“Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut with Jesan Sorrells and Libby Unger

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Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells,

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and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books

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Podcast, episode number

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201.

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Hmm. From our book today,

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from our collection today, I start

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off with this. The year

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was 2081, and everybody was finally

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equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law.

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They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else.

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Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than

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anybody else. All this equality was due to the

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211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to

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the Constitution. and to the unceasing vigilance of

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agents of the United States Handicapper General.

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Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for

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instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it

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was in that clammy month that the HG men

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took George and Hazel Bergeron’s 14-year-old son Harrison

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away. It was a tragic— it was tragic,

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all right. But George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a

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perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think of about anything

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except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was

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way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was

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required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a

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government transmitter. Every 20 seconds or so, the transmitter would send out

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some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their

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brains. George and Hazel were watching television.

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There were, there were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, which she’d forgotten For the

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moment, what they were about on the

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television screen were ballerinas. A buzzer

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sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic like

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bandits from a burglar alarm.

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And this is how we open our

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201st episode of our

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podcast today. It sets the stage for

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where we are going to be going, not only for the remainder of this year,

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but maybe even for the remainder of this podcast. But we’ll see.

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Certain books and certain authors walk with you through various

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stages of your life. Now, in my life,

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I constantly revisit Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, and even older

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works such as the Bible and the myths of Greece. And I’ve talked about

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that extensively on this show. But authors of the 20th

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century were writing during the height of collective literacy, when the

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Reader’s Digest Condensed Books had annual printings approaching 10

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million copies. At even the

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lowest level possible, what this means is that most people were reading

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authors, great authors in the 20th century across all

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genres. And the genre of science

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fiction was the one that got the least institutional and cultural respect and yet had

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the deepest penetration. There There were authors who,

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however, who sought to raise the profile of science fiction, including

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Isaac Asimov, who we’ve covered on this show, Robert Heinlein,

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Arthur C. Clarke, who we haven’t, and our author

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today. He was once quoted as saying,

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quote, I love this quote from him, no one can simultaneously be a

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respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works,

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close quote. Our author today, I

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guarantee you, didn’t understand how a refrigerator worked even during his

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long lifetime. But he understood the tragedies, the

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absurdities, and the surrealistic circumstances that surround the

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people who open the door of that refrigerator every day to

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assuage their anxieties and their

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concerns. Today on the show, we’re going to

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discuss themes from a collection of short stories of an author who

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whom I have been around the block at least 3 times in my life.

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Once at the age of 15, once again at the age of 30, and

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now as I knock on the door to 50.

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And each time the trip has become less and less amusing

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and more and more dismaying, almost at a

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Stanley Kubrick, a Kubrickian level of dismay.

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Kicking off our month-long journey, our month-long jog through the science fiction

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genre, We will today begin to extract

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lessons from a selection of short stories featured in

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Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt

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Vonnegut Jr.

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Leaders, our innovations might kill us

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all, but only if we fail to understand with

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sincerity in this not the best

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possible world, but the only one we’ve got, how to actually

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lead the people who are beneath, around, and walking

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beside those innovations. And I

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would add, whether they’re in software or in hardware.

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And joining me on the

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201st episode of the Leadership Lessons from the Great

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Book podcast, she did not join us on our 200th episode conversation. She

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couldn’t join us, but that’s okay. She’s joining us on the first, you know,

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iteration going back around the sun yet again. Uh, and

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back from our truncated conversation on Les Misérables, don’t worry, we’ll be,

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we’ll be picking that back up. Victor Hugo in, uh, in episode number 194

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is our advocate for building for the good in public, Libby

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Hunger. How you doing, Libby? Great. I am

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thrilled to be here. I didn’t make it to 200. I did make it to

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the 100. You did. Yeah, you did. That’s okay. Maybe

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to be here for 201. Maybe, maybe we’ll do— maybe

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you’ll do it on every, you know, on the, on the odd ones, like 100,

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300, 500, you know. And then I don’t know what we’re gonna do for the

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1,000th episode. I have no idea. I haven’t planned ahead that far. I’m

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fine for the 300. Yeah, yeah, I’ll book you. I’ll book you for

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300. All right, um, so let’s start off as we

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always do, looking at our author, Livvy. I

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have a few notes here on Kurt Vonnegut. So Kurt

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Vonnegut, I believe, was a prophet of the unraveling American

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culture during the 20th century. He was born in

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1922 and died in 2007. That means

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he saw everything or experienced everything from the

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vagaries of the Great Depression and the height of radio, and then

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all the way through the TV revolution. And knocked right on the door

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of seeing social media, although didn’t live long enough

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to really see that go to scale. I think that would have scared him poopless,

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actually, if he’d lived on that. It would have confirmed every,

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every negative thought he had about human beings during the course of the 20th

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century. He was a child of Silent Generation

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parents who experienced economic and cultural insecurity during

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the post-World War I years due to their German background. and

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their successes and failures in the brewery business in Indianapolis

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before and after Prohibition and the Great Depression. So Prohibition and the

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Great Depression really destroyed, really were the twin poles

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that pushed Vonnegut’s parents into a

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state of— Huh. Ennui and

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depression isn’t really the easiest way to say this. I

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did find out from my research that apparently his father consistently

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just chase, was trying to rechase, getting back to that, that area of

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entrepreneurship and ownership in the remainder of his life. And his mother became,

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according to Vonnegut, um, a bitter woman who tried to sell short

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stories. And eventually when he was in the army, and actually he was recalled from

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the army during World War II to come back home because she committed suicide,

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um, by, uh, by swallowing, uh, some sleeping pills.

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Um, and she was just, I think she was just bitter and angry about the

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loss of social status that occurred during the Great Depression and couldn’t really

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adapt or adjust. to, to the New World.

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Most notoriously, Vonnegut was enlisted in the Army in

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1943 and was captured by the Germans

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and sent to an internment camp in the city of Dresden, where he experienced the

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firebombing of the city on February 13th through the

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15th in 1945. He survived that firebombing

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by taking refuge in a meat locker 3 stories

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underground. That’s kind of amazing. And he said later on

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when he emerged, he was, he was dismayed that they had destroyed this

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beautiful city, and he couldn’t figure out why.

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He didn’t publish his first novel until he was 30 in

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1952, and that was Player Piano.

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He wrote, obviously, I mean, he wrote for all of his life,

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achieving, scratching out minimal success at best,

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just enough to keep going, and very often Not enough to really

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keep him, keep him going. I think he was probably a person who,

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if he had been a writer nowadays, would have been put on SSRIs immediately because

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he was full of anxiety and depression. But that was what drove him

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to write the things that he wrote and created inside of him, the innovations and

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the creativity, and allowed him to see the absurdity and the surrealism around

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him. And it wasn’t until his penultimate novel,

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Slaughterhouse-Five, about the firebombing of Dresden, was

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published, and that was published in 1969, that he became a household name

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for the baby boomer generation and the anti-war protest movement.

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And that was when his popularity began to skyrocket.

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So, you know, he was writing from ’52 to ’69

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consistently and publishing and getting no traction. And then Slaughterhouse-Five

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hit, and then that was it. It was a J-curve up and to the right

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for Vonnegut. So that’s sort of

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the background of him as a writer. We always kind of do that, just kind

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of sort of place him a little bit. Libby, I don’t know how

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much interaction you have with Vonnegut. As I said in my opening, I

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first stumbled upon him when I was 15 years old. I read a bunch of

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his stuff from Cat’s Cradle all the way to Player Piano, and of course

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Slaughterhouse-Five. I thought he was funny and amusing,

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and it was sort of that teenage, like, hahaha, things are absurd. Oh, this adult

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gets it. And then in my

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30s, I ran across him again. I read Slaughterhouse-Five

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again, and I thought, Okay,

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life’s absurd. So what? Like, what are we getting to here?

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I don’t get it. And I still chuckled,

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you know, with the absurdities and the, and the surrealism that he brought to

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Slaughterhouse-Five. And then I sort of dipped back into Player Piano and Cat’s

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Cradle a little bit. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. I love the title of

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that, that book. Oh my God. That was another one.

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Um, but it was less sort of haha teenage impactful for me.

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And now reading Welcome to the Monkey House, and I got a book, um, I

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was just telling you, um, for our benefit of our listeners, I just got a

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book that he wrote with, uh, Susan Campbell, or Susan Campbell compiled a bunch of,

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a bunch of stuff that Vonnegut wrote about writing. So I’m going to read

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that. As a person approaching 50, um,

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I have different thoughts on Vonnegut now, and it’s less funny and

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amusing and more weighty and

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tragic. Um, so Libby,

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go ahead. What have you got? I yield the floor

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to the right representative from Oregon. Go

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ahead. I had no idea where you were gonna go with where, you

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know, with how you interpret it now

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approaching 50. Um, you’re a bit

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tragic.

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Is, you know, is a good interpretation. I actually, uh,

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I was like, we’re on that track is how I read.

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Yes. Yeah, I read— I was reading especially the Harrison Bergeron.

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Um, so my, my

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experience with Kurt Vonnegut is

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I went to a super crunchy high school in

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Portland, Oregon. Very small, only

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45 kids in my graduating class. And as you can

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imagine, all the guys, you

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know, brooded and intellectualized over

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Kurt Vonnegut. And as a result,

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because I was new to Oregon, I was allergic to

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it. But we were

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the school that tried to get Ken Kesey to speak at our

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graduation, and I think we almost did.

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And so for me, it always represented, yeah,

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counterculture. And when I

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saw it on your reading list for this year, I was like, you

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know, I never read that. And I want to— like, what was

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Kurt Vonnegut about? And when I read Harrison Bergeron,

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I’m like, why have I never read Kurt Vonnegut?

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Right? Like, um, and

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then I was thinking, why, uh,

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why don’t people bring him up like they bring up 1984

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or they bring up Atlas Shrugged? And what’s really

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interesting is, you know, the

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counterculture of the anti-war movement was not

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bringing up, you know, Atlas Shrugged or

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1984. Mm-hmm. But they latched on to Ken

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Kesey and Kurt Vonnegut. And

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I still am struggling with what

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the intersection of those 2 movements, because

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I would really be expecting more like

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Ken Kesey and, you know, One Who Flew Over the

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Cuckoo’s Nest. Yep. And, you know, one of the

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takes on that is that institutions know better. Right.

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Than the individual. And Nurse Ratched

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is the queen of, you know, knowing better,

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you know, and protecting one from themself. Yeah.

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And so then you move into Harrison Bergeron, and we’re

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on, you know, the 210th, 12th, 13th,

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14th Amendment, all designed to protect

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ourselves from your day-to-day life.

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And lo and behold, who is the

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enforcer of, you

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know, um, uh, what’s the term that they use for

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keeping you at average intellect? Oh, handicapper.

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The handicapper. The handicapper. Right, right.

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Nurse Ratched, I know better, protect you from yourself.

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The handicapper, Female, I— we know better. You

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can’t— you know, we know better. But it’s dangerous for people to be

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prettier than average, to have more than average

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intellect. And just—

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I was

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like, all that comes to mind is the image of, you know,

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there was an image of equity that was

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hitting the meme world a couple of years ago. With the

248
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size of the fence. And— Oh,

249
00:15:46.622 –> 00:15:49.511
yeah. Right. And everyone—

250
00:15:50.362 –> 00:15:54.117
people were having trouble seeing over the fence. There was

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one who could, one who barely could, the other who couldn’t. And the

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00:15:57.905 –> 00:16:01.484
answer for equity was to dig a hole so that they were all the same

253
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height versus giving someone steps

254
00:16:05.688 –> 00:16:09.259
up to see over the fence. And you’re seeing

255
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this averaging down in school in Oregon,

256
00:16:13.160 –> 00:16:16.933
for instance. If you know, if you’re a

257
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person of color, you no longer have to get grades in high school.

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And this was a law that just recently passed within the last

259
00:16:26.193 –> 00:16:29.980
month. And so you want to talk

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00:16:29.980 –> 00:16:33.472
about— Yeah. You want to talk about

261
00:16:33.826 –> 00:16:37.065
the bigotry of low expectations. Yeah,

262
00:16:37.609 –> 00:16:41.423
we’re, we’re seeing that. Another thing that’s really interesting about Oregon

263
00:16:42.336 –> 00:16:45.798
is it used to be like— people used to mock Oregon as the People’s

264
00:16:45.798 –> 00:16:49.611
Republic of Oregon. Mm-hmm. People haven’t talked about that from

265
00:16:49.659 –> 00:16:52.688
an absurdity perspective in a very long time.

266
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And you’re seeing this kind of averaging down, you know, like California

267
00:16:57.319 –> 00:17:00.828
and their school districts, you know, they’re in the bottom 40,

268
00:17:01.341 –> 00:17:03.731
you know, 45 to 50%. Right.

269
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But this need to not have people feel

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bad about being less than

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is, you know, is pretty pervasive through a lot of

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institutions. And when I was reading The Harrison

273
00:17:19.395 –> 00:17:22.942
Bertrand, I’m like, oh my God, how did we

274
00:17:23.167 –> 00:17:26.922
get here? Why are people talking about

275
00:17:26.922 –> 00:17:30.170
this book? So I think, I think Harrison

276
00:17:30.170 –> 00:17:32.950
Bergeron— so Harrison Bergeron was written and published in

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00:17:32.950 –> 00:17:35.930
1961. Right. And, and

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00:17:35.930 –> 00:17:39.730
Slaughterhouse-Five, as I said, you know, in our opening before, didn’t come about

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00:17:39.730 –> 00:17:43.170
till ’69. So he was probably working on Slaughterhouse-Five. I know that he had

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00:17:43.170 –> 00:17:46.250
had— he’d been trying to figure out a way, Vonnegut had been trying to figure

281
00:17:46.250 –> 00:17:49.150
out a way to like talk about what happened in Dresden and work through his

282
00:17:49.150 –> 00:17:52.540
emotions about it. And so I know that he had,

283
00:17:52.690 –> 00:17:56.370
um, from my research, I know that he had started on Slaughterhouse-Five and he’d abandoned

284
00:17:56.370 –> 00:17:58.070
it and started on it again and abandoned it and started on it again and

285
00:17:58.070 –> 00:18:01.870
abandoned it. And then he finally had to go back to

286
00:18:01.870 –> 00:18:04.821
Dresden. I think he traveled there, if I remember correctly,

287
00:18:05.398 –> 00:18:08.798
or traveled back to Germany and was like looking around in the ’60s and like,

288
00:18:08.814 –> 00:18:12.550
oh, okay, this isn’t— kind of getting some catharsis there, right?

289
00:18:12.711 –> 00:18:16.527
Yeah. But Harris and Bergeron and all the other stories in Welcome to the Monkey

290
00:18:16.543 –> 00:18:19.510
House, I mean, if you look at the publication dates, you’ve got

291
00:18:19.526 –> 00:18:22.926
1961. You’ve got another story in here

292
00:18:23.198 –> 00:18:26.069
that was published in 1951.

293
00:18:27.225 –> 00:18:30.840
You’ve got another one which we’re going to talk about, Report on the Barnhouse Effect,

294
00:18:30.904 –> 00:18:33.684
which is a fascinating little tale,

295
00:18:34.857 –> 00:18:38.664
which was published in 1950, right on the, right on the, the tail

296
00:18:38.777 –> 00:18:42.376
end of, or not the tail end, but the beginning of Sputnik and Stalin setting

297
00:18:42.488 –> 00:18:46.023
off, setting off his own, his own nukes, testing his own nukes.

298
00:18:47.131 –> 00:18:50.104
Or one that we’re not going to talk about, but which I found to be

299
00:18:50.104 –> 00:18:53.734
particularly interesting, Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son. Which was published in

300
00:18:53.734 –> 00:18:57.411
1962. So these stories were

301
00:18:57.411 –> 00:19:00.237
collected together and they represent, I think, a, a,

302
00:19:01.602 –> 00:19:05.391
a pantheon of his thoughts, right? A way of him kind of working

303
00:19:05.455 –> 00:19:08.715
through, like we have blogging today. Well, we had blogging,

304
00:19:09.132 –> 00:19:12.376
right? And I’ve always used, yeah, Substack now,

305
00:19:12.601 –> 00:19:16.342
newsletters, email newsletters, where you’re working out ideas

306
00:19:16.454 –> 00:19:20.291
in public. Right. And, and, you know, obviously you didn’t

307
00:19:20.291 –> 00:19:23.999
have blogging or Substack or email newsletters in the ’50s. So the

308
00:19:23.999 –> 00:19:27.707
easiest way to do this as a writer was just to write your short story,

309
00:19:28.253 –> 00:19:31.832
put it out there, get it published in some sci-fi magazine

310
00:19:31.880 –> 00:19:35.620
somewhere that maybe some kid would see, or maybe some adult

311
00:19:35.620 –> 00:19:38.927
would see, and then move on to the next. And I think Vonnegut, I think

312
00:19:38.927 –> 00:19:42.024
this is how Vonnegut used the short story genre primarily.

313
00:19:42.683 –> 00:19:46.358
Yeah. I think you get to miss Harrison Bergeron

314
00:19:46.936 –> 00:19:49.649
if you’re using it in that way, because

315
00:19:53.103 –> 00:19:56.433
And this is now, this is the power of place and time now. In

316
00:19:56.433 –> 00:19:59.020
1961, historically speaking,

317
00:20:03.016 –> 00:20:06.705
people, the baby boomers were just sort of starting to

318
00:20:06.721 –> 00:20:10.563
hit the counterculture. Right. JFK had just been elected

319
00:20:10.579 –> 00:20:14.331
president. You know, he

320
00:20:14.460 –> 00:20:18.088
hadn’t said not quite just, or he had said, bear any burden,

321
00:20:18.120 –> 00:20:19.789
pay any price to ensure the survival and the success of liberty.

322
00:20:21.758 –> 00:20:24.986
He was the, the, the promise of Camelot to protect

323
00:20:24.986 –> 00:20:28.647
institutions and to bring them up to this heroic level was

324
00:20:28.840 –> 00:20:32.534
still there. And they didn’t know what we know living on the other

325
00:20:32.534 –> 00:20:35.858
side of that. They didn’t know that 60— November, in November of

326
00:20:35.858 –> 00:20:38.444
’63, he was going to be driving an open car in Dallas and that was

327
00:20:38.476 –> 00:20:42.073
going to be the end of it. They didn’t know any of that. They were

328
00:20:42.154 –> 00:20:45.076
on the cusp of, I mean, Sputnik had just happened.

329
00:20:45.928 –> 00:20:49.300
Kennedy had just announced that we were going to go to space or was going

330
00:20:49.300 –> 00:20:53.088
to announce that we were going to go to space. Um, the, uh, the

331
00:20:53.088 –> 00:20:56.761
Bay of Pigs hadn’t happened yet. You know, Cuba hadn’t happened

332
00:20:56.761 –> 00:21:00.483
yet. Um, the weed, mass use of

333
00:21:00.547 –> 00:21:04.317
weed, college protests, the society hadn’t blown apart

334
00:21:04.317 –> 00:21:07.493
quite just yet. Like, I think we think of the ’50s as like this thing

335
00:21:07.509 –> 00:21:10.942
that only happened between like 1949 and 1959.

336
00:21:11.359 –> 00:21:15.145
No. Yeah. The ’50s happened from 1949 all the way up to November

337
00:21:15.145 –> 00:21:18.627
of 1963. And that’s when the ’50s ended. And they ended with that

338
00:21:18.676 –> 00:21:22.111
gunshot in Dallas. Yeah. And the

339
00:21:22.111 –> 00:21:25.878
parallel that I draw to this is, I think our

340
00:21:25.878 –> 00:21:29.354
fourth turning ended with the attempted assassination

341
00:21:29.354 –> 00:21:32.457
attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania in

342
00:21:32.506 –> 00:21:36.077
2024. I think we’re done with the fourth turning. We’re now in this weird transitional

343
00:21:36.077 –> 00:21:39.438
moment to the spring, like in all, but I think it ended there.

344
00:21:40.101 –> 00:21:43.797
Like that slammed the door shut. And I’m saying this, by the way, You

345
00:21:43.797 –> 00:21:47.586
know, we’re recording this 4 days before September

346
00:21:47.586 –> 00:21:50.459
11th, 4 days before the 25th anniversary of September 11th.

347
00:21:51.663 –> 00:21:54.874
You know, so I think

348
00:21:54.874 –> 00:21:58.582
historicity and context matter for Vonnegut. I think

349
00:21:58.582 –> 00:22:02.419
he’s looking around. I think he had an absurdist mind anyway, but I think the

350
00:22:02.419 –> 00:22:05.261
counterculture hooked onto him after ’63

351
00:22:06.529 –> 00:22:10.109
because absurdism and surrealism was the only way the baby boomers

352
00:22:10.606 –> 00:22:14.364
who are going from being 13 years old, 12 years old, 10 years

353
00:22:14.396 –> 00:22:17.880
old in ’61, ’62, ’63. If you were a teenager in the ’60s,

354
00:22:18.635 –> 00:22:22.264
can you imagine like the whiplash you went through? Right. It must have been

355
00:22:22.264 –> 00:22:26.021
insane. And then you went to college and the ’70s haven’t

356
00:22:26.021 –> 00:22:29.794
even happened yet. So get ready for that. Get ready for sequined pants and disco.

357
00:22:30.517 –> 00:22:33.905
You’re gonna love that. Well, but it, um,

358
00:22:36.635 –> 00:22:39.655
I still see him being

359
00:22:40.876 –> 00:22:44.636
a prophet in the same way that Ayn Rand was.

360
00:22:44.990 –> 00:22:48.782
He just wasn’t as aware of it, maybe. Yeah, I would

361
00:22:48.782 –> 00:22:52.429
agree. Right? Like, I agree that he was working through the ideas.

362
00:22:52.943 –> 00:22:56.382
Yeah. But, um, in the same way, and maybe use

363
00:22:56.398 –> 00:23:00.125
absurd— absurdity to make it more

364
00:23:00.559 –> 00:23:04.330
relatable, or Yeah, so that people could digest

365
00:23:04.395 –> 00:23:08.047
it, you know, and just say, you know, have it something in the future, you

366
00:23:08.047 –> 00:23:11.409
know, versus like fiction. Yep. But if you just

367
00:23:11.474 –> 00:23:15.304
look at, you know, the weight of,

368
00:23:15.805 –> 00:23:19.359
you know, um, the weight of

369
00:23:19.375 –> 00:23:22.816
compliance and the weight of, um, the

370
00:23:22.832 –> 00:23:26.397
institution and dumbing you down, it’s only once,

371
00:23:26.494 –> 00:23:30.160
like Harrison, you know, Harrison you just couldn’t

372
00:23:30.209 –> 00:23:34.025
stay jailed underneath the weight of— Right. Yeah,

373
00:23:34.316 –> 00:23:37.808
the weight of the shields and all of that. And the ballerina

374
00:23:38.294 –> 00:23:41.901
took her mask off, and in their last moments, they were

375
00:23:41.998 –> 00:23:44.602
actually happy and free.

376
00:23:46.203 –> 00:23:48.288
You know, this need to be averaged

377
00:23:51.130 –> 00:23:54.539
and like everyone else, to be

378
00:23:54.539 –> 00:23:57.911
safe actually kills the soul and the

379
00:23:57.911 –> 00:24:01.604
spirit. And then, you know, in their, in their last moments,

380
00:24:01.652 –> 00:24:04.880
they’re dancing and kissing. And I think of this as the

381
00:24:04.944 –> 00:24:08.573
difference between, uh, China

382
00:24:08.797 –> 00:24:12.153
and Beijing and India and Delhi.

383
00:24:13.052 –> 00:24:16.729
You know, I’ll tell you, I felt a lot safer, like, walking

384
00:24:16.745 –> 00:24:20.583
in Beijing. Mm-hmm. Because

385
00:24:20.615 –> 00:24:24.260
everyone was extremely orderly and stopped and there was no

386
00:24:24.308 –> 00:24:27.118
individuality. It was, you know,

387
00:24:28.081 –> 00:24:31.662
it was gray and dark, but you knew you were safe

388
00:24:31.855 –> 00:24:35.275
with respect to the crowd. But I would much

389
00:24:35.307 –> 00:24:38.518
rather live in India. Right. Where, you know,

390
00:24:38.984 –> 00:24:42.227
everyone, you know, it’s talk, talk, talk, and there’s color everywhere.

391
00:24:43.640 –> 00:24:47.362
And You know, it’s— there’s a vibrancy to

392
00:24:47.506 –> 00:24:50.776
living in these areas. You know, it’s, you know, they’re religious and they’re

393
00:24:51.113 –> 00:24:54.912
family-oriented and community-oriented and they’re living their full

394
00:24:55.184 –> 00:24:58.374
life, you know, and the expression of humanity

395
00:24:59.128 –> 00:25:02.719
versus like Beijing. You’ve got all the

396
00:25:02.719 –> 00:25:06.422
rules and you don’t have family and there’s no religion and

397
00:25:06.422 –> 00:25:10.205
you can’t— you know, safe, sure, you know, but

398
00:25:10.750 –> 00:25:14.517
there’s no life. There’s no life. Yeah, it’s sterile safety. It’s

399
00:25:14.517 –> 00:25:18.012
so sterile versus the beauty and all that colors and

400
00:25:18.028 –> 00:25:21.300
self-expression in India where it— there’s

401
00:25:21.397 –> 00:25:25.230
self-expression, but you’ve also got a sense of family and institution

402
00:25:25.327 –> 00:25:29.080
and vibrancy. And when I was reading the Harrison Bergeron,

403
00:25:29.593 –> 00:25:33.379
it was kind of like the Beijing and then free

404
00:25:33.588 –> 00:25:36.331
into the Delhi. Yeah. Well, and

405
00:25:36.331 –> 00:25:40.164
it’s interesting that you pointed out, and I want to go— I want

406
00:25:40.164 –> 00:25:42.586
to focus a little bit on this for just a second. It’s interesting that you

407
00:25:42.651 –> 00:25:46.059
pointed out that the Handicapper General In Harrison Bergeron is a woman.

408
00:25:47.074 –> 00:25:50.846
And in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nurse Ratched is a woman.

409
00:25:52.360 –> 00:25:54.939
Um, so protectionism. Well, and

410
00:25:56.261 –> 00:25:59.422
I do not want to ground this conversation so much in our present time because

411
00:25:59.422 –> 00:26:02.005
I want it to be timeless. Yeah. And

412
00:26:03.567 –> 00:26:07.335
the trial of Lindsay Clancy is going on right now. Right. And for

413
00:26:07.335 –> 00:26:10.213
those of you who will listen to this in the future, Lindsay Clancy is a

414
00:26:10.677 –> 00:26:14.414
woman who has Whose trial has taken social media by

415
00:26:14.478 –> 00:26:17.803
storm, particularly among females of a certain

416
00:26:18.221 –> 00:26:22.012
age and demographic. And she is accused—

417
00:26:22.558 –> 00:26:25.546
or no, she is on trial for— I want to be very careful in my

418
00:26:25.546 –> 00:26:28.807
language here— she is on trial for allegedly

419
00:26:29.883 –> 00:26:33.144
killing her 3 children, and by the way, all under 10,

420
00:26:34.317 –> 00:26:38.044
allegedly sending her husband out of the house, allegedly

421
00:26:38.140 –> 00:26:41.669
killing her children, and the The defense for this case

422
00:26:42.815 –> 00:26:46.513
that her lawyers, her attorneys have mounted is

423
00:26:46.626 –> 00:26:49.499
that she was suffering from postpartum depression,

424
00:26:50.970 –> 00:26:54.379
was put on SSRIs. The SSRIs and the

425
00:26:54.379 –> 00:26:58.045
depression combined to make her, to

426
00:26:58.045 –> 00:27:01.721
make her not responsible for the

427
00:27:03.182 –> 00:27:05.908
murders of her, the alleged murders of her children.

428
00:27:07.018 –> 00:27:10.724
And thus she should be acquitted of the charges. The

429
00:27:10.724 –> 00:27:14.207
prosecution has taken the tact that, uh,

430
00:27:14.800 –> 00:27:18.523
well, people have agency and no matter how

431
00:27:18.587 –> 00:27:21.524
many, no matter how depressed you are, no matter, there are plenty of people who

432
00:27:21.540 –> 00:27:24.396
are depressed. There are plenty of people who take SSRIs. There are plenty of people

433
00:27:24.396 –> 00:27:28.055
with postpartum depression and there are plenty of women who are

434
00:27:28.055 –> 00:27:31.794
frustrated by their children and they never murder them. Exactly.

435
00:27:31.890 –> 00:27:35.633
So we should hold this woman Accountable for and

436
00:27:35.633 –> 00:27:39.477
responsible for her actions. And the last I heard,

437
00:27:39.687 –> 00:27:43.516
again, not grounding this in anything recent, just giving an overview

438
00:27:43.516 –> 00:27:46.619
for those of those folks who are listening. The most recent

439
00:27:48.258 –> 00:27:51.409
thing that I heard from my wife, because I really wasn’t focusing on this until

440
00:27:51.457 –> 00:27:55.156
about, you know, a week ago in any kind of meaningful way. But the last

441
00:27:55.156 –> 00:27:58.677
thing I heard from my wife who has been following this is that the jury

442
00:27:59.112 –> 00:28:02.444
deadlocked and there might be a mistrial. Apparently, one

443
00:28:02.620 –> 00:28:06.378
gentleman on the jury was, was holding out for a guilty

444
00:28:06.410 –> 00:28:10.071
verdict and everybody else was sort of aligned out of those 12 folks.

445
00:28:10.488 –> 00:28:13.764
This is where we’re at with that. So we have— and I’m using this to

446
00:28:13.956 –> 00:28:17.649
make a point. So we have Lindsey Clancy. We have, as an example, we

447
00:28:17.649 –> 00:28:21.278
have, we have, you know, Nurse Ratched

448
00:28:22.129 –> 00:28:24.955
and we have the handicapper general in Hermiston Bergeron. Yep.

449
00:28:27.448 –> 00:28:30.731
There’s a critique here about agency and responsibility.

450
00:28:31.246 –> 00:28:33.917
Yep. I, I,

451
00:28:35.000 –> 00:28:38.831
I’m gonna get in trouble, but what the hell, it’s my show. Is this a

452
00:28:38.895 –> 00:28:42.549
gendered critique, or is Vonnegut just making a much

453
00:28:42.775 –> 00:28:46.103
larger point and using irony and subversive

454
00:28:46.103 –> 00:28:49.704
surrealism to just sort of make this point? I don’t know that he was thinking

455
00:28:49.736 –> 00:28:52.465
about it that deeply, but is there a gendered critique here?

456
00:28:55.113 –> 00:28:58.339
I just, uh, wearing the lens of today.

457
00:28:58.965 –> 00:29:01.742
Yeah. I, I could easily see it back then.

458
00:29:03.010 –> 00:29:06.781
You know, nurses were women, right? Right. Yeah. Um, but

459
00:29:06.830 –> 00:29:10.489
it was interesting that the handicapper general,

460
00:29:11.324 –> 00:29:14.839
you know, was a woman, and it was about dumbing down so

461
00:29:14.855 –> 00:29:17.920
everyone feels, you know, comfortable and safe.

462
00:29:18.562 –> 00:29:22.323
Right. You combine it, and that’s just matriarchy. Right.

463
00:29:22.630 –> 00:29:25.361
Yeah. So that’s not a hard—

464
00:29:27.172 –> 00:29:30.049
my sense is Vonnegut was probably not that deliberative,

465
00:29:31.980 –> 00:29:35.249
but intuitively, there’s a message there.

466
00:29:35.684 –> 00:29:39.388
Yeah. I think, you know, the safetyism, you know,

467
00:29:39.485 –> 00:29:42.945
200 and some odd amendments, you know,

468
00:29:43.266 –> 00:29:46.966
because we can’t feel, you know, it

469
00:29:46.966 –> 00:29:50.556
gets me into the whole like microaggression world too, right?

470
00:29:50.621 –> 00:29:54.314
It’s just like, Just say, like, so they make you uncomfortable?

471
00:29:54.667 –> 00:29:58.064
Move on. You know, usually it’s a sign that something’s new and

472
00:29:58.112 –> 00:30:01.798
different. It doesn’t mean, you know, that it’s scary and bad.

473
00:30:01.958 –> 00:30:05.804
Right. But there’s no kind of personal, yeah, as you

474
00:30:05.804 –> 00:30:08.865
said, acceptance and personal responsibility and we, you

475
00:30:09.105 –> 00:30:12.358
know, and for owning your

476
00:30:12.358 –> 00:30:15.435
reactions and, you know, and taking care of your

477
00:30:15.435 –> 00:30:18.830
situations. As individuals. So

478
00:30:19.104 –> 00:30:22.870
it’s— it is interesting. And we have gone to the extreme, you

479
00:30:22.870 –> 00:30:25.682
know, in a society right now where victims are—

480
00:30:27.102 –> 00:30:30.719
where criminals are victims and victims are criminals. It’s that same kind of

481
00:30:30.751 –> 00:30:34.190
concept that I

482
00:30:34.222 –> 00:30:37.928
think was so— in the

483
00:30:38.009 –> 00:30:41.812
10 pages of that short story, I was like, it’s a prophet.

484
00:30:41.892 –> 00:30:45.234
Mm-hmm. I’m trying to go back to thinking

485
00:30:45.492 –> 00:30:49.243
what would have gotten him to the handicapper general

486
00:30:51.062 –> 00:30:54.182
concept based off of his experience from

487
00:30:54.864 –> 00:30:58.678
the 1920s to 1960s, through the

488
00:30:58.678 –> 00:31:02.453
end of the ’50s. Wearing your history

489
00:31:02.485 –> 00:31:05.746
hat, which is a lot more— or brain,

490
00:31:07.040 –> 00:31:10.622
which is a lot more robust in this than mine, what is your

491
00:31:10.622 –> 00:31:14.223
thought on the— So I think that

492
00:31:14.480 –> 00:31:18.101
you have always had, and this is why I asked about a gender

493
00:31:18.165 –> 00:31:21.659
critique. It’s babysitters, right? Yes.

494
00:31:21.931 –> 00:31:24.800
Yeah. But even more so than that. So

495
00:31:26.114 –> 00:31:29.287
the ’50s were the Eisenhower years. Uh-huh. And

496
00:31:30.264 –> 00:31:34.062
Eisenhower was sort of the, you know, the World War II

497
00:31:34.190 –> 00:31:37.203
general, you know, led D-Day.

498
00:31:38.123 –> 00:31:41.785
Became Republican president, you know,

499
00:31:41.866 –> 00:31:45.659
led the way on enforcing Brown versus the Board of

500
00:31:45.659 –> 00:31:49.014
Education, led the way

501
00:31:49.320 –> 00:31:53.147
on setting the table for integration of— or

502
00:31:53.147 –> 00:31:54.294
not integration, but

503
00:31:56.920 –> 00:32:00.425
followed up with Harry Truman’s efforts to

504
00:32:01.004 –> 00:32:03.079
integrate the armed forces.

505
00:32:05.368 –> 00:32:09.005
Eisenhower was a heck of a president. And then he closes the door

506
00:32:09.150 –> 00:32:12.883
by, by arguing about the— by arguing, by warning

507
00:32:12.979 –> 00:32:16.584
people about the military-industrial— warning the American public about the military-industrial complex, which of

508
00:32:16.584 –> 00:32:20.286
course proved to be true. Right. He was probably, huh,

509
00:32:20.526 –> 00:32:24.115
he was probably the last genuinely, other than maybe Ronald Reagan, even Ronald Reagan sort

510
00:32:24.115 –> 00:32:26.871
of shaded the truth sometimes a little bit, I think, because he had to.

511
00:32:27.672 –> 00:32:31.245
Eisenhower was probably the last honest Republican we’ve had in the White House.

512
00:32:31.743 –> 00:32:35.532
Now, Trump is a different thing. Trump is just bombastic and whatever.

513
00:32:35.580 –> 00:32:39.321
He’s not, he’s taking whatever party will take him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah,

514
00:32:39.434 –> 00:32:42.966
yeah. He ain’t, he ain’t that kind of deliberate, sort of honest

515
00:32:42.982 –> 00:32:46.579
Eisenhower kind of guy. Okay. So Eisenhower’s in the ’50s, right? Yeah.

516
00:32:46.916 –> 00:32:50.417
But the, but that’s the government. The culture

517
00:32:50.449 –> 00:32:54.270
underneath Eisenhower though, I think is very

518
00:32:54.367 –> 00:32:57.962
much in the 1950s. Just as it is

519
00:32:58.154 –> 00:33:01.217
now, because culture comes from the home.

520
00:33:02.564 –> 00:33:05.835
And the man in the gray flannel suit leaves the home and goes to the

521
00:33:05.835 –> 00:33:09.426
office, but who stays at home? Mm-hmm. The woman

522
00:33:09.619 –> 00:33:12.954
stays at home. Women in neighborhoods,

523
00:33:13.227 –> 00:33:17.027
women in homes, women in communities. Um,

524
00:33:17.716 –> 00:33:21.436
Vonnegut was married for 20 years, I

525
00:33:21.484 –> 00:33:25.253
think, if I remember correctly, and had 4 kids with, with one woman. Right?

526
00:33:25.654 –> 00:33:29.136
So he was, he was not trapped, but he was

527
00:33:29.200 –> 00:33:32.955
engaged in domesticity. He wasn’t living, leaving his house and then

528
00:33:32.955 –> 00:33:36.486
coming back. He was there all day, every day, and could

529
00:33:36.486 –> 00:33:40.064
see with, huh, two, two eyes,

530
00:33:40.257 –> 00:33:43.787
right? What’s happening inside of not just his household, but also all the other households

531
00:33:43.787 –> 00:33:47.397
on the block. Oh, you’re, you’re so right. And this is because I,

532
00:33:47.718 –> 00:33:51.281
you know, woman’s lib child, you know. Which happened all

533
00:33:51.473 –> 00:33:54.683
after that. Right, right, right. I’m a woman’s lib child. I’m very

534
00:33:54.779 –> 00:33:57.985
independent. I want my financial freedom, you know,

535
00:33:58.770 –> 00:34:01.926
opportunities, yada, yada, yada. I forget that

536
00:34:02.855 –> 00:34:06.685
the world, you know, I used to say that women did rule the world, you

537
00:34:06.749 –> 00:34:10.482
know, um, you know, through the family, right? And

538
00:34:10.722 –> 00:34:14.567
the strength of, you know, you know, the mom or his wife or whatever.

539
00:34:14.728 –> 00:34:18.573
I absolutely, God, what a blind spot. Thank

540
00:34:18.573 –> 00:34:22.322
you. Well, it’s okay. It’s all right. I mean, I mean, it’s, it’s so

541
00:34:22.803 –> 00:34:26.648
Gloria Steinem just died a couple of Like last week, right? She was 92.

542
00:34:27.610 –> 00:34:31.199
Betty Friedan, who was the queen of first wave feminism,

543
00:34:31.792 –> 00:34:34.965
Betty Friedan once said about Gloria Steinem, she’s too pretty

544
00:34:35.654 –> 00:34:39.500
to basically be up there. She’s going to ruin us. And she

545
00:34:39.564 –> 00:34:43.410
was right. I mean, Gloria Steinem brought you reproductive rights,

546
00:34:43.635 –> 00:34:47.304
quote unquote, which is a, which is a, you know, a mask for what abortion

547
00:34:47.577 –> 00:34:51.344
is. Yeah, exactly. And she Right.

548
00:34:51.809 –> 00:34:55.213
And Betty Friedan, or not Betty Friedan, but Gloria Steinem brought you

549
00:34:55.678 –> 00:34:59.210
the beginnings of the, the

550
00:34:59.210 –> 00:35:02.950
feminism that now winds up or washes up at the shores

551
00:35:03.062 –> 00:35:06.899
in our time of transgenderism, where now we’ve done the

552
00:35:06.899 –> 00:35:10.542
full circle. A man can become a woman and no one can say boo

553
00:35:10.623 –> 00:35:14.299
about it. Okay. But Betty Friedan, at the

554
00:35:14.299 –> 00:35:18.119
beginning of feminism in the late ’50s, early ’60s, when she was writing,

555
00:35:18.552 –> 00:35:22.366
Betty Friedan cared about 2 things. Number one, breaking stifling

556
00:35:22.398 –> 00:35:24.818
domesticity, breaking it. Mm-hmm.

557
00:35:25.907 –> 00:35:28.455
And getting men

558
00:35:29.753 –> 00:35:33.263
to not, not fulfill their responsibilities. That wasn’t it because that was

559
00:35:33.471 –> 00:35:37.140
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and all those folks back in the, back in the early

560
00:35:37.140 –> 00:35:40.954
20th century, right? That with the passage of the 19th Amendment. So it was

561
00:35:40.970 –> 00:35:44.207
about breaking domesticity for Betty Friedan. It was also about

562
00:35:45.425 –> 00:35:48.887
Taking that power that she saw, to your point, that women had in their

563
00:35:48.887 –> 00:35:52.220
communities and in their neighborhoods and in their family,

564
00:35:52.609 –> 00:35:56.115
taking that power because she saw the possibility, taking that power and scaling it up.

565
00:35:56.669 –> 00:36:00.269
Yeah. And I don’t think Betty Friedan fully understood.

566
00:36:03.621 –> 00:36:06.838
She couldn’t have fully understood where that was going to end up at.

567
00:36:07.872 –> 00:36:10.972
She was just looking around, to your point about a blind spot. She was just

568
00:36:10.972 –> 00:36:13.374
looking around at the kinds of things that she was seeing. And by the way,

569
00:36:13.390 –> 00:36:17.139
I think Vonnegut Jr. was seeing the exact same things. Plus, he

570
00:36:17.139 –> 00:36:20.878
had come out of his own family where his mother had ground down his father.

571
00:36:21.412 –> 00:36:25.150
Exactly, exactly, exactly. I mean, we all know.

572
00:36:26.658 –> 00:36:29.275
Yes, we’ve all watched that.

573
00:36:31.332 –> 00:36:33.850
And so he didn’t know, I don’t think, I don’t think he genuinely knew what

574
00:36:33.850 –> 00:36:36.936
to do with any of that. Yeah, I agree. Because how do you work through

575
00:36:36.936 –> 00:36:40.270
that? And he, the only tool he had was writing. That was— he wasn’t gonna

576
00:36:40.270 –> 00:36:44.046
go see a therapist. He wasn’t gonna do psychedelics. I mean, I love it that

577
00:36:44.046 –> 00:36:47.598
you mentioned Orwell and Ayn Rand. You didn’t mention

578
00:36:47.598 –> 00:36:50.940
Huxley, but, you know, Kesey, Huxley, all these guys.

579
00:36:51.555 –> 00:36:55.290
He had to work through that somehow, and writing was the only, the

580
00:36:55.290 –> 00:36:57.942
only drug he had. Had to work through it.

581
00:36:59.330 –> 00:37:02.669
Yeah. I’m so glad. I’m so

582
00:37:02.669 –> 00:37:06.460
glad we read this. I now, you know,

583
00:37:07.216 –> 00:37:10.887
I was doing a bunch of research, you know, in preparation.

584
00:37:11.961 –> 00:37:15.775
I was like, I need to read Slaughterhouse-Five. And, you know,

585
00:37:15.807 –> 00:37:19.574
I have the rest of The Monkey House, and I started going through

586
00:37:19.734 –> 00:37:23.308
different of the short stories. I’m like, these are just fabulous.

587
00:37:23.725 –> 00:37:27.555
I’m— this is fabulous. It’s really interesting.

588
00:37:27.988 –> 00:37:31.562
But also just the band,

589
00:37:32.059 –> 00:37:35.729
the comparison of Kesey and Kurt Vonnegut, and only because—

590
00:37:36.326 –> 00:37:39.915
You know, I went to such a super crunchy Portland, Oregon high

591
00:37:39.980 –> 00:37:43.585
school where all of that was, you know, just

592
00:37:43.585 –> 00:37:47.288
everyone bowed down to the Ken Kesey, Vonnegut gods,

593
00:37:47.466 –> 00:37:51.040
you know, as they were doing LSD on a, you know, yeah,

594
00:37:51.752 –> 00:37:55.428
on a Friday night. On a Friday night. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

595
00:37:55.720 –> 00:37:59.327
yeah. Yep. I think they refer to it as acid though. Yes, they

596
00:37:59.375 –> 00:38:03.102
did refer to it as acid. That’s right. Tripping like you

597
00:38:03.134 –> 00:38:06.932
would not believe. Anyway, let’s get back to the book for just a second. So

598
00:38:06.980 –> 00:38:10.009
we’re gonna pick up another story here that we have, because this is not just

599
00:38:10.009 –> 00:38:13.358
Harris and Bergeron we’re going to be focused on. I wanna pick up another story

600
00:38:13.550 –> 00:38:16.948
in the collection, Welcome to the Monkey House. New Dictionary.

601
00:38:17.621 –> 00:38:20.761
This one I picked because I think the battle of our time that we’ve been

602
00:38:20.761 –> 00:38:24.575
having is over who owns exactly the dictionary,

603
00:38:24.752 –> 00:38:26.979
who owns definitions and meanings of words.

604
00:38:29.876 –> 00:38:33.572
Yep. And I quote from Kurt Vonnegut. I wonder now what

605
00:38:33.572 –> 00:38:37.140
Ernest Hemingway’s dictionary looked like since he got along so well with dinky words that

606
00:38:37.140 –> 00:38:40.909
everybody can spell and truly understand. Mr. Hotchner,

607
00:38:41.361 –> 00:38:45.137
was it a frazzled wreck? My own is a tossed salad of instant coffee and

608
00:38:45.137 –> 00:38:48.622
tobacco crumbs and India paper, and anybody seeing it might fairly conclude that I

609
00:38:48.622 –> 00:38:52.114
ransack it hourly for a vocabulary like Arnold J. Toynbee’s.

610
00:38:53.023 –> 00:38:56.686
The truth is that I have broken its spine looking up the difference between principal

611
00:38:57.120 –> 00:39:00.895
and principal and how to spell Kashmir. It is a

612
00:39:00.895 –> 00:39:04.398
dear Leviathan left to me by my father, Webster’s New International

613
00:39:04.414 –> 00:39:07.692
Dictionary of the English Language, based on the International Dictionary of

614
00:39:07.692 –> 00:39:11.387
1890 and 1900. It doesn’t have radar in

615
00:39:11.483 –> 00:39:14.825
it or Wernher von Braun or sulfathiazole,

616
00:39:15.436 –> 00:39:19.147
but I know what they are. One time I actually took

617
00:39:19.629 –> 00:39:23.451
Self-entitled. And now I have this enormous and beautiful new

618
00:39:23.531 –> 00:39:26.983
bomb from Random House. I don’t mean bomb in a pejorative sense,

619
00:39:27.015 –> 00:39:30.435
or any dictionary sense for that matter. I mean that the book is heavy and

620
00:39:30.435 –> 00:39:33.534
pregnant and makes you think. One of the things that makes you think is that

621
00:39:33.743 –> 00:39:37.564
any gang of bright people with scads of money behind them can become appalling

622
00:39:37.741 –> 00:39:40.535
competitors in the American unabridged dictionary industry.

623
00:39:41.675 –> 00:39:45.080
They can make certain that they have all the words the other dictionaries have. then

624
00:39:45.209 –> 00:39:48.677
add words which have joined the language since the others were published, and then avoid

625
00:39:48.677 –> 00:39:50.870
mistakes that the others have caught particular hell for.

626
00:39:52.982 –> 00:39:56.528
Random House has thrown in a color atlas of the world as well, and

627
00:39:56.528 –> 00:39:59.815
concise dictionaries of French, Spanish, German, and Italian.

628
00:40:00.379 –> 00:40:04.197
And would you look at the price? And lausy me, Christmas is

629
00:40:04.295 –> 00:40:08.115
coming. When Mario Peh reviewed the savagely

630
00:40:08.115 –> 00:40:11.752
bopped 3rd revised edition of the Merriam-Webster for the Times in 1961, He

631
00:40:11.752 –> 00:40:15.413
complained of the, quote, residual prudishness, unquote, which still excludes certain

632
00:40:15.445 –> 00:40:18.978
4-letter words, quote, despite their copious appearance in numerous works of

633
00:40:18.978 –> 00:40:22.478
contemporary literature, as well as on restroom walls,

634
00:40:22.976 –> 00:40:26.685
close quote. Random House has satisfied this complaint somewhat. They

635
00:40:26.685 –> 00:40:30.458
haven’t included enough of the words to allow a Pakistani to decode Last Exit to

636
00:40:30.458 –> 00:40:34.199
Brooklyn or Ulysses either, but they have made brave beginnings dealing

637
00:40:34.392 –> 00:40:38.193
wisely, I think, with the elementary canal. I

638
00:40:38.225 –> 00:40:41.765
found only one abrupt verb for sexually congressing a woman, and we

639
00:40:41.765 –> 00:40:45.465
sure have Edward Albee to thank for its currency, though he gets no

640
00:40:45.465 –> 00:40:49.052
credit for it. The verb is hump, as

641
00:40:49.216 –> 00:40:51.148
in hump the hostess.

642
00:40:58.182 –> 00:41:00.912
This was, this was another really good one.

643
00:41:02.566 –> 00:41:06.210
Who controls the language? Who controls the

644
00:41:06.210 –> 00:41:10.020
dictionary? Yeah, well, by also the

645
00:41:10.020 –> 00:41:13.814
language, by virtue of controlling the dictionary, right? And yeah, I

646
00:41:13.814 –> 00:41:17.655
would have— 5 years ago, I thought that was like really absurd.

647
00:41:17.865 –> 00:41:21.366
It’s just like, yeah, you’re just trying to maintain

648
00:41:21.398 –> 00:41:25.049
decorum in, you know, informal writing. And now I’m like,

649
00:41:25.603 –> 00:41:28.373
no, they’re trying to control the language.

650
00:41:32.723 –> 00:41:36.497
What’s not— we got the, you know,

651
00:41:36.593 –> 00:41:40.399
and this is— There are 3 overlapping circles in here, right? So

652
00:41:40.511 –> 00:41:44.284
like, it’s technology, it’s communication, and it’s the lived

653
00:41:44.284 –> 00:41:47.560
reality of the failure to work through lived reality,

654
00:41:47.897 –> 00:41:51.718
right? So like Edward Albee, and I know who he’s talking about,

655
00:41:51.767 –> 00:41:55.460
the playwright, right? You know, writing about

656
00:41:56.548 –> 00:41:59.073
Pardon my use of the— well, my use of the word, my use of the

657
00:41:59.073 –> 00:42:01.712
term here, folks, but writing about humping the hostess.

658
00:42:02.950 –> 00:42:06.789
Okay. Like everybody knows what that

659
00:42:06.902 –> 00:42:10.742
means. And he’s writing— he wrote the story in 1967. This

660
00:42:10.790 –> 00:42:14.572
is amazing. And it’s not even really a story. It’s more like a dictionary

661
00:42:14.637 –> 00:42:17.707
review, which is why I picked it. Like, it’s amazing.

662
00:42:19.585 –> 00:42:23.368
But it also reveals, to your point, sort of

663
00:42:23.401 –> 00:42:27.223
how he was part of the group of

664
00:42:27.272 –> 00:42:30.948
folks, some, many of whom were born in the 1920s. Philip K.

665
00:42:31.013 –> 00:42:33.702
Dick was born in the ’20s. Frank Herbert, who wrote Dune, was born in the

666
00:42:33.702 –> 00:42:37.072
’20s. James Baldwin was born in the ’20s, right? Like,

667
00:42:37.396 –> 00:42:40.854
these guys were trying to square the circle of all those Venn diagrams

668
00:42:41.529 –> 00:42:45.305
from like what they see in the dictionary, which is the technology of the

669
00:42:45.305 –> 00:42:49.049
book, as we consistently talk about on this podcast, the greatest technology we’ve created.

670
00:42:49.647 –> 00:42:52.855
That technology, plus how that actually works and walks out in

671
00:42:52.887 –> 00:42:56.595
communication. And we are still doing this today. That’s the thing that

672
00:42:56.595 –> 00:43:00.352
struck me about this entire sort of book review, even

673
00:43:00.385 –> 00:43:04.001
the tongue-in-cheek way it was sort of written. But it’s

674
00:43:04.001 –> 00:43:06.164
deadly serious at the bottom because,

675
00:43:09.280 –> 00:43:12.778
I mean, that’s why words go in and out of our tech. Words go in

676
00:43:12.778 –> 00:43:14.842
and out of our, in and out of our culture all the time. This is

677
00:43:14.858 –> 00:43:17.905
why I’m fascinated by linguistics. Like John McWhorter’s work.

678
00:43:18.407 –> 00:43:22.017
Words go in and out of the language all of the time,

679
00:43:22.130 –> 00:43:24.854
and we make decisions, and then we fight

680
00:43:25.274 –> 00:43:28.305
brutally about who gets to own those words.

681
00:43:30.490 –> 00:43:34.312
So absolutely. Yeah, to think

682
00:43:34.312 –> 00:43:38.006
that we would own dictionaries for our entire life is

683
00:43:38.038 –> 00:43:41.830
just like laughable, right? You’d be so proud of your

684
00:43:42.312 –> 00:43:45.487
your well-worn paperback dictionary. And

685
00:43:46.017 –> 00:43:49.850
yeah, it wouldn’t withstand 24, you know, 24 months

686
00:43:49.850 –> 00:43:53.378
nowadays. But back then it was like, oh yeah, these are the

687
00:43:53.442 –> 00:43:56.569
words for our life. Well, I think, I think

688
00:43:56.569 –> 00:44:00.354
Merriam-Webster still publishes a physical dictionary. I think they still

689
00:44:00.354 –> 00:44:03.914
do. I think they still print off one. I bought, I bought some,

690
00:44:04.187 –> 00:44:07.570
I bought a couple of dictionaries over the past few years just to

691
00:44:08.020 –> 00:44:11.065
see how to, just to track how words change.

692
00:44:12.380 –> 00:44:15.650
Yep. Even the definitions of words that were

693
00:44:15.650 –> 00:44:18.183
defined one way in 1967

694
00:44:19.674 –> 00:44:23.489
are defined a totally different way in damn near 2027.

695
00:44:23.986 –> 00:44:26.968
Right. And it’s the same word.

696
00:44:27.850 –> 00:44:31.457
It’s just culture has shifted on the meaning. So,

697
00:44:32.162 –> 00:44:35.916
um, I mentioned James Baldwin. Yep. The term

698
00:44:36.029 –> 00:44:39.781
Black, nobody of James Baldwin’s generation

699
00:44:39.894 –> 00:44:43.083
would have used that term to describe themselves racially.

700
00:44:43.824 –> 00:44:46.903
They would have used the term, now this is going to make everybody uncomfortable, but

701
00:44:46.903 –> 00:44:49.305
this is the term they would have used. They would have used the term Negro.

702
00:44:51.118 –> 00:44:54.954
Sorry, folks. Like, that’s the term they would have used. That was an okay

703
00:44:54.954 –> 00:44:58.274
term to use, even in the midst of Jim Crow, even

704
00:44:58.274 –> 00:45:01.892
pre-civil rights. Negro was the appropriate term to use.

705
00:45:02.277 –> 00:45:05.947
Black didn’t enter the lexicon as a substitute for Negro

706
00:45:07.166 –> 00:45:10.756
until the 1970s and fully into the

707
00:45:10.756 –> 00:45:14.603
1980s. There were still African-Americans. And by the way, that’s another term that

708
00:45:14.603 –> 00:45:18.210
hadn’t entered into the lexicon either until after the civil rights

709
00:45:18.210 –> 00:45:21.929
movement. But there were African-Americans and quite frankly,

710
00:45:21.993 –> 00:45:25.808
Negroes. Yeah. Who were still calling them, using those terms to

711
00:45:25.840 –> 00:45:29.211
refer to themselves. themselves in the ’90s,

712
00:45:29.670 –> 00:45:33.448
not but 30 years ago. You can

713
00:45:33.448 –> 00:45:37.213
still find those words, though, in the dictionary. You could find Negro in

714
00:45:37.245 –> 00:45:40.930
the word— in the dictionary, but the definition is totally different now than it was

715
00:45:40.962 –> 00:45:44.743
in 1967. And that’s just one. You

716
00:45:44.840 –> 00:45:48.605
know, some of the research talked about Vonnegut as

717
00:45:48.637 –> 00:45:51.327
being somewhat conspiratorial. And

718
00:45:53.458 –> 00:45:57.053
I can see that in my 2026, ’27

719
00:45:57.165 –> 00:46:00.696
lens as well with the dictionary and the use of word

720
00:46:00.696 –> 00:46:03.264
changes, right? Like, so Negro to

721
00:46:04.292 –> 00:46:08.047
African American to Black, right? And then you have like Caucasian.

722
00:46:08.095 –> 00:46:11.610
I’m like, why don’t— why isn’t Caucasian a choice anymore? Like,

723
00:46:12.252 –> 00:46:15.880
why white? You know? And if you look at Black versus

724
00:46:15.944 –> 00:46:19.314
white, just it, you know, the contrast, it’s used for

725
00:46:19.314 –> 00:46:23.040
division. It’s a, you know, if you think about how— Mm-hmm. Persuasion is done,

726
00:46:23.056 –> 00:46:26.695
it’s through storytelling, it’s through imagery, and you make a

727
00:46:26.695 –> 00:46:30.351
clear black versus white just looking at the colors. It’s a

728
00:46:30.351 –> 00:46:34.173
lot easier divide to create. Oh yeah, need to keep the masses,

729
00:46:34.833 –> 00:46:38.443
you know, divided, right? So it is just kind of

730
00:46:38.620 –> 00:46:42.332
interesting. Why did we

731
00:46:42.332 –> 00:46:45.542
move to black when, you know, blacks aren’t

732
00:46:45.542 –> 00:46:49.333
black, you know? Right. And whites aren’t white. And whites aren’t

733
00:46:49.333 –> 00:46:52.601
white. different range.

734
00:46:52.778 –> 00:46:56.431
And so you do— it does get into

735
00:46:56.543 –> 00:46:59.540
why, you know, why are specific words

736
00:46:59.764 –> 00:47:03.177
entering a new lexicon and who’s making those

737
00:47:03.274 –> 00:47:06.879
changes. And I wouldn’t have thought about it, you know,

738
00:47:06.895 –> 00:47:10.709
until, you know, except for the last 6 years. And it’s like it always

739
00:47:10.805 –> 00:47:14.282
starts in the elite intellectual schools. And why do

740
00:47:14.507 –> 00:47:17.343
they need to change the words? Like, what

741
00:47:18.193 –> 00:47:22.015
I do. I love John McWhorter too. And, um, it’s,

742
00:47:22.272 –> 00:47:25.756
it is interesting, you know, to, to watch it

743
00:47:26.125 –> 00:47:29.674
because it is a control mechanism whether you know it or not. Like

744
00:47:29.754 –> 00:47:33.576
you said, degraded technology. How do you persuade

745
00:47:33.608 –> 00:47:37.220
through, you know, through reading and storytelling and

746
00:47:37.301 –> 00:47:40.962
imagery? You know, well, and a published dictionary

747
00:47:41.058 –> 00:47:44.735
also binds words to a time. Right. So

748
00:47:45.554 –> 00:47:49.295
one of the, one of the things that Vonnegut writes about in this,

749
00:47:49.504 –> 00:47:53.004
in this review, the new dictionary, is,

750
00:47:54.064 –> 00:47:57.500
um, the difference between ain’t and,

751
00:47:57.596 –> 00:48:00.567
um, what is it? Ain’t and— Ain’t and isn’t.

752
00:48:01.289 –> 00:48:05.063
Ain’t and isn’t. That was one. Um, and then the use of— I

753
00:48:05.063 –> 00:48:08.499
love this one— the use of like as a conjunction, meaning

754
00:48:09.076 –> 00:48:12.877
Do at meaning as, as do like I do, though

755
00:48:12.877 –> 00:48:16.725
occasionally found in good writers, is a provincialism and contrary to good

756
00:48:16.773 –> 00:48:20.157
usage. And I came up at a time,

757
00:48:20.638 –> 00:48:23.845
Mr. Vonnegut, may I call you Mr. Vonnegut? I’ll call you Kurt. I think you

758
00:48:23.845 –> 00:48:26.972
would appreciate that. Kurt, I came up at a time when like

759
00:48:27.838 –> 00:48:31.670
became a substitute for a pause in a sentence. Exactly.

760
00:48:32.199 –> 00:48:35.759
So it’s not do as I like to do

761
00:48:36.015 –> 00:48:39.800
or do as I would do. It’s not, that’s not how like

762
00:48:39.816 –> 00:48:43.474
is used as a synonym anymore. Like is now used as

763
00:48:43.571 –> 00:48:47.417
a pause, you know, like right here. Yeah. Like, and

764
00:48:47.449 –> 00:48:50.941
everybody just sort of accepts that. Well, my grandmother didn’t, who was of Kurt

765
00:48:50.941 –> 00:48:53.865
Vonnegut’s time when she was alive. She would always hit me in the back of

766
00:48:53.865 –> 00:48:57.644
the head, either metaphorically when she could no longer

767
00:48:57.644 –> 00:49:01.429
reach the top of my head or literally when she could. And she would

768
00:49:01.429 –> 00:49:04.374
always say, there’ll be no— I loved it how my grandmother put this— there will

769
00:49:04.374 –> 00:49:08.028
be no dis here or dat there in this house. Like, that ain’t gonna

770
00:49:08.028 –> 00:49:11.766
happen. And she would say, ain’t gonna happen. I’m like, what are you talking about,

771
00:49:11.847 –> 00:49:14.631
Grandma? You know? And

772
00:49:17.162 –> 00:49:20.698
my grandmother was right. Vonnegut was right. Yeah. And so these,

773
00:49:21.950 –> 00:49:25.718
even the colloquialisms that we use, whether they’re provincial or

774
00:49:25.718 –> 00:49:27.972
not, become

775
00:49:29.727 –> 00:49:33.379
something different if they’re permanently established

776
00:49:33.508 –> 00:49:37.159
through the publication of a book. Versus the malleability you

777
00:49:37.159 –> 00:49:40.677
see on social media and the malleability you see of words in the

778
00:49:40.790 –> 00:49:43.257
internet. And I think this is what has

779
00:49:44.889 –> 00:49:48.614
flummoxed, to use another old school word, flummoxed all of

780
00:49:48.614 –> 00:49:51.809
us is it used to take

781
00:49:53.616 –> 00:49:57.440
6 months to a year for a word to sort of travel from California to

782
00:49:57.440 –> 00:50:01.126
New York and for it to shift its meaning

783
00:50:01.224 –> 00:50:04.853
on the way. Now it doesn’t take 6 months to a year.

784
00:50:05.629 –> 00:50:08.992
Now it can happen and it does happen in the space

785
00:50:09.348 –> 00:50:12.918
of, in the space of a Google sweep or space of a Google search.

786
00:50:13.160 –> 00:50:16.775
Like, that’s it. It’s done. Right. And I

787
00:50:17.034 –> 00:50:18.793
don’t think as humans, we know how to deal with that.

788
00:50:21.790 –> 00:50:22.707
I don’t think we have any— Clearly not.

789
00:50:26.234 –> 00:50:29.902
Like, you just have to look at the Lindsey

790
00:50:29.902 –> 00:50:33.666
Clancy Trying to see where the

791
00:50:33.682 –> 00:50:37.356
sanity in the world is right now. Right. Well,

792
00:50:37.648 –> 00:50:41.449
and we also, we also live in a space

793
00:50:41.578 –> 00:50:45.038
where we’re highly individualistic and we’re also in

794
00:50:45.232 –> 00:50:49.080
various ways that are sometimes socially normed or not. We’re in

795
00:50:49.113 –> 00:50:52.842
various ways in rebellion against hierarchy. Like we’ve, we’ve, we’ve

796
00:50:52.971 –> 00:50:56.700
landed at the— Yes and no. I’m really in conflict with

797
00:50:56.700 –> 00:50:59.534
this because— Really? Okay. The,

798
00:51:00.880 –> 00:51:03.540
the control culture does not feel

799
00:51:03.540 –> 00:51:06.969
individualistic at all. It feels like they think they’re

800
00:51:06.969 –> 00:51:10.414
individualistic. Right. Right. But they’re

801
00:51:11.311 –> 00:51:14.276
not at all. And those who are trying to fight for

802
00:51:14.276 –> 00:51:18.074
individualism are being, you know, the live and let

803
00:51:18.186 –> 00:51:21.807
live is being, you know, pushed to the side and the

804
00:51:22.208 –> 00:51:25.790
individualistic and empathetic crew is saying, no,

805
00:51:26.048 –> 00:51:29.791
you must act like this. Yeah. So that’s why I

806
00:51:30.017 –> 00:51:33.745
think that I, I didn’t, I didn’t

807
00:51:33.809 –> 00:51:37.386
come to terms with this yet, but that’s why I

808
00:51:37.596 –> 00:51:40.867
think the counterculture, um,

809
00:51:41.527 –> 00:51:45.336
who isn’t counterculture now, right, still likes the

810
00:51:45.336 –> 00:51:49.099
Kesey and the Vonnegut, right? Um, is

811
00:51:49.115 –> 00:51:52.788
because they can see Uh, what they

812
00:51:52.853 –> 00:51:56.642
wanna see about themselves, right, in these books about

813
00:51:56.642 –> 00:51:59.468
individualism, right? Like, uh,

814
00:52:00.656 –> 00:52:04.413
like Howard Stern is no longer individualistic, but he sure thinks he is. Yeah,

815
00:52:04.429 –> 00:52:07.641
right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the, the

816
00:52:07.641 –> 00:52:11.382
pink-haired trannies think they’re individualistic, but

817
00:52:11.414 –> 00:52:15.155
they’re not. They’re trying to get everyone to, to

818
00:52:15.332 –> 00:52:18.916
abide you know, by their, by their worldview,

819
00:52:19.486 –> 00:52:22.026
you know, so, you know, I’m still,

820
00:52:23.417 –> 00:52:26.698
I’m still struggling kind of with that, like, interplay.

821
00:52:27.400 –> 00:52:30.881
Well, and I think, I think the interplay exists, as I said, at the,

822
00:52:31.528 –> 00:52:35.330
at the intersection of all 3 of those Venn diagrams, or those circles in

823
00:52:35.330 –> 00:52:38.840
that Venn diagram, right? So in one circle, you have the technology, which now

824
00:52:38.889 –> 00:52:42.544
includes not just the book, but it also includes the internet and the

825
00:52:42.544 –> 00:52:46.173
phones and everything else, the physical manifestations, right? Then in one,

826
00:52:46.285 –> 00:52:49.334
another circle, you have communication, which is all of the different ways we

827
00:52:49.334 –> 00:52:53.106
culturally communicate, both verbally and nonverbally,

828
00:52:53.427 –> 00:52:57.182
Eastern, Western, because, you know, the internet allows us to be global now, whether

829
00:52:57.182 –> 00:53:00.713
we want to be or not. Um, all of that. And then the third circle

830
00:53:00.729 –> 00:53:04.068
is culture, right? And culture, of course, is always

831
00:53:04.180 –> 00:53:07.984
downstream from a worldview. And our worldviews are driven right

832
00:53:08.032 –> 00:53:11.707
now by postmodernism. Right. Um, and, and

833
00:53:11.723 –> 00:53:14.387
then a touch of, you know, other things like naturalism.

834
00:53:15.013 –> 00:53:18.209
theism, you know, occasionally nihilism.

835
00:53:18.771 –> 00:53:22.448
And so, you know, culture lives downstream from all that. And inside of culture is

836
00:53:22.961 –> 00:53:26.799
government and politics and policy and entertainment and those kinds of things. So

837
00:53:26.799 –> 00:53:30.444
we have all these 3 overlapping Venn diagrams, right? And depending

838
00:53:30.444 –> 00:53:34.137
upon where we’re at in that overlap, I think that

839
00:53:34.137 –> 00:53:37.621
determines to what degree as

840
00:53:37.717 –> 00:53:41.555
individuals we think we are in rebellion. But also to what

841
00:53:41.667 –> 00:53:45.264
degree institutions, which are built by individuals, by the way,

842
00:53:45.280 –> 00:53:48.973
collecting together, institutions determine where

843
00:53:48.973 –> 00:53:52.762
they decide to place their— now I’m going to use

844
00:53:52.762 –> 00:53:55.990
a Foucault reference here— where they place their

845
00:53:56.038 –> 00:53:59.410
power. Yeah. Not authority, but

846
00:53:59.570 –> 00:54:02.011
power. Power. Right. And so I think it’s, it’s,

847
00:54:03.488 –> 00:54:07.220
it’s You know, we’re not

848
00:54:07.220 –> 00:54:10.780
going to submit to the hierarchical structures of the 1950s anymore. And

849
00:54:10.780 –> 00:54:14.360
that’s part of what’s driving us crazy is we have this fantasy of the

850
00:54:14.360 –> 00:54:18.060
1950s, like you were talking about. I’m a feminist and I’m independent and I want

851
00:54:18.060 –> 00:54:20.640
to be that. If we somehow went back

852
00:54:20.640 –> 00:54:24.440
to— forget going back to like the 1900s, the

853
00:54:24.440 –> 00:54:28.040
early 1900s, forget like 1918, 1920, forget that. Just to the

854
00:54:28.040 –> 00:54:31.760
1950s in culturally, not governmentally, not

855
00:54:31.760 –> 00:54:34.782
policy. but in culturally how we treated women, if we tried to go back to

856
00:54:34.782 –> 00:54:38.382
that, it can’t be done. I’m

857
00:54:38.398 –> 00:54:41.941
sorry. It just, it can’t be done. The level of, the level of,

858
00:54:42.248 –> 00:54:46.098
of, of control you’d have to engage in at a scale

859
00:54:46.147 –> 00:54:49.865
level, institutionally, culturally, it can’t be

860
00:54:49.865 –> 00:54:53.470
done. But, but at a family level, at an

861
00:54:53.584 –> 00:54:57.326
individualistic level, I yell at my kids about this sometimes. And sometimes

862
00:54:57.326 –> 00:55:00.484
I’m joking. Sometimes I’m not. Just depends on what we’re talking about. Out there, it

863
00:55:00.484 –> 00:55:04.145
might be 2026. In here, it’s 1950.

864
00:55:05.285 –> 00:55:09.074
Uh, but you’re talking about the

865
00:55:09.074 –> 00:55:12.333
counterculture, right? The counterculture is the family,

866
00:55:13.008 –> 00:55:16.829
right? Right. The, but the hierarchy

867
00:55:17.808 –> 00:55:21.244
is embedded in the consolidation of all these institutions,

868
00:55:21.661 –> 00:55:25.370
right? Right. Like, so the ability to work

869
00:55:25.370 –> 00:55:29.191
and create a small business is extremely difficult right now. Because

870
00:55:29.223 –> 00:55:32.354
of all the rules and regulations that the

871
00:55:32.418 –> 00:55:35.950
hierarchy is stipulating, is putting on businesses to

872
00:55:35.950 –> 00:55:39.770
control and protect workers. So there

873
00:55:40.846 –> 00:55:44.667
is— I think this is where the hourglass is flipping now.

874
00:55:44.795 –> 00:55:47.813
They talk about how the parties actually

875
00:55:48.407 –> 00:55:52.179
flip. Yeah. And I think what we’re seeing is the

876
00:55:52.260 –> 00:55:55.583
flipping of society in the hourglass right now.

877
00:55:57.110 –> 00:56:00.865
Okay. But they articulate— still working on the articulation of

878
00:56:00.898 –> 00:56:04.604
it. But there is something about this, the institutionalism,

879
00:56:04.685 –> 00:56:07.893
and there is a fight for conformity and—

880
00:56:10.000 –> 00:56:13.767
not conformity, but control via institutions,

881
00:56:14.202 –> 00:56:17.263
big business, politics or

882
00:56:17.263 –> 00:56:21.049
government, media, trying to control it

883
00:56:21.114 –> 00:56:24.920
all. The counterculture is what you’re talking about,

884
00:56:25.208 –> 00:56:28.815
which is the family structure, the,

885
00:56:29.136 –> 00:56:32.822
you know, the value system, the moral system

886
00:56:32.822 –> 00:56:36.269
is really the counterculture. And, you know,

887
00:56:36.429 –> 00:56:39.859
it’s shocking to say that. But I—

888
00:56:41.078 –> 00:56:43.226
will we go back to the 1950s?

889
00:56:44.604 –> 00:56:47.986
Not necessarily, but I think there’ll be a balancing act

890
00:56:48.115 –> 00:56:51.293
of Yeah, people recognizing that

891
00:56:51.743 –> 00:56:55.517
gender is hormone-based and not— In

892
00:56:55.517 –> 00:56:58.343
your brain. Yeah, right. And that there are going to be

893
00:56:59.033 –> 00:57:02.839
certain balances that we have to create in family units where

894
00:57:02.984 –> 00:57:06.661
it’s not maybe the wife only at home

895
00:57:06.661 –> 00:57:10.274
acting a certain way. She has opportunities to still

896
00:57:10.274 –> 00:57:13.791
work and make a living and own property and have her own bank account, but

897
00:57:13.807 –> 00:57:16.764
she’s opting for the family unit. because

898
00:57:17.521 –> 00:57:20.951
she’s deriving more meaning from that. Mm-hmm.

899
00:57:21.531 –> 00:57:25.219
And fathers are going

900
00:57:25.252 –> 00:57:28.370
back to doing what, you know,

901
00:57:29.512 –> 00:57:33.113
instinctually they’re designed to do, which is protect and

902
00:57:33.113 –> 00:57:36.735
feed and, you know, care for the family,

903
00:57:37.334 –> 00:57:40.506
you know, out in the real world.

904
00:57:41.763 –> 00:57:45.530
So I don’t, you know, I think that what

905
00:57:45.627 –> 00:57:49.249
we’re seeing and why the Fourth Turning in this transition feels

906
00:57:49.362 –> 00:57:53.021
messy is because we are— the hourglass is

907
00:57:53.086 –> 00:57:56.782
turning over. And what has been working,

908
00:57:57.366 –> 00:58:00.454
you know, the hourglass peaked

909
00:58:01.019 –> 00:58:04.793
with Howard Stern getting to the top of it and all these

910
00:58:04.793 –> 00:58:07.922
elite institutions and globalists

911
00:58:08.099 –> 00:58:11.336
and— Yeah.

912
00:58:11.982 –> 00:58:15.099
Microaggressions, yo, leading

913
00:58:15.115 –> 00:58:18.667
conversations and safetyism. I think the safetyism and

914
00:58:18.667 –> 00:58:22.023
that whole counterculture

915
00:58:22.459 –> 00:58:25.574
has got to the top of the hourglass in the

916
00:58:25.606 –> 00:58:29.381
hierarchy, and now the countervailing forces

917
00:58:29.413 –> 00:58:32.525
are coming back, and family and community and

918
00:58:33.912 –> 00:58:37.382
all that’s going to start taking over. I like the

919
00:58:37.382 –> 00:58:40.015
visual that you’re painting there with your words

920
00:58:41.171 –> 00:58:44.832
of a flipping of the hourglass, right? Because if you think about how an

921
00:58:44.929 –> 00:58:48.638
hourglass, how the sands come down through an hourglass, at first it’s

922
00:58:48.638 –> 00:58:52.155
messy and chaotic, to your point about it being a chaotic transition, with each

923
00:58:52.251 –> 00:58:55.350
individual grain of sand

924
00:58:55.864 –> 00:58:59.011
hitting at a different spot at the bottom of the hourglass and landing. And then

925
00:58:59.156 –> 00:59:01.404
everything else sort of compiles on top of it and compiles on top of it

926
00:59:01.404 –> 00:59:05.205
until it creates another, another, you know, triangle at the bottom of the, in

927
00:59:05.205 –> 00:59:08.641
the bottom of the hourglass. And being a visual guy and being an

928
00:59:08.754 –> 00:59:12.190
arts, you know, undergraduate major, you know, I

929
00:59:12.367 –> 00:59:14.585
gotta, I gotta visualize that in my, in my brain.

930
00:59:17.160 –> 00:59:20.995
No one grain of sand, just like no one drop of

931
00:59:20.995 –> 00:59:24.685
rain, just like no, no one

932
00:59:25.591 –> 00:59:29.258
flake of snow blames itself for

933
00:59:30.477 –> 00:59:33.673
You know, the avalanche or the flood

934
00:59:34.572 –> 00:59:38.249
or the sand on the beach in the hourglass.

935
00:59:38.441 –> 00:59:41.653
Yeah. No one grain of sand. And one of the

936
00:59:41.653 –> 00:59:45.474
insights that I think leaders can take from reading not

937
00:59:45.506 –> 00:59:49.328
just, um, Welcome to the Monkey House, but also The New Dictionary

938
00:59:49.360 –> 00:59:52.459
and really taking these short stories seriously is that, um,

939
00:59:57.703 –> 01:00:00.761
We, we have to, I think,

940
01:00:01.828 –> 01:00:04.109
figure out what works for individuals

941
01:00:05.938 –> 01:00:09.092
and at scale homes, maybe to communities.

942
01:00:10.020 –> 01:00:13.628
But then after that, I think we have to, and this is why I

943
01:00:13.628 –> 01:00:17.232
paused before I said it, I think we have to stop trying

944
01:00:17.345 –> 01:00:18.331
to scale up

945
01:00:20.319 –> 01:00:22.970
individual desires and

946
01:00:24.480 –> 01:00:28.169
appetites and perspectives to a

947
01:00:28.523 –> 01:00:31.891
larger space. And I think the internet as a piece of

948
01:00:31.907 –> 01:00:35.439
technology tempts us greatly to do that

949
01:00:36.049 –> 01:00:39.841
because it used to be— Yeah. It used to be that

950
01:00:41.495 –> 01:00:43.407
I didn’t know how weird I was.

951
01:00:45.907 –> 01:00:48.489
Really, I didn’t know how weird I was. And I don’t know how weird you

952
01:00:48.586 –> 01:00:51.814
are. I have no idea. We’re inside of our own houses. Yeah. When we go

953
01:00:51.895 –> 01:00:55.463
outside at, you know, the farmer’s market or walking down the

954
01:00:55.463 –> 01:00:59.289
street or in our cars or at work, we’re not talking about how

955
01:00:59.402 –> 01:01:03.100
weird we are. We’re doing the whole like third

956
01:01:03.132 –> 01:01:06.911
level social norm thing. We’re all hiding from everyone, right? And

957
01:01:06.927 –> 01:01:10.622
it’s fine. That’s that conformity, that stifling conformity, you know, that I think

958
01:01:10.622 –> 01:01:14.167
Vonnegut was opposed to. And I think that you’re talking about as well, but we

959
01:01:14.167 –> 01:01:17.995
all get to be weird inside of our own houses. And what the

960
01:01:18.076 –> 01:01:21.878
internet does, because now I have this technological device that allows

961
01:01:21.894 –> 01:01:25.351
me to connect with other weird people. Yeah. And this is where

962
01:01:25.560 –> 01:01:29.340
the transgender contagion, uh, the social contagion around Lindsay

963
01:01:29.340 –> 01:01:32.758
Clancy, the social contagions around race, George Floyd,

964
01:01:32.823 –> 01:01:36.502
COVID, like COVID was really interesting, right? Because we went

965
01:01:36.615 –> 01:01:40.311
from sort of the peak of

966
01:01:40.343 –> 01:01:43.583
being able to connect with everybody, being able to connect individually with how weird we

967
01:01:43.583 –> 01:01:47.263
are. We went from that to the institution saying,

968
01:01:47.780 –> 01:01:51.225
nope, slapping the game shut and saying, you’re all going to be shoved in your

969
01:01:51.322 –> 01:01:54.765
houses. And one of the things that I’ve noted repeatedly that

970
01:01:54.895 –> 01:01:57.685
nobody seems to be able to pick up on and go anywhere with is

971
01:01:59.008 –> 01:02:02.756
when the lockdowns occurred in—

972
01:02:03.290 –> 01:02:06.407
what was it? Started in March and April of 2020.

973
01:02:09.332 –> 01:02:11.659
Everybody collectively lasted about a month.

974
01:02:14.794 –> 01:02:17.679
Whether you were out rioting after that or not, it didn’t matter. But we had

975
01:02:17.679 –> 01:02:21.239
about a month in us collectively in the United States. And

976
01:02:22.097 –> 01:02:25.822
the level of what the

977
01:02:25.838 –> 01:02:28.348
government would have had to do with the next level, which is what they did

978
01:02:28.348 –> 01:02:31.277
in Australia and China, where they would have had to,

979
01:02:32.314 –> 01:02:35.134
they would have had to weld our doors shut or put us in prison camps.

980
01:02:35.810 –> 01:02:39.553
Yeah. I say this with absolutely no, this is

981
01:02:39.569 –> 01:02:43.069
not irony. This is an absolute sincere statement. I think that

982
01:02:43.118 –> 01:02:46.575
proves the fact that the American government didn’t do

983
01:02:46.689 –> 01:02:48.750
that and state governments didn’t do that

984
01:02:50.814 –> 01:02:54.631
is a testament to the remaining strains of Christianity in

985
01:02:54.663 –> 01:02:58.355
our culture that we sometimes take for granted

986
01:02:59.280 –> 01:03:03.011
because we’re always worried. And we should be, by the

987
01:03:03.011 –> 01:03:06.824
way. We’re always worried when oppression is going to show up. We are

988
01:03:06.824 –> 01:03:10.461
constantly monitoring the government because of our free speech

989
01:03:10.820 –> 01:03:13.374
and because of what we can do and what we can’t do. That’s why it

990
01:03:13.374 –> 01:03:16.441
only worked for a month with us. That’s why the lockdowns only worked for about

991
01:03:16.441 –> 01:03:19.122
a month. We got to the end of Netflix at the end of a month.

992
01:03:20.021 –> 01:03:23.682
Like, you can only combine with weird people in your house for so long before

993
01:03:23.714 –> 01:03:27.375
you want to, like, before, like, the furry forum that I’m in, I

994
01:03:27.407 –> 01:03:30.185
have to go meet the other furries. I know. And I just picked that one

995
01:03:30.185 –> 01:03:33.734
because it’s whatever, but you could pick anything. Like, I want to go riot about

996
01:03:33.766 –> 01:03:36.736
George Floyd because guess what? Like, I want to be with other people.

997
01:03:38.406 –> 01:03:42.157
We got to it at the end of the month and we realized

998
01:03:42.189 –> 01:03:45.636
that, okay, as individuals, we are atomized, whatever units,

999
01:03:46.037 –> 01:03:49.612
but we have to come together. Now that’s an inversion of the thing you’re talking

1000
01:03:49.628 –> 01:03:53.155
about, but it doesn’t make it less true. No,

1001
01:03:53.171 –> 01:03:56.826
but it, what it’s actually the balancing

1002
01:03:57.162 –> 01:04:00.769
act, you know, the, the 2 different sides of this,

1003
01:04:01.731 –> 01:04:05.566
um, are structure. And rules and,

1004
01:04:05.823 –> 01:04:09.663
you know, and complete freedom, right? And chaos. And we’ve gotten

1005
01:04:09.855 –> 01:04:13.229
to, you know, when there’s too much structure, the

1006
01:04:13.229 –> 01:04:16.811
rebellion happens, right? You know, and the live and

1007
01:04:16.843 –> 01:04:20.377
let live folks are kind of okay with it until they’re

1008
01:04:20.377 –> 01:04:24.152
not. And that’s the thing, you just never know. I’m a Taurus, you

1009
01:04:24.152 –> 01:04:27.751
know, Tauruses, we’re okay with things until we’re not.

1010
01:04:27.911 –> 01:04:31.140
Until you’re not. Never really know when that’s gonna happen, you know.

1011
01:04:31.943 –> 01:04:35.591
But I think that’s a good expression of what Americans are,

1012
01:04:36.041 –> 01:04:39.496
are like as well. And where we are is right now we have way

1013
01:04:40.138 –> 01:04:43.593
too much weight coming down. Mm-hmm. And, you know, and the

1014
01:04:43.593 –> 01:04:47.385
rebellion is, is starting back to say, hey, oh no, no, no, no, no, we

1015
01:04:47.450 –> 01:04:51.242
want our freedom, our freedom back. And so it’s

1016
01:04:51.242 –> 01:04:54.809
always going to be this tension, you know, too much freedom is

1017
01:04:54.906 –> 01:04:57.171
chaos and uncontrolled, you know,

1018
01:04:58.117 –> 01:05:01.820
lawlessness and too much control is the lack

1019
01:05:01.820 –> 01:05:05.074
of individuality in the sense of, you know, of,

1020
01:05:06.228 –> 01:05:09.882
of being a human. Right. Um, yet like you lose your, you

1021
01:05:09.994 –> 01:05:13.457
lose your soul, you become Beijing, right, where you’re

1022
01:05:13.457 –> 01:05:17.256
moving and you’re operating, but you’re just an ant in the ant farm,

1023
01:05:17.672 –> 01:05:21.439
right? Um, you know, so I think that’s what is

1024
01:05:21.535 –> 01:05:24.901
kind of what is happening right now. And the family unit, that’s just a

1025
01:05:24.901 –> 01:05:28.555
decent decentralization of, you know, of control,

1026
01:05:29.292 –> 01:05:32.913
right? Power. And that’s where it should be, as this balance between centralization and

1027
01:05:32.913 –> 01:05:36.646
decentralization. That opens the door to our next story.

1028
01:05:37.159 –> 01:05:40.524
I love it. Yes. So our next short story, Report on the

1029
01:05:40.524 –> 01:05:44.049
Barnhouse Effect. This is something— this was probably out of all the

1030
01:05:44.049 –> 01:05:47.815
stories other than Harris and Bergeron in this collection, Welcome

1031
01:05:47.815 –> 01:05:51.548
to the Monkey House from Kurt Vonnegut, this story struck me the deepest and was

1032
01:05:51.564 –> 01:05:52.798
the least amusing. to me.

1033
01:05:54.130 –> 01:05:57.837
That’s great. Yeah, it

1034
01:05:57.837 –> 01:06:01.640
starts as a report or a letter written by

1035
01:06:01.849 –> 01:06:04.464
somebody talking about somebody else.

1036
01:06:05.877 –> 01:06:09.198
It sort of reminded me a little bit of Fahrenheit

1037
01:06:09.214 –> 01:06:12.857
451, a little bit, in sort of how that

1038
01:06:12.857 –> 01:06:16.034
story is structured, where it’s somebody writing about

1039
01:06:16.853 –> 01:06:20.401
the society in which they see themselves and trying to figure out a A door,

1040
01:06:20.546 –> 01:06:22.398
trying to figure out where the door on the floor is, right?

1041
01:06:24.169 –> 01:06:27.921
Anyway, report on the Barnhouse effect. I’m gonna read a couple of

1042
01:06:28.984 –> 01:06:31.873
things out of this. Let me begin by saying that I don’t know any more

1043
01:06:31.905 –> 01:06:35.301
about where Professor Arthur Barnhouse is hiding than anyone else does.

1044
01:06:36.470 –> 01:06:39.910
Save for one short enigmatic message left in my mailbox on

1045
01:06:40.023 –> 01:06:43.688
Christmas Eve, I have not heard from him since his disappearance a year

1046
01:06:43.881 –> 01:06:47.453
and a half ago. What’s more, readers of this article will be

1047
01:06:47.453 –> 01:06:50.579
disappointed if they expect to learn how they could bring about the so-called

1048
01:06:50.774 –> 01:06:54.581
Barnhouse effect. If I were able and willing to give away that secret,

1049
01:06:55.210 –> 01:06:58.444
I would certainly be something more important than a psychology instructor.

1050
01:07:00.428 –> 01:07:03.420
I’ve been urged to write this report because I did research under the professor’s direction

1051
01:07:03.598 –> 01:07:06.770
and because I was the first to learn of his astonishing discovery. But while I

1052
01:07:06.786 –> 01:07:10.151
was his student, I was never entrusted with knowledge of how the mental forces could

1053
01:07:10.151 –> 01:07:13.861
be released and directed. He was unwilling to trust anyone with that information.

1054
01:07:15.186 –> 01:07:18.491
Hmm. I would like to point out that the term Barnhouse effect is a creation

1055
01:07:18.507 –> 01:07:22.295
of the popular press and was never used by Professor Barnhouse. The name he

1056
01:07:22.295 –> 01:07:24.439
chose for the phenomenon was dynamo-psychism,

1057
01:07:26.299 –> 01:07:29.897
or force of the mind. I cannot believe that there is a

1058
01:07:29.897 –> 01:07:33.430
civilized person yet to be convinced that such a force exists, what with its destructive

1059
01:07:33.430 –> 01:07:36.953
effects on display in every national capital. I think humanity has always had an inkling

1060
01:07:36.985 –> 01:07:40.391
that this sort of force does exist. It has been common knowledge that some people

1061
01:07:40.391 –> 01:07:44.227
are luckier than others with inanimate objects like dice. What Professor Barnhouse did

1062
01:07:44.275 –> 01:07:47.338
was to show that such luck was a measurable force,

1063
01:07:48.188 –> 01:07:50.575
which in his case could be enormous.

1064
01:07:52.402 –> 01:07:55.978
By my calculations, the professor was about 55 times more powerful than a

1065
01:07:55.978 –> 01:07:59.691
Nagasaki-type atomic bomb at the time he went into hiding. He was not

1066
01:07:59.691 –> 01:08:03.349
bluffing when, on the eve of Operation Brainstorm, he told General Honus

1067
01:08:03.349 –> 01:08:07.008
Barker, quote, sitting here at the dinner table, I’m pretty sure

1068
01:08:07.558 –> 01:08:11.215
I can flatten anything on Earth from Joe Louis to the Great

1069
01:08:11.279 –> 01:08:14.154
Wall of China. Close quote.

1070
01:08:15.713 –> 01:08:18.929
With that, the report on the Barnhouse Effect begins. And

1071
01:08:19.595 –> 01:08:23.229
what you find out is that Professor Barnhouse was

1072
01:08:25.351 –> 01:08:28.170
developing a way to move into

1073
01:08:31.425 –> 01:08:35.152
manipulate inanimate objects from

1074
01:08:35.298 –> 01:08:39.009
inkwells to entire cities. And of

1075
01:08:39.009 –> 01:08:41.438
course, this

1076
01:08:42.877 –> 01:08:45.853
power was

1077
01:08:47.179 –> 01:08:51.017
desired to be harnessed by— and I already mentioned Eisenhower

1078
01:08:51.066 –> 01:08:54.225
in this— the military-industrial complex.

1079
01:08:55.544 –> 01:08:59.033
However, Mr. Barnhouse. Mr. Barnhouse

1080
01:08:59.033 –> 01:09:02.833
decided he didn’t want to be— he didn’t

1081
01:09:02.849 –> 01:09:06.456
want to be handcuffed. He didn’t want to be wrangled. He didn’t

1082
01:09:06.552 –> 01:09:10.239
want to be controlled by the military-industrial complex,

1083
01:09:11.666 –> 01:09:15.481
whose stand-in was General Honus Barker. And the professor—

1084
01:09:15.626 –> 01:09:18.704
spoiler alert— decides he’s going to leave

1085
01:09:19.521 –> 01:09:21.557
and that he’s not going to be found.

1086
01:09:23.681 –> 01:09:27.073
This story is interesting in that it

1087
01:09:27.073 –> 01:09:30.886
combines a bunch of different ideas together that we’ve

1088
01:09:30.902 –> 01:09:34.117
sort of been exploring in our own show, going all the way

1089
01:09:34.182 –> 01:09:37.819
from The Trial of Adolf Eichmann by Hannah

1090
01:09:37.900 –> 01:09:40.906
Arendt to our conversations about AI on this show.

1091
01:09:44.002 –> 01:09:47.168
We’ve been worried about our innovations killing us, as I said at the opening.

1092
01:09:48.028 –> 01:09:51.698
Since the H-bomb. I mean, that just— that blew us away,

1093
01:09:52.083 –> 01:09:55.720
right? We even talked about this in my review of the movie Oppenheimer that I

1094
01:09:55.768 –> 01:09:59.358
did with Tom Libby, right? Love that movie. And

1095
01:09:59.774 –> 01:10:03.316
yeah, it was Oscar-bait. And yeah, no one could have done better. But still,

1096
01:10:04.101 –> 01:10:06.601
it’s— it’s— It is— it is a

1097
01:10:07.001 –> 01:10:10.607
testament to the power of the bomb

1098
01:10:11.088 –> 01:10:14.646
that it still scares the hell out of us. Damn near

1099
01:10:14.759 –> 01:10:18.256
90 years later. Matter of fact, I will point out

1100
01:10:18.320 –> 01:10:21.721
something. It’s very interesting that we all stopped yelling about,

1101
01:10:22.058 –> 01:10:25.395
culturally and collectively, yelling about thermonuclear destruction

1102
01:10:26.085 –> 01:10:29.919
right when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. But the second

1103
01:10:29.919 –> 01:10:32.822
the Russians decided they were going to reenter the chat with the invasion of the

1104
01:10:32.887 –> 01:10:36.448
Ukraine in, what was it, 2014, 2015, all of a

1105
01:10:36.448 –> 01:10:40.009
sudden talking about nukes was back on the table.

1106
01:10:43.638 –> 01:10:47.315
Nuclear weapons don’t just drop themselves out of planes. And

1107
01:10:47.411 –> 01:10:50.703
drones don’t just launch themselves over a city. And

1108
01:10:50.799 –> 01:10:54.476
cars, even the self-driving ones, don’t

1109
01:10:54.637 –> 01:10:56.981
just drive themselves into a group of people.

1110
01:10:58.330 –> 01:11:01.991
Just like behind Professor Barnhouse. So this is the thing that Vonnegut

1111
01:11:02.119 –> 01:11:05.090
got to that we are missing even with AI, I think.

1112
01:11:05.895 –> 01:11:09.465
There’s a brain from somewhere back there, and it’s a

1113
01:11:09.546 –> 01:11:13.279
human brain. And very often it’s a corrupted brain.

1114
01:11:18.917 –> 01:11:22.294
The report on Barnhouse Effect Libby is about a man who avoids being used by

1115
01:11:22.311 –> 01:11:25.865
other humans to become a weapon by just deciding to not play the

1116
01:11:25.865 –> 01:11:29.628
game. What happens to leaders? I’ll make

1117
01:11:29.628 –> 01:11:32.458
our turn here when they decide they are going to play another game.

1118
01:11:34.172 –> 01:11:35.809
Rather than the one placed before them?

1119
01:11:38.758 –> 01:11:42.338
Well, you know my obvious answer. I know my— I know your

1120
01:11:42.386 –> 01:11:44.724
obvious answer. I know what you’re gonna say.

1121
01:11:46.600 –> 01:11:49.801
Yeah, I mean, you have to go out and build it up, build it yourself,

1122
01:11:50.254 –> 01:11:53.875
right? Right. You know, you don’t settle for less, um, or

1123
01:11:53.875 –> 01:11:57.283
play a game that isn’t aligned with your values, right?

1124
01:11:57.483 –> 01:12:01.240
Um, just because you’ve— you’re scared to do it on

1125
01:12:01.272 –> 01:12:05.045
your own, right? Um, you need to demonstrate the

1126
01:12:05.045 –> 01:12:08.305
courage. You know, courage is not the absence of fear, but it’s acting,

1127
01:12:08.883 –> 01:12:12.223
you know, in spite of fear. In spite of it. Yeah. Um, because

1128
01:12:12.833 –> 01:12:16.413
it’s aligned with your— you know, what you’re creating is aligned with your values.

1129
01:12:17.232 –> 01:12:21.022
Um, but yeah, this was, you know, AGI came up,

1130
01:12:21.423 –> 01:12:24.683
you know, as I was thinking about this. the, um,

1131
01:12:26.306 –> 01:12:29.905
the whole nuclear, uh, thing.

1132
01:12:30.242 –> 01:12:34.054
I, I— it was interesting when you were saying that it had kind

1133
01:12:34.054 –> 01:12:37.670
of fallen from the wayside, uh, from the

1134
01:12:38.074 –> 01:12:41.497
vernacular discussion up until the, uh,

1135
01:12:42.272 –> 01:12:45.651
you, uh, you know, the color revolution in

1136
01:12:45.651 –> 01:12:49.399
Ukraine. But I actually, I actually think the last time I actually

1137
01:12:50.488 –> 01:12:54.135
Yeah. Of a public policy person, not a politician, but a public policy

1138
01:12:54.135 –> 01:12:57.701
person talking about the potential use of nuclear weapons was when,

1139
01:12:58.394 –> 01:13:01.674
was during the Serbo-Croatian War in the mid-1990s.

1140
01:13:02.840 –> 01:13:06.651
And everybody sort of clapped a hand

1141
01:13:06.651 –> 01:13:10.469
on top of that conversation. And I remember a headline and

1142
01:13:10.469 –> 01:13:14.065
it might’ve been from one of, talk about conspiracy theory. It might’ve been from one

1143
01:13:14.097 –> 01:13:16.044
of those wonderful full

1144
01:13:16.895 –> 01:13:20.347
Davos-invited conspiracy organizations like the

1145
01:13:20.347 –> 01:13:23.784
Trilateral Commission or the CFR, the Council on Foreign

1146
01:13:23.784 –> 01:13:27.477
Relations, some schmuck there. And yes, I do use that term on

1147
01:13:27.477 –> 01:13:31.170
purpose, putting it out there to see what was going to happen. I remember the

1148
01:13:31.170 –> 01:13:34.911
headline being, should we use nukes

1149
01:13:35.746 –> 01:13:39.005
in Europe? And it got clamped down

1150
01:13:39.294 –> 01:13:42.956
like that. 20 years later, the

1151
01:13:43.053 –> 01:13:46.797
Russians now come in. And all of a sudden

1152
01:13:46.845 –> 01:13:50.670
I’m seeing not just in one place, but it’s blooming like 10,000 poppies

1153
01:13:50.686 –> 01:13:53.633
everywhere, to paraphrase from Pol Pot or Chairman Mao.

1154
01:13:56.000 –> 01:13:59.800
Should we use nukes? Is Russia going to use nukes? We’re afraid

1155
01:13:59.800 –> 01:14:03.467
about using nukes. What are the results of nuclear warfare? What is—

1156
01:14:03.564 –> 01:14:07.183
what would a thermonuclear exchange look like? And the question, of course, I always

1157
01:14:07.183 –> 01:14:10.378
ask is, Who the hell is seeding this?

1158
01:14:12.310 –> 01:14:15.964
Like, what is the— to what? I’m— I come from a

1159
01:14:16.029 –> 01:14:19.707
family of lawyers. I hang around a lot of

1160
01:14:19.707 –> 01:14:23.332
lawyers. You learn some things.

1161
01:14:23.590 –> 01:14:27.413
Explains a lot. You learn, you learn some things after a while, right?

1162
01:14:27.863 –> 01:14:30.980
I was, I was even, I was even supposed to go to law school and

1163
01:14:30.980 –> 01:14:33.273
I didn’t. I was like, the world doesn’t need more barristers.

1164
01:14:34.783 –> 01:14:38.409
The question is, qui bono? Who benefits from this?

1165
01:14:39.170 –> 01:14:42.780
And there’s no conceivable benefit from having this conversation

1166
01:14:42.812 –> 01:14:46.630
unless, unless it’s the moving of the Overton

1167
01:14:46.630 –> 01:14:49.587
window. If that’s what we’re doing,

1168
01:14:51.237 –> 01:14:55.029
I would assert that Vladimir Putin successfully moved the Overton window with the

1169
01:14:55.029 –> 01:14:58.804
color revolution. But I don’t know to what end. I don’t

1170
01:14:58.804 –> 01:15:01.773
know who benefits from moving the Overton window on that conversation. conversation

1171
01:15:02.208 –> 01:15:05.900
unless it’s to open the door to talking about, to your point, generative

1172
01:15:05.980 –> 01:15:08.463
AI in terms of world-ending consequences?

1173
01:15:12.496 –> 01:15:15.610
Well, so one, I was thinking about when was the last time that it was

1174
01:15:15.707 –> 01:15:19.493
a big issue before like 2014, and it was

1175
01:15:19.509 –> 01:15:21.926
Chernobyl, right? Yeah.

1176
01:15:22.055 –> 01:15:25.761
Fukushima came and went,

1177
01:15:25.810 –> 01:15:29.624
but it wasn’t one of those, oh, we’re scared. Yeah. And,

1178
01:15:30.708 –> 01:15:34.446
you know, in my eyes, when I was just focused on work and not

1179
01:15:34.495 –> 01:15:38.216
watching the news at all, I probably would have just thought, well, that’s because all

1180
01:15:38.233 –> 01:15:42.059
the nuclear reactors have been disabled, yada, yada, yada. So

1181
01:15:42.107 –> 01:15:45.862
we’re not really afraid of it. But it did show up in

1182
01:15:45.862 –> 01:15:49.570
2014. It’s been— I

1183
01:15:49.570 –> 01:15:52.504
was trying to think back to, was it part of the Obama-Iran

1184
01:15:54.023 –> 01:15:57.841
Uh, did it come up during that? No, that caught— that’s modern-day Iran.

1185
01:15:58.595 –> 01:16:01.531
Yeah, well, 2014, when he— at the end of his,

1186
01:16:02.430 –> 01:16:06.280
um, administration. But wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, no, yeah,

1187
01:16:06.296 –> 01:16:09.617
go ahead. I do think— I think there’s 2 agendas that are— are—

1188
01:16:11.109 –> 01:16:14.928
the conspiracy conspirator in me thinks there’s 2 agendas

1189
01:16:14.960 –> 01:16:18.233
that are being pushed by it. One is we need to find a reason to

1190
01:16:18.233 –> 01:16:21.654
fight in the Middle East. preserve access to oil.

1191
01:16:22.088 –> 01:16:25.688
And so nuclear war was always

1192
01:16:26.283 –> 01:16:30.081
one of those go-tos, just like race wars are a go-to,

1193
01:16:30.387 –> 01:16:34.174
Russia is a go-to. Those are easy playbooks to really

1194
01:16:34.174 –> 01:16:36.784
spin up to create

1195
01:16:38.227 –> 01:16:41.519
reasons for fighting and division.

1196
01:16:43.348 –> 01:16:46.888
The other one is The whole climate agenda really

1197
01:16:46.888 –> 01:16:50.595
picked up around 2014. And if nuclear— if

1198
01:16:50.643 –> 01:16:54.399
nuclear energy is an option, then all of those

1199
01:16:54.415 –> 01:16:58.202
rare earths that we need to mine from those third world countries are no longer

1200
01:16:58.202 –> 01:17:01.508
needed for, you know, for batteries and

1201
01:17:01.508 –> 01:17:05.103
solar and, you know, and windmills

1202
01:17:05.248 –> 01:17:08.521
and all of the money that was going to be made off of,

1203
01:17:09.340 –> 01:17:12.350
you know, clean energy. that’s stupid.

1204
01:17:15.580 –> 01:17:19.373
And, you know, that, you know, if

1205
01:17:19.421 –> 01:17:22.502
you just think about value per mega— you know, cost per

1206
01:17:22.502 –> 01:17:25.907
megawatt and reliability and all that kind of fun stuff,

1207
01:17:26.950 –> 01:17:30.741
nuclear would have been the option that you would pursue. For sure. But there

1208
01:17:30.741 –> 01:17:33.970
weren’t a lot of beneficiaries in the world of— as many

1209
01:17:33.970 –> 01:17:37.727
beneficiaries in the world of nuclear as there are in, you

1210
01:17:37.727 –> 01:17:41.548
know, solar batteries that need to be replaced every 20 years. And you’ve got a

1211
01:17:41.628 –> 01:17:45.289
great recurring revenue model. You’ve got all these, you know, rare earth

1212
01:17:45.337 –> 01:17:48.500
metals that, you know, a lot of people are going to make a lot of

1213
01:17:48.532 –> 01:17:52.241
money off of, yada, yada, yada. Mm-hmm. The

1214
01:17:52.241 –> 01:17:55.307
second that nuclear became popular with these SMRs

1215
01:17:56.142 –> 01:17:59.562
is when AI needed the power

1216
01:17:59.835 –> 01:18:02.950
and these unreliable or inefficient

1217
01:18:03.046 –> 01:18:06.835
mechanisms for power, um, weren’t going to meet the, you

1218
01:18:06.915 –> 01:18:10.592
know, AI needs. Like, data centers can’t be powered

1219
01:18:10.592 –> 01:18:13.916
off of solar. Um, yeah, that’s when you got the nuclear

1220
01:18:14.141 –> 01:18:17.625
SMRs. But, um, the whole reason that I bring—

1221
01:18:18.557 –> 01:18:22.105
yeah. Oh no, did I freeze? Nope.

1222
01:18:22.555 –> 01:18:26.344
Did. Can you still hear me? Yes. Okay. Um,

1223
01:18:30.720 –> 01:18:33.287
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on,

1224
01:18:34.121 –> 01:18:34.571
hold

1225
01:18:38.036 –> 01:18:38.502
on.

1226
01:18:43.653 –> 01:18:47.441
All right. All right. Well, we

1227
01:18:47.441 –> 01:18:50.864
had a little bit of a disruption, technical glitch,

1228
01:18:50.928 –> 01:18:54.618
but essentially, you know, nuclear

1229
01:18:55.397 –> 01:18:58.886
was not something for us to pursue when we

1230
01:18:58.886 –> 01:19:02.537
needed— when we were investing in windmills and

1231
01:19:02.602 –> 01:19:06.231
solar-powered batteries. Now we need it for AGI.

1232
01:19:07.240 –> 01:19:10.701
And so for the greater good, we’re now backing

1233
01:19:10.894 –> 01:19:12.311
these SMRs and

1234
01:19:14.919 –> 01:19:18.462
nuclear. But that does go to the bigger

1235
01:19:18.463 –> 01:19:22.237
question about who decides what technology

1236
01:19:22.872 –> 01:19:25.297
is, how it should be used for the greater good.

1237
01:19:27.760 –> 01:19:31.376
You know, AGI can be used for good, it can be used for

1238
01:19:31.409 –> 01:19:35.189
bad. Yeah. But, you know, as

1239
01:19:35.285 –> 01:19:39.067
I look at like Sam Altman and Dario, I can

1240
01:19:39.067 –> 01:19:42.855
never say Dario’s last name. Yeah,

1241
01:19:43.003 –> 01:19:45.931
they want us to fear, you know, AGI.

1242
01:19:46.886 –> 01:19:49.937
So that they can control the

1243
01:19:49.937 –> 01:19:53.598
regulation, but yet they don’t want us to fear

1244
01:19:53.726 –> 01:19:57.483
it so much that we don’t embrace it in our everyday

1245
01:19:57.483 –> 01:20:00.952
life. Right. It’s this weird two-step

1246
01:20:01.594 –> 01:20:05.431
and report on the Barnhouse Effect sort of reveals this too, right? It’s this weird

1247
01:20:05.431 –> 01:20:09.108
two-step that has been going on in American culture since at minimum

1248
01:20:09.204 –> 01:20:12.865
the ’50s, probably further back than that. I think of

1249
01:20:12.897 –> 01:20:15.799
the old phrase, right? God made all men, or the old quote,

1250
01:20:16.778 –> 01:20:20.434
or quip, maybe it’s actually a better quip about the American West in the

1251
01:20:20.434 –> 01:20:24.267
1880s where God made all men equal, or no, God made all

1252
01:20:24.299 –> 01:20:27.010
men, but Samuel Colt made all men equal. Like,

1253
01:20:28.373 –> 01:20:31.211
oh, well, you hear a lot of that a lot in Texas. And it’s true.

1254
01:20:31.660 –> 01:20:35.365
Like, you know, if you’re going from the

1255
01:20:35.365 –> 01:20:39.038
prairie, if you’re going from back east out into the prairie, Nebraska,

1256
01:20:39.054 –> 01:20:42.245
Oklahoma, Iowa, Kansas, you know,

1257
01:20:42.742 –> 01:20:46.238
Texas with the Comanche back in the, back in the 1860s,

1258
01:20:46.254 –> 01:20:50.070
1870s, 1880s, 1890s. And you were a woman.

1259
01:20:51.161 –> 01:20:54.576
Yeah. Your best friend was a shotgun

1260
01:20:55.154 –> 01:20:58.746
or a six-shooter. That was your best, most reliable friend because you know

1261
01:20:58.762 –> 01:21:02.354
what? Your husband could be killed. Your sons

1262
01:21:02.530 –> 01:21:06.048
could, could, could be killed or captured. And every

1263
01:21:06.080 –> 01:21:09.835
single, not every single, the vast majority of women on

1264
01:21:09.947 –> 01:21:13.347
the Great Plains from back

1265
01:21:13.477 –> 01:21:16.776
east or immigrant parties coming over from Germany,

1266
01:21:17.294 –> 01:21:20.849
they all were armed. And the reason I bring

1267
01:21:20.962 –> 01:21:24.416
that up is because a weapon is just a piece of

1268
01:21:24.432 –> 01:21:28.177
technology. Yeah. It just sits there inanimate until a

1269
01:21:28.225 –> 01:21:31.860
human agent acts on it. And so, From Samuel

1270
01:21:31.893 –> 01:21:35.482
Colt and even from the Gatling gun, but from Samuel Colt all

1271
01:21:35.676 –> 01:21:39.087
the way down to AGI now, there’s a clear line to be

1272
01:21:39.087 –> 01:21:42.701
traced on. To your point about what Sam Altman’s running around

1273
01:21:42.701 –> 01:21:46.169
doing, these inventors claiming that

1274
01:21:46.830 –> 01:21:50.629
they can’t be— they need to be

1275
01:21:50.629 –> 01:21:54.236
constrained by government. Sam Altman running around going, oh dear God, please

1276
01:21:54.268 –> 01:21:57.918
constrain me. I can’t help developing what I’m— shut up. Yeah,

1277
01:21:58.015 –> 01:22:01.736
we know it’s regulatory capture. We know precisely what you’re doing, dude. Come

1278
01:22:01.801 –> 01:22:04.442
on, you’re not fooling anybody.

1279
01:22:05.764 –> 01:22:08.851
Like, tell it to somebody else who fell off the turnip truck 10 minutes ago,

1280
01:22:09.078 –> 01:22:12.731
right? Exactly. Like, it ain’t me, babe. It ain’t me. And by the way, Anthropic,

1281
01:22:12.748 –> 01:22:15.893
I’m looking at you too. Like, all of you doing the same thing.

1282
01:22:17.692 –> 01:22:20.453
And it is this— it is this iteration of

1283
01:22:22.130 –> 01:22:24.898
the disintermediation of consequences.

1284
01:22:26.037 –> 01:22:29.402
there’s a term that always occurs with

1285
01:22:29.418 –> 01:22:33.234
military or with technology that could be used for military applications,

1286
01:22:33.766 –> 01:22:37.494
but that the civilian world gets a hold of first, from the

1287
01:22:37.559 –> 01:22:41.295
revolvers of Samuel Colt all the way to the

1288
01:22:41.295 –> 01:22:45.111
nuclear, nuclear power plants, all the way to

1289
01:22:45.884 –> 01:22:47.962
AGI now. And

1290
01:22:50.492 –> 01:22:54.125
what Vonnegut was pointing out was the absurdity of this, I think, at the

1291
01:22:54.125 –> 01:22:57.032
fundamentally at the bottom. He didn’t know what the solution was. I just like, I

1292
01:22:57.032 –> 01:23:00.710
don’t think leaders know what the solution is. I think he thought that part of

1293
01:23:00.710 –> 01:23:04.325
the solution was just don’t play the game. And that’s what Barnhouse didn’t. That’s what

1294
01:23:04.325 –> 01:23:07.778
this character didn’t do. He just, he just like, you know what?

1295
01:23:08.581 –> 01:23:12.340
Like Bartleby Scrivener, you know what? I’d really rather not.

1296
01:23:12.741 –> 01:23:16.163
Bartleby the Scrivener and that, that great story by Herman Melville. Oh, will you do

1297
01:23:16.163 –> 01:23:19.634
this? No, you know what? I’d really rather not. And I

1298
01:23:19.811 –> 01:23:22.972
think in general, in our time,

1299
01:23:23.940 –> 01:23:27.784
the idea of not playing the game— you talked about conformity earlier—

1300
01:23:29.261 –> 01:23:32.961
is a real— I think that’s a real challenge for people to not

1301
01:23:33.009 –> 01:23:36.839
play the game. It goes along with FOMO. It goes

1302
01:23:36.839 –> 01:23:39.635
along with all these other dynamics that we have that are, again, at a social

1303
01:23:39.651 –> 01:23:43.439
contagion level spread to us by the internet. But

1304
01:23:43.439 –> 01:23:45.414
if you just don’t want to play, just don’t play.

1305
01:23:47.251 –> 01:23:49.819
Well, I mean, sadly,

1306
01:23:51.773 –> 01:23:55.197
I saw the, the preponderance of

1307
01:23:55.261 –> 01:23:58.933
conformity, you know, 6 years ago, which I

1308
01:23:59.289 –> 01:24:03.044
was incredibly surprised by. Right. You

1309
01:24:03.044 –> 01:24:06.347
know, I really did think as Americans, you know, or human

1310
01:24:06.380 –> 01:24:10.019
beings, that there would be more common sense with

1311
01:24:10.019 –> 01:24:13.277
respect to individual health

1312
01:24:14.464 –> 01:24:18.218
and, uh, and ways to maintain your health,

1313
01:24:18.635 –> 01:24:22.261
uh, and that we’d be— and that there was such a distrust

1314
01:24:22.823 –> 01:24:26.432
in the government and health system that people would

1315
01:24:26.432 –> 01:24:30.090
naturally be calling BS. Mm-hmm. But, um,

1316
01:24:30.684 –> 01:24:33.829
this need to— it goes to status,

1317
01:24:34.037 –> 01:24:37.037
and the need to belong is a lot more

1318
01:24:37.342 –> 01:24:40.919
important to many people than not.

1319
01:24:41.256 –> 01:24:44.882
And, you know, and there’s an animal instinct and a survival instinct associated with

1320
01:24:44.882 –> 01:24:48.026
that because in theory, you’re, you know, in the old days you were more

1321
01:24:48.074 –> 01:24:51.909
protected, you know, in the bigger group and you were exposed if you were out

1322
01:24:52.165 –> 01:24:55.518
alone, you know, same like with, you know, pack animals.

1323
01:24:56.192 –> 01:24:59.352
Mm-hmm. Um, but, uh,

1324
01:25:00.748 –> 01:25:04.438
I, I just have a wire, you know, you would, you had

1325
01:25:04.438 –> 01:25:08.267
said that the reason that Americans, um, couldn’t be

1326
01:25:08.267 –> 01:25:11.494
controlled in the same way that Australians and Europeans were,

1327
01:25:12.446 –> 01:25:15.414
um, is because of Christianity. And

1328
01:25:16.318 –> 01:25:17.903
I, I’m not sure that

1329
01:25:20.144 –> 01:25:23.848
that’s it. I think the people who were driven

1330
01:25:23.880 –> 01:25:27.271
to go to America all had,

1331
01:25:27.978 –> 01:25:31.804
yeah, not necessarily a rebellious instinct, but there

1332
01:25:31.933 –> 01:25:35.689
was a pioneering instinct. And that, you know,

1333
01:25:36.958 –> 01:25:40.091
I have this desire to go to Scotland, you know,

1334
01:25:40.702 –> 01:25:42.694
now to see my peeps, you know.

1335
01:25:44.108 –> 01:25:47.852
And it’s more like I want to see the

1336
01:25:48.045 –> 01:25:50.809
blood that I’m, you know, that I’m birthed from.

1337
01:25:51.837 –> 01:25:55.485
Braveheart warrior type. And I

1338
01:25:55.854 –> 01:25:59.582
think that, you know, whether it be the pilgrims or, you know, or

1339
01:25:59.695 –> 01:26:03.350
others, You know, these were individuals who were—

1340
01:26:06.249 –> 01:26:09.776
who couldn’t stand within the system and they

1341
01:26:09.776 –> 01:26:13.387
couldn’t conform and they refused to conform. Right.

1342
01:26:14.515 –> 01:26:17.740
So I just think that’s naturally our blood and our system.

1343
01:26:18.224 –> 01:26:21.402
But I continue to be

1344
01:26:21.402 –> 01:26:24.838
surprised, and I shouldn’t be,

1345
01:26:25.402 –> 01:26:28.291
at how many people choose who will, um,

1346
01:26:29.375 –> 01:26:33.207
who will shift their values to justify

1347
01:26:34.856 –> 01:26:38.420
roles and positions and decisions that they make. And

1348
01:26:38.500 –> 01:26:42.326
the— and I think it was— who was the, um, the Innovator’s

1349
01:26:42.375 –> 01:26:45.791
Dilemma? Christian— Oh, Clayton Christensen. Clayton

1350
01:26:45.808 –> 01:26:49.646
Christensen, you know, who had— it was very strong. He

1351
01:26:49.646 –> 01:26:53.407
was Mormon, very strong in his principles, and would

1352
01:26:53.407 –> 01:26:57.226
never— I can’t remember if it was like Sundays where he would never work or

1353
01:26:57.453 –> 01:27:01.245
he just refused. He said, if I make an exception once,

1354
01:27:02.000 –> 01:27:05.022
it’s the first of a million cuts

1355
01:27:06.677 –> 01:27:10.427
in moving away from my principles. And it is

1356
01:27:10.524 –> 01:27:13.729
in those small moments that we make decisions

1357
01:27:14.566 –> 01:27:17.967
that are counter to our value system

1358
01:27:18.254 –> 01:27:21.899
that will erode and allow

1359
01:27:22.092 –> 01:27:25.756
us to move away from who we are

1360
01:27:26.833 –> 01:27:29.985
in order to conform and belong.

1361
01:27:32.276 –> 01:27:35.743
And I’m fortunate that I’ve just never had that ability.

1362
01:27:37.737 –> 01:27:41.148
There’s something in my constitution that

1363
01:27:41.695 –> 01:27:45.214
if something doesn’t feel right to me after I’ve done it, I

1364
01:27:45.343 –> 01:27:48.916
can’t live with myself. Yeah. And

1365
01:27:49.012 –> 01:27:52.762
while it doesn’t undo the damage

1366
01:27:52.794 –> 01:27:55.839
that I may have done, names I may have called people, you

1367
01:27:56.672 –> 01:28:00.133
know, decisions that I may have made, stealing stickers as a young

1368
01:28:00.229 –> 01:28:03.851
kid, you know, those are things that I can’t, you know,

1369
01:28:04.652 –> 01:28:08.145
I knew were wrong and I couldn’t live with myself if I did again,

1370
01:28:08.899 –> 01:28:12.626
right? So I changed my behaviors. But it shows up a

1371
01:28:12.626 –> 01:28:15.751
lot in the corporate environment because I grew up very ambitious

1372
01:28:16.334 –> 01:28:20.171
and had great goals for myself. But

1373
01:28:20.171 –> 01:28:21.858
one of my driving—

1374
01:28:23.562 –> 01:28:27.242
fortunately, I’m extremely curious and I’m more focused on learning

1375
01:28:27.435 –> 01:28:30.757
and making a positive impact than I am with belonging.

1376
01:28:32.309 –> 01:28:35.622
Right, right, right. You know, so I

1377
01:28:36.832 –> 01:28:40.543
One can’t go against my values. Um, it just doesn’t

1378
01:28:40.543 –> 01:28:43.900
sit in my body. And, you know, it’s the same way

1379
01:28:44.044 –> 01:28:47.867
that, um, I’m more comfortable being uncomfortable than I

1380
01:28:47.916 –> 01:28:51.690
am being comfortable. Like, if I’m comfortable, my body is like, get up

1381
01:28:51.690 –> 01:28:55.063
and move. Mm-hmm. You know, you

1382
01:28:55.369 –> 01:28:58.918
need to get out there and get uncomfortable because that’s where

1383
01:28:58.918 –> 01:29:02.099
growth is. Yeah, danger is

1384
01:29:02.260 –> 01:29:05.689
Danger is in comfort. Yes. Right.

1385
01:29:06.075 –> 01:29:09.923
Yeah, go ahead. No, no, no. I think that then leads into our

1386
01:29:09.923 –> 01:29:13.726
last story and our last point as we round the corner here. Because, you

1387
01:29:13.726 –> 01:29:17.501
know, the last few— the last— this last season, we’ve

1388
01:29:17.501 –> 01:29:20.921
been trying to very much focus on what do we do?

1389
01:29:21.534 –> 01:29:25.341
What are the practical things that we do, right, to restore not only

1390
01:29:25.405 –> 01:29:28.373
our culture, but to build for the coming spring? Right. And we started on this

1391
01:29:28.470 –> 01:29:32.202
idea back with with, with Candide and the great

1392
01:29:32.202 –> 01:29:35.446
instauration with Francis Bacon. We continued it through our

1393
01:29:35.558 –> 01:29:39.251
conversations around Shakespeare and around the Constitution. And of course,

1394
01:29:39.283 –> 01:29:41.916
we’re going to continue it, you know, this month as we go through the sci-fi

1395
01:29:41.916 –> 01:29:45.609
genre, because I do think there’s some solutions here.

1396
01:29:45.914 –> 01:29:49.447
And one of them is— go ahead. Yeah, no, no, no. I know we want

1397
01:29:49.447 –> 01:29:51.566
to move on, but I also want to go back to

1398
01:29:55.644 –> 01:29:59.383
the, the concept of, you know, the institution telling you

1399
01:29:59.415 –> 01:30:03.187
what good is, right? Yeah. And you knowing it’s

1400
01:30:03.187 –> 01:30:06.188
not. And that’s why, like, using your

1401
01:30:06.316 –> 01:30:09.734
powers to defeat the enemy was

1402
01:30:10.248 –> 01:30:13.794
good, right? Yet our,

1403
01:30:14.179 –> 01:30:17.630
you know, our, our hero is like, no,

1404
01:30:18.015 –> 01:30:21.497
like, doing good— I’m taking myself out of this.

1405
01:30:21.867 –> 01:30:25.459
You telling me what is good does not, is not

1406
01:30:25.829 –> 01:30:29.227
good in my heart and in my values. Right. And so,

1407
01:30:30.000 –> 01:30:33.580
yeah, but these institutions telling you and you

1408
01:30:33.644 –> 01:30:36.838
not listening to your heart or your instincts

1409
01:30:37.499 –> 01:30:39.418
is where we lose ourselves as humans.

1410
01:30:41.365 –> 01:30:44.144
I think there’s another place we lose ourselves and it’s something that you said before.

1411
01:30:44.677 –> 01:30:48.491
You listed status, place, and then geography. I think, I

1412
01:30:48.556 –> 01:30:52.248
think geography really matters, um, outside of maybe a larger conversation

1413
01:30:52.248 –> 01:30:55.908
about migration or immigration. I think at a very narrow level, place matters.

1414
01:30:56.662 –> 01:31:00.386
Yeah. And that’s reflected in, in this story, Where I

1415
01:31:00.659 –> 01:31:04.496
Live. I’ll read a couple of things

1416
01:31:04.833 –> 01:31:08.622
here from this. I think you’ll find interesting. From Where I Live.

1417
01:31:09.344 –> 01:31:13.036
Not very long ago, an encyclopedia salesman stopped by America’s oldest library

1418
01:31:13.036 –> 01:31:16.792
building, which is the lovely Sturgis Library in Barnstable Village on Cape

1419
01:31:16.792 –> 01:31:20.577
Cod’s North Shore. And he pointed out to the easily alarmed librarian that

1420
01:31:20.577 –> 01:31:24.200
the library’s most recent general reference work was a 1938 Britannica

1421
01:31:24.569 –> 01:31:28.272
backstopped by a 1910 Americana. He said many important things had happened

1422
01:31:28.272 –> 01:31:31.686
since 1938, naming, among others, penicillin and Hitler’s invasion of

1423
01:31:31.782 –> 01:31:35.469
Poland. Pause. Just like who owns the dictionary, who owns the

1424
01:31:35.469 –> 01:31:39.285
Encyclopedia Britannica? Haha. I see you. I

1425
01:31:39.333 –> 01:31:42.667
see you, Vonnegut. I see you working. Back to the story.

1426
01:31:42.779 –> 01:31:46.519
Exactly. He was advised to take his astonishment to some of

1427
01:31:46.551 –> 01:31:50.212
the library’s directors. He was given their names and addresses.

1428
01:31:50.726 –> 01:31:53.343
There was a Cabot on the list and a Lowell and a Kittredge and some

1429
01:31:53.376 –> 01:31:56.699
others. The librarian told him that he had a chance of catching several directors all

1430
01:31:56.748 –> 01:31:59.558
at once if he would go to the Barnstable Yacht Club. So he went down

1431
01:31:59.558 –> 01:32:02.143
the narrow Yacht Club Road, nearly broke his neck as he hit a series of

1432
01:32:02.191 –> 01:32:05.659
terrific bumps put in the road to discourage speeders, to kill them if

1433
01:32:05.740 –> 01:32:09.288
possible. He wanted a martini, wondered if a

1434
01:32:09.288 –> 01:32:12.243
non-member could get served at the bar. He was appalled to discover that the club

1435
01:32:12.243 –> 01:32:15.743
was nothing but a shack of 14 feet wide. And 30 feet long,

1436
01:32:16.273 –> 01:32:19.869
a touch of the Ozarks in Massachusetts. It contained a

1437
01:32:19.933 –> 01:32:23.722
hilariously warped ping pong table, a wire lost and found basket with

1438
01:32:23.722 –> 01:32:27.173
sandy, fragrant contents, and an upright piano that had been under a leak in the

1439
01:32:27.173 –> 01:32:30.914
roof for years. There wasn’t any bar, any

1440
01:32:30.930 –> 01:32:34.558
telephone, any electricity. There weren’t any members there either.

1441
01:32:35.184 –> 01:32:38.090
To cap it all off, there wasn’t a drop of water in the harbor. To

1442
01:32:38.090 –> 01:32:41.509
the tide, which can be as great as 14 feet, was utterly out.

1443
01:32:42.664 –> 01:32:46.287
And the so-called yachts, antique wooden Rhodes, 18s,

1444
01:32:46.575 –> 01:32:49.926
Beetle Cats, and a couple of Boston Whalers were resting on the bluish-brown

1445
01:32:50.022 –> 01:32:53.565
glurp of the emptied harbor’s floor. Clouds of gulls and terns were

1446
01:32:53.645 –> 01:32:57.252
yelling about all that glurp and about all the good things in it they were

1447
01:32:57.252 –> 01:33:00.923
finding to eat. A few men were out there too,

1448
01:33:00.939 –> 01:33:04.675
digging clams as fat as partridges from the rim of Sandy Neck, the 10-mile-long

1449
01:33:04.723 –> 01:33:08.228
sand finger that separates the harbor from the ice-cold bay. And ducks and geese and

1450
01:33:08.309 –> 01:33:12.150
herons and other waterfowl out there too, teeming in the great salt marsh that

1451
01:33:12.215 –> 01:33:15.927
bounds the harbor on the west. And near the harbor’s narrow mouth,

1452
01:33:16.105 –> 01:33:19.634
a yawl from Marblehead with a 6-foot keel lay on her side,

1453
01:33:20.149 –> 01:33:23.402
waiting for the water to come back in again. She should never have come to

1454
01:33:23.419 –> 01:33:26.434
Barnstable Village, not with a keel

1455
01:33:27.369 –> 01:33:31.011
like that. This story

1456
01:33:31.124 –> 01:33:34.781
opens, Welcome to the Monkey House, where I live. And I

1457
01:33:34.975 –> 01:33:38.165
wanted to talk about this as a close to our

1458
01:33:38.293 –> 01:33:40.839
conversation today with Libby Unger because

1459
01:33:42.063 –> 01:33:45.874
Wendell Berry, the American gadfly and writer

1460
01:33:46.423 –> 01:33:50.202
who, who rhapsodized

1461
01:33:50.299 –> 01:33:54.082
prosaically about topsoil and

1462
01:33:54.260 –> 01:33:58.109
everything else from rural Kentucky, was a

1463
01:33:58.238 –> 01:34:01.550
person who believed— he died at 92 years old, lived a long life, by the

1464
01:34:01.550 –> 01:34:05.020
way. Same age as the recently departed, as the recently

1465
01:34:05.053 –> 01:34:08.649
departed Gloria Steinem, interestingly enough. Hmm.

1466
01:34:09.949 –> 01:34:13.674
Wendell Berry wrote for the vast majority of his career about the power of

1467
01:34:13.786 –> 01:34:17.286
place, the power of farming, topsoil,

1468
01:34:17.639 –> 01:34:21.444
climate. He wrote about the perils of

1469
01:34:21.492 –> 01:34:25.008
technology and capitalism at scale.

1470
01:34:25.747 –> 01:34:29.503
He wrote about the primacy of locality. And

1471
01:34:29.921 –> 01:34:33.564
the need to stay local, at the very minimum to

1472
01:34:33.564 –> 01:34:36.807
be regional, but to stay local. He wrote from a perspective,

1473
01:34:37.626 –> 01:34:41.414
um, that included a long chain of authors of the 20th century, from John

1474
01:34:41.414 –> 01:34:44.753
Steinbeck to Katherine Anne Porter, um, Charles

1475
01:34:44.865 –> 01:34:48.701
Portis, who wrote True Grit and never left Arkansas, by the way,

1476
01:34:49.103 –> 01:34:51.687
and Harper Lee, who wrote, you know, To Kill a Mockingbird.

1477
01:34:52.955 –> 01:34:56.729
Vonnegut is hooking onto that tradition in Where I Live. Even in

1478
01:34:56.745 –> 01:35:00.126
the way he describes Barnstable Village, the way he describes the

1479
01:35:00.126 –> 01:35:03.813
salesman’s frustrations, and then eventually a couple pages in, he

1480
01:35:03.813 –> 01:35:07.400
leaves off from the salesman and goes on to describe the village as a

1481
01:35:07.448 –> 01:35:11.064
place where everybody knows everybody. And from the

1482
01:35:11.064 –> 01:35:14.889
perspective of folks outside, nothing much is happening there, and

1483
01:35:14.921 –> 01:35:17.299
the people inside are just fine with it.

1484
01:35:19.073 –> 01:35:22.684
It’s not that they don’t want anymore or they don’t have ambitions. It’s that they

1485
01:35:22.829 –> 01:35:25.012
are, as St. Paul might say,

1486
01:35:26.392 –> 01:35:29.811
satisfied with where they are at. They are

1487
01:35:29.827 –> 01:35:33.648
content to be in Barnstable Village, content to

1488
01:35:33.664 –> 01:35:37.147
be in the place where they are. Now,

1489
01:35:37.773 –> 01:35:41.449
writers write what they write about and what they know, right? They always write from

1490
01:35:41.465 –> 01:35:45.205
what they know. And Vonnegut knew about being grounded. And this is the thing

1491
01:35:45.318 –> 01:35:49.074
I think that we’re missing here, grounded in a geography, grounded in a

1492
01:35:49.074 –> 01:35:51.462
place, grounded in a, in a locality.

1493
01:35:53.117 –> 01:35:56.869
And this leads to a point that I actually brought up earlier in an earlier

1494
01:35:56.869 –> 01:36:00.345
episode, probably a couple of years ago with Tom Libby, where I asked this question,

1495
01:36:01.052 –> 01:36:04.844
um, are there ever going to be any more great regional writers coming out of

1496
01:36:04.844 –> 01:36:08.218
America? And I think writing is

1497
01:36:08.218 –> 01:36:11.871
struggling right now because there aren’t a lot of great regional writers because

1498
01:36:11.903 –> 01:36:15.659
everybody’s captured by the internet. Everybody’s captured by social media. And so if

1499
01:36:15.659 –> 01:36:19.411
you’re a writer, you feel as though you have to write for this

1500
01:36:19.411 –> 01:36:22.763
vast expanse of global whatever, when in

1501
01:36:22.763 –> 01:36:26.307
reality, the best writers of the 20th century, from

1502
01:36:26.307 –> 01:36:29.338
Toni Morrison to Wendell Berry, wrote

1503
01:36:29.338 –> 01:36:33.107
specifically about places, specifically

1504
01:36:33.139 –> 01:36:36.218
about geography, specific about local things

1505
01:36:36.715 –> 01:36:40.307
happening to local people in local times, and

1506
01:36:40.644 –> 01:36:44.399
then Those books were published, which is a whole other kind of conversation,

1507
01:36:45.057 –> 01:36:48.218
and they scaled and found advocates and

1508
01:36:48.218 –> 01:36:51.717
ambassadors in other places. So we’re going to read Beloved in

1509
01:36:51.717 –> 01:36:55.504
November on this show. We’re going to read Beloved. I was challenged

1510
01:36:55.504 –> 01:36:59.260
to cover Toni Morrison, and it’s fine. We’re going to read Beloved. And I’m

1511
01:36:59.260 –> 01:37:02.807
going to bet that Beloved, from what I’ve read about Toni

1512
01:37:02.807 –> 01:37:06.626
Morrison, I’m going to bet it’s just about as local as

1513
01:37:06.738 –> 01:37:09.434
East of Eden was. by John Steinbeck.

1514
01:37:11.110 –> 01:37:14.726
The locality thing is the thing I think we’re missing. The place

1515
01:37:14.920 –> 01:37:18.084
geography thing is the thing that Wendell Berry was on. And I think that that’s

1516
01:37:18.084 –> 01:37:21.914
what we have to recapture. So Libby, how can leaders stay local

1517
01:37:21.914 –> 01:37:25.762
in their mindset and attachment, but also be engaged globally, or at least

1518
01:37:25.762 –> 01:37:29.305
regionally in the world? And I hate this term, but it is the one we

1519
01:37:29.370 –> 01:37:31.467
use. The world we live in today.

1520
01:37:34.194 –> 01:37:38.030
Well, um, the piece of when— about Wendell Berry

1521
01:37:38.191 –> 01:37:41.625
that you didn’t bring up is that he was

1522
01:37:42.219 –> 01:37:45.750
a Stan— he was, um, very elite and had a

1523
01:37:45.750 –> 01:37:48.847
promising career at Stanford University.

1524
01:37:49.601 –> 01:37:53.341
And he specifically opted out because he yearned

1525
01:37:53.999 –> 01:37:57.289
for what I would call real life. He decided he wasn’t going to play the

1526
01:37:57.289 –> 01:38:00.193
game anymore. That’s right. He went and played a different game. He went and played

1527
01:38:00.193 –> 01:38:03.878
a different game. And it also goes back to what you were

1528
01:38:03.878 –> 01:38:07.275
talking about with Vonnegut, um, in that good

1529
01:38:07.388 –> 01:38:11.073
writers don’t know how to create, how to build a, or

1530
01:38:11.073 –> 01:38:14.422
fix a refrigerator. Mm-hmm. And the concept is,

1531
01:38:15.240 –> 01:38:18.941
you know, how do you balance? Yeah, so for me, I, I feel

1532
01:38:18.941 –> 01:38:22.515
like I’ve balanced this. Like, I know how to fix things.

1533
01:38:23.332 –> 01:38:27.166
I understand how life is created. you know, I’m

1534
01:38:27.262 –> 01:38:30.396
in touch with life, you know, from

1535
01:38:30.396 –> 01:38:33.995
gardening to, you know, my animals, to being

1536
01:38:34.011 –> 01:38:37.739
able to fix minor things around the house. But I also

1537
01:38:37.787 –> 01:38:41.611
had an intellectual education, and I’ve

1538
01:38:41.611 –> 01:38:45.034
danced in both worlds. Mm-hmm. And the, you

1539
01:38:45.034 –> 01:38:48.617
know, and I think you value

1540
01:38:48.634 –> 01:38:51.381
place and real life

1541
01:38:53.148 –> 01:38:56.632
the more you’d be— yeah, once you’ve become detached from it,

1542
01:38:56.921 –> 01:39:00.020
when you live in the city life and everything,

1543
01:39:00.598 –> 01:39:03.777
everyone just believes what they read and they ignore their

1544
01:39:03.825 –> 01:39:06.298
experience. Mm-hmm. And they,

1545
01:39:07.582 –> 01:39:11.275
they choose status,

1546
01:39:12.480 –> 01:39:16.012
um, as dictated by who, based on what

1547
01:39:16.012 –> 01:39:18.806
values. over real

1548
01:39:19.545 –> 01:39:23.366
meaning that we get in place. And your

1549
01:39:23.414 –> 01:39:26.915
place that resonates with me is

1550
01:39:26.947 –> 01:39:30.254
like my family’s, you know, uh,

1551
01:39:30.881 –> 01:39:34.574
origins in Nebraska. You know, real

1552
01:39:34.574 –> 01:39:38.074
people with real problems. Right. Um, who are also,

1553
01:39:39.294 –> 01:39:42.828
you know, my dad would say about my uncle who stayed back, And

1554
01:39:42.876 –> 01:39:46.423
didn’t go to Wall Street, but he understood Main

1555
01:39:46.536 –> 01:39:50.294
Street. And I think as leaders, we

1556
01:39:50.294 –> 01:39:54.023
need to— it’s about, it’s really

1557
01:39:54.039 –> 01:39:57.736
about understanding all aspects of

1558
01:39:57.930 –> 01:40:01.190
the world that we operate in. And there isn’t like

1559
01:40:01.401 –> 01:40:03.744
place and locality

1560
01:40:06.930 –> 01:40:10.717
is meaningful if it grounds you in like

1561
01:40:11.814 –> 01:40:15.426
the real world, in physics of the real world,

1562
01:40:18.898 –> 01:40:21.465
in real human endeavors,

1563
01:40:23.338 –> 01:40:26.192
connection, the true connection to

1564
01:40:27.365 –> 01:40:31.109
soul-based living. Mm-hmm. We

1565
01:40:31.157 –> 01:40:34.957
need— that’s how you can lead teams is when you understand

1566
01:40:34.957 –> 01:40:38.641
people’s different motivations. And you have motivations that

1567
01:40:38.850 –> 01:40:42.527
are intellectualized, and you have motivations that

1568
01:40:42.527 –> 01:40:45.690
are part of the, you know, the physical and 3D

1569
01:40:46.782 –> 01:40:50.459
world. And we need to be able to bridge both.

1570
01:40:51.615 –> 01:40:54.858
Wendell Berry bridged both. Yeah. Right?

1571
01:40:55.388 –> 01:40:58.921
Because he could dance between the intellectual and the

1572
01:40:58.921 –> 01:41:01.779
physical. Vonnegut also

1573
01:41:03.255 –> 01:41:06.994
could balance the intellectual with the physical. And

1574
01:41:06.994 –> 01:41:10.393
those are the— this almost gets back into the

1575
01:41:10.458 –> 01:41:14.103
balance that we were talking about earlier between too much structure and

1576
01:41:14.103 –> 01:41:17.127
not enough. Mm-hmm. Place

1577
01:41:19.170 –> 01:41:23.005
in a world that is dictating

1578
01:41:23.182 –> 01:41:25.261
urban elite values,

1579
01:41:28.505 –> 01:41:31.981
does matter if you’re going to be grounded, to be away

1580
01:41:32.143 –> 01:41:35.439
from urban and intellectual states,

1581
01:41:35.939 –> 01:41:39.470
right? Mm-hmm. Like,

1582
01:41:39.566 –> 01:41:42.968
that’s why Iowa feels so, so attractive

1583
01:41:43.916 –> 01:41:47.098
when the only one— when one philosophy

1584
01:41:47.757 –> 01:41:51.308
is the driving force to feel connected, the place you

1585
01:41:51.308 –> 01:41:54.969
choose really matters. So,

1586
01:41:55.034 –> 01:41:58.578
as leaders, we need to find a way to balance

1587
01:41:59.142 –> 01:42:02.888
the intellectual and the ideal with the real. I

1588
01:42:02.953 –> 01:42:06.762
think what you said there is hugely important. And I’m going to close on

1589
01:42:06.762 –> 01:42:10.506
this note because I got to wrap up. I’m going to close on this note.

1590
01:42:13.618 –> 01:42:17.321
I think that balance that you’re talking about, yes, it’s what people are

1591
01:42:17.321 –> 01:42:21.035
seeking. And I think that I think that we will ruthlessly move in

1592
01:42:21.035 –> 01:42:24.722
that direction over the course of the next turning. I think that’s what actually

1593
01:42:24.722 –> 01:42:27.624
we’re going to wind up in. Yeah. I don’t know

1594
01:42:27.912 –> 01:42:31.696
practically how that’s going to look like or what that’s going to look

1595
01:42:31.696 –> 01:42:35.190
like, but I do know that that balance will be a thing.

1596
01:42:35.880 –> 01:42:39.679
So we’ll have the AI, we’ll have crypto, we’ll have whatever is going to happen

1597
01:42:39.695 –> 01:42:42.340
with VR, we’ll have the internet, we’ll have social media. None of those things are

1598
01:42:42.340 –> 01:42:45.932
going to go away, but Barry represents as

1599
01:42:46.028 –> 01:42:49.400
does Vonnegut and Steinbeck. And I mentioned

1600
01:42:49.400 –> 01:42:52.194
Katherine Porter and even Toni Morrison

1601
01:42:52.949 –> 01:42:56.305
represents the, the, the, the

1602
01:42:56.546 –> 01:42:58.778
deep psychology,

1603
01:42:58.987 –> 01:43:02.745
psychologization of how we think

1604
01:43:02.745 –> 01:43:06.518
about that local grounding. Yep. Um, by

1605
01:43:06.518 –> 01:43:09.858
the way, you can get local grounding in very practical material ways.

1606
01:43:10.276 –> 01:43:13.969
Here’s a couple of practical material ways. Jiu-jitsu. Jiu-jitsu. Absolutely. It’s the first

1607
01:43:13.969 –> 01:43:17.308
time at jiu-jitsu and we’re closing. Look at that. You got me first time. I

1608
01:43:17.340 –> 01:43:20.661
was almost out. Um, but yes, jiu-jitsu,

1609
01:43:21.191 –> 01:43:24.929
um, third places. We’ve kind of talked a little bit about

1610
01:43:25.041 –> 01:43:28.314
that here, but those need— those I think will come back. I’m seeing

1611
01:43:28.426 –> 01:43:32.116
gradual pop-ups all over the country of people trying to revisit

1612
01:43:32.116 –> 01:43:35.373
that. Um, also it will come in

1613
01:43:35.806 –> 01:43:38.983
more institutionalized structures in our brain. Yes, churches,

1614
01:43:39.560 –> 01:43:43.316
um, community centers. Volunteering, none of those things are going

1615
01:43:43.348 –> 01:43:47.057
to go away. They will just be transformed, I think, into

1616
01:43:47.121 –> 01:43:50.349
being more concentrated locally rather

1617
01:43:50.573 –> 01:43:54.266
than being so focused as we have been for

1618
01:43:54.266 –> 01:43:57.975
the last 25 years of this fourth turning, being so

1619
01:43:58.023 –> 01:44:01.524
focused on what’s happening globally and feeling as though we have to respond to all

1620
01:44:01.572 –> 01:44:05.393
the things happening globally. We don’t. And Barry gives us

1621
01:44:05.505 –> 01:44:08.843
a way to, again, psychologize that. Vonnegut in,

1622
01:44:09.276 –> 01:44:13.061
in Where I Live, and even in Harrison Bergeron and the Barnhouse Report on

1623
01:44:13.061 –> 01:44:16.252
the Barnhouse Effect, and all the other stories that are in Welcome to the Monkey

1624
01:44:16.316 –> 01:44:19.876
House gives us a way of grounding that, of psychologizing that, of thinking about that,

1625
01:44:19.892 –> 01:44:23.517
because we need both ends. We need the practical material stuff that’s

1626
01:44:23.533 –> 01:44:27.317
very hardheaded, but we also need the psychologization of it. We

1627
01:44:27.317 –> 01:44:30.332
need those 2 things together. And books are going to ground us

1628
01:44:31.230 –> 01:44:33.347
in, in that way, I think, as well.

1629
01:44:35.260 –> 01:44:39.037
All right. I’d like to thank Libby Unger coming on the show

1630
01:44:39.037 –> 01:44:41.255
today. As usual, always a great conversation, Libby.

1631
01:44:42.573 –> 01:44:45.626
So fun. And with that, well,

1632
01:44:46.992 –> 01:44:47.475
we’re out.