such divided places. So for me, when I watch the news, when I look at everything, I'm looking at the motivation behind what people are doing. What I've found consistently is that people are not consistent. And that's what I see often is that.
Warren Mainard: Consistently inconsistent.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Exactly. And so yeah, so for me, and I said this on the show a few weeks ago, on a certain opinion, I said, I wasn't against it because Republicans were against it. I mean, to be very honest with you, I'm a conservative. I've been a conservative most of my life. I'm maybe more libertarian and I shift in a lot of my views. I'm not necessarily depending on... the more information I have about something, something might shift. So I'm very open to that. But, I always say this just be... when I was against something, it wasn't because of who was doing it, I was against it because it was wrong. And so, early on, and if you don't mind, I'll be a little political. So in the beginning of president Donald Trump's term, we had people super angry. We had people rioting, which actually happened. The inauguration in January of 2017 was disrupted, which not a lot of people covered. And then of course, we had the Russia collusion theory that was being widespread. During that time, what I did, I literally went to liberal journalists who were, I completely disagree on so many things, but they were accurately saying that there's nothing here. This is not a true story. I mean, there are people that acted very shady inside the Trump administration that we can easily say that, but there's no Russia collusion. And so, post-election, my attitude was: look, I was against the conspiracy theories not because it was done by Democrats, I was against it because it's wrong based on having no evidence. And so for me, I approached anything with like, what is the evidence for it? And if you can... and the minute people start shouting or use ad hominen attacks, like attack somebody based on anything other than evidence, I start to suspect that they don't really have any real evidence behind it. And so, I think we are in an age of disinformation, and it's just constant. I mean, you and I can be watching an event live and literally as it's happening live, people will go: well, that's not actually what's happening. I mean, so reality has been subverted. So we don't know what reality is anymore. And so we have to... I look at it from the point of as a believer, as a Christian, I have to be on the side of truth. Even if it makes my side look bad. Like, I have to look at it and go: I look like an idiot now, but I was wrong.
Warren Mainard: Yeah.
DeCruz Pulikottil:And if you've heard my show, you've heard me apologize multiple times for saying something and being wrong about it in the later on.
Warren Mainard: Absolutely. In fact, I was gonna bring that up, that just on a show that you did recently, you started it off by saying to your co-host or your guest host who comes from a different place politically, and you said, I need to tell you I was wrong.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Right.
Warren Mainard: And that's just such an incredible example for so many people. I think because it's just so against the way that... where so many people try to engage with this, where they just keep digging a deeper hole, digging in their heels even more. And all that does is what? It just creates a bigger divide.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren: So I think there's kind of that idea of like, internally how do we process what's happening in our world? And as I shared earlier, seeing it through the lens of truth. Well, you said truth, seeing it through the lens of truth, and ultimately seeing it from the perspective of what we would call a biblical worldview.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Right. Yeah.
Warren Mainard: Realizing that we're living in a broken society. There is no savior out there running for president, running for office. They're all broken and they're all going to fall short in a number of different ways. So there's that internal component of it, but then there's also kind of the social external...
DeCruz Pulikottil: Right.
Warren Mainard: ...component of it. And I think there's a, this is kind of a great example of what we learned about in seventh grade health class. The flight or fight type of approach.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: The way that we engage with politics and cultural happenings in our world today where there's those that say, I'm out. I can't tell you how many people I've seen check off of social media in the last week.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: And I get it. No, no criticism whatsoever, but I'm out. I don't want to talk about it whatsoever. I don't wanna deal with it. I just wanna leave it alone. And then there are those that man, they're gonna fight about everything. And they're gonna... I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've had people troll me on the most innocuous statements that I've made over the last year. People that I haven't talked to in years that decide that this is their one time that they're going to hop on my Facebook feed and tell me everything that I'm wrong for saying or even not saying.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: But how do you navigate that? How do you navigate, really kind of being able to articulate and form balanced opinions when we know that in many ways all that's going to do is anger everybody?
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: What's your take on that?
DeCruz Pulikottil: And, Warren, I mean, I'll tell you, I am actually very thin skinned. I don't like being attacked. And so I'm always very fearful of what I share publicly because I'm just like, can I see the vitriol that people receive for being public about with their opinions. And I, it genuinely terrifies me because I'm like, I don't need that additional stress or anything in my life. Like, that's not what I'm for. And so I genuinely avoid, I'm actually someone that really avoids conflict and so the podcast for me is one of the safest places because I can just kind of share my views and then I can also kind of work through what I'm thinking. One of the things that, I used to work with the homeless population in Seattle through an organization. And one of the things that I learned from my experience there, in my six years there, was when I see a person: who they are, what they do in that moment is not the sum of who they are. So, when you see somebody with holding a sign on the side of the road, when if you had asked them in seventh grade, "Hey, what do you want to be when you grow up?" They would not have said, "I want to hold a sign by the side of the road." Like, that's not their first instinct, right?
Warren Mainard: Right.
DeCruz Pulikottil: But something happened to them, in their lifetime, where one day they woke up and decided, today's the day that I'm gonna hold up a sign and stand on the side of the road. So something happened to them. And so we have to really engage and look at people not at, not as the 'tweet' that they did or the status message or what they're saying in that moment, but as a whole being.
Warren Mainard: Yeah.
DeCruz Pulikottil: And if, and I have to look at it from the perspective of like, if God were to take my worst moment and judge me based on that worst moment, thank God he doesn't, there's no way I could stand. I couldn't survive. And so I think we have to be beyond generous with the grace that we offer people. And there are times on my podcast, I've been guilty of this, where I'm so quick to mock somebody. I'm so quick to like, just make fun of an opinion. It's fun, it's easy.
Warren Mainard: Sure.
DeCruz Pulikottil: There are people that you can mock very quickly, but, and I believe that you should call out bad character when you see it. But I think that if we were more generous with other people, I think we would have less of the divisions that we see today. And I think you can apply that outside of anywhere, actually.
Warren Mainard: Yeah. It's funny, I know you're a basketball fan, you're a Portland Trailblazers guy. And as you were describing that, I just thought about that term or that idea of posterizing - when someone just dunks on another guy and there's that one picture of just the dunker going down on the dunkee and if you only think about that defensive player...
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: ...in light of that posterized...
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: ...moment, you might think: oh, well that guy's horrible. But there are All Stars that have been posterized. There are NBA Hall of Famers who have been posterized. And so, like you said, you can't look at one moment and say, that defines what a person does. One 'tweet', one insensitive statement, whatever that is, like, we all need grace because we've all fallen.
DeCruz Pulikottil:Yeah.
Warren Mainard: I mean, the Bible says that all have fallen. And so there's that idea, you said of grace, and yet that's... grace seems to be almost the opposite of what we're seeing right now with what is now being called "Cancel Culture."
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: Talk a little bit of... for those that may not understand that, what is "Cancel Culture" and what is the danger of that kind of attitude or approach to people and relationships?
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah. So I mean, "Cancel Culture" is the way a lot of people describe it is essentially it's an online mob/witch hunt of somebody that does something that goes against the social dynamic. So, we had an example actually before the George Floyd riots was in New York City, where this woman started recording a video of an African American man who told her to, that this is not, you're not allowed to bring your dog here. I think that's what was going on. And she called 911, which, foolish mistakes all the way through. And then, she lost her job. She lost her pet. I think several other things that she may have even lost her chance to live in a new home or something like that. And is what she did wrong? Absolutely. And should there be consequences? Yes. But the way it came about is, what really astonished me, was just that there were so many people online willing to just rip this woman to shreds for that moment. And here's the other thing that, so we have a culture where we go after somebody and it's a feeding frenzy. And in fact, I would also say that as Christians, I notice it in Christian circles as well. And I'll give you an example. My friend, well, I met him once, we've stayed in touch. His name is Donnie Griggs, he's a pastor. And he wrote a book about small town churches and how there's a need for small town churches. And very conservative man from everything I know about him. And he posted on Twitter a few weeks ago, he said something like, it makes me ashamed to see the church that I've invested so much into with the Gospel for the last few years be taken over by conspiracy theories. And the deluge of comments and incriminations and people, very well-known figures in the evangelical movement, were ripping on this guy because they thought he was saying that he was ashamed of his congregation, which he wasn't. And maybe he could've been more articulate in how he stated it.
Warren Mainard: Right.
DeCruz Pulikottil: And I looked at the, so on Twitter now, they have this thing called quote tweet, where you take a tweet and then you, you can say something about it.
Warren Mainard: Yeah.
DeCruz Pulikottil: And I looked at the quote tweets and the people that went after this man calling him: liberal, socialist, effeminate, someone called him an effeminate pastor.
Warren Mainard: Right. Did they call him a Nazi too while they were at it?
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah, yeah. And, and just like, left wing liberal.
Warren Mainard: Yeah.
DeCruz Pulikottil: And I was just like, I know Donnie, and this is the opposite. Like, I, you know, and so we just assume, and not we, I mean many people just assume the worst about somebody when they meet them online. And, I don't know. I'm on Twitter too much, and it's a very unhealthy amount. Just last week before the Wednesday thing happened, the Capitol, riot, there was the biggest thing that was going viral was actually this guy, his name was, he's from Seattle. His name, his last name is Roderick, I think it's John Roderick. And he posted this like, long thread about his daughter wanted baked beans, and it seemed like he took the daughter through just the worst, like worst loops to get these baked beans now. He was like, okay, get a can opener. And she said, I don't know how the can opener works. And so in the tweet thread, he, it sounds like he made his daughter like, pull apart the can opener to figure out how it works. And it literally took like five, six hours and he was angry and crying and that's how he described it.
Warren Mainard: Oh my gosh. Yeah.
DeCruz Pulikottil: And then finally they get to the baked beans. Now, of course, everybody reading that thread ripped on this guy. They were like, this is the wrong way to teach your daughter something. This is not what you want to do as a father. This is incorrect. And I agree with them, right?
Warren Mainard: Yeah.
DeCruz Pulikottil: And then later on, he posted an apology 'cause he doubled down. He said, I didn't do anything wrong, blah, blah, blah. You guys don't know me. Then he posted an apology and he said, like, look there's a lot of stuff that I didn't put in the tweet. My daughter and I were joking around, we're playing around, we had fun. I didn't insert like my wife laughing, we stopped and we had some other food, like so it wasn't like she went hungry.
Warren Mainard: So there as more perspective than what everybody gleaned from the tweet.
DeCruz Pulikottil: More context, right?
Warren Mainard: Yeah. Yeah.
DeCruz Pulikottil: But the lesson that I learned, and I hope that, and they called him 'Bean Dad,' is what they called him. Like, that was the hashtag 'Bean Dad.' The, I hope the lesson that he learned was, if you look for your affirmation from social media, they will also eat you alive.
Warren Mainard: Yes.
DeCruz Pulikottil: They will also be your downfall. And if you look at the threads and you look at other things that other people post, they are looking for their affirmation and their joy, and everything from social media and the people online. And that in turn will destroy you. That will destroy, that will be the source of your destruction. And so, one of my new things now, and I'm gonna talk about it on my podcast down the road, is just kind of the idea of like, what if we all agreed in 2021 to do something that we don't post about? And I'm talking about a significant project that we don't go public with that we just share it with people in our lives. And we don't have to take a... post a picture, we don't have to do anything, and we just do it because intrinsically it's a good thing for us to do. And we kind of actively shut out the public nature of that project, whatever it is that we do.
Warren Mainard: Right. That's a great word. In fact, in one of the IMPACT men's cohorts that I lead... We've got these different cohorts of 10 men that meet for seven weeks, once a week. And one of the guys in the cohort bas basically said that same thing, that he gave his family, his wife and kids a challenge that each week they were to do one act of kindness. One good deed, give something, serve some way, but they weren't allowed to tell anybody. They weren't allowed to post anything about it. It just had to be totally, unheralded.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: And what that does for your character building is I think huge, but I think probably even maybe more so, is what does it expose inside of you? When you're like, man, I really, really want people to know about what I just did. I just wrote a big check.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: I just spent two hours in a food kitchen. I went outta my way to help somebody fix a flat tire and I really wanna humble brag about it.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Exactly. I mean, Warren, the worst thing is sometimes I'll look at stuff and it's not just like acts of kindness, it's just anything.
Warren Mainard: Yeah.
DeCruz Pulikottil: And I'll be like, oh, man, this will be good to talk about on my podcast. And I'm like, I'm talking to my friends, right. Like this is a conversation with my friend or I could tweet about this later. And it just kind of gets in your head of like, everything you're doing is, how can I perform this for everybody else, right?
Warren Mainard: Right.
DeCruz Pulikottil: And so that's the danger. And I think it's a huge... I deleted my Instagram two years ago and now I'm back on it because of my podcast. Like, they were like, you need to have an Instagram to like share. I hate it. I don't know how to use it very well. Like I feel super old when I mess around with it. It's kind of funny. But, I remember the reason I left Instagram was two, three years ago, I read the story of a pastor who had committed suicide.
Warren Mainard: Yeah.
DeCruz Pulikottil: And you probably remember this story.
Warren Mainard: I do.
DeCruz Pulikottil: But I... he was 30 years old pastoring, right.
Warren Mainard: Yeah.
DeCruz Pulikottil: And I went and looked at his...
Warren Mainard: Successful, good looking.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Beautiful family.
Warren Mainard: Beautiful family.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: Yeah.
DeCruz Pulikottil: And I remember looking at his Instagram, and I'm telling you, I thought to myself, if I was looking at this guy's Instagram, I would've been so jealous of him.
Warren Mainard: Right.
DeCruz Pulikottil: I would've been so jealous because at 30 he was pastor, he was a senior pastor at a large church, beautiful family, like you said, beautiful wife. And his life seemed perfect. And that's when, for me, the lie was exposed at how I had been looking at Instagram and Facebook. I deleted my Facebook now, where I just keep comparing. I can't help it. I compare my life to other people's lives. And I, you know, either you... some people use it to be competitive and to do better. Some, someone like me, just looks at it and goes, oh gosh, these guys are doing too well. I don't wanna look at this person anymore. So, yeah. So I mean, that's, that's kind of the lesson that I've learned as well from social media.
Warren Mainard: Yeah. There's no doubt. And there's a reason why a lot of people have decided: hey, this is not good for me. It's not healthy for me to be on here. And the Bible says, "Guard your heart for from it flows the wellsprings of life." And for many people, social media, it's just one of those things that just attacks the heart all the time. The news, watching Fox News or MSNBC or CNN, if you've got that all day long you're probably getting some arrows to the heart.
DeCruz Pulikottil: I mean, think about this right, Donald Trump is the president of the United States, the most powerful country in the world. He is in every sense the word one of the most powerful people in the world.
Warren Mainard: Yeah.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Why is it that he got he was most angry when he lost his Twitter account? Of all the things.
Warren Mainard: Yeah.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Why is it that the Twitter is the thing that just made him so mad about anything else? If he wants to, he can literally say that he's doing a speech tonight and it would be televised live to the world. Billions watching. But it's really interesting and fascinating to me, and I think it's reflection. It's not just him, it's a lot of us.
Warren Mainard: Right.
DeCruz Pulikottil: That he misses that Twitter account. And I think that's the most interesting thing.
Warren Mainard: Yeah. Yeah. And of course, using him as an example, but we all can be guilty of it.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yep.
Warren Mainard: The danger of being able to put out your unfiltered unreflected thoughts.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: Without any hindrance. That there's a lot of potential damage that can be done with that. Whether that's just me getting done with the Seahawks game on Saturday and tweeting out: fire Russell and fire Pete Carroll. I mean, that's idiotic.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: Like, that doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: But, you know, and in the sports realm, it's not that big of a deal.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Right.
Warren Mainard: But you start putting that same type of unreflecting thoughts out there in things that really do matter, especially as it relates to people and their livelihoods and the people that you care about, a relationship could be severed or damaged because of something like that. So it's just, yeah, there's a lot of unique things to think about. I want to finish with one more question for you. So a lot of the men that are part of IMPACT Players: they're husbands, they're fathers, they're leaders in their community. And one of the things that's really been a heavy burden for me, is the number of men, whether it's younger or older, but the number of men that I've talked to in the last three to six months who have described a relationship in their life, a lot of times, family, a lot of times parents or children who, because of their differing worldviews on some of these divisive issues, the relationship has essentially, basically been ghosted. Or basically like put to an end where they're like, one person has said to them, "I can't be around you. You're toxic. You're not healthy for me." And, and I just wonder, as you know, we navigate coming out of the year that was 2020 coming into 2021, I think everybody wants to see things improve.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Right.
Warren Mainard: Everybody wants to see things get better, but where do we start when it comes to trying to rehabilitate ourselves and our relationships over all the things that have caused divide? And I know that's a heavy question. You may not have an answer for it.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: But, what are your thoughts about that?
DeCruz Pulikottil: I think, well, that's a very good question. I can only speak for myself and what I've experienced in my own life. You mentioned the way we tweet, the way we say things. I'll tell you something about how I tweet. I became friends with a certain Seahawks player and after I became friends with him, I'm very careful about how I tweet about the Seahawks.
Warren Mainard: Yes.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Because I know that he's looking at my feed and I care about his feelings. I care about his life, his livelihood, and what, and for me, in instantly the realization is: what I say impacts him. I'm very critical of the mainstream media, very critical. And in the past, I've said things that are like really, criticizing the media, attacking them for lying, et cetera. And then I did... I have a member of a reporter for the Washington Post who follows me now and we've started talking to each other. And now I'm like, oh, how does she think about what I say?
Warren Mainard: Yeah.
DeCruz Pulikottil: And I've adjusted that and I think it takes a lot of humility. On our side to just go, what is necessary for me to say and what isn't? There you, if you have, I know there are family members, there are people that have lost family members to like conspiracy, like Q Anon, conspiracy theories. They're just gone deep into it and it's scary for their relatives to see what's going on. And I don't know that, if we could easily persuade everybody, then we wouldn't have differences of opinions. We're not gonna have everybody just angry at each other. So I think humility is the first step, like humility about your own opinions, humility about where you stand, and then looking at, like I said before, who is this person? Is this person the statement that he's making to me right now? Or do I know this person holistically and I know that to be different. I think having that perspective in mind will help us moving forward.
Warren Mainard: Yeah.
DeCruz Pulikottil: And then I keep advocating for disconnecting and being, not being connected with as many people as we want to be. I think we were okay when we weren't connected to 2,000 people on Facebook. I think that we were fine. We don't need to be connected with that many people. So I encourage people to step back away from the social media connectedness and and focus on the people around you as much as possible.
Warren Mainard: Yeah. That's a good word. I think, like you said, that humility is huge. Just to be able to admit when you're wrong, to be able to admit that you don't know everything, and that you could have a perspective that's been somehow influenced in an unhealthy way. And the thing that I've said to my wife, many times over the last several months has been, we've got to give ourselves a lot of grace.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: And we've gotta give one another a lot of grace.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: And I think you touched on that earlier, just believing the best about everybody and being willing to forgive, being willing to say: hey, we don't see eye to eye on that, but I still love you and care about you. And I love, there's a saying that Paul says in Romans where he says, "So much as it depends on, you live peaceably with all men."
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: And I love that idea because basically he's saying two things. He's saying, first of all, you're not going to be at peace with everybody.
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: There are going to be people that just refuse to forgive you, to reconcile with you, to treat you with kindness and respect. That's gonna happen. That's just the world that we live in. But so much as it depends on me. I want to make sure that the people around me, even the ones that have hurt me or I have hurt unintentionally, that they know that the door is always open. That my arms are always open to welcome that them back in. I think that's a great goal for us. And, man, this has been so good. I'd love for you, just give us, kind of give us a minute to know how we can follow you?
DeCruz Pulikottil: Yeah.
Warren Mainard: How we can listen to the podcast? What we can do to support you in the work that you're doing?
DeCruz Pulikottil: No, I appreciate that. Thank you again for having me. It's been fun. And, I know that, at some point down the road, I want you on my podcast so we can chat as well. Cause you've been listening to us for a while and you've been engaging. So for me, you can go to bigbrownarmy.com to look at our website, but honestly, you can just type in "Big Brown Army," three words on whatever podcast app that you use and you can subscribe to us. And, you can follow me on Twitter, @BigBrownArmy or on Instagram. And to support me, and support what we're doing. I think honestly, just, I love engagement; talk to us, tell us what we're doing wrong. I love the feedback. I want to, you know, if I'm wrong on something, I want to hear about it. I don't mind being corrected and adjusting where I stand on something. So more than happy to... and people email me and text me from all over the place. And it's fun to see the comments come in. So that's all I would say.
Warren Mainard: That's great. Well, and, and what's your Twitter handle again?
DeCruz Pulikottil: It's just @BigBrownArmy.
Warren Mainard: @ Okay, @BigBrownArmy. Fantastic. Yeah. Well, DeCruz, this has been great. And I just appreciate you. I appreciate your friendship and every time I listen to your podcast, I just, I get something out of it.
DeCruz Pulikottil: I appreciate that.
Warren Mainard: I feel like I'm a better person, a more balanced person because of it. And to be...
DeCruz Pulikottil: Even Star Wars one? even the Star Wars?
Warren Mainard: Yes, especially the Star Wars one. I love the Portland Trailblazers episodes that you've done. You definitely helped me look smarter at parties, so that's really what it comes down to. So, no, it's been great. Thank you so much for joining us. And with that, we're gonna sign off - signing off from my daughter's bedroom. My name is Warren Mainard.
