The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Attenuating Puritan by Robert McGuiness

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

The Attenuating Puritan by Robert McGuiness Amazon.com Robertmcguinessbooks.com Embark on a contemplative journey with our altruistic hero, a reflection of purity in words and deeds, yet occasionally marked by ancestral toxins. With unwavering conviction, he dances under the world's weight, marching into the unknown, his steps marked by hope and staunch faith. Bound by a noble quest to restore the splendor of Eden, his every gesture is a sacrifice, a stride towards the pristine and divine. Amidst adversities, he stands a fortified pilgrim, mastering the shackles of mind and body, emerging as a triumphant victor, a mirror to us all daring to confront our reflections. He is the champion of tainted sacraments, a crusader against the clutches of heavy metal and forever chemicals, hinting that our destinies might be cradled in such hands. As we tread the path of love eternal, each step taken is righteous, a gentle move towards the boundless cosmos that binds us in love. In The Attenuating Puritan, every breath taken is a whisper of attenuation, every quenched thirst a sigh of grace, and every bounty received a step closer to the celestial, encapsulating a tale of hope, resilience, and the ceaseless quest for the divine amidst the terrestrial. Personal Life Robert McGuiness was born on February 8, 1954 in Bayshore, New York. He was the second oldest of five born to Margaret Jean Reidy McGuiness and Robert Eugene McGuiness. He attended school in Smithtown, New York and graduated from Smithtown High School in 1972. Satisfying a natural wonderlust he ended up in Arizona and after working through a winter backpacked in Arizona and then through the Sierra Nevada logging over a thousand mountainous miles. At the end of 1976 he returned to the west coast and has made Northern California home ever since. Living remotely and off the grid, he gained great satisfaction in being a part of “The Back To The Land” movement. He has two children, Jewel and Bob. Unfortunately their mother, Sandra was killed in an accident with a log truck in 1987. Bob was in the vehicle and before he was 21 months old was severely injured. Comatose with blood in the ventricles he was flown to San Francisco. He was hospitalized for several months and before he could sit we returned to the north coast. We moved into town and started a rigorous routine of therapy and rehabilitation. He developed seizures and had surgeries and braces throughout his formative years. Richard, his brother lived with them during those difficult times and was a tireless advocate for Bob. He developed lung cancer and remained in character until his passing in 2007. Thirty seven years later Bob still lives at home, with Marbles and his Dad, and though there are physical residuals he manages quite well. Jewel has blessed us with three grandchildren, and she and her family continue to make the north coast home.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hey, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, ladies and gentlemen. There are ladies and gentlemen. That makes it official. Welcome to the show.

We certainly appreciate having you guys. As always, the Chris Voss Show is the podcast you should refer to your family and friends and neighbors and relatives. Just go door knocking on a Saturday morning like the Seventh Day Adventists or the Mormons do and pass the word around. Say, have you heard of our Lord and Savior, the Chris Voss Show podcast? Now I'm going to get, now I'm getting emails. Anyway guys, you know the drill. Go to goodreads.com for it says Chris Voss. we have to beg on the show a little bit you know what i mean

a little bit of groveling goodreads.com forces chris voss linkedin.com forces chris voss chris voss one on the tiktok and all those crazy places out there on the internet there's one or two of them opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Voss Show. Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. Today's featured author comes to us from bookstolifemarketing.co.uk. With expert publishing to strategic marketing, they help authors reach their audience and maximize their book success. Anyway, we have an exciting young man on the show. He's a multi-book author. He's going to be

talking about some of his amazing books in his writing and everything else. He's got two more books coming out after this, so it's pretty exciting. He's got a book we're going to be talking about today called The Attenuating Puritan. It came out March 1st, 2024. Robert McGinnis joins us on the show. Welcome to the show, Robert. How are you? Welcome. Pleased to be here. Pleased to have you. Honored to have you as well, sir. Anybody who's writing multiple books has got more going on than me. GiveUs.com, where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? I'm at RobertMcGinnisBooks.com. You can find me there. You can also Google search my books,

and they're available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble and all the common booksellers. www.smithtownbusbooks.com. You can find me there. You can also Google search my books, and they're available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble and all the common booksellers. Whatever fine books are sold. So give us a little bit of background and bio on you, if you would. Tell us a synopsis of kind of your history. I was born in New York, and I stayed there through high school. I graduated from Smithtown High School. After that, I moved out to the West Coast and I was back to the lander and lived off the grid for a while. Unfortunately, there was an accident that took my partner and injured my infant son, forced me to move into town and to be a caregiver for the last 35 plus years now. That's mostly what I've been up to in the majority of my adult life.

When did you start writing? When did you feel you were a writer? You had that knack. I had always written little things down, but somewhere I had heard is that in Ireland, you couldn't really be a certified poet until you'd lived a full lifetime because you would need to know the symbolism of the trees and the rocks and the animals and the heavens and stuff. By the time I got to my age, I felt like I'd lived a whole lifetime already. And I always felt that I had a Zen sort of life where I didn't want to give or receive information because it wasn't accepting things the way they were. But as I got older, I realized

that there's an important need to teach and there's a need to reach out and to direct people. So after a full lifetime of observation, I thought now is the time I need to speak up and to say something. Definitely something of value and hopefully something that directs us in the right direction definitely we need we need more of that you know the great thing about stories and lessons whether fiction or non-fiction they're lessons that teach us about life and we learn about life through them and we learn how people survive to cathartic moments we learn we're not alone so let's talk about your new book your your latest book there, The Attenuating Puritan.

Give us an overview of what's inside this novel. You know, there's so many threads in there that it's going to be hard to encapsulate them all. But I'll give you the best I can. I really started this book out with a guy, a man that I believe was autistic, you know, and we used to have one in 100,000 births that were on the spectrum. When I most recently read, it was down to one in every 36 live births is they're on the spectrum. And I wanted to point that out how the environment is connected to behavior. and it's connected to spirituality. So I really wanted, I first had this vision that I was going to have the 99 percenters round up the 1% and banish them to the island of trash and inject them with the genes where they could digest the plastic and force them to eat it. And I thought, that's a great story.

But at the same time, here we are again, placing blame elsewhere and not willing to do the work. So when I recreated it, I said, I need a guy that can take all the absurdity from the world, the absolute insanity. And I thought of instances where you could start out crying until you were done crying and you'd start laughing and how absurd it is. And then I thought you could take the same thing and start out laughing until you realize what you're laughing about and then start crying. And I thought that these two things are exactly what absurdity is. And it seems like we're living in this absurd world. You know, so I have this young man that I want to say is autistic.

He was an altar boy. And he got it in his mind somehow that he was going to clean up the Garden of Eden. And he wasn't going to ask for help. And he was just going to take it on himself to clean the entire Garden of Eden. Oh, really? Including that discarded apple and that snake that's running around there? No, far past that. We're getting into, you know, he's wearing this robe of repentance, and when he has a sinful thought, it starts pixelating, you know? And on the back of it, there's the upside-down face of jesus like the shrouded turin

and that i call the bloody anal stigmata that he got from attenuating so much emulsifiers he developed colon cancer oh wow and he bleeds from his back but he's always bleeding the face of jesus and and people are questioning on that anyway he starts out heading out west and he's by the Love Canal and he's foraging and he's breaking out in sores because everything's toxic that he's at. Yeah. And he's praying for a sign. So he's looking at the water running off the road into the drainage ditch and he sees a rainbow and all of a sudden it dawns on him. He's supposed to go to Flint, Michigan. That's where the water is really bad.

And he's going to go over there and he's going to attenuate as much of the tainted water as he can. And he hitchhikes over there and he's realizing, I can't drink all the water, so I'm just going to save the Lord's people. So he starts breaking into churches with a McDonald's straw and drinking the water out of the stoops and out of the baptismal baths. And he's attenuating all these heavy metals that are in Flint. And he sleeps out under the power lines and it's buzzing and zapping them. And he realizes that there's glyphosate in the communion hosts that are made out of wheat. And then he starts thinking of the absurdity of how much glyphosate's in the world and how ridiculous it is that he would try to attenuate it. But all of a sudden, he's looking into how to attenuate glyphosate, and he realizes that

infrared saunas is the way to go, and sauerkraut juice is the way to go. So he orders a couple of large cases of unconsecrated communion hosts from Amazon, and he has them shipped to an Airbnb that has an infrared sauna in them. And these cases each have 48,000 communion hosts in them in littler boxes. And he books the room, and he goes there, and they don't hear from him for four days. They finally knock on his door and he doesn't answer. So they let themselves in and he's naked in the infrared sauna, plastered communion hosts all over him and empty bottles of sauerkraut juice everywhere. And he's fast asleep in the sauna. And that's just a sampling of what this guy's going through to try to clean up the Garden of Eden.

He ends up having liver failure. He's in homeless camps trying to attenuate alcohol and drugs and those sorts of things. Then they end up putting a camera on him and a microphone, and someone sets up a website. And if they can bait him into doing something stupid, they would give him cash incentives. So he's the only one that doesn't know he's on camera, and he's wandering around in his robe, and people are baiting him left and right, trying to get him to do ridiculous stuff. He ends up, they create a flash mob at one point, and he's overwhelmed. After that, he gives a speech, which I call the Sermon on the Heap, because he's in a landfill standing on a pile of trash. And all of a sudden, they change from

leper.com, which is where they were baiting him to do bad stuff, to puritan.com, where he was looking for inspiration. And the crowd marveled that he was, you know, they were treating him like he was God. Anyway, he ends up going to Colorado for a while. And he starts going from one Superfund site to another. And he's kicking up radioactive dust. He's going to old mine sites. He's at Leadville. He's at all these places.

And he's thinking that if this is how we made America great, maybe we don't need to make America great again. You know, this is, you know, especially in Leadville, where he can't believe that there's a whole town inside a Super Fun site. And he goes to the restaurant. The waitress is good looking. She has no blemishes. She's alert. She's clear eyed. she's alert she's clear-eyed she looks like she's athletic and he's like what's the matter with these people don't they know they're in a super fun site they're meeting the bus where the kids are coming off and he's just boggled that nobody is alarmed they're all living their normal life and he's panicking he ends up sleeping that night out of town and he starts thinking of the neurology of

our country and how when you have a demyelinating disease, it affects your thinking, it affects your movements and your behavior, and one part of your body might not connect to the other part, you know, so it's all disjointed and he's thinking of that in politics when one part of the government isn't talking to the other part and how it's demyelinating you know and how it gets concentric you know for the different parts of it that should be working in harmony and in unison it becomes selfish and and and not working as a whole and when that happens is then there's the floundering and the scrambling around, but you become focused on yourself and not about the everybody, you know. So here's a problem with just thinking of the basic neurologic things that happen and how we could have this

government running that is neurologically deficit. The other thing is that I wanted to point out is when we have the environment that's affecting behavior, like I said, one in 36 live births is now on the autistic spectrum. Another thing that breaks down is our spirituality. And that's an important thing. And I said is when the pilgrims landed in Massachusetts, the only thing we really conquered through them in their search for religious freedom was we conquered spirituality.

And now as we used fluoride and aluminum and calcified the pineal gland, it's almost impossible for most Americans to have any kind of real spiritual experience. And we hear about the megachurches, we hear about people doing psychedelic drugs and mushrooms and all those things, but none of those are really spiritual, you know? And we use the hen, what I call, is where you have to be keeping each other in line to have a sort of spiritual experience. And it's very rare that someone can go up the mountain and talk directly to God. You know, and now you have to talk about God with other people, but you can't talk to God. And having, back in Israel in the day, they made practicing medicine illegal

because the king thought if God is talking to an individual, if we have a doctor that can get between God and that man, then the man doesn't have to take responsibility and he doesn't have to listen to the message that God's sending him. So it's real important that each of us have our own conversation with God. And the other part of that is we've put man on this pedestal, and we've disregarded most of the lower life forms. And, you know, and it's okay to wash the dishes and to use bug spray and to rat poison and everything else. But if we held every cell that contained the DNA in it, that gave us the gift of life. And I wrote that in another story where I was really wondering at what point in our evolution, if we all came from a single

cell, did spirituality actually enter the program? We don't have to be cognizant of it to have the ability to be thankful of that world. So when the single cell first was gifted light, was it thankful for it? And did it have spirituality at that moment? Or was spirituality not even part of it until we walked on two legs and left the primate status and became the intelligent modern man? And I really question that because, to me, every bit of DNA is sacred, even in the simplest of life forms. And the Puritan says over and over again is that respect all life, even the simplest of life forms.

And the effort is not to kill. The effort is to live and to let live. And, you know,'t keep saying things of that nature in the book you know it's is to hold every single cell as something that is sacred so what what made you write this book what was the what was the proponent behind it it seems like there's a lot of lessons about the environment different things there's a lot of things is the environment is one is because it's and and you know know, when I'm talking about attenuating, I'm talking about attenuating lies, talking about attenuating greed, I'm talking about

attenuating power, but I'm also talking about attenuating plastics and carcinogens and drugs and to clean the garden of Eden. One of the things that really caught my mind was reading Alexander Fraser Tytler. And he was in the 1700s. And one of the things that really dawned on me was the cycles that democracies go through, you know, and people will start out in bondage under an autocrat. And then what they first get is faith. And after they get faith, they get courage. And after they have courage, they get independent and they gain their liberty. And after they gain their liberty, they get greedy.

And after they get greedy, they get lazy. And after they're lazy, they get greedy they they get lazy and after they're lazy they get apathy and then they're back into servitude and back into bondage you know and i thought is that is if i created a character that was promoting faith that maybe we could make the progress happen a little bit faster and we could get out of the oncoming autocrat bondage that it seems like we're entering into now. So I really thought it's real important. The other thing is that I made it just a single person, but one of the main things that I was trying to promote was sacrifice. And it's something that we just don't hear much about anymore. And I really thought it was important for this guy to have enough faith where he'd be

willing to sacrifice his health and even to make the Garden of Eden pure. And through his faith, he could sacrifice himself and then get whole again. And several times, at one point, he needs a new liver, you know, and he ends up fighting with the doctors because he won't stop attenuating and he can't get clean enough to get a new liver. But when he leaves, all of a sudden, he doesn't need a liver anymore. You know, he has fertility issues. And at one point, he's not going to have any kids. And then later in the book, his young girlfriend's pregnant. So again, his faith and, you know, another thing that I always say, it's not what you do that guarantees a long life. It's what you don't do. And I think that not only the sacrifice, but learning patience and to fold your hands and not being reactive to everything is a very strong message and a very important message.

Do we want to get a plug in for your other book, Drop Calls, a collection of short stories? Okay, I'd love to do that as well. And some of those stories are very dear to my heart. The first one is Five G's over Walden Pond. And it's about a man who wants to go live a life more simply. And he goes up to Walden Pond and he makes a homeless camp. He's not even supposed to be there, so he's breaking the law. And he lays down at night and he sees satellites go by, planes going by.

He can hear the traffic on the highway and he's just wondering how he can live a life more simply. He doesn't take a cell phone with him, but it seems like cell phones are interrupting him in his daily life. And not just because of the noise. It ends up another fiction story, but all the wildlife starts dying and the plants start drying up. All the fish jump out of a pond. And he finds out after working hard at it that the water doesn't have any biologic function anymore. And all the hydrogens are attached at different lengths and at different angles, and there's no homogenous sample of water, and it has the ability to create hydroside where one sample of that dark water can rend all the surrounding water to have no biologic function. So anyway, that's one

of the stories. The second story might hit close to home. It's called The Dreamcatchers of Lago Amar. And bear with me here for a minute. A young man goes to Wisconsin, and he ends up shooting a couple of people. And, you know, I had read a lot of the Tearsmen of New York, and Brandt, the story of Brandt. And I don't know, you know, I got those books, ones written in 1838. So they're old books, people that had actually been in the Revolutionary War. The Frontiersman of New York was a little bit later, came out in about 1880. But it talks about King George and how during the Revolution, they were taking scalps of people and walking them up to Canada and then getting them back to the king. And they'd pay $8 for a scalp, unless it was a military man, they'd them up to Canada and then getting them back to the king. And they'd pay $8 for a scalp unless it was a military man.

They'd pay up to $20 for an officer. One parcel that was intercepted had about 1,600 scalps in it. Wow. Twenty-nine of them were infants. And this is one that was intercepted. Brandt and his fellow Indians claimed that they never fought women or children, and they believed that it was British soldiers that were scalping the women and the children. But still, at eight bucks apiece, you know, that was a substantial amount of money. And, of course, that's what the revolutionaries were doing. So anyway, in my story, it's a young man goes to Wisconsin, kills a couple people,

and the powers that be are so proud of how he got rid of the revolutionaries. And then I'm quoting Mao saying that every revolution is a just war. Every counter revolution is an unjust war. And that is because the natural cycle of things, after there's a power that's in place for a while, there has to be a reaction to it, and that's why the revolution is part of that natural process. The counter-revolution is not part of a natural process. So the young man is invited down to the resort, and he's like, I can't go empty-handed.

I have to bring something of substantial value down here. I'll be rubbing elbows with the hobnobs. And I need to really put my best foot forward. So he scalps the two people that he kills. And he hangs their scalps on willow hoops. Paints a circle around the circumference because they died at night. Dots because they died by gunfire. And he put lines across them because they died defending the streets. Whether that's the real story or not, that's not up to us.

You know, this is a fiction story. Anyway, the czar is impressed with him, and he takes one scalp and hangs it in the east window with the hair facing in, and he takes the other one and the hair is facing out and he puts it in the west window and the one in the east with the hair facing him starts oscillating and starts transmitting the truth of the universe at laser speed so much information that the czar has seizures and falls away from his desk and he goes back in his in the room and he can't look at that scalp anymore so he's like looking at the other one and this one's facing the other way and it's one man telling his life story at talking speed no drama you know and and it's it's it's comfortable and in this the czar starts having empathy for the people that he wanted to get rid of a moment ago.

And all of a sudden, he's growing this empathy. And I really wanted to point out that as like King George, you have an egotist. And the egotist is afferent. All the signaling goes to him. And he's terrestrial because he's of material and he's of the earth and he's transitory because the universe doesn't live like that when he averts his attention to the other one all of a sudden he's not an egotist he's altruistic you know he's not a ferent he's efferent and he's spreading light and love and he's spreading light and love. And he's not terrestrial,

but he's celestial. And in that love, he's eternal. And that to me is like the main turning point of the story. Granted, it goes on and there's other things in it, but that is really the nail that I wanted to hit home in that story. Lots of good stuff. What do you love about writing? What is it that motivates you? And I think you mentioned you have two or three books you're working on right now? Yeah, one of them is the sequel to The Attenuating Puritan. And at the end of the first story is him and his young wife,

they go to a genetics lab, and people are blowing up chemical plants and the world's getting crazy but they put genes and they work six months to get the enrons and the operons all going and they float out to the islands of trash to eat it and that's how he continues cleaning up the garden of eden like i told you before is we were going to banish the wealthy out there, but I said it's better if one guy takes this on himself, you know. So in the second one is she has a child at first, but it has so many medical problems because they've been eating plastic, and her faith is in the Puritan and not as much as his is in God. And we don't know if that's the reason or not,

but the Puritan has undivided faith in God, and her faith is undivided in him, you know? But at any rate, she ends up having placental abruption and via cortis, where the heart grows outside of the chest cavity. And then it doesn't live but a couple of weeks and then she ends up having a postpartum psychosis and she gets really really out there with it um they have a second child and then they have problems with that and i'm not even going to get into that because that's for the readers for the next story we want to but i really wanted to point out that is that it might not be a good idea to put genes in you to digest plastic. And even if you did that, a lot of the plastics wouldn't be digestible to the genes that we have.

Recently, they found more than 3,600 types of plastics in the human body. Wow. And they're finding it going through the blood-brain barrier in the brain. And that's alarming, you know. And again, I've lived a lifetime, or so I say, but it's something that we can't leave this to our children and to our grandchildren, to our great-grandchildren, because there's no future and there's no sustainability in it, you know. And that's probably the biggest motivating factor in me

writing stories now like we said is i lived 70 years watching us pollute and make the planet worse and worse always thinking that somebody else is going to do it or it'll clean itself up over time and in my life i've watched it go from bad to worse to worse to not even sustainable or survivable. You know, over at Rocky Flats, we're talking about a radiation fire that happened in the 50s. And it sprayed this cloud of radiation across and it has a half-life of 24 000 years and we can't go there now but they made it a wildlife refuge so you can go out there and look at some of the big game but i'm thinking nobody ever did a gleason scale study of those large games to find out how much of their dna's been altered and how carcinogenic they are it looks looks beautiful. It's green. It's placid, you know.

But when you really know what it is, it doesn't sustain life. It doesn't work, you know. And it's nice to just look the other way and forget about it, drive by real quick and see the elk or something, you know. But that's not the world we really want to give to our children. Yeah, we want to give a healthy world. So as we go out, give people your final pitch out to order of your book, where they can go to a website, maybe stay tuned for future books, etc., etc.

Okay, I can't say when the next ones will be out, but I'm working on them. I would say is that you can buy either of those books at Amazon.com. My publisher, Austin McCauley, they're available there at Barnes & Noble. And you could go to RobertMcInnisBooks.com. My publisher, Austin McCauley, they're available there at Barnes & Noble. And you could go to robertmcginnisbooks.com. And there'll be not only this interview, but there's several other interviews that I've done now that are available. And I hope you enjoy the read. And I hope it makes you want to, you know, like I said, don't react to everything, but to things that are important, the things that are going to protect life. We need to get together on and take some of this on our shoulders. Like I said, don't react to everything, but to things that are important, the things that are going to protect life,

we need to get together and take some of this on our shoulders. Well, thank you very much, Robert, for coming on the show, and thank you for sharing your wonderful writing and novels, etc., etc. Thank you, Chris, for having me. Totally a pleasure. Thank you. Folks, order of the book, wherever fine books are sold, is called The Attenuating Puritan, out March 1st, 2024, by Robert McGinnis. Watch for his future forthcoming books.

As always, folks, thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, linkedin.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, Chris Voss1, on the TikTok, and all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that should have us out.