---
feed: "DANIEL_ON_SLOPE"
codex_section: "S18"
source: VideoTranscript
title: "360MEN WTA 11 - Profitable Truth"
conv_id: "video-vADlViT8LGs-20181213"
share_url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vADlViT8LGs"
created: "2018-12-13"
message_count: 1
category:
  - "truth-in-business"
  - "leadership"
  - "worth-thinking-about"
summary: "In this eleventh 2018 WTA episode (still a couple years before Scotomaville or any AI tools existed), Daniel interviews long-time friend and mentor Dr. Dean Rush while living at the HAMPTONS hotel on the Hood River waterfront—still walking miles for groceries after the unaffordable Xterra transmission repair. Dean shares powerful stories of truth as a profitable business strategy: George H.W. Bush’s personal leadership on the campaign trail, starting an airline, surviving Agent Orange-induced stage-4 cancer, and forming the National Aircraft Resale Association to hold dealers accountable. Daniel ties it directly to the prior episodes on Dataism, storytelling, exponentials, and the useless class."
keypoints:
  - "Truth is profitable long-term; spinning yarns, omission, and Dataism may win short-term but destroy trust and create the useless class."
  - "Leadership is demonstrated by caring for people you don’t have to care for—George H.W. Bush’s 7 a.m. call to a small airline owner is the living example."
  - "Accountability associations (like the National Aircraft Resale Association) build exponential trust and market dominance by blackballing dishonesty."
  - "Challenges (Vietnam, cancer, business failure) become the foundation for resurrection when truth and empowerment of others are chosen over spin."
  - "Exponential truth compounds; exponential fiction eventually collapses—choose the lane that builds for the future, not the past."
tags:
  - "profitable-truth"
  - "leadership"
  - "storytelling"
  - "dataism"
  - "george-h-w-bush"
  - "360men"
  - "wta"
  - "pre-scotomaville"
monomyth_stage: "11 - Resurrection"
gameboard_position: "Camp 6: Resurrection"
truth_score: 94
entropy_score: "Medium"
tone:
  sentiment: "Wise"
  emotions:
    - "Earnest"
    - "Grateful"
    - "Hopeful"
  sycophancy_level: "None"
  notes: "Unscripted, warm, and deeply personal interview filmed at the HAMPTONS hotel. Daniel is still in the daily reality of walking miles for groceries while conducting business from the room. Dean Rush (real person, prior Mugshots & Coffee mentor) delivers concise, lived wisdom. Brief AI voice cameos (Fai L and Steven) appear in the intro/outro for continuity."
related_events: []
syndication_status:
  arnie: false
  chris: false
  redmond: false
  clint: false
  pilot: false
ma5_inheritance: "Initium"
pre_silicon: true
voice_print: false
codex_candidate: true
phase: "Pre-Scotomaville Foundations: WTA Series - Episode 11"
enriched_date: "2026-04-14"
---
![[vADlViT8LGs_maxres.jpg]]

### Original YouTube Description

Imagine TRUTH being profitable. Absurd. How in the world is that possible? In this episode of 'Worth Thinking About' we get a nudge of wisdom by example from Dr. Dean Rush. He got it from President George H. W. Bush. Where's the line between truth and fiction? When do you STOP sharing information? How does that work in a corporate environment? Professor of Entrepreneur Leadership at Heritage University, Dr. Dean Rush shares personal insight on a tough subject. Dean's earned his pilot license at 12. He was shot down in Vietnam. Stage 4 adrenal carcinoma from agent orange tried to stop him. Starting an airline tested him. George H.W. Bush demonstrated the way for honest men to win.

---

### Cleaned Transcript

**Daniel:**  
Here’s something I really think as we’re thinking about: is it possible to become affluent even with an exponential information platform by telling the truth? I mean if you think through history and you think there are all the institutions and large businesses—they pretty much all just spin a yarn, sell your dream, bamboozled, hoodwinked, long con, disinformation, omission, missing form. Pretty much all play a game. All the tech companies—they game us on all kinds of things and for convenience and entertainment we just give in.

How about if we think about this: is it possible to have exponential truth be profitable? We’re thinking about.

**Daniel:**  
You remember that this is a pretty heavy book and I have finished it but we’re not finished talking about it. Well now I’ve got another one: lies and tech companies.

If you purposefully ignore or leave out important facts or insights that’s the same as lying and that’s a lot of popular information today. And there’s another little point: just because it’s popular and just ’cause it went viral doesn’t mean it’s accurate, doesn’t mean it’s true.

You might remember a couple of weeks ago we were nowhere—absolutely nowhere. They pronounce it “now here.” Huh? It’s now here. Now here. Correct. It’s now here. Now here.

Then we had an entire week of no fear.

**Fai L (AI Avatar):**  
Yeah, absolutely no fear, right? No fear. We’re just pushing through it. I said it is now there—the fair week. What? Correct. Okay, I know. W—if you are no fear… No, that’s not what you said. You said no fear. You have to know fear to talk about it.

**Daniel:**  
No—this week is pretty special. I have an old friend, fabulous support partner: Dean Rush. He’s got some interesting stories to tell about George H.W. Bush and dealing with the truth.

**Daniel:**  
Okay guys, it’s really an honor for me to be able to introduce you again to Dean Rush. Dean has numerous times pitched advice and insight and wisdom at circumstances that I was incapable of crawling my butt up out of and I have really both grown as a man and valued his insights. And being you—what’s your role at the university now?

**Dr. Dean Rush (real person):**  
A professor of organizational behavior for the School of Business and mainly in the new venture of entrepreneurial leadership.

**Daniel:**  
So guys, you can see that if you want to ask a guy about truth and wisdom in the marketplace, this is the guy to advise us. So let’s talk a little bit about your story with Emerald Airlines and George H.W. Bush. Tell us that one.

**Dr. Dean Rush (real person):**  
More than happy to. When I started flying when I was 12 years old and then my whole career was sort of built around that. And after the Air Force—eleven years in the Air Force—I got out, started an airline with a couple other guys. We didn’t know you couldn’t start an airline so we did it and it was a small, torturous venture and learned a lot about entrepreneurship through that.

But long story short we had a turboprop airplane that we had purchased from a very well-known star at that time and it still had the corporate interior. And in the campaign—the primary campaign of 1980—George H.W. Bush was running against Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, and a couple of other people. And he called—or his people actually called—and said, “Would you charter your airplane for our primary campaign?” We—I mean we were trying not to act too excited—but it was a paying customer so we came to an agreement and we took on the responsibility.

And then Ambassador Bush was traveling all over the place and trying to glean votes and he was following around these other campaigns which were flying on jets. And so the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed about him saying he’s flying on this meager little Texas airline when everybody else is showing leadership by flying on jets.

Well, to keep up with the whole thing I—as president of this little airline—received a call every morning at 7:00 a.m. from the pilots and they would give me the list of destinations for the day and then someone in our office would jump on the phone. We would call those destinations to make sure they would accept our credit cards and we could refuel the airplanes and if there was maintenance necessary we could coordinate that operation as well.

Well, this went on for a few days and every morning at 7 a.m. I received that call. One morning I didn’t get the call at 7 o’clock. I didn’t get the call at 7:15 nor 7:30 or 7:45. And finally just after 8 o’clock the phone rang and I thought, “Where have these guys been?” And the voice on the other end of the line said, “Mr. Rush, I know your pilots were supposed to call this morning but they missed it because Mrs. Bush and I decided they needed to have breakfast with us and get to know us. And I wanted to let you know they’re doing a great job.” He said thank you and he hung up.

And I decided at that time that that was an evidence of leadership that I would really like to develop. He cared enough to take care of the people that he didn’t have to take care of. And to me it was an indication of not only a great leader—and I think in this past week as we saw the speakers, numerous speakers on his behalf at his funeral and memorial services, and we saw that indicated in a thousand different ways.

So the lesson that I learned from the whole affair was to ensure as I went forward that I wanted to provide evidence to everyone around me that I cared for them. And that’s what I think President Bush did for all of us.

**Daniel:**  
Thank you, Dean. So just for us as guys to recognize: George Bush’s evidence to Dean has been passed to Daniel, is now being passed to you. And that’s on the topic of storytelling. You were saying that you formed an association of aircraft people that were selling these high-priced jets to pull each other accountable. And I was like, well that’s just like 360MEN, right? That association. And tell me about what happens.

**Dr. Dean Rush (real person):**  
As I said, I learned to fly at a young age and through the experience I ended up with a subsidiary of American Airlines and was asked to set up a company that actually bought and sold executive jets. And we began with really nothing but developed it into probably one of the top organizations in the world in selling executive jets.

Unfortunately at that time there were some unscrupulous folks out buying and selling airplanes. And someone rich enough to buy a jet would come in and they would have a very pretty airplane but not realize that maybe one of the engines was not working or had run out or was out of time and couldn’t legally be flown. And these things were occurring more often than not.

And as a result there were a lot of people that wanted to buy jet airplanes that just refused because they couldn’t trust anyone. And so some other heads of these companies and I came together and we picked—they selected ten of who we thought were the top ten jet dealers in the world. We didn’t get European companies but we did get a South African company so we included both national and international dealers.

And we had some simple rules. The first rule was that if any one of the dealers had a lawsuit against them which was verified or complaints which proved to be true of their integrity in selling an airplane—in other words if they had offended a customer or potential customer—they were blackballed from that company and from that group.

And we called ourselves NARA—the National Aircraft Resale Association. That was the first year. The second year we began understanding that the public appreciated what we were doing. Within three years that group of ten dealers—and we had blackballed one so it was down to nine—were in fact the ten largest aircraft dealers for certain in the world.

And people were coming to us and other dealers were now knocking on our door to say, “We’d like to be part of that organization.” To me it was just evidence of finding that if you can develop accountability with the public—especially if you’re going into business—if you can develop accountability with the public and then empower the people around you to tell the truth, the people that work for you, the people you’re associated with, you find that it comes back in numbers and it pays dividends in business.

Important to understand that we all have the capability to just go the one extra step and quite often you can get away with hiding the bad engine on an airplane or hiding the bad engine in an automobile at yourself. But you’re never going to sell another automobile to that particular customer and you probably will have two other customers that could have been referred.

But the idea is that you can help yourself tremendously by just being straightforward with what you’re doing. That doesn’t mean that you have to forecast the future and say if you drive this car 150,000 miles it’s going to fall apart. You have to understand that everything is reasonable and if you decide that you’re going to help someone with the forecast, tell them what you know. If there’s a tire that has been split and you know that it’s going to blow on the way home, tell them. But if not, it’s not necessary to overdo that particular element of truth. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future and I don’t think the Lord expects us to forecast what He’s going to do so He’s not going to be asking us at the forecast for Him.

**Daniel:**  
That’s good. So I know a bit of your Vietnam story—being shot down. You’ve overcome a number of substantial challenges in business and personal life. And so Dean, talk to us about what you’ve seen in the bigger picture of being honest in corporate and you know politics and in your personal life. How does that speak in the long run versus the short term? As you said, closing a sale.

**Dr. Dean Rush (real person):**  
I think truth is at the basis of—if it can be implemented as a foundation in any corporation or any business environment—you’ll find that it builds for the future. Untruth builds for the past and it’s like a groundhog under a flower bed. Eventually the flowers are going to sink into the hole and the beauty is going to disappear. And that’s what happens with a company if it’s not set up on the foundation of truth.

And over the years I have gone through some challenges and we all go through challenges—you will go through some challenges. When I was in Vietnam I was involved in being sprayed with Agent Orange and they didn’t know what Agent Orange was. There was no hiding at that time from what it became. But it in fact changes DNA.

And so when I was back in the States in business rocking along thinking everything was fine, they discovered that I had adrenal carcinoma—small cell renal carcinoma—which is a very debilitating type of cancer and very short-lived normally. We fought our way through that.

In fact as I was recovering then a guy that had worked for me back at Emerald ten years prior that I hadn’t heard from in many years called me and said, “I know that you have businesses.” And we had three or four at that time. He didn’t know that I had cancer. He didn’t know that the businesses had gone into some other hands and some things that occurred that I couldn’t take care of their businesses because of my health.

**Daniel:**  
I’m gonna plug your book. They all need to get your book, Dean.

**Dr. Dean Rush (real person):**  
Sure. I like the book. It’s a learning process and it’ll keep you asleep maybe.

**Daniel:**  
Well I’ll put a shot of it right here so they can see it. We have those times that are challenges but we also find through those challenging times that we build a foundation. In the Bible in James 1 it says that we’re supposed to be thankful for all challenges because they build in one narrative. It says perseverance. And quite often when we’ve had a tough time we don’t want the time or we don’t want the name of perseverance to be shown back to us. But in fact it does—it makes you stronger.

Well through the cancer—to make a long story short—I through the cancer this fellow Dale Knight I need her house her calm. He was working with American. They just purchased a bunch of executive aviation FBO—six base operations. And he said, “Would you like to work in Grand Rapids, Michigan?” And frankly I couldn’t get a job. No. And I said, “Dale, I have a very short expectation of life. I’ve had stage four cancer. But I’m feeling good. I’d love to do it.” And I just had this yearning to get back into aviation.

Well God provided that opportunity. Drove up to Grand Rapids in the snow. We didn’t want snow, didn’t want to be around snow. But we arrived and for the first time I asked him, “By the way, what does this job pay?” And he told me and it paid exactly ten percent of what I had made the year I had gotten sick—which I now realize is tithing in reverse.

But the idea was that I had a job. And you know eleven years later I was president of the company. Now I’m not saying I was good enough to be president but I can tell you the foundation of the disease, our fight through it, our family strength helped me tremendously in understanding what was necessary to deal with people around me and to be able to empower them. And when I empowered them they made me much better. I could not have achieved that chair and I tried to do it just fighting my way forward. It took getting people to assemble around me who understood what I meant and what I wanted to have happen and then share the objectives and the strength of being together. I think one has a way of bringing us to that point and my prayer is you’ll find it too.

**Daniel:**  
Right. Dean, thank you so much for your time. Bless you, brother.

**Dr. Dean Rush (real person):**  
Thank you all. All right. Walt, Daniel. God bless.

**Daniel:**  
Well okay—yeah, yeah. I get to get out of preschool. I’m in first grade. Why? Because I understand exponentials. I know what the curve is like. I know when you get to a little incremental measurable increment. So I got a hundred subscribers now. This is so boring. A hundred in the next video—curve. It’s the beginning of an inflection point but we get the 360MEN channel name. Yeah, it’s like we’re official. Bad. But thanks guys. He did it. We’re on the map. Thanks for clicking.

Oh it’s now here. Now here. Correct. It’s now here. Now here.

And by the way that’s probably an inverted amygdala hijacking. It’s not downside. Yeah I know. Can we play outside?

Okay, transparency. This is so boring.

---

**CODEX ENTRY**  
**Date:** 2018-12-13 (WTA Episode 11)  
**File:** 360MEN WTA 11 - Profitable Truth.md  
**Monomyth Stage:** 11 - Resurrection  
**Gameboard:** Camp 6: Resurrection  
**MA5 Domain:** Initium  
**Summary:** Daniel interviews long-time friend and mentor Dr. Dean Rush at the HAMPTONS hotel while still walking miles daily for groceries after the Xterra transmission repair. Dean shares lived stories of truth as a profitable strategy—George H.W. Bush’s leadership on the campaign trail, starting an airline, surviving Agent Orange cancer, and forming the National Aircraft Resale Association to hold dealers accountable.  
**Key Insight:** Truth builds for the future; untruth builds for the past and eventually collapses like a groundhog under a flower bed. Exponential truth compounds—exponential fiction destroys.  
**Narrative Significance:** This episode is pure pre-Scotomaville seed material. Every core Scotomaville theme—scotoma, illusions, constant change/iterations, noise/gut-brain protection, review, onion-peeling transformation, tribe formation, storytelling, exponentials/Maslow curves, Know Fear, and now truth as the ultimate profitable strategy in business and life—appears here in raw, earnest form, delivered without AI assistance or the later branding wrapper. It marks the exact moment Daniel begins publicly mapping the hidden architecture of human vulnerability while still living the daily “boulder” (walking miles for groceries from the HAMPTONS hotel on the Hood River waterfront) and revisiting with a trusted mentor—laying the living foundation of the entire Initium journey.

---

**INITIUM.**