Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo with Tom Libby and Jesan Sorrells

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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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202. So

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we’re going to open up

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with a summary of some information

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from our book today, because the book that we are covering today is

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still under copyright, and so we don’t want to— we don’t want to get

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ourselves or the author in trouble.

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The book that we are going to be reading, and again, I’m going to start

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off with a summary, is divided up into 4 parts,

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and each part focuses on a different aspect

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of a character, a man who, when we open up the

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book, the first part, cannot sleep. He wanders

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around his high-rise, multi-roomed apartment, Seeking

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rest but cannot find it. This high-rise penthouse

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apartment has all the things, the

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materialistic things that any good 1980s

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millionaire would have in their apartment,

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including a poetry room, including windows

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with views, including a koi

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pond, a marble lobby with

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2 elevators. And of course, it’s a

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tower, a tower that rises above all of the banal

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little people. By the way, this comes back later.

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It’s going to be an important detail. The character can’t sleep.

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The character’s name is Eric Packer, and when you first meet him, he

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merely refers to himself as he. And

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the first thing that he desires is to, ironically enough,

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get a haircut. But he can’t.

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He can’t because the president’s in town. And by the

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way, before you ask which president, it’s the president of the United

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States. They make that clear in the novel.

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By the way, he doesn’t just refer to himself as I. He doesn’t just say,

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I want a haircut. He then switches to, we want a haircut.

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Going back through the first and third person is in the first part of the

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novel as he goes in and out of his own consciousness, trying to

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understand his own mind as he goes across town in a

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white stretch limousine that’s corked to

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avoid the silence— to avoid the noise of the New York City streets,

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just to get something as banal as a haircut.

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Now, there are other characters that are introduced in the first part of this novel.

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There’s a security guard. a thick-necked man named

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Torval, whose job it is to keep Eric Packer

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alive and to monitor for threats. There’s also

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analysts that meet him in this limousine, people that come in and out,

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and not just analysts, but lovers, uh,

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wives, and others who float in and out of

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his stretch limousine as it crawls through

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Midtown Manhattan traffic towards something as banal

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as a haircut.

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This novel is one of

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several that were written during the course of the

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1980s and the 1990s, where the author today tried to make

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sense of what was going on at the

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intersection of wealth, culture, status, And

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finally, even in this novel where the inside of the limousine

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features banks and rows of computers, technology.

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This novel was written right at the beginning of,

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well, the beginning of the rebuilding after the dot-com

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crash. And this novel was published 2 years

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after 9/11. And in the world that we live in

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today, Well, the deep 20th, 21st

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century that we are in, a novel like this probably

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wouldn’t have been written. And that is why it’s important to

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look at this novel today.

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There is an idea that

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the past grows brighter and

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brighter, even as the future seems grimier and grimier.

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And this idea haunts the footsteps of Western man like a specter.

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That’s one of the pieces that’s in this novel, one

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of the points that it’s made. And the coming

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apart of the understanding and communication among people

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driven primarily by technology is something that this novel

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focuses on. Now, our author today

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was one of the quiet documenters of the last 50 years. of not only

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American culture unraveling, but also he was a

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documenter and a predictor of the last 25 years of chaos

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that we’ve all sort of been through. He also

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accomplished something that very few American authors, at least that I’m aware of, have done

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in the last 50 years. He proposed actual solutions

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to the problems that we face. Sure, not solutions we may

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like and not solutions that make us comfortable, but they are solutions,

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Nonetheless, as was once infamously stated or

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quipped in one of the great movies of our time, The Big Lebowski,

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say what you want about National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos.

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Well, say what you want about what this author is proposing today, at least it’s

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a solution. The author proposes,

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and we as readers presuppose, and then we have to figure

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out, does this actually, or is this actually going to work in

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reality? Today on the show, we’re

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going to discuss themes from a book I read for the first time when I

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was 23 years old. And reading it again now,

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almost 25 years later, well, I can say this, and I

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think our co-host today will agree with me, uh, the book did not

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age well.

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Resuming our month-long jog through the science fiction

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genre, We will try to extract lessons, at least a couple,

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from a book described once by a New York Times— New York

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Magazine, a New Yorker magazine writer as, quote,

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an Ayn Rand hero in a minimalist rendering of Ulysses

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that morphs into an urban thriller. We’re going to be looking at the

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book Cosmopolis by Don

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DeLillo.

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Leaders, you won’t find solutions to problems

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the way Eric Packer was looking for them, floating above the problems themselves

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and by committing to nothing and to no one. We’ve already tried that. We

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tried that for the last 25 years and it hasn’t worked. We need you to

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get out of the limo, get into the office, and

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actually get in the game.

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And joining me And to kick us off,

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back from our 200th episode conversation with a bunch of guest

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co-hosts smarter than both of us put together,

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is our advocate for pragmatism in leadership. And he’s going to tell us

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what he thought of the movie that they made about 9 years

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later based off this book, Tom Libby.

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How you doing today, Tom? How’s it going?

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I am doing very well. Really, really good day today. I mean,

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for those of you who don’t know New England, This is probably one of the

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5 or 10 days in New England that you actually love being from here.

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This is the weather. It’s so nice. Literally perfect, you

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know, 75 degrees, bright and sunny, slight breeze to

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the air, no humidity whatsoever.

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We only get about 5 of these a year, but these are the days that

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you hold on to in New England. But yes, I am doing very, very

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well today. Thank you. Excellent. Normally you’re like, well,

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you know, I don’t know, I don’t know. But you know, the weather’s working for

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you today. So that’s good. It’s working for you

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today. So let’s get into

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Cosmopolis, a book that, by the way, was widely panned when it

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was published. It got incredibly negative reviews. Critics did not

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like this book when it was published. And I’ll talk a little bit about

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DeLillo’s background as a writer and kind of set the table a little

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bit. So Don DeLillo

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is a— he was born on November 20th, 1936, and

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he’s still alive, by the way. He has not— he has not passed away.

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He is a playwright, sort of in the David Mamet mode. We’ve talked

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about Mamet a little bit on this podcast. He wrote Glengarry Glen Ross and

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other great plays that were turned into movies. And Delilah is that guy. He’s the

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guy who writes a book and then takes that book, either turns it into a

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play or turns it into a movie. But he’s a playwright, an author, and

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what I consider to be a cultural gadfly.

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He discovered that he could write because he read a lot of books, weirdly enough.

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Delilah published his first book in 1971, Americana.

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I think he was around the age of 35 or 36 or so when he

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published his first book. And then he published 6 novels in the ’70s and

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’80s, and he just sort of kept going. As a matter of fact, he,

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he looked— he revisited Americana, I believe, in the ’90s.

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And he wrote about that book, quote, I don’t think that book would have been

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published today. I don’t think I would have gotten my start from that book.

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He’s like, that book was really bad. You know, but I

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mean, like, That’s really good for an author to say, because

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if you, if you, you know, are 50 years away from something, you

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should probably have a different, a different thought process on it, or 30 years away

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from it. You should probably have a different thought process on it than when you

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originally, when you originally wrote it. Delilah has been

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prolific. He’s produced— he’s published at least 1 or 2

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novels every decade since at least the 1970s. He’s one of our most

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prolific We would call him a postmodern author.

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He does not— he rejects that label. He doesn’t want to be called postmodern. He

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thinks that he is in a line of modernist authors

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going all the way back in time to

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William Faulkner, right? And he was deeply influenced

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by Hemingway and by other folks who looked at the culture and

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critiqued the culture of their time. Me personally, when I read

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Delilah, When I read Cosmopolis or other— or some of his other novels like

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White Noise is really good. I put him in

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that long line of ’80s and ’90s authors that were trying to define the ’80s,

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and you see that a lot in Cosmopolis, going all the way

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from Jay McInerney, who wrote Bright Lights, Big City,

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to— which was turned into a movie with Michael J. Fox— to Bret Easton

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Ellis, who has his own podcast now, and he, of course, wrote American

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Psycho. which was turned into the great movie starring Patrick Bateman.

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No, not Patrick Bateman. The guy who— he was played by— Patrick Bateman was played

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by the guy who played Batman, Christian Bale. Christian

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Bale. And of course, then you have Don DeLillo

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and Cosmopolis. And by the way, Cosmopolis was turned into a movie in

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2012 starring Robert Pattinson, who

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was just coming off of his—

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jaunt through the Twilight films and hadn’t

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quite sort of gotten out of that dark, broody,

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vampiric horror mode that everybody sort of knew him in as a, as an

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actor. By the way, directed by David Cronenberg, which we’ll talk about the movie here

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in just a moment. Delilah describes himself and his writing approach as

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follows, and I want to read this quote very briefly before I let Tom jump

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in. Quote, I’m a novelist, period. An

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American novelist. And, quote, it’s important to write

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against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption

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and of debilitating entertainment. I think writers by nature must

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oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to

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impose on us. Close quote.

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So that’s a little bit about Delilo. Not formally trained in writing, but

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has just sort of, you know, just done it. He’s done the act.

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Tom, I don’t know how much you knew about him before I proposed this

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book. I sort of slapped you onto Cosmopolis, and then I sent

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you the link to the trailer, and then you went off and watched the movie.

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And so why don’t you— why don’t you tell the

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listeners your experience with this

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wonderful piece of content? I’ll say it this

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way. I didn’t know much about him prior

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to this. Mm-hmm. But because of watching the

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film, I decided to go down a little bit of a rabbit hole.

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Because of my reaction to the film, I just felt like there

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had to be more to this guy if you were doing him on the podcast,

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right? Right. I just felt like him as an author, him as a writer, he

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had to have more depth. He had to have more, um, he

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had to have more substance to him. Yes.

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Yes. I’m trying to be very

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careful how I word this because I don’t want to give too much away of

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what I felt and thought about the actual movie

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versus the screenplay versus the writing

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versus the acting, etc., etc. There’s a lot to unpack there.

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But once I started kind of going down the rabbit hole realizing, wow,

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like this guy First of all, won a

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ton of awards, nominated for a Pulitzer.

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So I’m guessing some of his previous works were really

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good. I didn’t think this one

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was. It’s okay. You’re not alone. A lot of

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critics did not. They did not like this book. Right. So when you told

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me that it got poor reviews, that did not surprise

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me. Right. Now, had I knew him, had I read

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all this stuff about him and his life, and then had not read

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or seen the book, read the book or seen this film yet, and you said

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this got negative reviews, might have been surprised by that just because of all the

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positives that he’s had in his life, wins, so to speak.

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And he’s had enough of them. Again, when you look at some of the awards

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that he’s won, some of them were significant. These are not like, you know, I

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won my high school essay report, you know, award.

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Some of them are pretty significant. And again, being nominated for a Pulitzer, in my

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opinion, is simply— that’s amazing

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enough because there’s only so many of those given. It’s not like, you

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know, it’s not like the Golden Globes or

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the Emmys where we’re literally handing out thousands of them per year.

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Right. You can say what you want about there’s only one Best Picture,

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one Best Actor, whatever. I get that. But we’re giving these things out

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like, like Pez dispensers at this point. But we’re not doing

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that with the writing. I don’t see the same thing in writing. I see the

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same thing in writing. It’s when you win a Pulitzer or you have a best—

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you have a New York Times bestseller, you’re legit at this

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point. Like, so again, I’m just kind of trying to clarify here. I

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feel like this guy is a legit author. I feel like he’s In most

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circles, people would consider him a good author, but this

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particular work I did not find very fascinating.

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Well, and, and, and he, he, he is noted for, if you read in his

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biography on his, on his Wikipedia page, which I did, um,

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he is noted for doing experiments.

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So he’ll write a book that’s an experiment. And if

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it works, it works. Like his second book, he’s— second or third book, he said

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was like the hardest book that he’d ever written. Because it was this

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experimental sort of magic, real magical realism. I think he was

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probably influenced by Gabriel García Márquez.

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Yeah, Gabriel García Márquez. I probably said

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that wrong in the wrong order, but he was, he was influenced by magical, magical

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realism. And so he wrote a very layered, complicated novel that again also

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didn’t do well. But when I look— and so when I look at

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Delilah, I expect there to be for every, you know,

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maybe Americana or White Noise, there’s going to be a Cosmopolis because he’s just

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going to take a risk, right? He’s just going to take a flyer, right? And

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to me, that backs up what he says about

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himself in that he’s a writer.

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So he’s willing to take risks and sort of work things

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out in public. And I think if he had come, come in,

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probably, I mean, he was born in ’36. So if he had

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come in 2 generations later, you know, and had been able to

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experience the internet directly versus coming from a

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literary culture, right? I think he probably would have been a blogger and a

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Substacker by this point. You know, he would have made that turn.

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Such as it is, I don’t think that he’s out there doing any of that

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because he looks at novels as the way that he sort of works, works that

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out. Now, with that being said, Cosmopolis is a very minimalistic

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book. So the reason I sent you the

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link to the— essentially link to the trailer, and then I had you watch the

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movie, was because the book and the movie are roughly

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similar, you know, and Delillo helped out on the writing of the

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film. So he, like, he— because he’s a playwright, so he understands how to

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strip things out and what works in the medium of film versus what works in

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the medium of a book. And those are 2 different things, right? Because with the

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camera you can show, whereas with a novel you have to tell. Okay,

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got it. And he understands how to go back and forth, back

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and forth between those 2. And so what I liked about the novel, I will

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say this, what I enjoyed about the novel is

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the pacing is quick. It’s a minimalistic read.

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It’s only, I mean, it’s barely over 200 pages. It’s

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209 pages, you know, so it’s not hard to read. You

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don’t have to, you don’t have to sort of do a whole lot for it

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there. Um, you, you

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get the sense of who the character Eric Packer really is

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from the minimalism. Um,

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and you can come to the novel, as I did when I was 23, with

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all of the

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intimations of the 1980s to this thing,

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and it works just fine. Like, you can slap this on onto the 1980s, it

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works just fine. And I think if you could, if you could write this novel

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today, and I’ll just say this out loud. If Delilah had written and

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published his novel today, you would just slap the social media and AI,

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you know, people on top of it, the AI titans on top of it, or

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the startup people on top of it. Now, I’m not quite sure that

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anyone would read it because even as minimalist as it is,

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it’s still not stripped down enough for a modern audience where,

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you know, 1.6 seconds, that’s what Bob Rucker said in the 200th episode,

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1.6 seconds is how quickly people’s attentions move. That’s ridiculous.

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So I think Delillo would struggle, as most authors are struggling right now,

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to get people’s attention in the novel, using the novel as a way to get

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their attention. I think he probably would just do it as a— he

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would just do it as a streaming Netflix show.

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Just in the car. This is a streaming Netflix show. Like, the whole show is

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just in the car.

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Actually, you know, the funny thing is, as we were discussing before

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you hit the record button here, the subtle differences between the book and the

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movie. And I think if they did it as a 6-episode,

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35 to 40-minute episode Netflix series,

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they probably would have been able to include every bit that they left

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out from the book into the movie. Oh, yeah. All the little details

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with the worker bee in the beginning versus the worker bee in

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the end. And again, I’m trying not to give too much away in case somebody

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wants to go read this. But Right. They probably could have

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included all of that instead of leaving some of it out.

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Because you get the gist at the end of the movie, you get the

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gist that the worker bee expects him to know him.

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Right. But because he doesn’t, that’s a big deal. That’s a big deal. That’s a

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big deal. Which I think you could, in a series where you did like 6

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episodes or something like that, at like 30, 40 minutes long, you could have

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probably put that in there. So that you didn’t have to figure that out by

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listening to the dialogue. Right. It’s a lot more of a slow burn

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over a series than a 2-hour, well, hour and a

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half to 2-hour long movie. Which, speaking of the hour and a half to 2-hour

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long movie, so I watched it.

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I made it about 45

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minutes in before other external factors

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forced me to abandon the film. I had

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to go negotiate with other parties. And, well, that was it.

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I then moved on to Slaughterhouse-Five, just because, you know, Vonnegut.

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But, but you and your wife watched it. And I know

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your wife had a visceral reaction to it or a visceral response to it, as

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00:21:00,563 –> 00:21:04,291
did, weirdly enough, most people when this movie came out. It was not a popular

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movie either. So for our listeners,

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00:21:09,740 –> 00:21:13,548
Cosmopolis, 2012. Tell them a little bit about that, about

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the film version. So

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00:21:16,361 –> 00:21:18,739
yeah, should I tell them the whole story?

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You edit however it is you see fit. At this

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point in our show, on the relationship we have on the show, do whatever you

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feel. Go ahead, whatever you want to do. I know, but now I’m injecting my

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wife into this. I’m not sure. You are, right? So I mean, how much is

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you versus her? Yeah, I know you gotta make Editing decisions.

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I’ll lay the groundwork. I’ll lay the groundwork is this. So when my wife and

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I watch a movie, typically I will be sitting up watching the movie. She will

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lay down. She puts her feet— she rests her feet on my lap, whatever. I

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00:21:49,588 –> 00:21:52,350
rub her feet while we watch the movie, blah, blah, blah. Stupid husband-wife stuff, right?

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00:21:52,816 –> 00:21:56,589
Yep. So I had— I had to— I had sent you

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the text because at the end of this movie, my

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wife abruptly sits up. And looks at me and

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says, do you talk to Hasan outside of

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work hours? Now, for those of you who don’t know, we’ve mentioned this several times

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in the podcast. Hasan and I have a couple of projects that we work on

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together that are within working hours. So we have

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working meetings together, et cetera, et cetera. And I said, yeah, of course. I said,

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we’re friends. I talk to him all the time outside of, outside of

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work hours. Why? She goes, you need to text him right now and say he’s

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dead to me. And I go, he’s dead to me. No, I was like,

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00:22:31,767 –> 00:22:35,537
what do you mean? She’s like, she’s like, I just lost 2 hours of my

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life I am never going to get back. And that was her response to the

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movie. So then I proceeded to tell her,

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I said, you have to understand, hon, this is homework. Hasan and I are going

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00:22:46,607 –> 00:22:49,880
to talk about this book on Monday. This is about the podcast.

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00:22:50,618 –> 00:22:53,987
And she goes, this is the leadership podcast thing that you guys do, right?

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And I go, yeah. She goes, what exactly are you supposed to take from

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leadership out of that movie? And I go,

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well, there were at least 2 or 3 things that I took. And again, I’m

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watching this movie. I’m not watching this movie for

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entertainment purposes. I’m watching this movie as quote

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00:23:12,823 –> 00:23:16,638
unquote homework. Homework. So, I’m looking for things for you

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00:23:16,654 –> 00:23:20,277
and I to talk about today. Exactly. So, again, I was not looking at

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this as like, oh, I’m watching this movie because Are you not

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00:23:23,789 –> 00:23:27,546
entertained? You know, like, this is not what I was

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00:23:27,659 –> 00:23:31,384
thinking of. I was, I was looking at the, at the, at this as a

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00:23:31,496 –> 00:23:35,205
cheat code. You sent me this in lieu of having to go read the

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book over the course of a weekend. A weekend. You know, you didn’t expect me

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to read the whole book in a weekend, so you just thought the book would

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00:23:41,130 –> 00:23:44,711
be worth it. I mean, the movie would be sufficient anyway. So that was my

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wife’s reaction to the movie. Now, that being said, I will say

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that I do agree with her. Had I been watching that for

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entertainment purposes, I probably would not have watched the whole movie.

383
00:23:56,467 –> 00:24:00,234
Yeah. Now, for the sake of this podcast, I’m glad I did because there was

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00:24:00,234 –> 00:24:04,066
a couple of lessons that leaders should really pay. If you are a leader,

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00:24:04,082 –> 00:24:06,791
if you’re leading a team, if you’re leading a company, if you’re lead— if you

386
00:24:06,791 –> 00:24:09,981
are a community leader and you watch this movie

387
00:24:11,039 –> 00:24:14,213
from that perspective, this guy supposedly runs a

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giant company and he’s riding in the back of a limo because he’s very wealthy

389
00:24:17,868 –> 00:24:21,190
and he made all his money running this company. And he is supposed to be

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00:24:21,463 –> 00:24:25,224
projecting himself as the leader of this company. And you can very

391
00:24:25,400 –> 00:24:28,598
easily watch this movie and think of things that you should not be doing as

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00:24:28,614 –> 00:24:32,374
a leader, or will not do, or won’t do, or change if you

393
00:24:32,406 –> 00:24:35,957
are currently doing. And that’s the way that you come across. You need to change

394
00:24:35,957 –> 00:24:39,766
a few things. So overall, yes, movie was very

395
00:24:39,798 –> 00:24:43,012
bad. Robert Pattinson, I am sorry, I hate to say this for those of you

396
00:24:43,012 –> 00:24:46,433
who are fans of his, not Not good.

397
00:24:47,106 –> 00:24:50,395
He is not good. Now, in his defense,

398
00:24:50,861 –> 00:24:54,631
you’re trying to take a 2003 book and turn him

399
00:24:54,631 –> 00:24:58,321
into Mark Zuckerberg, which didn’t exist in 2003. But you’re

400
00:24:58,337 –> 00:25:01,883
trying to make the 2012 movie based on a person who’s alive

401
00:25:01,947 –> 00:25:05,445
today that didn’t exist in 2003. So again,

402
00:25:05,621 –> 00:25:09,279
there’s some things that Robert Pattinson had no control over, but still

403
00:25:10,049 –> 00:25:13,728
very bad. Very bad, very bad, very bad acting. The screenplay

404
00:25:13,761 –> 00:25:17,090
wasn’t very great. It wasn’t written really well into the— they

405
00:25:17,171 –> 00:25:20,953
didn’t give the actors a lot to

406
00:25:20,953 –> 00:25:24,584
work with. I thought the best character in the whole movie was the

407
00:25:24,584 –> 00:25:28,392
security guard. Oh yeah, Torval. Yeah, Torval. And then

408
00:25:28,392 –> 00:25:31,566
he— I don’t even understand, why would you do that?

409
00:25:34,322 –> 00:25:37,264
Made no sense to me. So the

410
00:25:37,747 –> 00:25:41,542
things we will focus on

411
00:25:41,751 –> 00:25:44,098
in the show, now that we’ve sort of laid out the book and the movie

412
00:25:44,098 –> 00:25:46,611
a little bit, here are the things that we are going to focus on.

413
00:25:49,262 –> 00:25:52,341
The— there are several beats that occur both in the book and in the movie.

414
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So the first beat, which I think relates to leaders, is about the flow

415
00:25:56,597 –> 00:25:59,844
of data, right? It’s about this idea that

416
00:26:00,169 –> 00:26:03,038
somehow, and I kind of said it in my opening and my warning to leaders,

417
00:26:05,538 –> 00:26:08,838
First off, you have to make a decision to get in the limo. But once

418
00:26:08,838 –> 00:26:12,059
you make the decision to get into the limo, once you make the decision to

419
00:26:12,059 –> 00:26:14,796
get into your startup or get into your business or get into the thing you’re

420
00:26:14,877 –> 00:26:18,594
doing, that can be both a— and we

421
00:26:18,594 –> 00:26:21,567
see this with Eric Packer. You see this with this character played by

422
00:26:21,664 –> 00:26:25,359
Robert Pattinson in the movie. You can

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00:26:25,375 –> 00:26:28,842
become trapped by— you could become

424
00:26:28,842 –> 00:26:32,526
trapped in a self-sealing A self-sealing bubble of

425
00:26:32,575 –> 00:26:36,203
logic. And that’s what the car represents, right? So he’s going,

426
00:26:36,316 –> 00:26:40,042
he’s pushing through Midtown Manhattan traffic. There are riots that are

427
00:26:40,042 –> 00:26:42,978
occurring around him. There’s a whole sequence in the movie with rats

428
00:26:44,802 –> 00:26:48,481
where these people come in. This is the Cronenberg touch, by the way, where people

429
00:26:48,513 –> 00:26:51,570
come into a diner and they throw rats and then they run out. It’s hilarious.

430
00:26:53,723 –> 00:26:57,113
They, you can, you can be sealed away from the whole scene in the

431
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library with his, with his wife, right,

432
00:27:00,965 –> 00:27:04,373
who eventually, you know, he takes her money too. And, you know, eventually, like, she

433
00:27:04,373 –> 00:27:07,927
goes broke too. And the, the, in the

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00:27:08,008 –> 00:27:11,578
book, that’s actually done a lot better because he actually, you get to

435
00:27:11,578 –> 00:27:15,245
understand that he’s smelling the library and he’s drawing connections between something

436
00:27:15,278 –> 00:27:18,750
that’s very, very old and something that’s very, very quote unquote new,

437
00:27:19,057 –> 00:27:22,899
right? New and self-sealed, right? So anyway, as a leader, you can get into your

438
00:27:22,947 –> 00:27:26,724
new thing, your new car, your new business, your new whatever. And

439
00:27:26,805 –> 00:27:28,260
now you’re self-sealed away

440
00:27:28,260 –> 00:27:32,048
from from everything. And you think that whatever comes in is

441
00:27:32,177 –> 00:27:35,898
the thing that’s going to be the information or the

442
00:27:35,962 –> 00:27:39,674
data or the tool that’s going to help you be successful. So that’s

443
00:27:39,674 –> 00:27:41,944
really the second thing. The first thing is how do you get out of it?

444
00:27:41,992 –> 00:27:43,892
How do you get into the car? But then once you’re in the car, how

445
00:27:43,940 –> 00:27:46,613
do you not fool yourself? Then the third thing I think you can take from

446
00:27:46,999 –> 00:27:50,755
both the film and the book, and we’ll talk about this today, is sort of

447
00:27:51,013 –> 00:27:53,079
the— Huh.

448
00:27:59,800 –> 00:28:02,915
When there are data points that aren’t working with you. So he’s trying to short

449
00:28:02,915 –> 00:28:06,111
the yen. This is a huge thing in the book. It’s a huge thing in

450
00:28:06,127 –> 00:28:09,836
the movie. Why is he trying to short the yen? Well, he’s trying to

451
00:28:10,317 –> 00:28:14,011
manipulate finance and he’s a finance guy because it’s, it’s

452
00:28:14,091 –> 00:28:17,270
written again, Delilah is writing from the perspective of a 1980s person

453
00:28:17,864 –> 00:28:21,573
looking at 2003, not to Tom’s point, the perspective of someone in

454
00:28:21,573 –> 00:28:25,250
2026 looking at tech billionaires, right? He doesn’t have that information at the

455
00:28:25,250 –> 00:28:28,762
time. So he’s looking at finance guys. He’s looking at people who are like Wolf

456
00:28:28,762 –> 00:28:32,304
of Wall Street or Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street. You know,

457
00:28:32,368 –> 00:28:36,039
greed is good. He’s looking at those kinds of guys. And those kinds of guys,

458
00:28:36,087 –> 00:28:39,325
by the time the end of the 1990s came, they were telling everybody

459
00:28:39,742 –> 00:28:43,381
finance will all be run on numbers. There will be no human being inputs whatsoever.

460
00:28:43,445 –> 00:28:47,020
We will need nothing. It was the first sort of intimation of everything that has

461
00:28:47,196 –> 00:28:50,386
washed up on our shores in the last few years with AI. It

462
00:28:50,979 –> 00:28:54,570
was the first sort of proto version of that because they were all gathering data

463
00:28:54,746 –> 00:28:57,841
and they thought the data was clean and cool and amazing and all of this.

464
00:28:58,660 –> 00:29:01,502
Well, what happens when your data points don’t work?

465
00:29:02,674 –> 00:29:06,222
What happens when that cool, clean thing gets screwed up by, to your point about

466
00:29:06,222 –> 00:29:09,450
Paul, Paul Giamatti in the film,

467
00:29:09,980 –> 00:29:13,705
what happens when human beings come in and screw up your

468
00:29:13,753 –> 00:29:17,141
data? How do you engage with that as a leader? So we’ll talk a little

469
00:29:17,141 –> 00:29:20,208
bit about that because I think that’s also really relevant for leaders out of this

470
00:29:20,272 –> 00:29:23,779
book. And then finally, and I think I think this is

471
00:29:23,957 –> 00:29:26,806
also the piece that, that like flummoxes us about this film.

472
00:29:28,470 –> 00:29:31,487
9/11. This, I mean, this book was published 2 years after 9/11.

473
00:29:32,601 –> 00:29:36,329
And we are on the 25th anniversary as of 3

474
00:29:36,329 –> 00:29:39,100
days ago, 25th anniversary of 9/11. Uh,

475
00:29:40,418 –> 00:29:44,148
I don’t know about you, Tom, but I have definite opinions

476
00:29:44,148 –> 00:29:47,941
about that event. Um,

477
00:29:48,284 –> 00:29:52,087
you and I both lived through it. We’re of that certain age. And, uh,

478
00:29:52,169 –> 00:29:55,008
we didn’t live through it, watching it on a YouTube video afterward.

479
00:29:56,735 –> 00:30:00,540
So, and I remember being 2 years away from that

480
00:30:00,685 –> 00:30:04,119
and really not understanding still how to put that into any

481
00:30:04,200 –> 00:30:07,898
sort of structure that made

482
00:30:07,898 –> 00:30:08,321
sense.

483
00:30:11,626 –> 00:30:15,344
Um, 25 years afterward, it’s a little bit of a

484
00:30:15,344 –> 00:30:19,118
different, little bit of a different story. But not, not that much.

485
00:30:19,183 –> 00:30:21,215
So I think there are some points that we could hit on in this book.

486
00:30:21,279 –> 00:30:24,843
I do think there is some value, but I would agree this is a book

487
00:30:24,843 –> 00:30:28,499
or a movie you can chew once, spit out, and then be done.

488
00:30:29,231 –> 00:30:32,773
I think you can move on to other Delilah books. White Noise, like I said,

489
00:30:32,998 –> 00:30:36,590
is infinitely better than this one. I

490
00:30:36,687 –> 00:30:40,536
also really liked, let’s see, which

491
00:30:40,569 –> 00:30:44,366
a lot of people didn’t, The Body Artist, which this actually, this book is considered

492
00:30:44,366 –> 00:30:47,283
to be a follow-on to The Body Artist. A lot of people didn’t like Body

493
00:30:47,283 –> 00:30:50,441
Artists, but they liked it better than they liked Cosmopolis. Or you could pick up

494
00:30:50,441 –> 00:30:54,002
DeLillo’s book that he won a bunch of prizes

495
00:30:54,131 –> 00:30:57,928
for called Underworld, which is actually

496
00:30:58,351 –> 00:30:59,182
pretty good. Okay.

497
00:31:02,458 –> 00:31:05,287
As you roll through the book, so let’s go back to the book for just

498
00:31:05,287 –> 00:31:09,006
a second. As you roll through the book, Eric Packer, you know,

499
00:31:09,814 –> 00:31:12,067
gets out of the car, in and out of the car. He’s wandering in and

500
00:31:12,067 –> 00:31:14,514
out of the car like all the time. This is also reflected in the film.

501
00:31:14,976 –> 00:31:17,669
He’s wandering in and out of the car, and one of the, one of the

502
00:31:17,957 –> 00:31:21,660
key characters in the, in the book and in the

503
00:31:21,660 –> 00:31:25,379
movie, interestingly enough, is, is his, is

504
00:31:25,411 –> 00:31:28,024
his wife, who is a wealthy

505
00:31:29,082 –> 00:31:32,929
woman who is a poet. And

506
00:31:32,945 –> 00:31:36,231
not a poet in terms of an actual artist. And I think this is what

507
00:31:36,231 –> 00:31:40,046
Delilah is talking about. She’s a poet in the sense of rich

508
00:31:40,158 –> 00:31:43,671
people picking something that they want to do. And then sort of just doing it

509
00:31:43,671 –> 00:31:47,139
and calling themselves this thing. Meanwhile, all of us average schmucks have to go out

510
00:31:47,139 –> 00:31:50,479
and actually, like, earn a living. That’s how she’s a poet. And

511
00:31:50,592 –> 00:31:54,253
Packer sees this in her. And they were supposed to be married in an

512
00:31:54,301 –> 00:31:58,138
arranged marriage, but they haven’t consummated the marriage. By the way, in case you’re—

513
00:31:58,138 –> 00:32:00,707
just to put this up front, right up— well, not right up front, but put

514
00:32:00,707 –> 00:32:04,159
this in now, now that you’re sort of, you know, 30 minutes into the show.

515
00:32:04,866 –> 00:32:08,238
Uh, sex is a big driver in this. in this book,

516
00:32:08,575 –> 00:32:12,025
just so you know. And there is a lot of sexual content in the movie.

517
00:32:12,105 –> 00:32:15,171
Don’t watch it with kids. A lot of sexual content in the movie. Don’t watch

518
00:32:15,171 –> 00:32:18,894
it with kids. But it is a huge driver. And

519
00:32:18,991 –> 00:32:22,811
Eric is trying to get his wife to consummate the marriage with him, and she

520
00:32:22,923 –> 00:32:26,678
won’t do it. And that’s a huge, like, linchpin

521
00:32:26,711 –> 00:32:30,530
moment in the second part of— of the first

522
00:32:30,562 –> 00:32:32,248
part of this book.

523
00:32:34,986 –> 00:32:37,686
Then, of course, there’s the scene with the folks with the rats in the rat

524
00:32:37,815 –> 00:32:41,162
suits. There’s a whole

525
00:32:41,630 –> 00:32:45,128
sequence inside of here that

526
00:32:45,241 –> 00:32:49,003
talks about the markets and the shorting of the yen and the South

527
00:32:49,003 –> 00:32:52,557
Asian markets and what that means, right?

528
00:32:55,596 –> 00:32:59,360
Then there’s a riot. The car is spray-painted because, you know, people want

529
00:32:59,360 –> 00:33:02,869
to eat the rich, even in 2003. And there’s a

530
00:33:02,885 –> 00:33:06,526
line in here that actually is reflected in the movie, but it’s way

531
00:33:06,607 –> 00:33:10,378
deep in part 2 of the book. It says this, a specter is haunting

532
00:33:10,410 –> 00:33:12,837
the world, the specter of capitalism.

533
00:33:14,034 –> 00:33:16,850
And of course, this is a variation on

534
00:33:18,342 –> 00:33:21,922
the Communist Manifesto, in which Europe is

535
00:33:21,922 –> 00:33:25,468
haunted by the specter of communism circa 1850, right

536
00:33:25,790 –> 00:33:29,275
before communism actually becomes a thing. And Delilah, of course, is making

537
00:33:29,275 –> 00:33:32,917
parallels between communism and capitalism. in the way that it— the way that

538
00:33:32,965 –> 00:33:36,349
those systems, not the way that they’re actually played out, but the way those

539
00:33:36,349 –> 00:33:39,941
systems focus around power and hierarchy and authority. Okay.

540
00:33:40,887 –> 00:33:44,688
So that’s in the second part of the book. Eric is rolling through, you

541
00:33:44,688 –> 00:33:48,152
know, the streets of Midtown Manhattan, avoiding the

542
00:33:48,184 –> 00:33:51,712
president’s barricades and blockage as much as he

543
00:33:51,712 –> 00:33:55,481
possibly can to get his haircut. Again, the most banal thing possible. I’m going to

544
00:33:55,481 –> 00:33:56,090
go get a haircut.

545
00:34:01,616 –> 00:34:05,258
He opens as a character who can’t sleep, and I think that’s actually

546
00:34:05,258 –> 00:34:08,916
significant, Tom. Um, it

547
00:34:08,981 –> 00:34:12,423
makes him disconnected, first from himself and then from everybody

548
00:34:12,520 –> 00:34:15,845
else, and then from his wife, his intimate relationships. He’s so

549
00:34:15,845 –> 00:34:19,314
disconnected, he has to go get a haircut, which we find out later on the

550
00:34:19,314 –> 00:34:23,033
barbershop is owned by his father. So we like, you know, there’s a whole dynamic

551
00:34:23,033 –> 00:34:26,862
that’s going on there. Leaders need to get

552
00:34:26,862 –> 00:34:30,588
out of the car. And yet disconnected leadership is often rewarded.

553
00:34:32,782 –> 00:34:36,542
Yeah, we saw how, how Eric managed it in the movie. We read how

554
00:34:36,574 –> 00:34:40,366
Eric managed it in the book. Not well is the answer. So what’s a

555
00:34:40,479 –> 00:34:44,268
better way to manage that disconnected leadership? Or, or how do leaders avoid being

556
00:34:44,301 –> 00:34:44,838
disconnected?

557
00:34:48,643 –> 00:34:52,376
Well, I think I think I’m not, I’m

558
00:34:52,376 –> 00:34:55,101
not gonna, I’m not gonna give him a pass here.

559
00:34:56,242 –> 00:34:59,504
No. I think, I think it’s hard for any of us to even comprehend

560
00:35:00,243 –> 00:35:03,457
what those guys go through because we don’t have that kind of money. We don’t

561
00:35:03,457 –> 00:35:07,076
have that kind of authority over, uh, over

562
00:35:07,109 –> 00:35:10,409
markets. We don’t have that kind of pull or power over,

563
00:35:11,101 –> 00:35:14,804
uh, you know, just the, the, the

564
00:35:14,804 –> 00:35:18,467
sheer The sheer arrogance of

565
00:35:18,499 –> 00:35:21,740
thinking— I mean, and again, if you’re thinking about

566
00:35:22,606 –> 00:35:26,328
specific notations in the book or the movie, his

567
00:35:26,441 –> 00:35:30,227
people are telling him, this is not a good idea. The president’s

568
00:35:30,227 –> 00:35:33,628
in town. Right. There’s a funeral procession for somebody who’s very, very

569
00:35:33,660 –> 00:35:37,430
famous that’s going on. You’re never going to get there. And

570
00:35:37,430 –> 00:35:41,039
the thought of like somebody who feels like they’re above

571
00:35:41,039 –> 00:35:44,796
everything else, Not just above, like, not above the law, sort of. Well,

572
00:35:44,812 –> 00:35:48,248
maybe he does feel that too, but he’s got so much money,

573
00:35:48,505 –> 00:35:50,641
he’s just gonna do what he wants to do and no one’s gonna stop him.

574
00:35:50,753 –> 00:35:54,269
And no one’s gonna stop him. Yeah. So, and again, that’s why

575
00:35:54,542 –> 00:35:57,641
I preface all that by saying I’m not giving him a pass here, but it’s,

576
00:35:57,979 –> 00:36:01,431
it’s easy for us to be judgmental of that when we don’t have that

577
00:36:01,431 –> 00:36:04,690
scenario to, to lean on or, or that, or that, that

578
00:36:04,706 –> 00:36:06,842
experience to, to kind of come from.

579
00:36:08,446 –> 00:36:11,951
Because every one of us that have been in leadership roles are probably going to

580
00:36:12,000 –> 00:36:15,705
look at him and say, you disconnected

581
00:36:16,043 –> 00:36:19,477
on— you did it to yourself. As soon as you get to a certain point

582
00:36:19,525 –> 00:36:22,991
where you’re starting to hire people that you don’t give a crap about,

583
00:36:23,632 –> 00:36:27,054
right? So now, or you’re not the one hiring them anymore. So

584
00:36:27,070 –> 00:36:30,492
you’ve gotten so big and so powerful that now you have people

585
00:36:30,846 –> 00:36:34,093
that have people that have people that hire people, right?

586
00:36:34,788 –> 00:36:38,335
So, right, when you’re running a multi-billion dollar organization like that,

587
00:36:38,865 –> 00:36:42,412
you’re so disconnected. I’m not sure there is a way back for those people.

588
00:36:42,717 –> 00:36:46,296
Think about all of the quote unquote billionaires that we see in the, in

589
00:36:46,408 –> 00:36:49,987
the, in the public eye, right? Right. The Elon

590
00:36:50,019 –> 00:36:53,791
Musks of the world, the Sam Altmans of the world, the Mark Zuckerbergs

591
00:36:53,791 –> 00:36:57,274
of the world. How many of them do we actually think

592
00:36:58,429 –> 00:37:02,151
understand what we’re talking about or saying? Oh, yeah. No, they don’t.

593
00:37:02,215 –> 00:37:05,742
Can you name any of them? I mean, the one, the only one guy

594
00:37:05,983 –> 00:37:08,949
that I can think of that gets, I don’t even say he gets a pass,

595
00:37:09,333 –> 00:37:13,117
but more often than not, you hear, well, but he came from where

596
00:37:13,117 –> 00:37:16,051
we come from. So, he knows us a little better than the other guys, is

597
00:37:16,147 –> 00:37:19,706
Mark Cuban. Yeah. Okay. Mark Cuban,

598
00:37:19,931 –> 00:37:23,586
when people talk about the billionaires who get it, he’s probably the only

599
00:37:23,618 –> 00:37:27,466
one that gets named and everybody goes, oh, yeah, you’re probably right. Now,

600
00:37:27,610 –> 00:37:31,376
whether he does or doesn’t, I’m not suggesting that, but I’m saying, Sure, sure.

601
00:37:31,601 –> 00:37:35,238
His mannerisms, his actions, the way he does things, the way he

602
00:37:35,238 –> 00:37:37,378
interacts with certain people, the way you see him,

603
00:37:39,010 –> 00:37:42,449
the way you see him engaging with startup world, it’s like

604
00:37:43,316 –> 00:37:46,996
people feel like he still gets it. Right. I don’t

605
00:37:47,028 –> 00:37:50,408
think we can say that about anybody else. Who else do we— like,

606
00:37:50,795 –> 00:37:54,483
who else do we talk about? So, so I’m not

607
00:37:54,740 –> 00:37:57,975
sure how much we can pull them back at all. is, I guess, my point.

608
00:37:58,120 –> 00:38:01,509
What they should be thinking, if they can’t be pulled back, what they should be

609
00:38:01,509 –> 00:38:04,674
thinking is, can I create an inner circle? Can I

610
00:38:05,188 –> 00:38:08,948
surround myself with people who won’t be disconnected so they can

611
00:38:09,044 –> 00:38:12,755
keep me in check? And that’s what I don’t think they do well. That’s the

612
00:38:12,755 –> 00:38:16,418
thing that I would vilify them for. Okay, but wealth is always relative.

613
00:38:17,173 –> 00:38:20,467
It’s always relative to the guy standing next to you, right? So think about the

614
00:38:20,467 –> 00:38:23,760
people in the town that you live in, in Massachusetts.

615
00:38:24,243 –> 00:38:28,013
Think about who is at the tippy top of status and class

616
00:38:28,045 –> 00:38:30,912
in that town. Like, I’m thinking of somebody in my town, right, who’s at the

617
00:38:30,912 –> 00:38:34,538
tippy top status and class. I won’t say a

618
00:38:34,538 –> 00:38:37,728
name. And

619
00:38:38,732 –> 00:38:42,273
I found out yesterday something that I didn’t know about this person, that

620
00:38:42,273 –> 00:38:45,236
apparently the only reason they went to the local

621
00:38:45,896 –> 00:38:49,439
church that we have— I won’t say the name of the church either— but the

622
00:38:49,439 –> 00:38:52,898
only reason they went, that person who’s at the tippy top of our social status

623
00:38:52,898 –> 00:38:56,505
in our town, They’re the town’s version of Eric Packer.

624
00:38:56,666 –> 00:39:00,345
Okay. That person, the only reason they went to

625
00:39:00,636 –> 00:39:04,041
the church for like 2 or 3 years

626
00:39:04,494 –> 00:39:08,210
wasn’t because they were particularly religious or particularly had a particularly strong belief

627
00:39:08,210 –> 00:39:11,667
system, but because they held the note on the church.

628
00:39:17,874 –> 00:39:21,468
And I can go to my local grocery store and see that person

629
00:39:21,533 –> 00:39:25,341
walking around. with their family. And that, by the way, that person isn’t

630
00:39:25,357 –> 00:39:27,696
young either. I don’t live in a town full of young people. I live in

631
00:39:27,696 –> 00:39:31,519
a town full of old people. Okay. The person is not, let’s

632
00:39:31,519 –> 00:39:34,679
put it this way, that person is not under 40. Just frame it that way.

633
00:39:35,717 –> 00:39:39,509
Okay. Think about the town you live in. I’m sure you can think of a

634
00:39:39,509 –> 00:39:43,098
person like that in your town. So wealth is relative.

635
00:39:43,374 –> 00:39:46,897
We always talk about millionaires, not even millionaires. We talk about billionaires because it’s easy

636
00:39:46,897 –> 00:39:50,375
because they’re over there in the stratosphere over there. Let’s make this really

637
00:39:50,489 –> 00:39:52,384
real. If you’re the leader,

638
00:39:54,330 –> 00:39:58,155
if you’re at the tippy top of the social structure in your town, I agree

639
00:39:58,220 –> 00:40:01,738
with you. It’s incumbent to surround yourself with people who will keep you

640
00:40:01,851 –> 00:40:05,523
grounded. And I think it’s just as hard at the town

641
00:40:05,523 –> 00:40:09,272
level as it is at the billionaire level. I think wealth is relative

642
00:40:09,272 –> 00:40:13,084
on this. I don’t know.

643
00:40:13,198 –> 00:40:16,329
So you’re, so you’re thinking So, the guy that owns the,

644
00:40:16,795 –> 00:40:20,621
let’s just say, I don’t know, a restaurant down the street

645
00:40:20,669 –> 00:40:23,789
that happens to be a world-class restaurant. I get it. Sure. I’m just saying. Yeah,

646
00:40:23,805 –> 00:40:27,119
make up something. Yeah, that’s fine. The restaurant makes the guy a millionaire.

647
00:40:27,669 –> 00:40:31,452
Yeah. My— and

648
00:40:31,549 –> 00:40:34,790
I say this, I use that as an example because I’ve spent a significant amount

649
00:40:34,790 –> 00:40:38,640
of time in the restaurant industry. Sure. If it were me, I

650
00:40:38,689 –> 00:40:42,369
would still be in the kitchen. I like the kitchen. I

651
00:40:42,481 –> 00:40:46,043
like the cooking. I like the structure. I like the organization. I

652
00:40:46,251 –> 00:40:50,086
like the creativeness that comes out of the kitchen,

653
00:40:50,342 –> 00:40:53,920
right? So, whether I was making $1 million a year, $10

654
00:40:53,968 –> 00:40:57,706
million a year, or $1 a year, I would still be in

655
00:40:57,818 –> 00:41:01,476
the kitchen running that at the— so, I would

656
00:41:01,508 –> 00:41:05,326
know all the people that worked in the kitchen, right? Like, I get—

657
00:41:05,342 –> 00:41:08,199
that’s what I’m saying. at the town level,

658
00:41:09,050 –> 00:41:11,699
I’m disagreeing with you a little bit because— Oh yeah, that’s okay. At the town

659
00:41:11,699 –> 00:41:14,926
level, it is easier. I think it’s— I think when we,

660
00:41:15,617 –> 00:41:18,491
when we are— I’m not suggesting

661
00:41:19,310 –> 00:41:23,147
that the same thing doesn’t apply to the status part of it. That part, maybe

662
00:41:23,147 –> 00:41:26,872
you’re right. Maybe you’re right. The arrogance level is probably the

663
00:41:26,872 –> 00:41:30,341
same. I’m not talking about that. But when I’m talking about, like,

664
00:41:31,031 –> 00:41:34,661
people that People that know their employees’ names to the

665
00:41:34,661 –> 00:41:38,479
point where they’re not going to go have a conflict with them and not be

666
00:41:38,479 –> 00:41:41,698
able to identify them. I just don’t see that happening at that level.

667
00:41:42,456 –> 00:41:46,070
I don’t see that happening with people who own— Now, I will

668
00:41:46,070 –> 00:41:49,329
say, at the local level,

669
00:41:50,587 –> 00:41:54,391
if you have a particular— if they own an international organization, like

670
00:41:54,391 –> 00:41:57,679
some sort of large company or something, then maybe, sure.

671
00:41:58,460 –> 00:42:00,850
Sure. But then I’ll tell you what, if that person happens to be a friend

672
00:42:00,850 –> 00:42:02,570
of mine, I’m going to smack the crap out of him when I see him

673
00:42:02,570 –> 00:42:05,250
at the supermarket acting like he doesn’t know any better. Like, you know what I

674
00:42:05,250 –> 00:42:08,870
mean? Like, that’s— yeah, there’s, you know, they don’t live in my

675
00:42:08,870 –> 00:42:12,570
town. The people— Zuckerberg doesn’t live in my town. Sam Altman don’t live in my

676
00:42:12,570 –> 00:42:16,270
town. I promise you, we do not have billionaires in my town,

677
00:42:16,270 –> 00:42:19,990
right? So, so, so again, my point is, my point is we get

678
00:42:19,990 –> 00:42:23,570
caught up on the M, the million— the M for millionaire and the B for

679
00:42:23,570 –> 00:42:27,274
billionaire. I think we get so caught up on like the material

680
00:42:27,274 –> 00:42:30,889
nature of the money and the numbers we’re working with. And by the way, we’re

681
00:42:30,889 –> 00:42:33,665
about to get caught up on trillionaire too. Like we’re about to get caught up

682
00:42:33,665 –> 00:42:37,511
on that number, right? And to your point, Mark Zuckerberg

683
00:42:37,511 –> 00:42:41,164
doesn’t live in my town. Neither does Sam Altman. And I’m

684
00:42:41,164 –> 00:42:43,776
never going to see those guys. However,

685
00:42:45,515 –> 00:42:49,139
the guy who runs the 500-person manufacturing company,

686
00:42:49,284 –> 00:42:52,802
I’m going to see that guy. I agree with you there. And I think that

687
00:42:52,834 –> 00:42:55,366
guy, in relative terms,

688
00:42:56,184 –> 00:42:59,613
struggles with connecting with his

689
00:42:59,645 –> 00:43:03,299
people just as much as a Sam

690
00:43:03,395 –> 00:43:07,145
Altman does. No, not Sam Altman. Mark Zuckerberg does, who runs a 50,000,

691
00:43:07,162 –> 00:43:10,767
150,000-person global organization. So

692
00:43:11,729 –> 00:43:15,415
here’s— I’m not suggesting you’re wrong, but I

693
00:43:15,671 –> 00:43:19,037
happen to be at a— No, go ahead. Suggest that I’m wrong. It’s okay. I

694
00:43:19,101 –> 00:43:22,668
happen to be at a company outing on Saturday. with my brother. My

695
00:43:22,733 –> 00:43:26,253
brother invites my wife and I to his company outing every year

696
00:43:26,301 –> 00:43:29,918
because he works for a really cool company. They do— they still do company outings.

697
00:43:30,410 –> 00:43:33,973
500 people that work for the company there. The owner of the company

698
00:43:33,989 –> 00:43:37,747
shows up, walks around, shakes every godforsaken person’s hand to make sure he

699
00:43:37,747 –> 00:43:41,529
knows who they are. Okay. So, it still exists

700
00:43:41,529 –> 00:43:45,164
is my point at that level. Okay. When you got to— and by the way,

701
00:43:45,277 –> 00:43:48,832
he owns a very large company and he is easily

702
00:43:49,600 –> 00:43:53,450
His net worth is easily in the triple millions. Okay. I

703
00:43:53,482 –> 00:43:56,863
would say he’s probably worth about $120, $150 million. So, again,

704
00:43:57,203 –> 00:44:00,612
he’s not Sam Altman. He’s not Mark Zuckerberg. But to your point and to your

705
00:44:01,009 –> 00:44:04,652
assumption, the

706
00:44:04,652 –> 00:44:08,120
money matters. The money doesn’t matter to him. He still feels like the

707
00:44:08,120 –> 00:44:11,234
employees that brought him there are worth knowing.

708
00:44:11,896 –> 00:44:14,552
And I think that’s the point that I wanted to make. Like, that’s the whole

709
00:44:14,569 –> 00:44:18,026
point to me. If you get to the

710
00:44:18,026 –> 00:44:21,635
point where you’re running it, again, I know we keep throwing the same

711
00:44:21,635 –> 00:44:25,131
names around, Zuckerberg, but they have thousands. Elon Musk has

712
00:44:25,163 –> 00:44:28,515
thousands of employees. There’s no possible way that he’s going to know every one of

713
00:44:28,515 –> 00:44:31,595
them. There is just not possible. But can he

714
00:44:32,060 –> 00:44:35,348
build it to the point where everybody above you

715
00:44:35,813 –> 00:44:38,876
cares about the person below them so that there’s a trickle effect?

716
00:44:39,598 –> 00:44:42,966
Right. So, at least you feel cared. My wife works for the

717
00:44:43,030 –> 00:44:46,859
largest healthcare company in our country. And the

718
00:44:46,859 –> 00:44:49,860
person, her boss’s boss, barely knows her name.

719
00:44:51,377 –> 00:44:54,813
That’s where I think the problem lies. We’re not setting up systems

720
00:44:55,233 –> 00:44:59,069
in place to make people feel like they’re worth it. We’re

721
00:44:59,069 –> 00:45:02,664
not putting in systems in place to make leaders and give

722
00:45:02,777 –> 00:45:06,401
leaders the ability to make

723
00:45:06,466 –> 00:45:09,679
people feel that they mean something to each other.

724
00:45:10,273 –> 00:45:13,229
Okay. So, let me ask you this question. And this is a challenge question. We’ve

725
00:45:13,229 –> 00:45:16,227
kind of Talked about it a little bit previously on our show, but this is

726
00:45:16,227 –> 00:45:19,311
a good spot. I mean, this is a sharp point. This is where Cosmopolis really

727
00:45:19,407 –> 00:45:22,957
works as a sharp point, a wedge to sort of break apart this question.

728
00:45:23,359 –> 00:45:27,133
Okay. Delilah thinks like you do. I would argue,

729
00:45:27,519 –> 00:45:30,442
I would assert, I think he would agree with you if he were sitting here

730
00:45:30,507 –> 00:45:34,024
talking about his book. I think he would absolutely agree with you. I think

731
00:45:34,024 –> 00:45:37,590
Delilah would probably say that I’m naive. That’s fine.

732
00:45:37,879 –> 00:45:41,572
No, no, it’s fine. And the reason why I say it’s fine is because I

733
00:45:41,733 –> 00:45:44,525
think the question that we can’t get our arms around is

734
00:45:45,585 –> 00:45:49,228
not a question of wealth and wealth disparities, because wealth is always

735
00:45:49,276 –> 00:45:52,486
relative. I’m going to keep going back to that. Wealth is relative. Okay?

736
00:45:53,545 –> 00:45:56,884
If I’m standing— if I’m a trillionaire standing next to a billionaire, I feel rich.

737
00:45:57,863 –> 00:46:00,607
The billionaire feels poor. Doesn’t matter. Wealth is relative.

738
00:46:01,490 –> 00:46:05,166
That’s number 1. That’s my first assertion. My second assertion is that

739
00:46:05,422 –> 00:46:09,189
Because wealth is relative, as you go down the scale of wealth,

740
00:46:09,574 –> 00:46:13,373
right, you get to the games that people play. The status

741
00:46:13,373 –> 00:46:17,123
games that people play shift around, but they’re the same games. They’re coming from the

742
00:46:17,123 –> 00:46:20,890
same place. And so this goes to my third point, which is enveloped

743
00:46:20,890 –> 00:46:24,705
in this question to you, is the thing that we’re not getting

744
00:46:24,721 –> 00:46:28,456
our arms around, not the money or the status, but who

745
00:46:28,504 –> 00:46:32,351
these people were before they even earned a dime.

746
00:46:32,688 –> 00:46:36,120
Is that the part that we can’t get our arms around? Because I would assert

747
00:46:36,120 –> 00:46:39,872
that that is. I think that that’s the root thing. That’s possible, but we’re

748
00:46:39,953 –> 00:46:42,935
also making, making a direct correlation between the,

749
00:46:43,577 –> 00:46:47,233
the, the financial stature and the financial, um,

750
00:46:48,452 –> 00:46:52,269
how you just worded it, sorry, status. Status, sorry, the financial status

751
00:46:52,557 –> 00:46:56,246
to leadership and the status. Like, we’re making those 2 things be the same

752
00:46:56,310 –> 00:46:59,972
thing, and I don’t think they need to be. I think My point

753
00:47:00,037 –> 00:47:03,673
to the gentleman that I met over the weekend is,

754
00:47:05,460 –> 00:47:09,096
and maybe it’s a personality thing, to your point, he built the

755
00:47:09,096 –> 00:47:12,379
company from zero. Like, he built the company from nothing.

756
00:47:13,056 –> 00:47:16,420
Right. And by the way,

757
00:47:16,533 –> 00:47:19,833
he’s one of the few. I don’t know if we’re aware of this at this

758
00:47:19,833 –> 00:47:23,512
point, but the average length of employee tenureship right now in the U.S. is

759
00:47:23,692 –> 00:47:27,344
18 to 20 months. That’s the average length of

760
00:47:27,344 –> 00:47:31,069
tenureship in companies. He— this guy still has people that have been working for him

761
00:47:31,117 –> 00:47:34,570
for 25 years. That doesn’t happen very often anymore,

762
00:47:35,228 –> 00:47:38,487
but it’s a direct correlate. That’s a direct correlation to leadership, in my opinion.

763
00:47:39,322 –> 00:47:42,951
People don’t leave his company because they love working for him. They like

764
00:47:43,160 –> 00:47:46,644
the environment. They like the structure that he’s put in place. They like the style

765
00:47:46,644 –> 00:47:50,466
of leadership that he has developed. And when I say he has developed, he

766
00:47:50,450 –> 00:47:54,236
He pushes that leadership style down on his people. You’re going to lead the

767
00:47:54,236 –> 00:47:57,621
same way I do. And it’s a taught thing. It’s not a forced thing. It’s

768
00:47:57,621 –> 00:48:01,231
not like he’s saying— he’s not cracking a whip saying, do this, do that. No,

769
00:48:01,311 –> 00:48:04,119
he’s saying— Right, right, right. If you are the right fit here, you’re the right

770
00:48:04,119 –> 00:48:07,841
fit here because you lead a certain way. You care about people a

771
00:48:07,889 –> 00:48:11,483
certain way. You look to solve problems a certain way. And if

772
00:48:11,499 –> 00:48:14,852
that fits in my mold, you’re going to do well here. And these people have

773
00:48:14,852 –> 00:48:18,463
been there 25 years. Okay. So

774
00:48:18,479 –> 00:48:21,129
this trips us into something else. I don’t even need to go back to the

775
00:48:21,129 –> 00:48:24,806
book. I won’t even say go back to the book. Read Cosmopolis. This will

776
00:48:24,806 –> 00:48:27,599
trip you up a little bit here. So one of the things in the movie

777
00:48:27,856 –> 00:48:31,405
is the, the, the, the, the events in the

778
00:48:31,485 –> 00:48:34,985
book take place in the year 2000. Yeah. Which is interesting.

779
00:48:36,142 –> 00:48:39,835
The book was published in 2003, 2 years after September

780
00:48:39,835 –> 00:48:43,657
11th. I’m going somewhere with this. One of the things that was

781
00:48:43,772 –> 00:48:47,590
noted that I noted, and I was talking with

782
00:48:47,590 –> 00:48:50,923
my wife about it in the car on Sunday as we were coming home from

783
00:48:50,923 –> 00:48:53,721
church and my daughter was asking us about 9/11 because she’s 16.

784
00:48:55,193 –> 00:48:58,752
For her, it’s not grainy history, but it’s getting there. And for my

785
00:48:58,752 –> 00:49:02,528
9-year-old, it’ll be like his, when his grand— when my grandparents told me about

786
00:49:02,528 –> 00:49:06,310
Pearl Harbor, you know, and his kids will have no connection to it whatsoever.

787
00:49:06,473 –> 00:49:10,002
Okay. That’s where we’re going with this. Well, that’s where we’re going as a

788
00:49:10,002 –> 00:49:11,339
culture with 9/11.

789
00:49:14,753 –> 00:49:18,184
The September 11th terrorist attacks. I remember where I was,

790
00:49:18,443 –> 00:49:22,112
what I was doing, who was around. I remember those. It was a seminal traumatic

791
00:49:22,177 –> 00:49:25,878
moment that happened to us. I posted

792
00:49:25,878 –> 00:49:29,248
something on Facebook. I don’t know if you saw it, Tom, but I posted something

793
00:49:29,264 –> 00:49:33,027
on Facebook that was written by somebody from a different organization,

794
00:49:33,300 –> 00:49:37,148
a public, different, an online magazine, doesn’t matter. And basically the

795
00:49:37,148 –> 00:49:40,843
guy said, I’m still angry. And guess what? I am too. I’m still

796
00:49:40,843 –> 00:49:43,635
angry about that. And I’m going to be angry about that for the rest of

797
00:49:43,651 –> 00:49:47,004
my life. And it’s going to be something that me and Jesus and the wall

798
00:49:47,053 –> 00:49:50,766
will all work together to figure out. But I’m going to be angry

799
00:49:50,766 –> 00:49:52,739
about it. And I, and I think that

800
00:49:56,564 –> 00:50:00,292
if you watched this happen on TV and you knew

801
00:50:00,356 –> 00:50:04,102
people who went through that, Or even, even closer to

802
00:50:04,102 –> 00:50:07,788
it. If you were in or near any of the

803
00:50:07,788 –> 00:50:11,496
places where any of those planes went down, were forced down and were used as

804
00:50:11,599 –> 00:50:15,412
weapons. I’ve been to the 9/11

805
00:50:15,412 –> 00:50:18,188
Memorial. I took my kids down there, my oldest daughter down there when she was,

806
00:50:18,414 –> 00:50:22,238
when she was probably 9 or 10. Right. And I impressed upon

807
00:50:22,286 –> 00:50:24,744
her, this is a graveyard.

808
00:50:26,095 –> 00:50:29,721
This is a graveyard in a city. And there are things that

809
00:50:29,738 –> 00:50:33,272
happened to us as a country that not only

810
00:50:33,789 –> 00:50:37,130
did we have to deal with, but we had to struggle around and we’re still

811
00:50:37,243 –> 00:50:41,031
struggling around. I don’t think all of the ripples have gone out from

812
00:50:41,047 –> 00:50:44,399
9/11 in our culture. I just don’t. I think it’s gonna take a long time.

813
00:50:47,409 –> 00:50:51,013
One of the ripples that went out, and this is really

814
00:50:51,079 –> 00:50:54,732
important because it ties into this book, It ties into our frustration

815
00:50:54,732 –> 00:50:58,409
about the ways that billionaires and millionaires and soon-to-be

816
00:50:58,409 –> 00:51:02,022
trillionaires are treating people in leadership positions. It ties even into the

817
00:51:02,022 –> 00:51:04,783
frustration that got me to start this podcast as I’m thinking about it now.

818
00:51:06,036 –> 00:51:09,825
There is a sense that nothing ever happens

819
00:51:09,825 –> 00:51:13,614
as a consequence to people for leadership failures. Hmm. So

820
00:51:13,663 –> 00:51:16,665
think about 9/11. Who got fired behind that?

821
00:51:19,526 –> 00:51:21,987
Who got their government pension taken away behind that?

822
00:51:24,326 –> 00:51:27,579
Yeah, we had a commission and there was a report with a book that was

823
00:51:27,677 –> 00:51:31,433
published. But where was the actual

824
00:51:31,449 –> 00:51:35,210
material consequence? And I’m not talking about the wars that

825
00:51:35,210 –> 00:51:38,666
happened afterward. That’s a separate issue over there. I’m just talking about that thing right

826
00:51:38,666 –> 00:51:42,507
there. You and I both lived through this. This is lived history for us. I

827
00:51:42,507 –> 00:51:46,309
don’t remember anybody falling on the sword, much less being pushed

828
00:51:46,358 –> 00:51:49,891
down the steps. And then you go to the 2008

829
00:51:49,891 –> 00:51:52,910
financial collapse. How many bankers lost their jobs?

830
00:51:53,729 –> 00:51:57,327
And I’m not talking about the average teller at your local Wells Fargo branch.

831
00:51:58,146 –> 00:52:01,936
Those people lost their jobs for sure. Bank of America closed a bunch of

832
00:52:01,936 –> 00:52:05,533
different branches. Chase had to restructure. Is Jamie Dimon still at the

833
00:52:05,533 –> 00:52:08,777
top of Chase? Last I looked, he was. He’s not

834
00:52:08,841 –> 00:52:12,607
retired. Nothing happened to him. He was just in a room with

835
00:52:12,623 –> 00:52:16,229
Ben Bernanke who told him, sign on the dotted line or else, you know, we’ll

836
00:52:16,245 –> 00:52:18,800
take away your bank. We’ll nationalize your bank. Don’t worry, we’ll keep you in charge,

837
00:52:18,817 –> 00:52:22,331
but we’ll nationalize your bank. No penalty.

838
00:52:23,480 –> 00:52:27,204
And then we have the big boy, COVID. Regardless of where you come

839
00:52:27,220 –> 00:52:29,794
down on COVID, by the way, the other end of 9/11. So you have 9/11,

840
00:52:29,810 –> 00:52:33,598
you have COVID. Yeah. Regardless of whether or not

841
00:52:33,647 –> 00:52:35,754
you, where you come down on masks and all the stuff.

842
00:52:38,226 –> 00:52:41,686
We just saw Fauci, not this, not just this,

843
00:52:41,864 –> 00:52:45,631
just this summer, get called up to Congress. They grilled him.

844
00:52:46,714 –> 00:52:49,512
But that guy’s not losing his government pension. I’m not asking him to lose his

845
00:52:49,545 –> 00:52:52,181
life. I’m not asking him to be put in jail. He didn’t even lose his

846
00:52:52,295 –> 00:52:54,446
pension. He’s still getting paid.

847
00:52:56,130 –> 00:52:59,919
I think the frustration that we have as little people is that there

848
00:52:59,968 –> 00:53:01,895
seems to be no material

849
00:53:01,895 –> 00:53:05,454
consequence for failures that are

850
00:53:05,583 –> 00:53:08,198
obvious to everyone. That’s number one.

851
00:53:09,434 –> 00:53:13,269
And then number two, there’s a massive frustration that there’s failures

852
00:53:13,382 –> 00:53:16,559
for us in our lives

853
00:53:17,217 –> 00:53:20,731
when we screw up. Like you were talking about your wife, for

854
00:53:20,747 –> 00:53:24,470
example, or myself, right? We all work in organizations

855
00:53:24,518 –> 00:53:27,487
where if we screw up, we know if we screw up, we’re out. Our pension’s

856
00:53:27,487 –> 00:53:31,194
gone. You know, our retirement’s gone. Things get

857
00:53:31,194 –> 00:53:34,388
taken away from us. We have to figure out how to live. But at a

858
00:53:34,388 –> 00:53:37,559
certain point, and we all down here in the hoi polloi don’t know where that

859
00:53:37,624 –> 00:53:40,505
point is, but we know it exists. You just, there’s no consequence.

860
00:53:42,246 –> 00:53:46,038
And I think The Cosmopolis is written partially out of the frustration of a

861
00:53:46,038 –> 00:53:49,733
lack of consequence. But I also think that over the last 25 years, that frustration

862
00:53:49,733 –> 00:53:53,379
has grown. And I don’t know who fixes that problem. That’s a

863
00:53:53,428 –> 00:53:56,689
problem of leadership. I’m going to disagree with you on one point,

864
00:53:57,256 –> 00:54:00,961
but for not, not for the reason that you might think. Okay. So I

865
00:54:00,961 –> 00:54:04,638
disagree with you when you say there’s no consequence.

866
00:54:05,232 –> 00:54:08,973
Like, so the people up here make these mistakes and there’s no consequence. You

867
00:54:08,973 –> 00:54:12,505
have to be clear about what you’re saying because there is

868
00:54:12,939 –> 00:54:16,632
a very— there is consequence. It just doesn’t happen to

869
00:54:16,696 –> 00:54:20,357
them. Like, it’s like I hit a certain

870
00:54:20,405 –> 00:54:23,744
point in my career, I can make whatever mistake I want and the only person

871
00:54:23,777 –> 00:54:27,610
getting fired is the person beneath me. Right. Yeah. That does happen,

872
00:54:27,610 –> 00:54:31,190
right? Like, think about this. Think about the corporate structure. And I’ll just give you

873
00:54:31,190 –> 00:54:34,830
an example that I lived through, by the way. So, I

874
00:54:34,830 –> 00:54:38,170
worked for a VP of sales and marketing for a company one time. I was

875
00:54:38,170 –> 00:54:41,610
a sales manager. He messed up so bad. He gave us

876
00:54:41,610 –> 00:54:44,990
directive. He gave us this plan that he was going to roll out quarter 1,

877
00:54:44,990 –> 00:54:48,610
quarter 2, blah, blah, blah. By quarter 3, 3 of the sales managers were fired

878
00:54:48,610 –> 00:54:52,290
because they didn’t get it. No, it wasn’t his mistake that the

879
00:54:52,290 –> 00:54:55,723
plan sucked. Excuse my language. It wasn’t his mistake that the plan

880
00:54:55,739 –> 00:54:59,524
didn’t come to fruition. It wasn’t his mistake that nothing worked the way

881
00:54:59,524 –> 00:55:03,052
that he expected it to work. 3 of the 5 sales managers

882
00:55:03,052 –> 00:55:06,532
underneath him all got terminated. So, to your

883
00:55:06,661 –> 00:55:10,028
point, there are consequences, but usually it’s like that

884
00:55:10,173 –> 00:55:13,813
whole, the shit rolls downhill kind of scenario, right? Yeah.

885
00:55:14,198 –> 00:55:17,438
Where the guy sitting at a certain pinnacle point

886
00:55:18,512 –> 00:55:22,080
can make that mistake And then say, oops, my bad,

887
00:55:22,096 –> 00:55:25,113
I’ll fix it, but I need a different team to fix it. So I’m going

888
00:55:25,113 –> 00:55:28,429
to fire these people and get a new team. Right. And Delillo writes

889
00:55:28,429 –> 00:55:31,459
Cosmopolis, and you even saw this in the movie, as a cathartic

890
00:55:32,965 –> 00:55:35,557
outworking. You talk about the guy, the guy at the end of the movie, the

891
00:55:35,557 –> 00:55:39,199
Paul Giamatti character, right? The cathartic outworking of this

892
00:55:39,264 –> 00:55:42,471
lack of consequence. Someone has to be out of consequence

893
00:55:42,970 –> 00:55:44,743
to these people directly.

894
00:55:48,309 –> 00:55:51,135
And who’s it going to be? Because apparently the government is impotent.

895
00:55:52,468 –> 00:55:56,273
Apparently the systems are impotent. This is actually— here’s

896
00:55:56,835 –> 00:56:00,255
the analogy. Here’s the parallel. The systems are potent enough

897
00:56:00,897 –> 00:56:04,671
so that when the yen gets shorted, as a small investor, I go broke,

898
00:56:05,329 –> 00:56:08,990
but they’re not powerful enough to make sure that Eric Packer goes

899
00:56:09,086 –> 00:56:12,700
broke. Right. Right. That’s

900
00:56:12,990 –> 00:56:16,358
what we don’t like. That’s what’s driving us crazy.

901
00:56:16,874 –> 00:56:20,645
Yeah, I agree with that. And I, I think that

902
00:56:21,612 –> 00:56:24,957
there used to be a sense of honor

903
00:56:25,407 –> 00:56:29,201
in our culture, not big time, but I think the,

904
00:56:29,410 –> 00:56:32,868
the post-World War II guys, the veterans

905
00:56:33,468 –> 00:56:36,887
who came back home after they had gone through Iwo Jima,

906
00:56:37,502 –> 00:56:41,340
And the firebombing of Dresden and everything else. If

907
00:56:41,340 –> 00:56:44,696
you went through those things, you absolutely understood what honor was.

908
00:56:45,530 –> 00:56:48,790
You absolutely understood what responsibility and leadership was. You

909
00:56:49,047 –> 00:56:52,724
absolutely understood that if a failure occurred

910
00:56:53,061 –> 00:56:55,373
on your watch, you were going to be fired.

911
00:56:56,690 –> 00:57:00,463
Because you just went through Iwo Jima and the guy behind you and the guy

912
00:57:00,463 –> 00:57:03,176
to the left of you and the guy in front of you all died. I’m

913
00:57:03,192 –> 00:57:06,749
thinking of Kurt Vonnegut, right? The number of things that that guy went through in

914
00:57:06,797 –> 00:57:10,579
World War II where people just around him just died. And now he’s

915
00:57:10,627 –> 00:57:14,072
like alive and he can’t figure out why. I think there were a lot of

916
00:57:14,072 –> 00:57:17,613
vets like that. Like, why that guy and not me? That impresses a

917
00:57:17,613 –> 00:57:21,346
sense of responsibility on you, a sense of weight on you in a leadership position

918
00:57:22,580 –> 00:57:25,977
that then you bring back to the home front. And from about

919
00:57:26,105 –> 00:57:29,406
1945 to about 1975, we have the biggest

920
00:57:29,406 –> 00:57:33,065
explosion in leadership success in the United

921
00:57:33,081 –> 00:57:36,376
States because guys understood honor and responsibility.

922
00:57:38,954 –> 00:57:41,696
And I think that we don’t have that now. I was going to say, I

923
00:57:41,696 –> 00:57:44,890
can’t, I definitely can’t argue with that because I agree with you. I absolutely agree

924
00:57:44,890 –> 00:57:48,455
with you. I think that the leaders that, and it goes back to the, you

925
00:57:48,455 –> 00:57:52,201
and I have had conversations, several conversations about this too, where the younger

926
00:57:52,201 –> 00:57:55,964
generation, I mean, because I went to college

927
00:57:56,212 –> 00:57:59,854
And because I graduated college, I have this piece of paper in my hand now.

928
00:58:00,447 –> 00:58:04,201
You should give me a job. Like, it’s this entitlement that

929
00:58:04,234 –> 00:58:07,908
we have that has kind of drifted or not drifted, kind of leaked

930
00:58:07,924 –> 00:58:11,662
into our leadership mentality. Leadership is becoming

931
00:58:11,854 –> 00:58:15,528
an entitlement phase instead of an earned

932
00:58:15,528 –> 00:58:19,058
phase. Well, I think we’re turning the corner because I think,

933
00:58:19,235 –> 00:58:21,529
remember I said 9/11 and COVID, I think those are the twin

934
00:58:23,887 –> 00:58:27,587
Oh, you were about to say it. I was. Yeah. Yeah. I have

935
00:58:27,587 –> 00:58:31,409
my hands up. I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to

936
00:58:31,409 –> 00:58:34,791
do it. But you know what I was going to say? Of cultural

937
00:58:34,791 –> 00:58:38,406
chaos, right? They’re the 2 bookends. Bookends.

938
00:58:39,487 –> 00:58:43,312
Better term. Bookends. Bookends. They are

939
00:58:43,425 –> 00:58:46,958
the bookends of cultural chaos. And this ties into

940
00:58:47,039 –> 00:58:50,166
like theories that I have of the generational turning from Strauss and Howe and the

941
00:58:50,166 –> 00:58:53,559
fourth turning and all that, right? Okay. And other people disagree with me and

942
00:58:53,836 –> 00:58:55,829
whatever. It’s fine. Whatever dates.

943
00:58:58,662 –> 00:59:01,035
I think both of those events, both those bookends,

944
00:59:02,503 –> 00:59:05,828
on the one hand, you had the bookend of, or the beginning of it.

945
00:59:07,578 –> 00:59:11,235
And I will tell you, when I saw that plane, I was standing at a

946
00:59:11,235 –> 00:59:14,909
Borders bookstore looking up at a big screen

947
00:59:14,957 –> 00:59:18,536
TV and I saw that plane turn and hit the South Tower. Saw that

948
00:59:18,585 –> 00:59:21,287
live on TV. And everybody around me was like,

949
00:59:22,722 –> 00:59:25,999
and that was like, I was like, oh, this is on purpose. And I was

950
00:59:26,032 –> 00:59:29,228
like, oh, we’re, this is going to start now. Now we’re going to begin.

951
00:59:29,728 –> 00:59:33,495
This is okay. Oh, wow. And

952
00:59:33,511 –> 00:59:37,039
that’s when the anger started. Because I’m like, who, who, who is this? Because this

953
00:59:37,039 –> 00:59:40,566
doesn’t just happen. This is not just a thing. This isn’t an

954
00:59:40,566 –> 00:59:44,355
event from nowhere with no one behind it. There’s a

955
00:59:44,483 –> 00:59:48,121
brain and a mind back there. Anyway, you get that

956
00:59:48,249 –> 00:59:52,095
one event and then you go all the way through with no consequence,

957
00:59:52,159 –> 00:59:55,669
by the way, as I already pointed out, no consequence, no consequence of

958
00:59:55,685 –> 00:59:58,874
significance. Let’s frame it that way. 2 leaders

959
01:00:00,092 –> 01:00:03,586
who were supposed to be holding the public

960
01:00:03,698 –> 01:00:07,159
trust. I’m looking at you, Bill Clinton, who were

961
01:00:07,159 –> 01:00:10,845
supposed to be holding the public trust. Like, people forget

962
01:00:10,845 –> 01:00:14,499
this. Bill Clinton was offered Osama bin Laden in 1995.

963
01:00:15,334 –> 01:00:18,722
The Saudis said, would you like him? And they

964
01:00:18,722 –> 01:00:22,561
said, and, and, and, and the Clinton administration

965
01:00:22,916 –> 01:00:25,883
and the Clinton State Department basically said, no, we don’t have anywhere to put him.

966
01:00:26,560 –> 01:00:28,737
So guess where he went? He went right to Afghanistan

967
01:00:30,881 –> 01:00:33,124
because the Saudis wanted him out of their country

968
01:00:35,095 –> 01:00:38,906
for a whole variety of reasons that eventually later on would become pretty

969
01:00:38,923 –> 01:00:42,730
fairly evident. You can’t have a guy like that in your

970
01:00:42,778 –> 01:00:45,083
country running around. He makes trouble.

971
01:00:48,983 –> 01:00:52,301
No significant problems, no

972
01:00:52,301 –> 01:00:56,004
significant problems, no significant consequences to Bill Clinton, no

973
01:00:56,004 –> 01:00:59,341
significant consequences to anybody in the State Department or in his administration.

974
01:00:59,957 –> 01:01:03,780
And I know we don’t do that traditionally, historically, like once a presidential

975
01:01:03,780 –> 01:01:07,508
administration and their folks are out, We don’t have, we don’t do the things that

976
01:01:07,508 –> 01:01:10,602
other countries do where we go back and we hang people. Like, we don’t do

977
01:01:10,602 –> 01:01:14,099
that. We just move on to the next election cycle. And that has created stability.

978
01:01:16,107 –> 01:01:19,595
And the downside of that, the dark side of that, the minority report on that

979
01:01:19,595 –> 01:01:23,390
is that when mistakes were made and someone needs to be held responsible, you

980
01:01:23,390 –> 01:01:26,675
have no one. That’s the minority report. That’s the dark side of that choice.

981
01:01:27,114 –> 01:01:30,904
Okay. From there, you go through the last 25 years,

982
01:01:30,936 –> 01:01:34,234
you go to, you go to COVID. Again, a situation where

983
01:01:36,566 –> 01:01:39,270
name me the governmental official who we put our trust in,

984
01:01:42,507 –> 01:01:46,066
who’s fallen on the— I mean, maybe you could maybe make the argument

985
01:01:46,468 –> 01:01:50,252
that Andrew Cuomo kind of got it in New York State. Maybe you could

986
01:01:50,252 –> 01:01:53,934
make that argument. But one guy, I mean, Gavin Newsom was

987
01:01:54,031 –> 01:01:57,833
partying with no masks on after telling everybody to go like mask up and

988
01:01:57,833 –> 01:02:01,651
don’t hang around your folks at Thanksgiving. No penalty, no structure. That guy’s

989
01:02:01,651 –> 01:02:05,301
going to run for president. Yeah. Yeah. In

990
01:02:05,350 –> 01:02:09,079
2026, and I’m sorry, in 2028, in 2 years, that guy’s going to

991
01:02:09,128 –> 01:02:12,454
run for president. That guy’s going to ask for your vote and my vote.

992
01:02:12,938 –> 01:02:14,967
And that guy might win. And that guy might

993
01:02:14,967 –> 01:02:18,168
win. That guy might win.

994
01:02:19,030 –> 01:02:22,393
Again, no responsibility. So I think

995
01:02:22,797 –> 01:02:26,028
I’m not the only one. I think we are at the end of the lack

996
01:02:26,028 –> 01:02:29,598
of responsibility. But here’s the but. Remember I said at least

997
01:02:29,598 –> 01:02:32,921
Delillo proposes a solution, the solution that Delilah

998
01:02:32,921 –> 01:02:36,754
proposes to fixing that problem is not a solution that we would find

999
01:02:36,786 –> 01:02:40,218
palatable. We don’t want to hang bankers in the street or execute people

1000
01:02:40,699 –> 01:02:44,483
who fail as startup founders. We don’t want to hang our politicians

1001
01:02:44,483 –> 01:02:46,905
like they did during the French Revolution. We don’t want to do any of that.

1002
01:02:47,594 –> 01:02:50,753
So I guess the question becomes, for this section anyway,

1003
01:02:51,780 –> 01:02:55,580
what do we do with those leaders who fail spectacularly?

1004
01:02:55,644 –> 01:02:58,515
I’m not talking about failure a little bit. I’m not talking about things you can

1005
01:02:58,515 –> 01:03:02,011
come back from. I’m talking about spectacular cultural failures.

1006
01:03:03,006 –> 01:03:06,683
What do we do with people like that? Because we don’t

1007
01:03:06,683 –> 01:03:10,152
have a solution right now. And I think the Gen Zers, I think they

1008
01:03:10,232 –> 01:03:13,925
desperately want a solution. And that’s why they’re looking at, shall we say,

1009
01:03:14,005 –> 01:03:17,666
more revolutionary forms of political expression,

1010
01:03:18,019 –> 01:03:21,777
because at least those more revolutionary forms of political expression offer

1011
01:03:21,777 –> 01:03:25,309
the option for if something doesn’t work, I riot and

1012
01:03:25,405 –> 01:03:29,135
fix it. Well, yeah, we

1013
01:03:29,135 –> 01:03:32,702
tried that too in 1992 with— in LA. That

1014
01:03:32,702 –> 01:03:35,964
didn’t work either. We did. And that didn’t work either. But you know what? They

1015
01:03:36,028 –> 01:03:39,734
weren’t alive then. So they’ve got to go through it themselves. Yeah. You

1016
01:03:39,734 –> 01:03:43,435
know, the— And this is a really hard

1017
01:03:43,435 –> 01:03:46,264
question because I don’t know what the solution is. I really don’t. I just know

1018
01:03:46,264 –> 01:03:50,094
the problem’s there. The problem is, to your point, to your point

1019
01:03:50,094 –> 01:03:53,793
a second ago, the problem is it doesn’t matter. it doesn’t matter whether

1020
01:03:53,826 –> 01:03:57,197
we have the solution or not. There’s always going to be a sect of people

1021
01:03:57,197 –> 01:04:00,730
that don’t want the solution that we provide and they want a different solution. And

1022
01:04:00,730 –> 01:04:04,519
there’s going to be a— it doesn’t matter whether there’s 2

1023
01:04:04,808 –> 01:04:08,566
or 5 or 25 solutions presented. You are always

1024
01:04:08,598 –> 01:04:12,130
going to have factions and sects of people that are going to— Sure. I like

1025
01:04:12,130 –> 01:04:14,779
this one. No, I like that one. So it’s almost like

1026
01:04:14,860 –> 01:04:18,472
that Oh,

1027
01:04:18,552 –> 01:04:22,034
there’s a term for it that I’m losing my mind on right now, but

1028
01:04:22,579 –> 01:04:26,205
it’s almost like you have so many options that you just

1029
01:04:26,318 –> 01:04:29,847
fail to make a decision. Oh, paralysis analysis. Yeah. So

1030
01:04:30,425 –> 01:04:34,275
that’s essentially what would happen anyway, because no matter what

1031
01:04:34,275 –> 01:04:38,094
solution somebody presents, somebody’s going to go, oh, that solution sucks.

1032
01:04:38,190 –> 01:04:41,094
Let me present my own. And then somebody’s going to go, I don’t like either

1033
01:04:41,094 –> 01:04:44,537
of those 2. Let me present my own. And now we have a dozen

1034
01:04:44,879 –> 01:04:48,455
or dozens of solutions and no one’s going to make a decision because they’re going

1035
01:04:48,455 –> 01:04:52,284
to have analysis paralysis. That’s

1036
01:04:52,284 –> 01:04:56,006
my— that’s what I fear. I, I’m worried about— because to your point,

1037
01:04:56,022 –> 01:04:59,178
not only do we not have a solution, but I’m worried that even if we

1038
01:04:59,259 –> 01:05:02,171
do present a solution, it’s gonna, it’s gonna have a, uh, it’s gonna have a

1039
01:05:02,171 –> 01:05:05,920
trickle effect or some sort of steamroll effect where

1040
01:05:06,130 –> 01:05:09,741
now everybody has a solution. Because that’s the other thing about Gen Z, If you

1041
01:05:09,741 –> 01:05:13,390
want to talk about Gen Z, because it’s, if they can’t

1042
01:05:13,390 –> 01:05:17,217
collectively do something, it’s okay for everybody to do their own thing.

1043
01:05:18,832 –> 01:05:22,600
So, well, well, you, there’s no sense of coordination

1044
01:05:22,616 –> 01:05:26,287
here. We kind of, we kind of, I think we kind of proposed a

1045
01:05:26,336 –> 01:05:29,021
solution. Interestingly enough, I go, I go back to this in my brain when we

1046
01:05:29,021 –> 01:05:32,614
talked about, um, um, Hannah Arendt’s book,

1047
01:05:33,051 –> 01:05:36,428
um, about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, right? Eichmann in Jerusalem.

1048
01:05:37,700 –> 01:05:40,696
And one of the points I made on that podcast, I don’t think you co-hosted

1049
01:05:40,696 –> 01:05:43,563
with me. I think that was— No. Bob Rucker or somebody else. Might have been

1050
01:05:43,595 –> 01:05:47,367
Libby Unger, maybe. One of the points I

1051
01:05:47,367 –> 01:05:51,078
made on that episode, and it now comes back to me as maybe the

1052
01:05:51,078 –> 01:05:54,047
solution, or at least the beginnings of a proposal,

1053
01:05:54,289 –> 01:05:58,101
because we need something. We need a proposal of some— the

1054
01:05:58,165 –> 01:06:01,964
right representative from Texas proposes something. Okay. That way we’ve got

1055
01:06:01,964 –> 01:06:05,679
something on the table here that we can at least argue over. Um,

1056
01:06:06,067 –> 01:06:09,755
Arendt made a point in there that basically you

1057
01:06:09,787 –> 01:06:13,475
can’t have— Adolf Eichmann’s defense, one of parts of his

1058
01:06:13,507 –> 01:06:17,173
defense was that he was just making decisions

1059
01:06:18,490 –> 01:06:22,153
to move things along inside of a system where he had

1060
01:06:22,410 –> 01:06:26,250
ultimately no responsibility. And because

1061
01:06:26,266 –> 01:06:30,014
he had ultimately no responsibility, even he was being victimized by the system and

1062
01:06:30,095 –> 01:06:33,938
thus could not be held responsible. I’ve made that, make

1063
01:06:33,938 –> 01:06:37,658
that, made that argument about, about his participation in the

1064
01:06:37,658 –> 01:06:41,248
Final Solution and his participation in the Holocaust and all the things that happened in

1065
01:06:41,297 –> 01:06:45,104
Germany between, you know, 1929 or ’28

1066
01:06:45,104 –> 01:06:47,762
or so and 1945. Okay.

1067
01:06:49,802 –> 01:06:53,210
The Israeli High Court didn’t accept that. By the way,

1068
01:06:54,287 –> 01:06:57,999
the International Criminal Court at Nuremberg didn’t accept

1069
01:06:57,999 –> 01:07:00,859
that either. Nor should we accept it.

1070
01:07:03,133 –> 01:07:06,184
And my worry is, or not my worry, my concern is,

1071
01:07:07,011 –> 01:07:10,078
as we put AI into decision-making roles,

1072
01:07:11,932 –> 01:07:15,768
now you get more and more of the person, person,

1073
01:07:16,122 –> 01:07:19,748
the software from nowhere that can never be held responsible and things just

1074
01:07:19,748 –> 01:07:23,406
happen. I

1075
01:07:23,439 –> 01:07:27,130
think the solution to this problem is And this is the

1076
01:07:27,130 –> 01:07:30,870
solution that, again, the right representative from Texas proposes. Since I’ve brought up the

1077
01:07:30,870 –> 01:07:34,530
question, I’m going to propose a solution. I think the solution is we start

1078
01:07:34,530 –> 01:07:37,910
taking away people’s government pensions. Start with

1079
01:07:37,910 –> 01:07:41,610
Fauci. Just deny him his pension. That’s fine.

1080
01:07:41,610 –> 01:07:45,410
Just get enough people, vote in Congress. I don’t care which—

1081
01:07:45,410 –> 01:07:47,770
I do not care. I think we could get bipartisan. I think we could actually

1082
01:07:47,770 –> 01:07:50,810
get bipartisan. I think we can get bipartisan agreement on this. Actually, I think we

1083
01:07:50,810 –> 01:07:54,533
could. And you just propose, hey, He’s no longer—

1084
01:07:54,549 –> 01:07:58,108
his pension stops in 2026. And good luck. Go

1085
01:07:58,316 –> 01:08:01,763
have fun with the pharmaceutical companies. I think this— I think we have to start

1086
01:08:01,763 –> 01:08:05,546
taking away people’s money and their benefits because then it

1087
01:08:05,546 –> 01:08:08,463
becomes real for people. I’m not asking you to take away their lives. I’m not

1088
01:08:08,511 –> 01:08:11,253
asking— I’m not even saying that Dr. Fauci can’t go and get another job somewhere.

1089
01:08:11,557 –> 01:08:15,357
Absolutely. Go get hired by the Idaho Health Department. I don’t care.

1090
01:08:16,046 –> 01:08:19,720
Move to Idaho or Kansas or Wyoming

1091
01:08:19,866 –> 01:08:23,668
or Florida or Alpha Centauri, anywhere else will hire

1092
01:08:23,797 –> 01:08:27,470
you. It’s fine. You just don’t get to get paid here.

1093
01:08:29,596 –> 01:08:32,907
Because I think it’s money. I think money is the thing you have to start

1094
01:08:32,907 –> 01:08:36,555
taking away from people. And I’m not just talking about actual cash on the

1095
01:08:36,587 –> 01:08:40,318
barrelhead, although we’ll do that too. Start

1096
01:08:40,318 –> 01:08:44,063
taking away benefits. No, you don’t get lifetime healthcare for the rest of your

1097
01:08:44,112 –> 01:08:47,962
life. No, you don’t get lifetime stock options. I’m looking

1098
01:08:48,010 –> 01:08:51,831
at you, Nancy Pelosi. You don’t get lifetime stock options. And Dan

1099
01:08:51,831 –> 01:08:55,059
Crenshaw, I’m looking at all, both, all of you. No, just start taking it away.

1100
01:08:55,862 –> 01:08:59,330
Now, who will enforce that? That’s a different question. How will we get there? That’s

1101
01:08:59,330 –> 01:09:02,284
a different question. How will we whip the votes? That’s a different question. The proposal

1102
01:09:02,284 –> 01:09:05,704
is on the table. Simple. 2 sentences. If you

1103
01:09:05,817 –> 01:09:09,189
violate the public trust, we take away your pension.

1104
01:09:13,026 –> 01:09:15,675
I think that would be fair. I would vote for that, just so you know.

1105
01:09:16,253 –> 01:09:20,059
But I also think, like, I think that there’s, you know, so my—

1106
01:09:20,492 –> 01:09:23,720
I have a couple of kids that are Gen Zs. And they—

1107
01:09:24,282 –> 01:09:26,690
when we’re talking— where you’re talking about,

1108
01:09:27,975 –> 01:09:31,812
like, you know, the relevancy of the M or the

1109
01:09:31,812 –> 01:09:35,024
B or the T, right? The millionaire, billionaire, trillionaire. Yeah.

1110
01:09:35,682 –> 01:09:39,190
My Gen Zers have come up with a global

1111
01:09:39,222 –> 01:09:42,796
solution that says all the

1112
01:09:42,796 –> 01:09:46,426
sports industries have salary caps. Why don’t we put salary caps on people?

1113
01:09:47,374 –> 01:09:51,200
Oh, I’d be fine with that. And by the way, they’re not talking about

1114
01:09:51,248 –> 01:09:54,607
like, like, you know, stopping people from earning a living. Like,

1115
01:09:54,768 –> 01:09:57,693
obviously, if you want to be— go— you want to go be Mark Zuckerberg, go

1116
01:09:57,757 –> 01:10:01,373
be Mark Zuckerberg, but pick a number. And

1117
01:10:01,453 –> 01:10:04,908
by the way, they’re open to the number. Whether it’s $1

1118
01:10:05,101 –> 01:10:08,840
billion or $500 million or one— or

1119
01:10:08,888 –> 01:10:12,274
maybe it’s $10 billion, whatever that number is. But pick a number

1120
01:10:12,659 –> 01:10:16,029
and just say, from now, when you hit that number, everything you earn after that

1121
01:10:16,029 –> 01:10:19,849
goes back into a general pool that helps— that helps actually,

1122
01:10:20,202 –> 01:10:23,973
you know, feed the world, feed hunger, uh, the homeless, whatever.

1123
01:10:24,840 –> 01:10:28,290
You can even pick the charity, whatever, it doesn’t even matter. Or, you know, maybe

1124
01:10:28,306 –> 01:10:31,918
the cause, maybe not the charity, but— You pick the cause, and then a

1125
01:10:32,481 –> 01:10:36,144
selected group of people from those causes will be the ones

1126
01:10:36,240 –> 01:10:39,324
basically divvying up the money to whatever

1127
01:10:39,389 –> 01:10:43,052
501s exist in that cause. So whether it’s clean

1128
01:10:43,084 –> 01:10:46,586
water, world hunger, poverty,

1129
01:10:47,582 –> 01:10:51,197
homelessness, etc., etc., pick a global

1130
01:10:51,197 –> 01:10:54,859
problem. And once you hit a certain number, the rest of any

1131
01:10:54,892 –> 01:10:58,184
money you earn after that goes right into that. Now, by the way, They were

1132
01:10:58,184 –> 01:11:01,553
perfectly okay. This is so funny that they had this conversation, but they said they’re

1133
01:11:01,553 –> 01:11:05,146
perfectly okay if your number dips, you can earn it back.

1134
01:11:05,467 –> 01:11:07,970
Like, they’re not going to take the money from you if you don’t hit the

1135
01:11:07,970 –> 01:11:11,739
number. So, if the number’s $1 billion, like we just talked about the

1136
01:11:11,739 –> 01:11:15,413
trillion, Elon Musk hit $1 trillion, 2 or 3 days later, went back

1137
01:11:15,413 –> 01:11:19,087
under $1 trillion. Their philosophy or their thinking is

1138
01:11:19,841 –> 01:11:23,418
there’s no penalty for going below it. You only

1139
01:11:23,514 –> 01:11:27,267
get it’s not even really a penalty, but you only hit the salary

1140
01:11:27,363 –> 01:11:31,003
cap if you hit it. Now, if you know anything about sports, Mm-hmm.

1141
01:11:31,789 –> 01:11:35,541
the salary caps in some sports are not real. There’s

1142
01:11:35,621 –> 01:11:39,389
always ways to manipulate the salary cap. I’m sure these people will

1143
01:11:39,405 –> 01:11:43,189
figure out some of those ways. But the reality of it is, until they do,

1144
01:11:43,638 –> 01:11:45,979
you could take— to your point, you could take a lot of that stuff right

1145
01:11:45,979 –> 01:11:49,154
out from underneath them, and you can level the playing field of

1146
01:11:50,148 –> 01:11:53,786
a pretty high mountain. And again, They’re not trying to put roadblocks in

1147
01:11:53,852 –> 01:11:57,444
front of people who are going from, you know, I earned $1 million

1148
01:11:57,958 –> 01:12:01,444
to I want to earn $10 million. You go right ahead. That’s

1149
01:12:01,493 –> 01:12:05,285
capitalism. Go get your capitalistic, you know, fill. And you want to go

1150
01:12:05,285 –> 01:12:08,986
from $10 million to $100 million, go for it. But at some point, the

1151
01:12:08,986 –> 01:12:12,641
money becomes so irrelevant that

1152
01:12:12,818 –> 01:12:16,583
what number is the number that we think of when we think

1153
01:12:17,133 –> 01:12:20,653
right now, I’m just talking. I’m in my 50s,

1154
01:12:20,958 –> 01:12:24,428
right? I’m in my 50s. If I were to

1155
01:12:24,589 –> 01:12:28,380
earn, there is a number that I would never be

1156
01:12:28,380 –> 01:12:32,075
able to spend. I just know it. I know there is. I know

1157
01:12:32,140 –> 01:12:35,690
there’s a number. If I had $10 million or $15 million or $25 million or

1158
01:12:35,722 –> 01:12:38,855
$100 million, I would never spend that money.

1159
01:12:39,530 –> 01:12:43,224
So, what do I do with it? Do I reinvest it into myself or

1160
01:12:43,224 –> 01:12:47,047
my family? Do I create a— A trust that now my kids

1161
01:12:47,079 –> 01:12:50,675
get to earn money on money they never earned? No. Well, first of all, just

1162
01:12:50,675 –> 01:12:54,224
letting everybody know that is never happening. I will

1163
01:12:54,224 –> 01:12:58,013
never— I don’t care. This generational wealth thing has to go right out the window.

1164
01:12:58,382 –> 01:13:02,011
My kids, my children, I tell them all the time, every dollar in my bank

1165
01:13:02,011 –> 01:13:04,772
account I’m gonna try to spend before the day I die because you did not

1166
01:13:04,901 –> 01:13:07,871
earn that money and you are not going to get that money. Now, so I

1167
01:13:07,871 –> 01:13:10,263
take the, I take the opposite tact, and I’ll tell you why in a minute,

1168
01:13:10,279 –> 01:13:12,020
but go ahead, Tom. I was just going to say,

1169
01:13:14,020 –> 01:13:17,710
I’ll make sure there’s enough in there to bury me, whatever kind of funeral you

1170
01:13:17,710 –> 01:13:20,170
want to have, whatever kind of party you want to throw because ding dong, the

1171
01:13:20,170 –> 01:13:23,490
witch is dead, whatever. I don’t care. There’ll be a certain amount of money in

1172
01:13:23,490 –> 01:13:26,930
there that I know that you’re not going to get wealthy on because you didn’t

1173
01:13:26,930 –> 01:13:30,750
earn that. You didn’t work for it. Now, that being said, I’ve

1174
01:13:30,750 –> 01:13:34,330
presented options to all of my kids that say, if you want to help

1175
01:13:34,330 –> 01:13:37,390
build the company that we’re building right now and you want to earn some of

1176
01:13:37,390 –> 01:13:40,351
that money, then I will leave that money to you. But you gotta earn it.

1177
01:13:40,448 –> 01:13:43,422
You’re not gonna go, you’re not gonna go plant

1178
01:13:44,246 –> 01:13:47,900
trees and for— and then come back to me and say, I’m broke, I need

1179
01:13:47,900 –> 01:13:51,715
money. It’s not happening. I’m not doing that anyway. So, right, or write poetry.

1180
01:13:52,022 –> 01:13:54,463
You don’t want them to go off and write poetry. Yeah, exactly. They’re not—

1181
01:13:55,967 –> 01:13:59,605
back to the book. My kids are not writing poetry, calling themselves a poet, and

1182
01:13:59,605 –> 01:14:02,937
then living off my money. That is not happening ever.

1183
01:14:03,325 –> 01:14:04,053
Just letting you know.

1184
01:14:07,560 –> 01:14:11,342
So I am a believer. I will say this. I am a believer

1185
01:14:11,358 –> 01:14:15,172
in generational wealth. I do believe in that because

1186
01:14:15,172 –> 01:14:18,831
it is the way in which families have grown in America

1187
01:14:18,944 –> 01:14:22,712
over the long course of time. However, you only

1188
01:14:22,744 –> 01:14:26,125
really have control 3 generations out. And then after that,

1189
01:14:27,011 –> 01:14:30,683
you know, things, things get really shaky

1190
01:14:30,699 –> 01:14:34,167
3 generations out. And by the way, 3 generations from the time in which you

1191
01:14:34,183 –> 01:14:37,939
made the money, right? So, you know, the first generation builds

1192
01:14:38,132 –> 01:14:41,792
and saves and scrimps and builds and saves

1193
01:14:41,905 –> 01:14:45,677
and scrimps. The second generation tends to, to Tom’s

1194
01:14:45,677 –> 01:14:49,369
point, tends to spend because they didn’t earn it and don’t appreciate

1195
01:14:49,369 –> 01:14:52,548
it in general. And then the third generation has nothing

1196
01:14:53,447 –> 01:14:56,802
and has to go back to guess what? Scrimping and saving

1197
01:14:57,075 –> 01:15:00,706
and not spending. We used to call that shirt

1198
01:15:00,754 –> 01:15:03,700
sleeves to shirt sleeves in 3 generations. That used to be the, that used to

1199
01:15:03,700 –> 01:15:07,422
be the phrase. I think it’s from like David Copperfield or something. Dickens observation.

1200
01:15:08,668 –> 01:15:11,726
However, not however, with that being said,

1201
01:15:15,143 –> 01:15:17,075
I am not opposed to generational wealth.

1202
01:15:19,688 –> 01:15:23,284
I am opposed to, and this is where I slightly differ from

1203
01:15:23,284 –> 01:15:25,987
Tom here. I am opposed to

1204
01:15:27,264 –> 01:15:30,837
the presupposition that some

1205
01:15:30,837 –> 01:15:34,681
people have around what I should do

1206
01:15:34,698 –> 01:15:37,975
with my money. And I’m also

1207
01:15:37,991 –> 01:15:41,542
opposed to the presuppositions and the assumptions that

1208
01:15:41,542 –> 01:15:44,697
exist underneath the thing that exists

1209
01:15:45,394 –> 01:15:49,055
underneath money, which is, and this also is the thing

1210
01:15:49,055 –> 01:15:51,835
underneath leadership that we haven’t really touched on, but we’ll get to it now and

1211
01:15:51,835 –> 01:15:54,402
then we’ll go back to the book. Character. So

1212
01:15:55,524 –> 01:15:58,909
Eric Packer, at the end of the day, even though his father was a

1213
01:15:58,974 –> 01:16:02,230
barber, didn’t get that thing

1214
01:16:02,342 –> 01:16:06,128
transferred to him other than in— and he has a great line at the

1215
01:16:06,128 –> 01:16:09,401
beginning of the book that we’ve sort of skipped over when he’s talking to his,

1216
01:16:09,626 –> 01:16:12,898
his chief financial analyst guy, the one who’s like 22.

1217
01:16:13,716 –> 01:16:16,620
He’s like, well, you’ve been with me ever since we were like at that itty-bitty

1218
01:16:16,620 –> 01:16:19,096
startup. And he sort of says it and you got to go on to the

1219
01:16:19,096 –> 01:16:22,810
next thing, right? These guys, and I

1220
01:16:22,826 –> 01:16:26,628
make this point all the time, these guys didn’t come

1221
01:16:26,628 –> 01:16:30,299
from nowhere. They’re not just in

1222
01:16:30,347 –> 01:16:33,519
situ. They didn’t just pop out like Athena out of the head of Zeus.

1223
01:16:33,954 –> 01:16:37,435
Okay. They came from somewhere. They have a

1224
01:16:37,743 –> 01:16:41,154
root. And what we’ve done poorly at a

1225
01:16:41,154 –> 01:16:44,158
cultural level, and by the way, I have no problem with a salary cap. No

1226
01:16:44,158 –> 01:16:47,304
problem with that at all. Sure, put that proposal on the table. Yeah, let’s propose

1227
01:16:47,304 –> 01:16:50,947
a salary cap. Now, my question is, how do you enforce that? To Tom’s point

1228
01:16:50,979 –> 01:16:54,061
about getting around salary caps, I’m looking at you, the NBA.

1229
01:16:54,992 –> 01:16:58,731
You’re the most notorious out of all of them. But, um, but, um,

1230
01:16:59,261 –> 01:17:02,760
the way you enforce all of that is cultural

1231
01:17:02,872 –> 01:17:06,612
enforcement. We need a cultural change

1232
01:17:07,206 –> 01:17:10,897
around not money and what you spend on it, but a cultural change

1233
01:17:10,897 –> 01:17:14,597
around your character. To close the loop back to the guy

1234
01:17:14,662 –> 01:17:18,383
who was the leader of the company that he built, who’s a multimillionaire and yet

1235
01:17:18,383 –> 01:17:21,774
shook everybody’s hand at the barbecue. Where did that come from?

1236
01:17:23,450 –> 01:17:27,161
Came from his culture, came from his character. Did he pass that along

1237
01:17:27,193 –> 01:17:30,994
to his kids? We don’t know. And that’s

1238
01:17:30,994 –> 01:17:33,721
the part that we can’t control. That’s the part I think that drives us insane.

1239
01:17:34,140 –> 01:17:37,415
Because if every generation had the same character as the first generation,

1240
01:17:37,770 –> 01:17:40,852
maybe not in the same coming out in the same ways. but had that same

1241
01:17:40,852 –> 01:17:44,501
character, you wouldn’t have shirtsleeves to

1242
01:17:44,501 –> 01:17:47,715
shirtsleeves in 3 generations. And even when you had a country where

1243
01:17:48,840 –> 01:17:52,480
people did do the care— not people, culture did the character

1244
01:17:52,496 –> 01:17:56,185
molding based on, and I’m just going to put all my cards on the table

1245
01:17:56,185 –> 01:17:59,008
here, based on a Christian ethic and a Christian worldview.

1246
01:18:00,691 –> 01:18:03,183
I’m not going to say we had more moral people, but I am going to

1247
01:18:03,183 –> 01:18:07,002
say that people were more morally checked in their character. and more ethically

1248
01:18:07,018 –> 01:18:10,867
checked in their character because guess what? They knew the

1249
01:18:10,867 –> 01:18:14,700
rules and they knew they understood at a deep level that

1250
01:18:14,989 –> 01:18:18,629
if I violate these rules, something eternal is going to happen to me. They didn’t

1251
01:18:18,629 –> 01:18:22,414
have to accept it. They just had to realize that that’s the rule. We’ve

1252
01:18:22,430 –> 01:18:25,958
abandoned all that. We’ve said that doesn’t matter. I’m actually doing a lot of work

1253
01:18:25,958 –> 01:18:29,487
on this right now. I’m involved in a program called the Coulson Fellows Program. We’re

1254
01:18:29,487 –> 01:18:33,239
doing a lot of work around these areas of worldview. And almost while I’m

1255
01:18:33,255 –> 01:18:36,030
reading this book, it’s kind of interesting, like how these things are running parallel. And

1256
01:18:36,030 –> 01:18:39,396
I’m reading a ton of books from a ton of authors about this kind of

1257
01:18:39,492 –> 01:18:43,195
problem. Because at the heart of it, how do you enforce a salary

1258
01:18:43,195 –> 01:18:46,673
cap? At the heart of it, how do you have somebody who has the will

1259
01:18:46,898 –> 01:18:50,071
and the ability and the character to look at somebody like a Fauci in the

1260
01:18:50,071 –> 01:18:53,854
face and say, nope, not today, we’re done? Where does that come

1261
01:18:53,854 –> 01:18:57,637
from? And that has to come from character. And character is

1262
01:18:57,637 –> 01:19:01,372
informed by culture. And that’s the

1263
01:19:01,372 –> 01:19:05,186
entire loop that we’re trapped in. that we can’t seem to, we can’t seem to

1264
01:19:05,316 –> 01:19:08,534
work our way out of. And maybe we never will. Maybe it’s, maybe it’s one

1265
01:19:08,534 –> 01:19:11,073
of those human problems that we just never will be able to work ourselves out

1266
01:19:11,073 –> 01:19:13,516
of. But it seems really sharp in the last 25 years.

1267
01:19:15,212 –> 01:19:18,971
Well, I think it’s really, it’s really funny that you say it like that

1268
01:19:19,149 –> 01:19:21,907
as we’re talking about this stuff, because like, it’s,

1269
01:19:23,332 –> 01:19:26,739
it’s almost like we need some sort of reset button to push. Yes.

1270
01:19:27,595 –> 01:19:31,357
Right. And that reset button is going to have to

1271
01:19:31,390 –> 01:19:35,023
be some world event that

1272
01:19:35,023 –> 01:19:38,647
just stops people in their tracks, right? Like, whether it’s,

1273
01:19:39,433 –> 01:19:43,057
I don’t know, enter the name of whatever

1274
01:19:43,057 –> 01:19:46,104
movie or book you want to think of that, like, you know,

1275
01:19:46,569 –> 01:19:49,969
2012 or The Day the Earth Stood Still or

1276
01:19:50,418 –> 01:19:53,898
War of the Worlds. War of the Worlds. It doesn’t matter. Like,

1277
01:19:54,203 –> 01:19:57,298
Day After Tomorrow. I’m just thinking of random

1278
01:19:57,956 –> 01:20:01,681
that’s not always one thing, right? Like, think of like whether a

1279
01:20:01,809 –> 01:20:05,615
geostorm, whether it was like something that was like some

1280
01:20:06,000 –> 01:20:09,693
extreme weather thing that just basically annihilates the Earth’s population

1281
01:20:09,693 –> 01:20:13,450
like Day After Tomorrow. War of the Worlds is an alien kind of creation.

1282
01:20:13,547 –> 01:20:17,240
Okay, great. If we saw an alien race coming at us and we knew we

1283
01:20:17,240 –> 01:20:20,307
only had 5 years until the alien race got here to the world, like we

1284
01:20:20,307 –> 01:20:23,100
saw the Hubble telescope showed us some— Sure.

1285
01:20:24,646 –> 01:20:28,362
whatever. I bet your bottom dollar that every country on this planet would

1286
01:20:28,362 –> 01:20:31,869
eventually figure out that their problems with each other are not that important.

1287
01:20:32,590 –> 01:20:35,656
So this is Project Hail Mary. This is the first part of Project Hail Mary.

1288
01:20:35,946 –> 01:20:39,578
Exactly, exactly my point. Yeah. So project— like I said, enter your name and the

1289
01:20:39,578 –> 01:20:40,610
name of your movie here.

1290
01:20:43,790 –> 01:20:47,510
But like, but, but that’s— but that something like that would

1291
01:20:47,526 –> 01:20:51,296
have to happen, some sort of reset, because whether you’re talking about the—

1292
01:20:51,779 –> 01:20:55,230
and by the way, there was a good

1293
01:20:55,230 –> 01:20:58,950
amount, a fair amount of people that I knew that

1294
01:20:58,983 –> 01:21:01,894
thought that COVID was going to be that reset. Yeah.

1295
01:21:02,687 –> 01:21:06,310
And it did not turn out to be the Spanish flu or the

1296
01:21:06,310 –> 01:21:10,120
Black Plague or anything, but— Or World War I. Right.

1297
01:21:10,379 –> 01:21:14,174
But they thought they saw that coming. And anyway,

1298
01:21:14,577 –> 01:21:18,017
but like, But it just never happened. I know other people that thought that

1299
01:21:18,049 –> 01:21:21,466
2008, that crash, the banking crash of

1300
01:21:21,498 –> 01:21:24,305
2008, that was going to be the button. Think about this, though.

1301
01:21:25,443 –> 01:21:29,020
Aside from COVID pretty much everything that happened that we could think of as the

1302
01:21:29,101 –> 01:21:32,790
reset button is happening in an isolated instance, meaning

1303
01:21:32,870 –> 01:21:35,998
like it’s just happening to the US. Right.

1304
01:21:36,575 –> 01:21:40,152
It’s just happening in Afghanistan. It’s just happening in

1305
01:21:40,265 –> 01:21:43,394
North Korea or in the Korean Peninsula. Like,

1306
01:21:44,280 –> 01:21:47,598
these are very isolated. If you want a reset button, it needs to be global.

1307
01:21:47,840 –> 01:21:51,513
It needs to be something that threatens our entire globe’s economy, our

1308
01:21:51,513 –> 01:21:54,891
entire globe’s function. It has to— it

1309
01:21:55,980 –> 01:21:59,378
has to be humanly unifying

1310
01:22:02,073 –> 01:22:05,365
in order for it to be a true reset. And I don’t see anything like

1311
01:22:05,365 –> 01:22:09,192
that happening anytime soon. So I will tell you, as a person who had

1312
01:22:10,010 –> 01:22:12,670
Who was raised in a Christian household and had a lot of Left Behind books

1313
01:22:12,670 –> 01:22:16,130
in my house. Thanks, Mom. A lot of Left Behind books. And I don’t know

1314
01:22:16,130 –> 01:22:18,690
if you know what those books are. It was a part of a Christian subculture

1315
01:22:18,690 –> 01:22:22,190
thing in the 1990s, basically fictionalizing the Book of Revelations.

1316
01:22:22,850 –> 01:22:26,350
Okay. And it’s fine. Like, once

1317
01:22:26,350 –> 01:22:29,730
people who are in Christian subcultures who are listening to this will understand what I’m

1318
01:22:29,730 –> 01:22:33,310
talking about. If you’re not in a Christian subculture or you weren’t an evangelical Christian

1319
01:22:33,310 –> 01:22:36,229
in the 1990s, you’ll have no idea what I’m talking about. And it’s fine.

1320
01:22:37,770 –> 01:22:41,113
The Christian version of that is the Book of Revelation. It’s the end of the

1321
01:22:41,129 –> 01:22:44,798
Bible. It’s the apocalypse. It’s Jesus riding on a white

1322
01:22:44,798 –> 01:22:47,160
horse with the sword coming out of his mouth in judgment.

1323
01:22:48,601 –> 01:22:52,323
Let me tell you something. I grew up underneath that

1324
01:22:52,323 –> 01:22:56,035
sort of thinking. Sure. That eventually there would be this thing. And by the

1325
01:22:56,035 –> 01:22:59,004
way, that sort of thinking still exists in the Christian, in the American Christian church.

1326
01:22:59,456 –> 01:23:02,070
I don’t know about globally. I can’t speak to that. But in the American Christian

1327
01:23:02,070 –> 01:23:05,287
church, it definitely exists. It’s still there. That strain hasn’t gone anywhere.

1328
01:23:05,894 –> 01:23:09,561
Yeah, of course. And the irony is

1329
01:23:10,220 –> 01:23:13,646
that for both the secular person who’s not a believer

1330
01:23:14,257 –> 01:23:17,464
and for the person who is a believer, they’re both looking for the same thing

1331
01:23:17,480 –> 01:23:21,217
out of the sky to come and unite the

1332
01:23:21,217 –> 01:23:24,482
people. And the thing I always

1333
01:23:24,853 –> 01:23:28,501
say is this, while you’re waiting on the thing to come out of the sky,

1334
01:23:28,711 –> 01:23:32,430
let’s get a proposal on the table because Because what,

1335
01:23:33,157 –> 01:23:34,792
what if something never comes?

1336
01:23:36,903 –> 01:23:38,803
What if this just goes on and on?

1337
01:23:40,661 –> 01:23:44,355
Hmm. What if instead of us looking to the

1338
01:23:44,355 –> 01:23:48,139
sky, we do

1339
01:23:48,139 –> 01:23:51,583
the hard work? And this is the character part. We do the hard work of—

1340
01:23:52,343 –> 01:23:55,367
and like, I love that you and your family are having these kinds of conversations

1341
01:23:55,367 –> 01:23:59,071
because we’re having these kinds of conversations just on the other end of the worldview

1342
01:23:59,521 –> 01:24:02,908
continuum, right? Starting from a different set of presuppositions,

1343
01:24:03,293 –> 01:24:06,938
but winding up in the same cul-de-sac. Yeah. Interesting.

1344
01:24:08,190 –> 01:24:11,834
I think that’s more of what has to happen. And it’s a

1345
01:24:11,963 –> 01:24:14,692
drip, drip, drip thing. And we want it to happen immediately because we want it

1346
01:24:14,692 –> 01:24:18,127
to happen at the speed of a tweet. But it doesn’t. Culture is

1347
01:24:18,176 –> 01:24:21,017
slow. It took us 25 years to get to COVID.

1348
01:24:21,531 –> 01:24:25,143
Well, and we, we have mentioned this on this podcast

1349
01:24:25,143 –> 01:24:28,707
several times, what you described. is what we

1350
01:24:29,221 –> 01:24:32,961
think needs to happen at a visceral level to me

1351
01:24:33,073 –> 01:24:36,782
and you. It has to start at home. If we’re

1352
01:24:36,782 –> 01:24:40,410
not teaching our kids character, if we’re not teaching our kids morals and

1353
01:24:40,538 –> 01:24:44,375
judgment and all that, then why would we expect society to be the ones

1354
01:24:44,423 –> 01:24:48,196
to teach them? Why are we thinking that they’re going to go off

1355
01:24:48,196 –> 01:24:52,001
to college and learn how to be an adult? That’s so dumb. Or

1356
01:24:52,177 –> 01:24:55,870
why would we expect that after they make their first million, Or their first

1357
01:24:55,870 –> 01:24:59,130
$500 million or the first $500,000 or their first

1358
01:24:59,130 –> 01:25:02,370
$100,000 that somehow they will become a moral person.

1359
01:25:03,070 –> 01:25:05,950
No, the morality has— the moral has to come first.

1360
01:25:07,190 –> 01:25:10,830
The morals have to come before the $100,000. Which, by the way, which, by the

1361
01:25:10,830 –> 01:25:14,010
way, so in that conversation, I said to my, my young— my youngest, my daughter,

1362
01:25:14,010 –> 01:25:17,330
I said, so let me get this straight. You hit the Powerball tomorrow. Let’s say

1363
01:25:17,330 –> 01:25:19,460
you hit the Powerball for $500 million.

1364
01:25:21,480 –> 01:25:25,221
Are you going to still go to work on Monday? And she’s— her

1365
01:25:25,269 –> 01:25:28,946
answer was, I don’t know. Good answer, because you probably don’t

1366
01:25:28,962 –> 01:25:32,655
know. I get that. But are you going to start

1367
01:25:32,655 –> 01:25:36,429
donating every paycheck you get after that because you have

1368
01:25:36,429 –> 01:25:40,138
$500 million? If $500 million is enough. Yeah. So

1369
01:25:40,138 –> 01:25:43,718
now every dollar you earn, don’t bother putting that $500 million in the

1370
01:25:43,735 –> 01:25:47,470
bank or in some sort of stocks or whatever, because if you earn

1371
01:25:47,470 –> 01:25:51,090
money on that $500 million, you’re not going to get it, right? Like,

1372
01:25:51,090 –> 01:25:54,830
that’s what you’re telling me, that you’d be okay with that? And she basically said,

1373
01:25:54,830 –> 01:25:57,510
yeah. She’s like, yes, I would be okay with that. I was like, it’s easy

1374
01:25:57,510 –> 01:25:59,810
to say when you don’t have to— It’s easy to say when you don’t have

1375
01:25:59,810 –> 01:26:03,330
it. It’s easy to

1376
01:26:03,330 –> 01:26:07,050
say. On the flip

1377
01:26:07,050 –> 01:26:09,750
side, though, on the flip side, I’ll say, I’ll say this way, I’ll say this

1378
01:26:09,750 –> 01:26:13,515
a different way. I’m involved in another project with

1379
01:26:13,515 –> 01:26:17,345
somebody that we both know, the two of us know very well. And

1380
01:26:17,345 –> 01:26:21,014
I’m involved in this project and we’re building something. We’re building something very

1381
01:26:21,111 –> 01:26:24,924
real. And I think it’s going to be saleable in the very near

1382
01:26:25,037 –> 01:26:28,594
future. Not, not, this is not, this is not a 10-year project.

1383
01:26:28,962 –> 01:26:32,696
Yeah. We’re thinking about 3 years and we should have something saleable.

1384
01:26:32,744 –> 01:26:36,590
Now, whether it sells in 3 years or not, different story. But I

1385
01:26:36,590 –> 01:26:40,230
said to him, just a couple of weeks ago. I have a

1386
01:26:40,230 –> 01:26:43,827
number. I have a number in my brain. If somebody offers me that

1387
01:26:43,827 –> 01:26:47,440
number, this is gone. We’re selling it immediately if they offer me that

1388
01:26:47,473 –> 01:26:51,288
number because I hold the majority

1389
01:26:51,288 –> 01:26:55,120
stake. Yep. I have more authority in

1390
01:26:55,298 –> 01:26:59,142
the sale. And I said to this person, I’m telling you right now,

1391
01:26:59,467 –> 01:27:02,248
if that number— now, that number is a

1392
01:27:04,407 –> 01:27:07,902
6, 7, 8-digit number. Sure.

1393
01:27:08,927 –> 01:27:12,214
So 8 digits, just so for everybody who doesn’t want to do the math, that’s

1394
01:27:12,278 –> 01:27:15,724
$10 million minimum. Like, I’m just saying it’s in the— it’s in the 8— it’s

1395
01:27:15,724 –> 01:27:19,523
in the 8 digits. So it’s in that range, that number from

1396
01:27:19,571 –> 01:27:23,066
10 to 99. But it’s in that number, it’s in that range. And I said,

1397
01:27:23,563 –> 01:27:27,250
anybody offers us anything close to that or that number, we’re out. We’re

1398
01:27:27,250 –> 01:27:29,991
out. I’m just telling you, we’re out and we’re going to go retire and we’re

1399
01:27:30,071 –> 01:27:33,400
going to go You can go build another company if you want, but I’m out.

1400
01:27:33,400 –> 01:27:36,400
At my age, if I get that number, I’m out.

1401
01:27:39,710 –> 01:27:43,520
I’m going to buy a vacation home in the Keys and you’re going to see

1402
01:27:43,520 –> 01:27:46,280
me in New England in the summer and the Keys in the winter. That’s it.

1403
01:27:46,280 –> 01:27:48,420
I’m going down to the Keys. I’m going to hang out on Tom Lippy’s boat

1404
01:27:48,420 –> 01:27:51,580
or whatever the heck he’s doing. And it’s going to be great. But

1405
01:27:51,580 –> 01:27:55,140
to your point about the salary cap thing, but that’s— it’s a different

1406
01:27:55,140 –> 01:27:58,950
way. It’s the opposite version of looking at it. Right. But it’s kind of

1407
01:27:58,950 –> 01:28:02,768
the same in the sense of like, I’m not saying that I

1408
01:28:02,880 –> 01:28:06,635
want to be— I don’t need to be a billionaire. I don’t need that in

1409
01:28:06,667 –> 01:28:10,309
my life. But I’m making a conscious

1410
01:28:11,223 –> 01:28:14,625
effort to say, I know there’s a number I’m never going to be able to

1411
01:28:14,625 –> 01:28:17,978
spend until the end of my life. And if I can hit that number today,

1412
01:28:18,716 –> 01:28:21,989
I’m out. I’m going to go live the rest of my life doing what I

1413
01:28:22,053 –> 01:28:25,260
want to do and not beating myself up and

1414
01:28:25,260 –> 01:28:28,520
like, I, it’s, it’s, it’s just, it’s just that

1415
01:28:28,520 –> 01:28:31,720
way. It’s just that way. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. No, no, no. There’s a, there’s a

1416
01:28:31,720 –> 01:28:34,920
Chinese proverb I wanna close this segment with because we got around the corner here.

1417
01:28:35,020 –> 01:28:37,920
So close this segment. There’s a Chinese proverb I wrote down. I saw it the

1418
01:28:37,920 –> 01:28:41,200
other day and I wrote it down in my, in my notebook that I carry

1419
01:28:41,200 –> 01:28:44,940
around, my little black notebook where I write interesting things down that I see. May

1420
01:28:44,940 –> 01:28:48,320
sometimes eventually they may become blog posts, Substack articles.

1421
01:28:48,960 –> 01:28:52,730
Sure. Tweets, whatever. Old Chinese proverb says this,

1422
01:28:53,299 –> 01:28:56,894
if you must play, decide on 3 things at the start,

1423
01:28:57,539 –> 01:29:01,312
the rules of the game, the stakes of the game, and the

1424
01:29:01,312 –> 01:29:02,924
quitting time from the game.

1425
01:29:06,022 –> 01:29:09,677
And I think we need to embellish. I think we need to embed that thinking

1426
01:29:10,209 –> 01:29:13,961
in leadership, in leaders, if we want to have good future leaders.

1427
01:29:14,476 –> 01:29:18,297
Eric Packer, didn’t know what the stakes of the game were. Well, maybe he did

1428
01:29:18,297 –> 01:29:21,676
at the beginning, but the stakes changed. He sure as heck didn’t know when the

1429
01:29:21,676 –> 01:29:22,577
quitting time was.

1430
01:29:25,483 –> 01:29:29,074
And so he had trouble, right? He had trouble getting out of the car. He

1431
01:29:29,074 –> 01:29:30,991
had trouble every time he got out of the car. Every time he got out

1432
01:29:30,991 –> 01:29:34,602
of the car, there was a problem. But you know what? The

1433
01:29:34,602 –> 01:29:38,324
problems are the human things that leaders have to deal with. And every

1434
01:29:38,324 –> 01:29:42,030
time he got back into the self-sealing sacred environment of the

1435
01:29:42,030 –> 01:29:45,879
vehicle, The yen was crashing. There was more damage

1436
01:29:45,879 –> 01:29:49,639
being done even at a virtual level. So he’s being attacked organically

1437
01:29:49,815 –> 01:29:53,495
and virtually all at the same time, trying to return him to something that is

1438
01:29:53,607 –> 01:29:57,158
human, trying to bring him back. And this is what circumstances do to leaders.

1439
01:29:57,527 –> 01:30:01,303
They mold us and shape us and they try to return us to

1440
01:30:01,383 –> 01:30:04,565
base and they try to build us into whether we want to be built into

1441
01:30:04,613 –> 01:30:08,212
or not people of character. That’s what all of ours— that’s all the

1442
01:30:08,212 –> 01:30:11,931
failures do. That’s, it’s trying to get you to

1443
01:30:11,931 –> 01:30:15,649
have character. And when you read the diaries or you

1444
01:30:15,681 –> 01:30:19,367
read the writings of these leaders afterward, after events have happened,

1445
01:30:20,355 –> 01:30:24,113
you get to see if they became people of character or

1446
01:30:24,113 –> 01:30:27,263
if they learned nothing at all. And that’s,

1447
01:30:27,638 –> 01:30:29,253
that’s one of the really disturbing things.

1448
01:30:33,730 –> 01:30:36,987
Let’s round the corner here. So we kind of talked about solutions to problems. I

1449
01:30:36,987 –> 01:30:40,430
put forth a couple of different proposals. Tom put forth

1450
01:30:40,850 –> 01:30:44,670
a salary cap. I said we should just be taking people’s money

1451
01:30:44,670 –> 01:30:48,311
away when they violate public trust. I think those are 2 things that are on

1452
01:30:48,311 –> 01:30:50,976
the table right now. I think we should do both of them. We shouldn’t have

1453
01:30:51,009 –> 01:30:54,198
to pick between those 2. I think we should do both of them. Okay. Both

1454
01:30:54,247 –> 01:30:57,840
hands. The right representative from Texas. Sure. Yeah, you can get my vote on that.

1455
01:30:58,676 –> 01:30:59,191
Both and.

1456
01:31:02,511 –> 01:31:05,454
I think the other thing that we have that we need to understand about culture

1457
01:31:05,553 –> 01:31:08,497
is that writers And we talked about this in our 200th episode, right?

1458
01:31:09,380 –> 01:31:12,670
Writers have a lot of, a lot of power. Like if you could figure out,

1459
01:31:12,911 –> 01:31:15,543
and this is what Delilah’s trying to figure out with Cosmopolis and with every other

1460
01:31:15,543 –> 01:31:18,336
book that he wrote. If you could figure out how to turn your talent to

1461
01:31:18,352 –> 01:31:22,124
critiquing and, and gadflying on culture, you could get

1462
01:31:22,124 –> 01:31:25,430
people to understand maybe the character is a problem, or

1463
01:31:25,430 –> 01:31:28,961
maybe there’s an alarm bell that should be rung, or maybe we are gonna have

1464
01:31:28,961 –> 01:31:32,604
a problem. And I think Delilah wrote Cosmopolis cuz he saw a problem

1465
01:31:32,653 –> 01:31:35,140
happening, but he didn’t know how to articulate it. And it’s the only tool he

1466
01:31:35,140 –> 01:31:38,958
had. Yeah. One of the things

1467
01:31:38,974 –> 01:31:42,584
that we struggle with is we live in a time where our technological

1468
01:31:42,584 –> 01:31:46,049
power, and we saw this with Eric Packer in his car and with his manipulation

1469
01:31:46,049 –> 01:31:49,273
of the yen, where our technological power has outstripped our moral

1470
01:31:49,273 –> 01:31:52,193
meaning-making. And we’ve wound up in a crisis.

1471
01:31:53,091 –> 01:31:55,513
And it’s very much a,

1472
01:31:56,877 –> 01:32:00,534
whatever we call it after postmodernism, postmodern,

1473
01:32:00,791 –> 01:32:04,303
modern crisis, right? It’s, we call it a crisis of

1474
01:32:04,335 –> 01:32:07,458
meaning, but we also call it a crisis of

1475
01:32:07,960 –> 01:32:10,209
ethics, or we call it a crisis of leadership.

1476
01:32:12,422 –> 01:32:15,243
But I think these crises are primarily driven by our technology.

1477
01:32:16,779 –> 01:32:20,309
They’re driven by what we can see on the dashboard. This is the AI thing.

1478
01:32:20,989 –> 01:32:23,182
They’re driven by what we can see on the dashboard. And

1479
01:32:25,301 –> 01:32:28,470
I wanna, I wanna kind of close with this idea.

1480
01:32:29,217 –> 01:32:32,974
We can talk about this. How can leaders

1481
01:32:34,372 –> 01:32:38,145
avoid or not avoid, mitigate, that’s not, avoid is not, I don’t

1482
01:32:38,145 –> 01:32:41,839
think you can avoid it these days, mitigate managing only by the

1483
01:32:41,839 –> 01:32:45,147
dashboard. Because that’s what Eric Packer was doing. He was trying to manage by the

1484
01:32:45,147 –> 01:32:48,953
dashboard. The dashboard was clean. The dashboard was pure. You know, leaders

1485
01:32:48,985 –> 01:32:51,266
like that, the data is clean, the data is pure.

1486
01:32:51,940 –> 01:32:55,489
It’s the same impetus, just in a different

1487
01:32:55,489 –> 01:32:59,174
flavor. that leads people to like fire AI folks. We were just talking about this

1488
01:32:59,206 –> 01:33:02,589
in the meeting that we were in this morning. Fire AI folks because I could

1489
01:33:02,589 –> 01:33:06,262
do all this development, we could do all this development in Claude. And you get

1490
01:33:06,262 –> 01:33:10,071
out far enough on Claude or you get it far enough on any AI-driven

1491
01:33:10,233 –> 01:33:13,853
software development. And all of a sudden you realize, oh, oh,

1492
01:33:15,017 –> 01:33:17,881
we need all those people back. I mean, I called this like 2 years ago.

1493
01:33:18,172 –> 01:33:21,310
And by the way, you’re going to rehire them at twice what you would have

1494
01:33:21,310 –> 01:33:24,408
paid them. And the longer you wait, the more you’re going to— the more you’re

1495
01:33:24,440 –> 01:33:28,222
going to pay them. And you’re going to be mad, but you’re not going to

1496
01:33:28,238 –> 01:33:31,956
have a choice because your code is garbage. And so the

1497
01:33:31,956 –> 01:33:35,381
code is garbage. The dashboard data was not accurate.

1498
01:33:35,896 –> 01:33:39,477
The real world keeps pushing in on us. And

1499
01:33:39,558 –> 01:33:41,878
our technocratic hubris

1500
01:33:43,452 –> 01:33:47,168
convinces us that we can, like, push back on that. And nature always reasserts.

1501
01:33:48,706 –> 01:33:52,266
Always. So how do leaders, how do

1502
01:33:52,330 –> 01:33:56,022
leaders avoid the seduction of managing by the dashboard

1503
01:33:56,200 –> 01:33:57,592
or managing by the AI?

1504
01:34:00,788 –> 01:34:04,574
Well, I, it’s, I’m gonna give you an example of,

1505
01:34:04,914 –> 01:34:08,069
I was talking to my kids the other day about, you know, quote unquote AI

1506
01:34:08,069 –> 01:34:10,986
taking over the world, et cetera, et cetera, or whatever. I was like,

1507
01:34:11,700 –> 01:34:15,544
let me tell you what Here’s why, here’s why it scares me a little

1508
01:34:15,544 –> 01:34:18,813
bit. And here’s why the human element

1509
01:34:20,053 –> 01:34:23,667
in the, in the, in the example that I gave them is a must and

1510
01:34:23,765 –> 01:34:27,358
not a, and not a, you know, paradise by the

1511
01:34:27,358 –> 01:34:30,033
dashboard lights here that you’re talking about. Yeah.

1512
01:34:31,480 –> 01:34:35,098
Let’s say you have somebody on life support and AI and you’re

1513
01:34:35,098 –> 01:34:37,237
looking at the, and you’re looking at the dashboard

1514
01:34:39,575 –> 01:34:43,028
The numbers are the numbers, what they, what they are. If you leave the

1515
01:34:43,044 –> 01:34:46,287
decision strictly up to AI and there is a

1516
01:34:46,513 –> 01:34:50,274
51% chance that this person doesn’t recover, AI is

1517
01:34:50,371 –> 01:34:53,778
pulling the plug. It’s not worth the resources to

1518
01:34:53,778 –> 01:34:56,734
continue to perform, to give this person life,

1519
01:35:01,680 –> 01:35:05,074
artificial life. Artificial life. Yep. Artificial life. You’re gonna pull the plug.

1520
01:35:05,462 –> 01:35:08,875
Life support is now gone because the AI said it’s 51%.

1521
01:35:09,212 –> 01:35:11,952
It’s more likely that they are going to be a drain on the system, that

1522
01:35:11,952 –> 01:35:14,997
they’re going to be a drain on our— every system that you can check the

1523
01:35:14,997 –> 01:35:18,250
box on, right? Electricity, resources,

1524
01:35:18,362 –> 01:35:22,160
personnel, blah, blah, blah. When the doctor walks into

1525
01:35:22,208 –> 01:35:25,701
that room as a human being and sees the

1526
01:35:25,717 –> 01:35:29,227
same exact numbers and says, this person’s got a 50/50

1527
01:35:29,259 –> 01:35:33,001
shot, but Or a 51% shot that they’re going

1528
01:35:33,017 –> 01:35:36,814
to die anyway, no matter what I do, and a 49% shot that I can

1529
01:35:36,814 –> 01:35:40,623
pull them out and save them. But my gut tells

1530
01:35:40,720 –> 01:35:44,344
me, based on what I’m seeing in my experience, based on other

1531
01:35:44,522 –> 01:35:46,577
people that have had the same similar symptoms,

1532
01:35:48,350 –> 01:35:52,196
the numbers can tell them whatever they want. But my gut tells me I have

1533
01:35:52,196 –> 01:35:55,476
an 80% chance of saving that person’s life. AI can’t

1534
01:35:55,573 –> 01:35:58,793
duplicate that. So, by

1535
01:35:59,676 –> 01:36:03,288
what the point I’m making here is by strictly looking at the dashboard and

1536
01:36:03,384 –> 01:36:06,884
not actually looking at the human interaction and

1537
01:36:07,237 –> 01:36:10,689
leveraging your experience, we say our gut, but

1538
01:36:10,753 –> 01:36:14,557
reality is your gut is not a real thing. Right. It’s your

1539
01:36:14,606 –> 01:36:18,218
life experiences that tell you stuff, like, they give you the instance, they give you

1540
01:36:18,234 –> 01:36:21,669
the vibe or

1541
01:36:21,669 –> 01:36:25,344
whatever you’re calling your gut. That’s not a real

1542
01:36:25,441 –> 01:36:28,859
thing. What is real is that you’re basing this on

1543
01:36:28,971 –> 01:36:32,806
something else that you know that you just can’t put your

1544
01:36:32,902 –> 01:36:36,416
finger on. You can’t pull the subject matter out of your

1545
01:36:36,513 –> 01:36:40,252
mind, but you just know. That’s what we’re

1546
01:36:40,380 –> 01:36:43,204
calling our gut. So, to not

1547
01:36:44,648 –> 01:36:48,419
strictly lead by the dashboards, you’ve got to fight that urge

1548
01:36:49,029 –> 01:36:52,861
to not lead by the dashboards because The dashboards are— there’s

1549
01:36:52,877 –> 01:36:56,726
no human element in the dashboard. If you want to, if

1550
01:36:56,726 –> 01:37:00,332
you want to be, if you’re going to lead by

1551
01:37:00,478 –> 01:37:04,179
strictly by the dashboard, then you should go lead an AI program

1552
01:37:04,179 –> 01:37:07,218
that is all AI agents and you can lead by the dashboards.

1553
01:37:08,013 –> 01:37:11,515
If you want to lead people, then you need to interact with people.

1554
01:37:12,166 –> 01:37:15,857
It’s really that simple. You cannot— I don’t, I don’t—

1555
01:37:15,857 –> 01:37:19,678
somebody who just looks at dashboards and makes decisions strictly by the numbers, I don’t

1556
01:37:19,694 –> 01:37:23,533
think I would give them the title or a label of leader. I don’t think

1557
01:37:23,533 –> 01:37:27,260
I would be able to or willing to do that. Somebody who understands their people,

1558
01:37:27,388 –> 01:37:30,665
who works with them, who sees them, who talks to them, who is

1559
01:37:31,645 –> 01:37:34,986
up to their elbow. Now, when I say their people, again, I do take into

1560
01:37:35,099 –> 01:37:38,295
consideration the people that are managing a

1561
01:37:38,295 –> 01:37:41,990
1,000-person company. I don’t expect them to know all the 1,000 people,

1562
01:37:42,407 –> 01:37:45,845
but their inner core, their executive-level

1563
01:37:45,941 –> 01:37:49,491
board or whatever, I do expect them to know them really well. I expect them

1564
01:37:49,491 –> 01:37:52,929
to know how they lead. I expect them to know how they trickle down the

1565
01:37:52,929 –> 01:37:56,655
leadership responsibilities into the mid-tier leaders and the, you

1566
01:37:56,719 –> 01:38:00,333
know, the entry-level leadership roles in a very large

1567
01:38:00,333 –> 01:38:03,835
organization. It might be a sales manager that reports to a VP of

1568
01:38:03,867 –> 01:38:07,079
sales that reports to a senior VP of sales and marketing, etc., etc.

1569
01:38:08,428 –> 01:38:12,107
I expect every level to know and understand the level above them, the level

1570
01:38:12,139 –> 01:38:15,416
below them. And how they interact. So

1571
01:38:15,416 –> 01:38:19,112
there’s that. It just seems to me

1572
01:38:19,112 –> 01:38:22,310
that, and again, I give you the scenario of the person on life support, because

1573
01:38:22,600 –> 01:38:26,426
if you’re leading by the dashboard, you’re pulling the plug on that person,

1574
01:38:26,620 –> 01:38:30,188
and it might be a little bit premature. I think

1575
01:38:30,268 –> 01:38:34,078
that humanity will always, not humanity, nature

1576
01:38:34,528 –> 01:38:37,968
will always reassert itself. And we see this with Eric Packer in Cosmopolis at the

1577
01:38:37,984 –> 01:38:41,792
end. Where he, where he, he

1578
01:38:41,792 –> 01:38:45,435
has a deadly interaction with someone that he ignored,

1579
01:38:45,759 –> 01:38:49,257
a data point he couldn’t see. Yeah. Because he was so

1580
01:38:49,257 –> 01:38:52,719
seduced by the dashboard, so seduced by the AI,

1581
01:38:53,041 –> 01:38:56,520
such as it were, that he believed that everything would be clean.

1582
01:38:56,584 –> 01:39:00,127
Everything’s going to fall down. And by the way, the hubris and the narcissism started

1583
01:39:00,127 –> 01:39:03,971
with shorting the yen, but it wound him up right

1584
01:39:03,971 –> 01:39:07,740
there. And our egos always trip us up. This

1585
01:39:07,804 –> 01:39:10,912
is the thing, like hubris, ego,

1586
01:39:11,282 –> 01:39:14,634
narcissism. These are the, these are the cardinal sins of

1587
01:39:14,634 –> 01:39:18,039
leadership. And if you’re leading by

1588
01:39:18,039 –> 01:39:20,509
dashboard, it gives you a nice little cover.

1589
01:39:22,150 –> 01:39:25,605
Just like leading by AI, lead with leading the AI

1590
01:39:25,605 –> 01:39:28,098
chatbots gives you chatbots gives you a nice little cover.

1591
01:39:29,408 –> 01:39:33,044
And at the end of the day. When the chips are down, the

1592
01:39:33,044 –> 01:39:36,882
human beings are going to be the ones, or nature, or circumstances

1593
01:39:36,978 –> 01:39:40,542
that didn’t make it into the software or into the algorithm or onto the

1594
01:39:40,542 –> 01:39:43,770
dashboard. Those are going to be the things that screw you up. Those are going

1595
01:39:43,770 –> 01:39:47,238
to be the things that you didn’t pay attention to. And we see this in,

1596
01:39:47,511 –> 01:39:51,188
we see this in Cosmopolis, not just also the book, but in the movie. And

1597
01:39:51,204 –> 01:39:54,142
we see it in real life. We see this reflected in reality.

1598
01:39:54,881 –> 01:39:58,540
And I think that the average

1599
01:39:58,604 –> 01:40:02,128
person, the average leader who’s further down in status on the totem pole than the

1600
01:40:02,128 –> 01:40:05,965
trillionaire, the millionaire, or the billionaire, should be just

1601
01:40:05,965 –> 01:40:09,781
as cautious as those people are. Just as cautious,

1602
01:40:09,975 –> 01:40:13,759
because if you are the local hundred-thousandaire in your town or the local

1603
01:40:13,759 –> 01:40:17,371
millionaire in your town, you can also be gotten

1604
01:40:17,793 –> 01:40:21,636
by hubris and narcissism and ego. You need to pay attention.

1605
01:40:22,730 –> 01:40:26,440
All right. See, we squeezed more. You can tell your wife

1606
01:40:26,440 –> 01:40:30,160
we squeezed more out of Cosmopolis than she might have thought there was.

1607
01:40:30,420 –> 01:40:32,940
If you don’t mind, if you don’t mind, though, real, real quick, I want to

1608
01:40:32,940 –> 01:40:36,720
finish. I want to finish the— because I thought we would get to all of

1609
01:40:36,720 –> 01:40:40,500
what I said on the couch. There were— I’ll just round this

1610
01:40:40,500 –> 01:40:43,680
off by saying, and I’ll make it very, very quick. I told her there were

1611
01:40:43,680 –> 01:40:47,520
2 or 3 things that I pulled out of that movie that were explicit,

1612
01:40:47,520 –> 01:40:51,320
like very good lessons for leadership leaders to learn, one of which

1613
01:40:52,094 –> 01:40:55,404
I think we’ve touched on most of them. But when I said to her,

1614
01:40:55,870 –> 01:40:59,597
be careful of your own ego, the fact that he thought that he

1615
01:40:59,645 –> 01:41:03,067
was going to get across town to get a haircut regardless of what was happening,

1616
01:41:03,581 –> 01:41:06,843
that showed a level of arrogance that only rich people have,

1617
01:41:07,598 –> 01:41:11,309
right? Number one. Number two, only people that have made it to a

1618
01:41:11,309 –> 01:41:15,004
certain point in their lifespan without

1619
01:41:15,952 –> 01:41:19,792
roadblocks getting in the way in the first place. That seems like that, again,

1620
01:41:19,808 –> 01:41:23,181
the Zuckerberg era thing where he just kind of, he just kind of fell into

1621
01:41:23,181 –> 01:41:26,972
that billionaire role, fell into that $100 billion, like it just fell into it. Number—

1622
01:41:26,972 –> 01:41:30,553
so that was number one. Number 2 was the, uh, the interaction with the

1623
01:41:30,553 –> 01:41:34,344
Giamatti, uh, character at the end where if you’re disconnected so

1624
01:41:34,344 –> 01:41:38,087
deeply from the people that work for you that you can’t recognize that they’re, that

1625
01:41:38,119 –> 01:41:41,909
they, they themselves are in trouble, which in turn puts you into

1626
01:41:41,974 –> 01:41:45,809
trouble. Mm-hmm. Like that’s poor leadership, in my opinion. And

1627
01:41:45,809 –> 01:41:49,432
then the third one was never taking the advice of

1628
01:41:49,432 –> 01:41:53,247
somebody that you pay for their advice. His head of

1629
01:41:53,279 –> 01:41:56,918
leadership— his head of security— Security. Constantly trying to

1630
01:41:57,111 –> 01:42:00,573
point him in the right direction, and he completely ignored him, even though

1631
01:42:00,974 –> 01:42:04,806
he pays him to do that. So if you’re gonna

1632
01:42:04,806 –> 01:42:08,589
pay somebody to give you advice, take their goddamn advice, because if you don’t,

1633
01:42:08,733 –> 01:42:12,110
then just fire the person. Like, get rid of them if you’re not gonna— why

1634
01:42:12,110 –> 01:42:14,704
do you have them if you’re not gonna listen to them and pay and take

1635
01:42:14,704 –> 01:42:17,861
their advice? So those are the 3 things that came out of that conversation with

1636
01:42:17,861 –> 01:42:21,200
her on the couch. And she went, oh, you got all that from that

1637
01:42:21,329 –> 01:42:25,043
crappy movie? I said, yes, because I was watching it through a

1638
01:42:25,043 –> 01:42:26,819
different lens than you were watching it.

1639
01:42:30,216 –> 01:42:33,987
Well, uh, I got someone knocking at the door of my self-sealing

1640
01:42:34,100 –> 01:42:37,842
podcast studio here. Uh, so we gotta go, but I want to thank

1641
01:42:37,842 –> 01:42:40,148
Tom Libby for coming on the show today. And with that, well,

1642
01:42:41,966 –> 01:42:42,470
we’re out.