A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion w/Tom Libby & Jesan Sorrells

1
00:00:01,440 –> 00:00:05,280
Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and

2
00:00:05,280 –> 00:00:08,680
this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books

3
00:00:08,680 –> 00:00:10,560
podcast, episode number

4
00:00:10,720 –> 00:00:14,480
190. What this means,

5
00:00:14,480 –> 00:00:18,240
by the way, if you’re accounting at home, is we are 10 books,

6
00:00:18,320 –> 00:00:21,840
10 episodes away from our big 200th

7
00:00:22,080 –> 00:00:25,760
episode of this show. That

8
00:00:25,760 –> 00:00:29,540
means we’ve really done something. That’s all that means. Just means that we’ve

9
00:00:29,540 –> 00:00:33,220
really done something here. So we’ll have more updates on that 200th episode

10
00:00:33,220 –> 00:00:36,500
and of course you will be joined by our guest co host on that 200th

11
00:00:36,500 –> 00:00:39,980
episode and a few other guests if I can wrangle some people together. So stay

12
00:00:39,980 –> 00:00:43,820
tuned to this spot for them. I’d

13
00:00:43,820 –> 00:00:47,180
like to open today with a

14
00:00:48,300 –> 00:00:52,020
not really a selection, but maybe the first opening lines, the first

15
00:00:52,020 –> 00:00:55,730
openings stanzas of our of

16
00:00:55,730 –> 00:00:58,890
our book today. And I quote,

17
00:00:59,690 –> 00:01:01,450
I will be her witness.

18
00:01:03,770 –> 00:01:07,570
That would translate S Testigio and we will not

19
00:01:07,570 –> 00:01:11,250
appear in your and will not appear in your traveler’s phrase book because it is

20
00:01:11,250 –> 00:01:13,930
not a useful phrase for the prudent traveler.

21
00:01:15,130 –> 00:01:18,810
Here is what happened. She left one man. She left a

22
00:01:18,810 –> 00:01:22,350
second man. She traveled again with the first. She let him die

23
00:01:22,350 –> 00:01:26,030
alone. She lost one child, to quote unquote

24
00:01:26,030 –> 00:01:29,190
history and another to quote unquote complications.

25
00:01:29,750 –> 00:01:33,550
I offer in each instance the evaluation of others. She

26
00:01:33,550 –> 00:01:37,030
imagined herself capable of shedding that baggage and came to

27
00:01:37,030 –> 00:01:40,310
Boca Grande a tourist. Una tourista,

28
00:01:40,950 –> 00:01:44,510
so she said. In fact, she came here less a

29
00:01:44,510 –> 00:01:48,280
tourist than a sojourner. But she did not make that

30
00:01:48,360 –> 00:01:51,960
distinction. She dreamed

31
00:01:51,960 –> 00:01:55,160
her life. She made not enough

32
00:01:55,400 –> 00:01:58,360
distinctions. She died

33
00:01:59,080 –> 00:02:01,640
hopeful. In summary,

34
00:02:02,760 –> 00:02:06,160
so you know the story. Of course, the story had

35
00:02:06,160 –> 00:02:09,400
extenuating circumstances. Weather, crack

36
00:02:09,400 –> 00:02:12,850
sidewalks and paragornia. But only

37
00:02:13,410 –> 00:02:14,290
for the living.

38
00:02:17,650 –> 00:02:21,290
When you open up the book here, when you open

39
00:02:21,290 –> 00:02:24,770
up the book today, you are introduced to

40
00:02:25,170 –> 00:02:28,130
a woman named Grace Strasser

41
00:02:28,610 –> 00:02:30,610
Mindana, nee Tabor.

42
00:02:32,210 –> 00:02:35,890
She has been for 50 of her 60 years a student

43
00:02:35,890 –> 00:02:39,050
of delusion, a prudent traveler from Denver,

44
00:02:39,050 –> 00:02:42,710
Colorado. Her mother died of influenza one morning

45
00:02:42,710 –> 00:02:46,550
when she was eight. Her father died of gunshot wounds, not self inflicted,

46
00:02:46,710 –> 00:02:50,390
one afternoon when she was 10. From that

47
00:02:50,390 –> 00:02:53,590
afternoon until her 16th birthday, she lived alone in

48
00:02:53,910 –> 00:02:57,430
their in her parents suite at the Brown Palace Hotel.

49
00:02:58,550 –> 00:03:02,310
She has lived in equatorial America since 1935 and only

50
00:03:02,310 –> 00:03:05,470
twice have had equatorial fever. She is an

51
00:03:05,470 –> 00:03:09,230
anthropologist. Grace is who lost faith in her own method,

52
00:03:09,230 –> 00:03:12,970
who stopped believing that observable activity defined

53
00:03:12,970 –> 00:03:16,810
anthropos. She studied under Kroeber at California and

54
00:03:16,810 –> 00:03:20,050
worked with Levi Strauss at Sao Paulo, classified several

55
00:03:20,130 –> 00:03:23,730
societies, catalog their rights and attitudes on occasions of Birth,

56
00:03:24,530 –> 00:03:27,889
population, initiation and death, did extensive and well

57
00:03:27,889 –> 00:03:31,730
regarded studies on the rearing of female children in the Mato Grosso

58
00:03:31,730 –> 00:03:35,410
and along certain tributaries of the Rio Jingu. And still

59
00:03:35,890 –> 00:03:39,090
she did not know why any of these female children did or do not

60
00:03:39,710 –> 00:03:43,470
do anything at all. She

61
00:03:43,470 –> 00:03:47,230
wound up in a land called Boca Grande and wound up there,

62
00:03:47,710 –> 00:03:51,470
well, by plane. Boca Grande is not a land of

63
00:03:51,470 –> 00:03:55,230
contrasts. On the contrary, Boca Grande is relentlessly, quote,

64
00:03:55,230 –> 00:03:58,910
unquote, the same. The cathedral is not Spanish colonial,

65
00:03:58,910 –> 00:04:02,670
but corrugated aluminum. There are no waterfalls of note,

66
00:04:02,750 –> 00:04:06,380
no ruins of interest, no chic boutiques. The

67
00:04:06,380 –> 00:04:09,620
politics of the country, of course, at first appear to offer contrast,

68
00:04:09,780 –> 00:04:13,060
involving, as they do, the quote, unquote, colorful Latin

69
00:04:13,060 –> 00:04:16,860
juxtaposition of guerrillos and colonels. But when

70
00:04:16,860 –> 00:04:20,580
the tanks are put away and the airport reopens, nothing actually changes

71
00:04:20,660 –> 00:04:24,420
in Boca Grande. Boca Grande is the

72
00:04:24,420 –> 00:04:28,140
name of the country as well as the name of the city, as if the

73
00:04:28,140 –> 00:04:31,300
place defeated the imagination of even its first settler.

74
00:04:32,600 –> 00:04:36,200
And of course, there’s this quote in the book and I quote.

75
00:04:36,200 –> 00:04:40,040
Boca Grande has no history, the librarian said, and he seemed gratified that I had

76
00:04:40,040 –> 00:04:43,560
asked, as if we had together hit upon a catechistic point

77
00:04:43,960 –> 00:04:45,720
of national pride.

78
00:04:48,040 –> 00:04:51,680
The book we are going to cover today is a fiction

79
00:04:51,680 –> 00:04:55,440
book that reads like non fiction. It reads like

80
00:04:55,440 –> 00:04:59,170
reportage. It’s the story of a woman

81
00:04:59,330 –> 00:05:03,090
who is looking for surety, narrating the life of another

82
00:05:03,170 –> 00:05:07,010
woman who is so. And you’re going to want to

83
00:05:07,010 –> 00:05:10,610
follow the bouncing ball here with me today. So solipsistic,

84
00:05:10,610 –> 00:05:14,210
not narcissistic, but so solipsistic that she is

85
00:05:14,210 –> 00:05:17,970
perpetually surprised by how other

86
00:05:17,970 –> 00:05:21,530
people’s minds work, which is

87
00:05:21,530 –> 00:05:25,300
particularly relevant for our era where we follow the

88
00:05:25,300 –> 00:05:29,060
bouncing ball on social media and through social

89
00:05:29,060 –> 00:05:32,380
media posts and even into our own personal lives.

90
00:05:33,180 –> 00:05:36,860
But we really are lacking a deep understanding of how

91
00:05:36,860 –> 00:05:38,460
other people’s minds work,

92
00:05:40,540 –> 00:05:44,380
exploring themes that we opened the door to in our

93
00:05:44,460 –> 00:05:48,140
last conversation in the Optimist’s Daughter. And we’ll continue on

94
00:05:48,140 –> 00:05:51,860
through another book by this authority later on in the

95
00:05:51,860 –> 00:05:55,620
month. Today we’re going to cover a book

96
00:05:55,620 –> 00:05:58,380
of Common Prayer by Joan

97
00:05:58,860 –> 00:05:59,580
Didian.

98
00:06:03,820 –> 00:06:07,220
Leaders. One of the things that we’re going to pull out of this book is

99
00:06:07,220 –> 00:06:09,780
one of the things that we always say. So I’m just going to front load

100
00:06:09,780 –> 00:06:13,580
it here. The more things change, the more

101
00:06:13,580 –> 00:06:16,700
they regrettably stay the same.

102
00:06:18,520 –> 00:06:21,920
And the problem of eyewitness testimony, the

103
00:06:21,920 –> 00:06:23,320
problems that we have.

104
00:06:25,640 –> 00:06:29,000
The problems that we have, I thought were problems of a lack of

105
00:06:29,000 –> 00:06:32,440
language in order to engage in discernment, to

106
00:06:32,440 –> 00:06:36,080
interpret assertions that may be bogus. Bogus, and then to

107
00:06:36,080 –> 00:06:39,520
discern and critically think through the challenge of what we

108
00:06:39,520 –> 00:06:43,240
observe interpersonally. But I’m beginning to think

109
00:06:43,240 –> 00:06:45,360
maybe that the problem

110
00:06:47,600 –> 00:06:51,440
is that we only think that our

111
00:06:51,440 –> 00:06:55,280
own minds are sure to exist and we’re not

112
00:06:55,280 –> 00:06:57,120
quite sure about everybody else’s.

113
00:07:00,560 –> 00:07:03,760
My compatriot along this journey today

114
00:07:04,720 –> 00:07:08,320
back to discuss the timeless nature of Central American

115
00:07:08,480 –> 00:07:11,870
republics, guerrilla

116
00:07:11,870 –> 00:07:15,550
republics, particularly like Boca Grande. The 1970s,

117
00:07:15,550 –> 00:07:17,990
when a lot of those Central American republics were.

118
00:07:19,270 –> 00:07:23,110
Well, they were America’s backyard for the battles

119
00:07:23,110 –> 00:07:26,470
between the Yankees and the communists,

120
00:07:27,590 –> 00:07:31,350
is our good friend of the show and a person who’s not

121
00:07:31,350 –> 00:07:35,070
struggling with. With understanding other people’s minds, but a person with other. Chuckling,

122
00:07:35,070 –> 00:07:38,840
Understanding other people’s behaviors, just as I

123
00:07:38,840 –> 00:07:42,680
am. Tom Libby. How are you doing today, Tom?

124
00:07:44,120 –> 00:07:47,440
Well, based on that intro, I would have to be completely honest with

125
00:07:47,440 –> 00:07:51,160
everybody listening right now and saying, I’ve had better days. You know, like, today is.

126
00:07:51,719 –> 00:07:53,720
Has been a very challenging day.

127
00:07:55,400 –> 00:07:59,200
I will, however, say by the

128
00:07:59,200 –> 00:08:02,440
end of the day, I will have had a good day regardless, because that’s just

129
00:08:02,440 –> 00:08:05,990
kind of in my personality. So regardless of how the day starts and

130
00:08:05,990 –> 00:08:09,630
whatever challenges I face, typically when I say my day is

131
00:08:09,630 –> 00:08:13,470
done from, you know, from professional life into

132
00:08:13,470 –> 00:08:17,270
personal life, that gets left behind, and it’s fine by the time

133
00:08:17,270 –> 00:08:20,990
I’m done with it, and then I move on. So I will be fine. But

134
00:08:20,990 –> 00:08:24,190
as of right now, it’s been a challenging day so far, if I’m just being

135
00:08:24,190 –> 00:08:27,830
completely honest. Absolutely. This is. This is what we love. We love the

136
00:08:27,830 –> 00:08:31,680
honesty and the transparency on the show, by

137
00:08:31,680 –> 00:08:35,400
the way. I got a. I got a text message from someone

138
00:08:35,400 –> 00:08:38,600
who is a listener, and I want to give a. I want to give a

139
00:08:38,600 –> 00:08:41,720
shout out to this person early in the show,

140
00:08:42,360 –> 00:08:45,880
fellow named Nicholas Jackson. He’s been listening to our show

141
00:08:46,280 –> 00:08:49,720
and he sent me a text message, actually, which,

142
00:08:49,960 –> 00:08:53,680
no, listeners, you don’t have the ability to send me a text message on the

143
00:08:53,680 –> 00:08:57,240
regular. No. So sorry. Uh, Nick gets special

144
00:08:57,240 –> 00:09:00,430
treatment because, well, he’s a personal friend of ours.

145
00:09:00,830 –> 00:09:04,510
Well, personal friend of mine, anyway. I don’t believe Tom has never met him, but.

146
00:09:05,630 –> 00:09:08,750
But Nick sent me this. This text message last week when I was

147
00:09:09,150 –> 00:09:12,430
dead sick in the middle of, like, sweating and fever,

148
00:09:12,910 –> 00:09:16,630
and I was laying on my couch and my phone happened to buzz and. And

149
00:09:16,630 –> 00:09:20,270
Nick almost never texts me unless there’s like, an emergency or something

150
00:09:20,270 –> 00:09:24,110
pops up or something like that. And he sent me a Picture of

151
00:09:25,740 –> 00:09:29,180
the screen in his car listening to our

152
00:09:29,180 –> 00:09:32,860
episode from last week, the Optimist’s Daughter. And he

153
00:09:32,860 –> 00:09:36,700
said, and I quote, I’ve really been enjoying your podcast.

154
00:09:36,860 –> 00:09:40,380
Your perspective, education, intelligence really shines through in your work here.

155
00:09:41,259 –> 00:09:43,660
I think we really have a ton in common when it comes to our thoughts

156
00:09:43,660 –> 00:09:46,300
about cultural, religion and the impact of Western culture.

157
00:09:48,460 –> 00:09:52,240
So, Tom, I can’t take all the credit for that. That also goes

158
00:09:52,240 –> 00:09:55,280
to you. So there you go. A little something else to brighten your day. Look

159
00:09:55,280 –> 00:09:56,840
at the day’s getting better already.

160
00:10:02,280 –> 00:10:06,080
We’re not, we’re not just doing unexamined, unrewarded,

161
00:10:06,080 –> 00:10:09,640
unrequited humans work here. We’re

162
00:10:09,640 –> 00:10:13,480
actually, we’re actually doing something meaningful. And speaking of doing something meaningful, let’s,

163
00:10:13,480 –> 00:10:17,330
let’s do the transition here. We talk a little bit

164
00:10:17,330 –> 00:10:20,770
about Joan Didian. So we’ve

165
00:10:20,850 –> 00:10:24,410
covered two of her books on our show previously in

166
00:10:24,410 –> 00:10:28,050
solo episodes. One in the second

167
00:10:28,130 –> 00:10:31,730
season of the show, we did Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which was her

168
00:10:31,730 –> 00:10:35,490
initial collection of essays that she wrote in

169
00:10:35,490 –> 00:10:39,010
the 1960s. And we’re going to recover that in an upcoming episode

170
00:10:39,650 –> 00:10:43,490
with, with another guest co host coming up here fairly soon. So stay

171
00:10:43,490 –> 00:10:47,070
tuned for that. And then we also covered her first novel

172
00:10:47,230 –> 00:10:50,030
that she wrote, Play it as it Lays,

173
00:10:51,070 –> 00:10:54,830
a interesting novel about a, about

174
00:10:54,830 –> 00:10:58,430
a woman struggling, right. To

175
00:10:59,470 –> 00:11:03,230
navigate her life in Southern California

176
00:11:03,630 –> 00:11:06,990
while the, while the

177
00:11:07,070 –> 00:11:10,550
specter or the idea of the

178
00:11:10,550 –> 00:11:13,880
freeway in LA runs through everything.

179
00:11:15,480 –> 00:11:18,800
And now. So this will be, this will be Didian’s third book that we’ve covered

180
00:11:18,800 –> 00:11:22,600
of hers on this show. So that’s, that makes her like, I mean, I don’t

181
00:11:22,600 –> 00:11:26,280
think we’ve covered any male author three times here on this

182
00:11:26,280 –> 00:11:29,720
show so far. So that makes her a grand champion.

183
00:11:30,120 –> 00:11:33,760
But I don’t think I’ve ever covered her with another guest. Actually, I

184
00:11:33,760 –> 00:11:37,160
haven’t covered her with another guest until now. So

185
00:11:38,880 –> 00:11:42,560
most people, when I introduce them to Joan Didiana, have one of two responses.

186
00:11:42,720 –> 00:11:46,400
They’ll either say, that’s really

187
00:11:46,400 –> 00:11:49,840
interesting. And then they sort of like eat the hors d’ oeuvre and

188
00:11:50,720 –> 00:11:54,440
wander away. Or they

189
00:11:54,440 –> 00:11:57,600
will say, oh, I read her

190
00:11:58,240 –> 00:12:01,960
and, but, and then there’s a whole like thing of string of things

191
00:12:01,960 –> 00:12:05,770
after that. Right. Didion was a

192
00:12:06,330 –> 00:12:10,170
woman who, a writer

193
00:12:10,490 –> 00:12:14,090
who started writing. She started her career when she,

194
00:12:14,170 –> 00:12:17,930
when her mother gave her a notebook, I love this, gave her a

195
00:12:17,930 –> 00:12:21,250
notebook as a little girl and told her to write down her thoughts because her

196
00:12:21,250 –> 00:12:24,810
mother couldn’t be bothered to hear them. I thought was really interesting

197
00:12:26,010 –> 00:12:29,820
Didion was influenced by Ernest Hemingway. And I

198
00:12:29,820 –> 00:12:32,900
have a quote in here from her about how she did her writing process.

199
00:12:33,620 –> 00:12:37,340
But she won an essay in high school. There was an essay

200
00:12:37,340 –> 00:12:41,100
contest back when they used to have essay contests. Vogue magazine did an

201
00:12:41,100 –> 00:12:44,660
essay contest. And I think she won it when she was like 17

202
00:12:44,739 –> 00:12:48,180
years old and then graduated high school and went to work for

203
00:12:48,580 –> 00:12:52,180
Vogue magazine in, in New York City. So she flew from,

204
00:12:52,660 –> 00:12:55,780
from California, where she was born and raised,

205
00:12:56,550 –> 00:13:00,230
flew out to. Flew out to New York, lived in New York for a time,

206
00:13:00,630 –> 00:13:03,670
became a journalist, learned the discipline of

207
00:13:03,670 –> 00:13:07,470
journalistic presentation and, you know,

208
00:13:07,470 –> 00:13:11,190
was coming around and was writing essays and writing column

209
00:13:11,190 –> 00:13:14,230
pieces and being edited during a time when

210
00:13:14,870 –> 00:13:18,710
that was probably the best way for a young writer to actually

211
00:13:18,710 –> 00:13:22,320
become honed. She’s totally the

212
00:13:22,320 –> 00:13:26,040
opposite of a John Steinbeck, right, who we covered on this show. She was

213
00:13:26,040 –> 00:13:29,120
not a working class. She didn’t come up from working class back. Well, she came

214
00:13:29,120 –> 00:13:32,560
from working class background, but she was not,

215
00:13:32,880 –> 00:13:36,600
she was not part of a working class milieu. She never thought

216
00:13:36,600 –> 00:13:40,120
of herself that way. But she also never thought of herself as an

217
00:13:40,120 –> 00:13:43,600
intellectual or a scholar or, or even particularly a writer.

218
00:13:44,480 –> 00:13:48,240
She thought of herself as a journalist. And the many things that I’ve,

219
00:13:48,470 –> 00:13:52,230
I’ve watched on her, I watched her autobiography that was produced

220
00:13:52,230 –> 00:13:55,350
on Netflix about her. I’m fascinated by this woman

221
00:13:55,990 –> 00:13:58,950
because she represents

222
00:13:59,750 –> 00:14:03,110
sort of that mid century writing moment,

223
00:14:03,910 –> 00:14:07,430
that brief moment between the end of the 50s and the beginning of the

224
00:14:07,430 –> 00:14:10,790
80s when you could kind of get away with anything

225
00:14:11,030 –> 00:14:14,880
if you were a male or female writer. Like you really could.

226
00:14:14,880 –> 00:14:17,440
Like everything had become really super egalitarian.

227
00:14:18,800 –> 00:14:22,520
Magazines like Vogue were publishing really interesting writing, but so was

228
00:14:22,520 –> 00:14:25,520
like Reader’s Digest and Life magazine.

229
00:14:26,800 –> 00:14:30,440
You know, you could open up, you could open up Harper’s

230
00:14:30,440 –> 00:14:33,920
Weekly and you could see a writing from Hunter.

231
00:14:34,080 –> 00:14:37,720
Well, you could see writing from Hunter Thompson just using him as an

232
00:14:37,720 –> 00:14:41,340
example. I’m not saying Hunter Thompson never wrote for Harper’s Weekly, but you could. Charles

233
00:14:41,340 –> 00:14:45,020
Portis is a better example who wrote True Grit. You could see writing from Charles

234
00:14:45,020 –> 00:14:48,460
Portis right next to reporting from Walter

235
00:14:48,460 –> 00:14:52,060
Cronkite. Just to use another example of a name that folks would know. It was

236
00:14:52,060 –> 00:14:55,740
that weird mid century American moment when high culture and low

237
00:14:55,740 –> 00:14:59,580
culture began to merge together and began to overlap and began

238
00:14:59,580 –> 00:15:03,220
to influence each other. And Didion was at the center of all this. Her

239
00:15:03,220 –> 00:15:06,680
first collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was written

240
00:15:08,120 –> 00:15:11,640
basically because she was asked to go back to California after

241
00:15:11,720 –> 00:15:15,520
she quit Vogue. She was asked to go Back to California by the

242
00:15:15,520 –> 00:15:18,720
New York Times, who had picked up on her to report on what was going

243
00:15:18,720 –> 00:15:22,520
on at Haight Ashbury, because the summer of love was about to kick off.

244
00:15:22,760 –> 00:15:26,280
And of course, she was right around the age

245
00:15:26,280 –> 00:15:30,080
where you could go and observe the summer of love and not

246
00:15:30,080 –> 00:15:33,730
be a part of it. And she did. And to her

247
00:15:33,730 –> 00:15:37,410
horror. And this is where it’s interesting.

248
00:15:37,410 –> 00:15:39,890
The thing, the other thing that fascinates me about Didion is interesting.

249
00:15:40,930 –> 00:15:44,450
Didion was probably the last gasp

250
00:15:45,250 –> 00:15:49,010
of California Republican leanings that eventually would become

251
00:15:49,010 –> 00:15:52,690
left wing over the course of the 80s and

252
00:15:52,690 –> 00:15:56,290
90s. She was sort of that last gasp of California

253
00:15:56,290 –> 00:15:59,640
propriety that was, that was holding back.

254
00:15:59,960 –> 00:16:03,240
The Haight Ashberry types who are,

255
00:16:03,800 –> 00:16:07,480
in our own era would have, would be the great grandfathers

256
00:16:08,200 –> 00:16:11,720
of the folks who are high

257
00:16:11,880 –> 00:16:15,600
on methadone and pooping themselves on fentanyl right now in the streets of

258
00:16:15,600 –> 00:16:19,320
San Francisco. That’s what Haight Ashbury gets you. You wind up at that

259
00:16:19,320 –> 00:16:23,040
spot, at least I think you do. So that’s a

260
00:16:23,040 –> 00:16:26,610
lot there. I just document dumped on you tomorrow about Didion.

261
00:16:27,250 –> 00:16:30,610
And that’s really like stuff just for the Wikipedia article and other things that I’ve

262
00:16:30,610 –> 00:16:34,370
been able to gather about her going around. Like I said, most people have not

263
00:16:34,370 –> 00:16:38,050
heard of her because she’s considered to be a literary writer, not a popular writer.

264
00:16:39,970 –> 00:16:43,090
And she was also considered to be a very waspish

265
00:16:43,410 –> 00:16:46,890
writer. She was a classic sort of. I write for the New

266
00:16:46,890 –> 00:16:50,370
Yorker. Oh, the New Yorker. And then your voice goes up at the end and

267
00:16:50,370 –> 00:16:53,010
you know, you stick out your pinky like you’re drinking tea or some crap.

268
00:16:54,010 –> 00:16:57,690
So, but, but I think

269
00:16:58,170 –> 00:17:01,890
she was a woman who wanted to be read by more people, but was

270
00:17:01,890 –> 00:17:05,730
just fine not being read by more people. And I think that’s

271
00:17:05,730 –> 00:17:09,450
what really turns people off about Didion. She doesn’t really care if you

272
00:17:09,450 –> 00:17:13,010
don’t like her writing or her sentence structure or not. She’s doing work

273
00:17:13,010 –> 00:17:16,490
and if you want to come along, that’s cool, but if not, well,

274
00:17:16,650 –> 00:17:20,450
there’s plenty of other writers for you to read. She

275
00:17:20,450 –> 00:17:24,130
was also nervous. She was a small woman, so she

276
00:17:24,130 –> 00:17:27,730
wasn’t that tall and she was little. She was like frail boned

277
00:17:27,730 –> 00:17:31,570
and tiny. She was a tiny woman. Although the, the COVID of

278
00:17:31,570 –> 00:17:35,250
Sagittari towards Bethlehem that I have, we took a close up of her

279
00:17:35,250 –> 00:17:38,970
and she has these big Jackie Onassis sunglasses that like cover half of her head.

280
00:17:41,770 –> 00:17:45,050
And she’s so California

281
00:17:45,050 –> 00:17:48,820
Waspy specific that

282
00:17:48,820 –> 00:17:52,500
she like presents a door even before you’ve Opened it

283
00:17:53,300 –> 00:17:56,820
and most people. We were talking about Eudora Weltley last week. Right.

284
00:17:57,220 –> 00:18:00,660
Welty, who, who wrote from a Southern

285
00:18:00,740 –> 00:18:04,300
American perspective. Didian definitely

286
00:18:04,300 –> 00:18:08,060
wrote from a Californian perspective. Even though she spent a lot

287
00:18:08,060 –> 00:18:10,700
of her career and a lot of her life in New York and then went

288
00:18:10,700 –> 00:18:14,550
back to California. But Didion didn’t care about what was going on in

289
00:18:14,550 –> 00:18:18,230
Kansas. She had no there there, and she wasn’t going to go have a there

290
00:18:18,230 –> 00:18:22,070
there. And she was fine not having a there there. And so she

291
00:18:22,070 –> 00:18:25,310
wrote for a very specific, very specific voice, for very specific audience,

292
00:18:26,190 –> 00:18:29,910
and she observed human behavior in a very specific way. And so these

293
00:18:29,910 –> 00:18:33,230
are things that fascinate me about Diddy. So again, I just document dumped on you.

294
00:18:34,190 –> 00:18:37,670
So just want to give you some time to marinate and think because I know

295
00:18:37,670 –> 00:18:39,790
we didn’t have a whole lot of time to like give you some research time,

296
00:18:39,790 –> 00:18:43,490
but what do you know about Joan Didion, if anything, beyond just what

297
00:18:43,490 –> 00:18:46,850
I’ve told you? Right. Right now? Yeah. No, so there’s very few, I would say

298
00:18:46,850 –> 00:18:50,370
there’s very few things I know about Didion. But, and I’ll give you the one

299
00:18:50,370 –> 00:18:54,130
thing, because it pertains to my world a little bit, by the way, so

300
00:18:54,610 –> 00:18:58,450
I won’t, I won’t be able to

301
00:18:58,450 –> 00:19:02,210
quote her. But there’s a, there’s a, there’s a,

302
00:19:02,610 –> 00:19:06,410
there’s a position that she takes that kind of does influence marketing

303
00:19:06,410 –> 00:19:09,690
a little bit. Like, I’ll explain in a second. So, but to your point,

304
00:19:10,890 –> 00:19:14,690
I don’t, I never really read her. I

305
00:19:14,690 –> 00:19:17,770
never really like, I, I, I’ve known about her, put it that way. I know

306
00:19:17,850 –> 00:19:21,570
about her, I’ve known her, I’ve heard her name several times, but I’ve never

307
00:19:21,570 –> 00:19:25,170
gone out of my way to read her writing for no other reason

308
00:19:25,170 –> 00:19:28,930
than the fact that she’s always seemed a little obscure to me.

309
00:19:28,930 –> 00:19:32,410
Right. Like, she’s always seemed to be a little bit outside of the,

310
00:19:32,490 –> 00:19:36,220
the huge, the hugeness.

311
00:19:36,220 –> 00:19:39,620
Like, so when you think of the Hemingways and the Faulkner’s and the

312
00:19:39,620 –> 00:19:43,340
Steinbecks, she’s never usually in that conversation. So for me, she’s always been

313
00:19:43,340 –> 00:19:47,060
on like an outsider looking in from that perspective. I’m not suggesting that she’s

314
00:19:47,060 –> 00:19:50,780
not a quality writer. The, the reason that she resonates with

315
00:19:50,780 –> 00:19:54,620
me and the reason I said what I said a second ago is she had

316
00:19:54,620 –> 00:19:58,220
a particular opinion, and I’m going to paraphrase because I don’t remember the

317
00:19:58,220 –> 00:20:01,900
exact quote, but she had a, she had a particular opinion about the way that

318
00:20:01,900 –> 00:20:04,760
sentences are written that makes

319
00:20:05,480 –> 00:20:09,280
essentially what she’s saying is words matter, right? The way that you

320
00:20:09,280 –> 00:20:13,040
place words on a page matters. The order in

321
00:20:13,040 –> 00:20:16,720
which you place them on that page matters. And if you use the exact

322
00:20:16,720 –> 00:20:20,560
same words and rearrange the order, it’s a different sentence that

323
00:20:20,560 –> 00:20:23,840
means a completely different thing. So, and what I mean by and why I say

324
00:20:23,840 –> 00:20:27,480
that, that some, Some people in the marketing

325
00:20:27,480 –> 00:20:31,100
world know her because of that quote. And again,

326
00:20:31,100 –> 00:20:34,140
I’m not quoting it exactly as, you know, like, but there. But if you go

327
00:20:34,140 –> 00:20:37,420
back and look at the quote, you’ll understand what I mean. Because in marketing,

328
00:20:38,140 –> 00:20:40,460
words matter. Like, you have to be.

329
00:20:41,500 –> 00:20:45,340
Sometimes when you’re trying to be clever, you can be disingenuous. When you’re. Sometimes

330
00:20:45,340 –> 00:20:48,940
when you’re trying to be transparent, you’re giving away the farm. Like,

331
00:20:48,940 –> 00:20:52,380
there’s words matter and how you phrase things matter.

332
00:20:52,460 –> 00:20:56,260
And so she comes up sometimes in those conversations with. Which is why I

333
00:20:56,260 –> 00:20:59,700
at least have heard her name before, but never really went out and read her.

334
00:20:59,700 –> 00:21:03,140
Now, to your point, about once, I, Once you sent me some of the.

335
00:21:04,100 –> 00:21:07,780
The course material for this podcast,

336
00:21:08,180 –> 00:21:11,140
and I started looking at it and I, I did find the quote, by the

337
00:21:11,140 –> 00:21:14,900
way. I was like, oh, I recognize this quote. I was like, that. That it’s

338
00:21:14,900 –> 00:21:17,780
the same Diddy and like, it’s the same person. I was like, okay, so now

339
00:21:17,780 –> 00:21:21,630
I started looking at her writings and stuff, and I was like, oh, interesting. And

340
00:21:21,950 –> 00:21:25,790
to your point about the whole, I found it.

341
00:21:25,790 –> 00:21:28,830
I found it interesting, too, that she wrote from

342
00:21:29,310 –> 00:21:32,870
behavioral perspective, like an observational behavioral perspective

343
00:21:32,870 –> 00:21:36,110
than. Than an experiential

344
00:21:36,190 –> 00:21:39,870
perspective. Right? Like, so I think you’ve kind of alluded to that,

345
00:21:39,950 –> 00:21:43,710
but to me, that’s a very clear distinction. Right? I’m an observer.

346
00:21:43,710 –> 00:21:47,430
I’m going to write what I see. I’m embedded in this. I’m going to

347
00:21:47,430 –> 00:21:51,070
write what I’m feeling based on what I’m. Based on what I’m experiencing. So

348
00:21:51,340 –> 00:21:54,460
she was a different kind of writer from what I can see based on some

349
00:21:54,460 –> 00:21:57,420
of the stuff that you sent to me. But again, where she fits into my

350
00:21:57,420 –> 00:22:00,900
world is that quote. And again, I’m not going to quote it, but just

351
00:22:00,900 –> 00:22:04,740
paraphrasing the importance of how you structure sentences and the

352
00:22:04,740 –> 00:22:08,460
way that these sentences impact what you’re trying to interpret or mean.

353
00:22:09,820 –> 00:22:12,780
That all matters to me. Now, one other thing I wanted to throw in here,

354
00:22:12,860 –> 00:22:16,540
by the way, because as you know me, I live

355
00:22:16,540 –> 00:22:20,140
my life around quotes from famous people and stuff. I,

356
00:22:20,220 –> 00:22:23,060
I happen to have Written a book about these quotes. I’m not going to mention

357
00:22:23,060 –> 00:22:26,900
the book, but whatever. But the, but one of the things

358
00:22:26,900 –> 00:22:30,700
that I found interesting about your initial commentary

359
00:22:30,700 –> 00:22:34,300
in, about eyewitnesses, eyewitness behavior and things like that,

360
00:22:34,620 –> 00:22:38,140
it. It reminds me of a quote that is attributed to

361
00:22:38,380 –> 00:22:42,100
Albert Einstein most times, but has never been able to be proven

362
00:22:42,100 –> 00:22:45,950
that it was exactly him that said it. But the quote

363
00:22:45,950 –> 00:22:49,670
is that. And the reason that. And I feel very strongly as to

364
00:22:49,670 –> 00:22:52,950
why eyewitness testimony in legal cases is.

365
00:22:53,350 –> 00:22:57,110
Is not really reliable. It’s is because

366
00:22:57,510 –> 00:23:01,230
of this particular quote that constantly pummels my brain

367
00:23:01,230 –> 00:23:05,030
every time I hear something like this. It’s. Perception is greater than

368
00:23:05,030 –> 00:23:08,830
reality. And again, it’s attributed to Albert Einstein most times,

369
00:23:08,830 –> 00:23:12,550
but there’s no written proof. Like, there’s no book or essay he wrote or anything

370
00:23:12,550 –> 00:23:15,550
like that that they can extrapolate it from, but

371
00:23:15,870 –> 00:23:19,510
it’s very commonly given to him. And what I

372
00:23:19,510 –> 00:23:23,190
mean, the reason I think that that’s relevant to what you were saying is think

373
00:23:23,190 –> 00:23:26,950
about this. If perception is greater than reality, and I

374
00:23:26,950 –> 00:23:30,750
give people the simplest version of this I can think of, Hasan

375
00:23:30,750 –> 00:23:34,510
and I are sitting in a room for 1 hour, 60

376
00:23:34,510 –> 00:23:38,350
minutes. Both of us leave that room and look at each other.

377
00:23:38,350 –> 00:23:42,150
And one of us says, I can’t believe that was only 60 Minutes. And the

378
00:23:42,150 –> 00:23:45,830
other one says, 60 Minutes. That felt like three days. Well,

379
00:23:45,830 –> 00:23:49,190
here’s the reality, folks. It was 60 Minutes. No matter how you time it, no

380
00:23:49,190 –> 00:23:53,030
matter how you measure it, no matter how you. It’s still 60 minutes. Regardless.

381
00:23:53,030 –> 00:23:56,750
The both of us experienced 60 minutes, but our perception of that

382
00:23:56,750 –> 00:24:00,070
60 minutes was way more impactful to us as a person.

383
00:24:00,630 –> 00:24:04,310
Which means, which I’m getting. I’m circling around to my point here,

384
00:24:04,390 –> 00:24:08,160
which means that all of this eyewitness testimony, observation

385
00:24:08,160 –> 00:24:11,840
of human behavior, all that stuff is influenced by your own

386
00:24:11,840 –> 00:24:15,560
perceptions. It’s not the reality. You’re not observing real. You’re observing

387
00:24:15,560 –> 00:24:19,240
it through the lens of your own, Your own eyes. So it’s,

388
00:24:19,240 –> 00:24:22,960
it’s. It’s your perception of that, whatever that reality is, which is.

389
00:24:22,960 –> 00:24:26,760
And again, you and I have had several conversations about my frustration with

390
00:24:26,920 –> 00:24:29,640
today’s version of journalism, which is not.

391
00:24:31,810 –> 00:24:35,610
It’s not a perception of behavior, it’s an opinion. It’s my

392
00:24:35,610 –> 00:24:39,290
opinion of that behavior. And it’s not reporting just the facts

393
00:24:39,290 –> 00:24:42,850
or like giving, you know,

394
00:24:43,010 –> 00:24:46,810
the, the exact reality versus injecting my own opinion into what

395
00:24:46,810 –> 00:24:50,490
that reality should or shouldn’t be or can or can’t be. That’s journalism. Today,

396
00:24:50,490 –> 00:24:54,330
journalism today is not observing human behavior and. Right. And

397
00:24:54,330 –> 00:24:57,830
telling us what it is. It’s injecting their own opinions. So, again,

398
00:24:57,830 –> 00:25:01,670
circling back here. Wrapping up. Wrapping up, I should say. No, no, no, you’re.

399
00:25:01,670 –> 00:25:05,070
You’re right. Yeah. No. So the. The quote you were talking about from Didion, I’ll

400
00:25:05,070 –> 00:25:08,150
just give it to the folks here, because I have it here in my. In

401
00:25:08,150 –> 00:25:10,030
my course materials for today,

402
00:25:12,830 –> 00:25:16,550
for our conversations. This is actually from her essay published in. I

403
00:25:16,550 –> 00:25:20,110
believe it was 1976,

404
00:25:20,190 –> 00:25:23,790
if I remember correctly, called why I Write

405
00:25:24,100 –> 00:25:27,460
that. She wrote for. For the New York Times. And I

406
00:25:27,460 –> 00:25:30,500
quote, to shift the structure of a sentence

407
00:25:30,820 –> 00:25:34,340
alters the meaning of that sentence as definitely and

408
00:25:34,340 –> 00:25:37,860
inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the

409
00:25:37,860 –> 00:25:41,700
meaning of the object photographed. The arrangement of

410
00:25:41,700 –> 00:25:44,820
the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in

411
00:25:44,820 –> 00:25:48,620
your mind. The picture tells you how to arrange the words, and the

412
00:25:48,620 –> 00:25:52,280
arrangement of the words tells you. Or tells me what. What’s going on in the

413
00:25:52,280 –> 00:25:55,920
picture. Close quote. Yeah. So now you get what I’m

414
00:25:55,920 –> 00:25:59,680
saying. Yep. Yep. Well, and that’s very. I mean, she. So she

415
00:25:59,680 –> 00:26:03,280
started writing for Vogue, Right? And so, like, back in the day,

416
00:26:03,280 –> 00:26:05,760
Vogue wasn’t just like this.

417
00:26:07,280 –> 00:26:10,640
I remember vogue in the 1990s. It was this magazine that,

418
00:26:10,960 –> 00:26:14,480
you know, was the size of, like, a tree trunk. Like, how many trees had

419
00:26:14,480 –> 00:26:18,100
to be killed to go into that magazine? Right. Um. All glossy,

420
00:26:18,580 –> 00:26:22,420
all filled with emaciated models that look like they needed a meal. Male

421
00:26:22,420 –> 00:26:26,020
and female. I’m not being gendered here. They all look. They all looked

422
00:26:26,020 –> 00:26:29,820
hungry and. And. And. And weirdly enough, Vogue always

423
00:26:29,820 –> 00:26:33,460
smelled like perfume. And I never, like.

424
00:26:33,780 –> 00:26:37,380
You touch the magazine, you’re, like, smelling all day. Like, the hell was that? Oh,

425
00:26:37,380 –> 00:26:40,020
I just touched a magazine and, like, the newsstand. Like, give me a break.

426
00:26:41,220 –> 00:26:43,980
For me, this. For me, that’s Vogue magazine.

427
00:26:45,180 –> 00:26:48,940
That’s not what Vogue magazine always was. Vogue magazine was

428
00:26:48,940 –> 00:26:52,660
actually a legit, like, literary magazine back in the day when

429
00:26:52,660 –> 00:26:55,980
Didian was writing for it and the editors at Vogue.

430
00:26:56,780 –> 00:27:00,540
So it’s interesting talk about this now, because The Devil Wears Prada 2 just

431
00:27:00,540 –> 00:27:04,380
came out, and the Meryl Streep character in there is supposed to

432
00:27:04,380 –> 00:27:08,140
be based off of whoever the woman was, that Anne Wintour,

433
00:27:08,140 –> 00:27:11,370
I believe it was, who was the editor in chief at Vogue.

434
00:27:12,090 –> 00:27:15,530
Now, I don’t know what an editor in chief does for a glossy fashion magazine

435
00:27:15,530 –> 00:27:18,930
these days, but I know what an editor in chief used to do back in

436
00:27:18,930 –> 00:27:22,610
the day and an editor in chief back in the day was the

437
00:27:22,610 –> 00:27:25,690
person who, to go back to the Didian quote here,

438
00:27:27,770 –> 00:27:30,490
would look at and question your arrangement of words.

439
00:27:35,380 –> 00:27:39,180
This question is not in the course materials, but it occurs to me to ask

440
00:27:39,180 –> 00:27:42,740
this. So

441
00:27:42,740 –> 00:27:46,540
there’s two other authors we’ve covered on this show. George Orwell, who wrote

442
00:27:46,540 –> 00:27:50,340
his great essay on the English language, which we talked about, about the arrangement

443
00:27:50,340 –> 00:27:52,740
of words. And then

444
00:27:54,420 –> 00:27:56,740
David Ogilvie, we talked about his book

445
00:27:58,900 –> 00:28:02,670
Confessions of an Advertising man, which actually, you

446
00:28:02,670 –> 00:28:04,510
and I should talk about that book. It’s another one we should go back and

447
00:28:04,510 –> 00:28:07,990
revisit, as I talked about it with John Hill and Chris

448
00:28:07,990 –> 00:28:10,790
Widener. But we should, we should go back and talk about that book.

449
00:28:12,230 –> 00:28:15,910
One thing that, that unites. There’s a thread that unites George Orwell to David

450
00:28:15,910 –> 00:28:19,630
Ogilvy to Joan Didion. There’s a, there’s a thread here, and the thread

451
00:28:19,630 –> 00:28:23,030
is the idea that words matter,

452
00:28:23,110 –> 00:28:26,880
that language matters. Here’s the question

453
00:28:26,880 –> 00:28:29,600
that’s not in the script, but it just occurs to me to ask.

454
00:28:32,800 –> 00:28:36,080
We started off this month with the idea from Seth Godin that everyone’s a marketer

455
00:28:36,080 –> 00:28:39,800
now, and

456
00:28:39,800 –> 00:28:43,280
yet language seems to matter less and less,

457
00:28:44,160 –> 00:28:47,720
which is weird because we now have the, like,

458
00:28:47,720 –> 00:28:51,360
language prompting machines. Yeah. That

459
00:28:51,360 –> 00:28:55,110
we’re dumping words in and we’re expecting the language prompting

460
00:28:55,110 –> 00:28:58,710
machines to suddenly become conscious and kill us

461
00:28:58,710 –> 00:29:02,550
all. And I’m not the first person to point

462
00:29:02,550 –> 00:29:05,910
out this disconnect like, like there’s something we’re

463
00:29:05,910 –> 00:29:09,389
missing in our current era.

464
00:29:10,110 –> 00:29:11,790
And so I guess the question is,

465
00:29:17,230 –> 00:29:20,450
How do we get back to the kind of language

466
00:29:20,450 –> 00:29:24,050
discipline? Or is there a way to get back to the kind of language

467
00:29:24,050 –> 00:29:27,770
discipline that Didian and Orwell and Ogilvy

468
00:29:27,770 –> 00:29:30,810
had in the space of

469
00:29:31,450 –> 00:29:35,250
the discourse that we engage in on a regular

470
00:29:35,250 –> 00:29:38,650
basis, Is there a way to get back to that discipline?

471
00:29:41,450 –> 00:29:44,930
Because I don’t think people believe words make pictures anymore anymore,

472
00:29:45,170 –> 00:29:48,930
even though, weirdly enough, again, we have the words machines that make pictures.

473
00:29:49,810 –> 00:29:50,210
Right.

474
00:29:53,330 –> 00:29:55,570
That’s a, that’s a really good question, actually.

475
00:29:58,130 –> 00:30:01,890
I, I think it’s less about. And to your point,

476
00:30:01,890 –> 00:30:05,570
to your point about the, the, you know, we have machines now that can take

477
00:30:05,570 –> 00:30:09,090
our words and turn them into pictures. Right. So you, you can tell,

478
00:30:10,730 –> 00:30:14,490
I don’t know, Gemini or Chat GPT or whatever it says I want a

479
00:30:14,490 –> 00:30:18,330
picture of a person, male or female, you know, whatever, and

480
00:30:18,570 –> 00:30:22,250
I want them positioned this way. And, and it will do it,

481
00:30:22,250 –> 00:30:25,210
right? For the most part, it’ll do it. If your prompt is good enough, it’ll

482
00:30:25,210 –> 00:30:27,690
give you A picture that you’ll go, oh, that’s what I was thinking.

483
00:30:28,890 –> 00:30:32,690
So I think we’re already seeing what you’re

484
00:30:32,690 –> 00:30:36,330
talking about in. And you. We’ve had several conversations on

485
00:30:36,330 –> 00:30:40,050
here about the. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a,

486
00:30:40,210 –> 00:30:44,010
a better, better example. It’s, it’s a, it’s a clear, it’s a clear example of

487
00:30:44,010 –> 00:30:47,170
garbage in, garbage out. Right? Like meaning. So

488
00:30:47,490 –> 00:30:51,330
therefore you have to be better with your words in

489
00:30:51,330 –> 00:30:55,010
that prompt to get out of that LLM what you want out of

490
00:30:55,010 –> 00:30:58,730
it. So to your point, I think we are circling it. I think

491
00:30:58,730 –> 00:31:02,130
we’re just coming at it from a different perspective than we’re used to.

492
00:31:02,450 –> 00:31:06,130
Again, you and I grew up in a time where somebody could paint a beautiful

493
00:31:06,130 –> 00:31:09,730
picture with a good essay, right? Or if somebody

494
00:31:09,730 –> 00:31:13,330
wrote a really well written paragraph or something like that, you can envision in your

495
00:31:13,330 –> 00:31:17,170
brain exactly what they were talking about. And more importantly,

496
00:31:17,330 –> 00:31:21,170
if two or three people were discussing it, that is Book clubs, if

497
00:31:21,170 –> 00:31:24,690
two or three or four people were discussing it, they had the same impression,

498
00:31:25,970 –> 00:31:29,730
right? Because writers were writing in

499
00:31:29,730 –> 00:31:33,410
such a descriptive way that we could envision it. Now we’re just

500
00:31:33,410 –> 00:31:37,090
taking that description and putting it into an LLM so that we can

501
00:31:37,090 –> 00:31:40,730
actually see the picture. Instead of talking about the picture, we’re actually,

502
00:31:40,890 –> 00:31:44,170
we’re seeing the picture visually. Now, that being said, I

503
00:31:45,930 –> 00:31:49,770
don’t know where the impact is going to start and stop with

504
00:31:50,410 –> 00:31:53,210
actual writers and having them

505
00:31:54,170 –> 00:31:57,980
protect their content to the point where you, you or I

506
00:31:57,980 –> 00:32:01,380
couldn’t take that content, throw into an LLM and say, give me a picture based

507
00:32:01,380 –> 00:32:05,220
on this author’s description. Like, so I think that we’re

508
00:32:05,220 –> 00:32:09,060
in some wild, wild west kind of stuff here with that. But. And

509
00:32:09,060 –> 00:32:12,140
I think there are occasions already where

510
00:32:12,460 –> 00:32:16,300
today’s version of authors are being a little bit more obscure, being a little bit

511
00:32:16,300 –> 00:32:20,060
more vague, so that you can’t take their stuff and

512
00:32:20,060 –> 00:32:23,740
put it directly into the LLM. But if somebody comes to them and wants to

513
00:32:23,740 –> 00:32:27,550
interpret the, their book into a movie, they now get paid as the adviser to

514
00:32:27,550 –> 00:32:31,270
that movie and they can interpret what they meant. Well. And I wonder if this.

515
00:32:31,270 –> 00:32:33,910
And then we’ll circle back to the book, because we got to get back to

516
00:32:33,910 –> 00:32:36,950
the book. But I wonder if this answers the question that we, we

517
00:32:37,430 –> 00:32:41,150
broached in the Optimist Daughter episode, episode

518
00:32:41,150 –> 00:32:44,470
number 189 before this one, where we were talking about

519
00:32:44,470 –> 00:32:47,830
regionalism and the regional voice. And I was saying, you know,

520
00:32:49,840 –> 00:32:53,360
the death of the regional voice in America because of the flattening and the homogenization

521
00:32:53,360 –> 00:32:56,640
of Internet culture where everyone has to sound the same as if they came from

522
00:32:56,640 –> 00:33:00,240
everywhere. And the, the pressure on a

523
00:33:00,240 –> 00:33:03,520
writer to sound unique is

524
00:33:03,520 –> 00:33:07,200
incredible right now. Yeah. To push

525
00:33:07,200 –> 00:33:10,880
through the noise that’s been created by, quite frankly, language and

526
00:33:10,880 –> 00:33:14,680
by, quite frankly, a loose, undisciplined, and unserious

527
00:33:14,680 –> 00:33:18,390
language that’s everywhere. And so

528
00:33:18,630 –> 00:33:22,150
the. Maybe what you’re talking about, it occurs to me,

529
00:33:23,190 –> 00:33:26,710
maybe it resets. Maybe we do find a Eudora Welty,

530
00:33:27,110 –> 00:33:30,630
but it’s. She’s regional and obscure

531
00:33:31,030 –> 00:33:34,790
until she gets plucked by some screenwriter somewhere.

532
00:33:35,350 –> 00:33:39,110
Maybe that’s the solution to the problem. I don’t know. Or the trade off. I

533
00:33:39,110 –> 00:33:41,990
don’t know. So I. I wonder. I wonder if we’re going to get to a

534
00:33:41,990 –> 00:33:45,750
point where the writers are going to start doing it themselves, right? So, like, so

535
00:33:45,750 –> 00:33:49,590
in the book that they publish, there’ll be a little vague and obscure. Then they

536
00:33:49,590 –> 00:33:53,070
take their own book and throw it into an LLM and say, create a movie,

537
00:33:53,070 –> 00:33:56,590
but add this and that and this and that. Like, add these components

538
00:33:56,670 –> 00:33:59,550
where I left out here and here. And then all of a sudden we have

539
00:33:59,550 –> 00:34:02,750
AI generated movie based on the writer themselves

540
00:34:03,390 –> 00:34:05,550
injecting their thoughts into their own book.

541
00:34:07,630 –> 00:34:11,360
That’s Wild west to do. Okay. I don’t know what to make of that. That’s

542
00:34:11,360 –> 00:34:15,160
definitely Wild West. That’s a definitely Wild west idea. I don’t

543
00:34:15,160 –> 00:34:17,000
know what to make of that. I don’t know what Didion would have made of

544
00:34:17,000 –> 00:34:18,680
that. But I do know we got to go back to the book,

545
00:34:21,080 –> 00:34:24,720
back to A Book of Common Prayer. By the way,

546
00:34:24,720 –> 00:34:28,520
the title of the book, A Book of Common Prayer, does

547
00:34:28,520 –> 00:34:32,360
reference A Book of Common Prayer, which I

548
00:34:32,360 –> 00:34:35,920
believe, if I remember correctly, is the title of

549
00:34:35,920 –> 00:34:39,750
the. It’s not West.

550
00:34:39,750 –> 00:34:43,110
Yes. Westminster Catechism. I believe, if I remember correctly,

551
00:34:43,430 –> 00:34:46,270
and I’m doing that from my brain. And so if I’ve gotten that wrong and

552
00:34:46,270 –> 00:34:50,070
you’re listening, email me or text me if you have my phone number

553
00:34:50,950 –> 00:34:54,510
and correct me, but I believe it’s the Westminster Catechism. So this is. It’s a

554
00:34:54,510 –> 00:34:58,270
call back to religion. Right. Which is kind of ironic because of what we’re dealing.

555
00:34:58,270 –> 00:35:02,070
Not ironic, but it’s kind of another. Another layer of meaning from

556
00:35:02,070 –> 00:35:05,190
language that Didion is, Is socially

557
00:35:05,190 –> 00:35:08,750
signaling by selecting this title

558
00:35:08,750 –> 00:35:12,510
for. For the book. Okay, so the book is divided up into five

559
00:35:12,510 –> 00:35:15,630
different sections. Six different sections. Sorry. And

560
00:35:16,990 –> 00:35:20,750
in each section. Well, not in each section, but the way it’s divided

561
00:35:20,750 –> 00:35:24,030
up, the. The woman that I introduced at the beginning

562
00:35:24,990 –> 00:35:28,830
Grace Strasser Mendana, who is an anthropologist,

563
00:35:29,410 –> 00:35:33,250
is narrating the life of. Of Charlotte

564
00:35:33,250 –> 00:35:37,050
Douglas. By the way, Charlotte is a. Is a very

565
00:35:37,050 –> 00:35:40,450
special name for me. I’ll just leave it at that. So

566
00:35:40,450 –> 00:35:43,650
Charlotte Douglas has. Has a lot of problems,

567
00:35:45,810 –> 00:35:49,490
to say the least. Charlotte Douglas is trapped in Boca Grande.

568
00:35:50,450 –> 00:35:53,490
Charlotte Douglas might have gone to Boca Grande because

569
00:35:54,050 –> 00:35:57,850
she wanted to go to Boca Grande, but Grande is in the middle of.

570
00:35:58,010 –> 00:36:00,970
When Charlotte Douglas arrives, it’s in the middle of

571
00:36:02,170 –> 00:36:05,490
a, well, civil strife, civil

572
00:36:05,490 –> 00:36:09,210
unrest. It’s in the middle of a civil war, a guerrilla war, actually.

573
00:36:10,090 –> 00:36:13,690
And it turns out that the people who are

574
00:36:14,810 –> 00:36:18,010
running the guerrilla war happen to be in the

575
00:36:18,490 –> 00:36:20,810
family of Charlotte Douglas’s husband,

576
00:36:22,660 –> 00:36:25,620
making it extra complicated for. For Charlotte.

577
00:36:26,820 –> 00:36:30,260
Now, Charlotte Douglas doesn’t really understand what’s going on.

578
00:36:30,580 –> 00:36:34,180
Charlotte Douglas spends a lot of time at the airport in Boca Grande, which

579
00:36:34,180 –> 00:36:37,619
seems to be the place where. And Didion is sort of

580
00:36:37,780 –> 00:36:41,180
interesting when she sort of puts this in perspective. It’s a place where all the

581
00:36:41,180 –> 00:36:44,540
action happens. It’s a place where a lot of the negotiations happen, particularly the

582
00:36:44,540 –> 00:36:48,110
restaurant at the airport is where a lot of the negotiations around the

583
00:36:48,110 –> 00:36:51,830
civil War is where the negotiations around how the war

584
00:36:51,830 –> 00:36:55,590
will be, how the government will be reset up. A lot of these things

585
00:36:55,830 –> 00:36:59,670
happen here at the. At the airport. Remember, Grace is reporting on all of

586
00:36:59,670 –> 00:37:03,510
this. So we are reading what Grace is reporting on Charlotte

587
00:37:03,510 –> 00:37:07,350
doing. So it’s a. It’s an inversion, right?

588
00:37:07,430 –> 00:37:11,150
It’s. We’re looking at the actions of a person observing the

589
00:37:11,150 –> 00:37:14,910
actions of a person through a microscope that’s being held by somebody

590
00:37:14,910 –> 00:37:17,570
else who’s also looking through the microscope.

591
00:37:19,810 –> 00:37:23,530
As you go through the narrative, you also find out

592
00:37:23,530 –> 00:37:27,170
that the. Charlotte has had some problems not just with the person she’s

593
00:37:27,170 –> 00:37:30,890
currently married to, but problems with the people that she. The

594
00:37:30,890 –> 00:37:34,490
man she was formerly married to. Charlotte had a

595
00:37:34,490 –> 00:37:37,650
daughter and. And Charlotte’s daughter.

596
00:37:38,290 –> 00:37:41,250
Charlotte’s daughter was. Was named Marin.

597
00:37:41,990 –> 00:37:45,790
And Marin gets involved with a group

598
00:37:45,790 –> 00:37:49,110
of. Well, a group of

599
00:37:49,750 –> 00:37:53,070
revolutionaries and revolutionaries in

600
00:37:53,070 –> 00:37:56,470
America. And the FBI comes and visits Charlotte because

601
00:37:56,870 –> 00:38:00,310
they suspect that Marin, her daughter, is going to contact

602
00:38:00,470 –> 00:38:03,750
her. This is a throwback to things that were happening in the

603
00:38:03,750 –> 00:38:07,350
1970s. Patty

604
00:38:07,350 –> 00:38:10,840
Hearst was kidnapped. The heiress. Patty Hearst was kidnapped

605
00:38:11,000 –> 00:38:14,440
and. And then was later revealed to be working with the

606
00:38:14,440 –> 00:38:18,040
Symbionese Liberation Army. Those of you who are

607
00:38:18,680 –> 00:38:22,320
history files can go look that up. But that’s what Didion is

608
00:38:22,320 –> 00:38:26,080
referring to. And there was a spate of this happening right, where

609
00:38:26,080 –> 00:38:29,120
rich young socialites would go off with these

610
00:38:29,120 –> 00:38:32,720
revolutionary armies, shave their heads and then start

611
00:38:32,720 –> 00:38:36,300
blowing up buildings inside of America. The FBI

612
00:38:36,380 –> 00:38:37,820
clearly took.

613
00:38:40,140 –> 00:38:43,820
How can I put this? They clearly took a problem or they had a

614
00:38:43,820 –> 00:38:47,300
problem with this offense to this. They did take offense to this. It’s a deep

615
00:38:47,300 –> 00:38:50,939
offense to this. And people forget the 1970s was a

616
00:38:50,939 –> 00:38:54,740
time of great. Just like in the early 20th century, a

617
00:38:54,740 –> 00:38:58,220
time of great anarchy in America. There were a lot of

618
00:38:58,220 –> 00:39:02,030
internal civil bombings. There were a lot of these

619
00:39:02,030 –> 00:39:04,710
revolutionary groups, not just

620
00:39:05,510 –> 00:39:08,630
symbionese, who I’ve never heard of liberation,

621
00:39:09,590 –> 00:39:13,070
but also groups that were in favor of black liberation, women’s

622
00:39:13,070 –> 00:39:16,750
liberation, gay liberation. And all of

623
00:39:16,750 –> 00:39:19,270
these liberation fronts or liberation groups

624
00:39:20,630 –> 00:39:24,390
all had violence and anarchy at the bottom of them. They

625
00:39:24,390 –> 00:39:25,750
weren’t necessarily about.

626
00:39:28,770 –> 00:39:32,450
Well, Malcolm X had a great, a great phrase. He said, we’re either going to

627
00:39:32,450 –> 00:39:35,010
solve this with a bullet or we’re going to solve it at the ballot box.

628
00:39:35,330 –> 00:39:39,050
Right? And a lot of these folks wanted to solve things with

629
00:39:39,050 –> 00:39:42,770
the bullet because they thought the ballot box had failed. Didion was in the middle

630
00:39:42,770 –> 00:39:46,370
of all this. The other dynamic that’s in this is the late

631
00:39:46,370 –> 00:39:48,690
1970s were the beginnings of

632
00:39:50,050 –> 00:39:53,650
genuine revolts, like between the Sandinistas

633
00:39:54,380 –> 00:39:57,260
and everybody else in San Salvador

634
00:39:58,220 –> 00:40:01,980
that eventually of course, would be funded by the Ronald Reagan administration in the

635
00:40:01,980 –> 00:40:05,780
United States. But in the 1970s, all this stuff was getting planted, all these

636
00:40:05,780 –> 00:40:08,700
seeds were getting planted. And as a matter of fact, Didion had been sent down

637
00:40:09,340 –> 00:40:13,180
to Central America to report on some of these civil

638
00:40:13,180 –> 00:40:16,980
wars and guerrilla wars that were going on and these experiences that were

639
00:40:16,980 –> 00:40:19,980
written about in her non fiction book, I believe it’s called Salvador

640
00:40:21,280 –> 00:40:25,040
Influenced Very much A Book of Common Prayer and her perceptions of

641
00:40:25,040 –> 00:40:26,720
society and how it breaks down.

642
00:40:30,320 –> 00:40:34,080
Joan Didion did something very interesting that I haven’t really

643
00:40:34,560 –> 00:40:38,240
talked about since Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which we covered on the show

644
00:40:38,480 –> 00:40:42,200
with Professor Dr. Momin. Quasi. Oh, gosh.

645
00:40:42,200 –> 00:40:45,120
Way back in the second season of our show,

646
00:40:46,090 –> 00:40:49,570
Didion was the classic, and this is why I mentioned that she was a wasp,

647
00:40:49,570 –> 00:40:52,930
white Anglo Saxon, Protestant. She was the classic WASP

648
00:40:52,930 –> 00:40:56,730
colonialist going down to Central America, reporting on what people

649
00:40:56,730 –> 00:41:00,410
were doing and then being emotionally impacted by it while all the people

650
00:41:00,650 –> 00:41:03,530
standing around down there looked at her and said, well,

651
00:41:04,570 –> 00:41:08,330
you could always go home Yankee. Which

652
00:41:08,330 –> 00:41:10,970
is the typical response.

653
00:41:13,020 –> 00:41:16,740
Didion took a hard. She took a journey into the heart of darkness of

654
00:41:16,740 –> 00:41:19,980
human behavior. And so he wrote a book of common prayer and Salvador,

655
00:41:20,380 –> 00:41:24,220
one. One non fiction and one fiction in order to sort of deal

656
00:41:24,220 –> 00:41:28,020
with what she saw in the context of her of a life in the

657
00:41:28,020 –> 00:41:31,420
United States that was also being written by riven by civil strife.

658
00:41:31,900 –> 00:41:35,340
Turns out the Boca Grande isn’t just a place in Central America,

659
00:41:35,500 –> 00:41:39,020
it’s also a place in your backyard in America.

660
00:41:42,290 –> 00:41:45,930
War is a particularly brutal dissector of middle class assumptions

661
00:41:45,930 –> 00:41:49,730
about human behavior. And civil war in a foreign country.

662
00:41:49,890 –> 00:41:53,650
Is this dissector just taken to another level?

663
00:41:56,450 –> 00:41:59,410
Tom, watching human behavior is a spectator sport.

664
00:42:00,770 –> 00:42:03,570
If the New York Times asks you to go to Central America,

665
00:42:04,780 –> 00:42:08,260
let’s frame it that way. Or some other place like you were talking about in

666
00:42:08,260 –> 00:42:11,980
our last episode, talking to somebody from Russia. If you were

667
00:42:11,980 –> 00:42:15,780
suddenly asked to go to Ukraine to report on what’s happening in the Ukraine

668
00:42:15,780 –> 00:42:19,580
and to put what you were seeing in accurate

669
00:42:19,580 –> 00:42:23,260
sentences and languages for the folks back home, not for

670
00:42:23,260 –> 00:42:26,180
me, I don’t live in your local community. But just say folks in your local

671
00:42:26,180 –> 00:42:30,020
community, your friend circle. Or maybe you go to the Ukraine, maybe you’re not asked

672
00:42:30,020 –> 00:42:32,900
to report. Maybe you go to Ukraine, you hang out, you come back. I know,

673
00:42:32,900 –> 00:42:36,380
bed. During early. During the Ukraine war, there were all kinds of like

674
00:42:37,660 –> 00:42:40,940
Special Forces guys that were like going off and running off to go fight the

675
00:42:40,940 –> 00:42:44,780
Russians in the Ukraine. And I met several of

676
00:42:44,780 –> 00:42:47,220
those guys, not who went to go fight the Russians in the Ukraine, but I

677
00:42:47,220 –> 00:42:50,940
met several forces, Special Forces guys. And so I understand that mentality. Not understand, but

678
00:42:50,940 –> 00:42:54,020
I recognize that mentality. They wouldn’t want to go off and get involved in some

679
00:42:54,020 –> 00:42:57,820
Contra Trump like that. But folks who have that are of that mentality

680
00:42:57,820 –> 00:43:01,620
don’t necessarily always have the words to describe what it is they’ve seen or

681
00:43:01,620 –> 00:43:05,360
what it is they’ve dealt with. That’s why they suffer from ptsd. You, on the

682
00:43:05,360 –> 00:43:09,080
other hand, do have the language to describe that. So I’m going to ask

683
00:43:09,080 –> 00:43:12,640
you this question. What if it. A little bit, now that I’ve pre

684
00:43:12,640 –> 00:43:15,400
preempted it and built it up. Yeah, I’m going to. I’m going to. What if

685
00:43:15,400 –> 00:43:15,680
it.

686
00:43:19,280 –> 00:43:23,120
What if you had to go someplace and see something like

687
00:43:23,120 –> 00:43:26,880
the Ukraine or San Salvador in the late 70s that you had

688
00:43:26,880 –> 00:43:30,580
absolutely no context for and could not understand? How would you describe it to

689
00:43:30,580 –> 00:43:31,420
people coming back?

690
00:43:37,260 –> 00:43:41,020
I would hope that I would

691
00:43:41,020 –> 00:43:44,860
be. I would hope that I would be of my

692
00:43:44,860 –> 00:43:48,460
own, that I would take my own advice. Right.

693
00:43:48,700 –> 00:43:51,740
Meaning if I knew nothing about what

694
00:43:52,620 –> 00:43:56,380
the purpose of this war was or what the catalyst of

695
00:43:56,380 –> 00:43:59,680
this war was or what the. And I was just going over there to,

696
00:43:59,920 –> 00:44:03,720
to observe and report back. Right.

697
00:44:03,720 –> 00:44:06,960
Like, I would hope that I would be very

698
00:44:09,040 –> 00:44:12,720
careful on how I worded factual information. Like,

699
00:44:12,720 –> 00:44:16,560
because that, to me, that’s, at that point, that’s the only, that’s the only

700
00:44:16,560 –> 00:44:20,080
thing that I should be interested in or

701
00:44:20,080 –> 00:44:23,850
willing to do is to go over there and basically

702
00:44:23,850 –> 00:44:27,650
just report back what I see, what I, not what I feel. I

703
00:44:27,650 –> 00:44:30,930
mean, if I’m in the middle of a bunker and I feel the whole bunker

704
00:44:30,930 –> 00:44:34,730
shaking because some bomb landed above us, I’m going to be petrified. Right?

705
00:44:34,730 –> 00:44:38,570
So now I’m, now I’m writing from a perspective of whoever dropped that bomb

706
00:44:38,570 –> 00:44:42,410
is the enemy or the evil one, and we’re the good ones. And that’s not

707
00:44:43,370 –> 00:44:47,210
for me to say at that point. Who am I? I’m an, I’m an outsider

708
00:44:47,210 –> 00:44:50,720
looking in. I have no right to say which one is right or wrong and

709
00:44:50,720 –> 00:44:54,480
which one is good or evil. So, and, and whether or not that

710
00:44:54,480 –> 00:44:58,160
even exists in this particular battle, so to speak. Right.

711
00:44:58,560 –> 00:45:01,920
So I would hope that I would take my own advice and be able to

712
00:45:02,560 –> 00:45:06,400
take down factual information, what

713
00:45:06,400 –> 00:45:10,000
exactly is happening and be able to report that as fact and not

714
00:45:11,040 –> 00:45:14,840
put in any of emotional stature to it. Because that’s not what

715
00:45:14,840 –> 00:45:18,640
I was there to do, number one, or not. Even if that is

716
00:45:18,640 –> 00:45:22,360
the purpose of sending me there, I don’t have any context for it.

717
00:45:22,360 –> 00:45:26,080
So I shouldn’t have an opinion about it, essentially, is what I’m. My point is.

718
00:45:26,080 –> 00:45:29,000
So hopefully I would take my own advice and do just that.

719
00:45:29,480 –> 00:45:32,520
Okay, now let’s go live in the reality, the real Tom Libby.

720
00:45:33,480 –> 00:45:37,200
We’ve set up the idealized Tom Libby. Okay? Now what about the real Tom Libby?

721
00:45:37,200 –> 00:45:40,120
What is the real Tom Libby going to actually do, though? As I can tell

722
00:45:40,120 –> 00:45:43,480
you right now, the question is reversed on me and I got to go to

723
00:45:43,480 –> 00:45:47,140
the Ukraine and I got to. I am absolutely going to be emotionally

724
00:45:47,140 –> 00:45:50,060
driven. There’s just no way around it. Like, it’s going to.

725
00:45:51,980 –> 00:45:55,780
If a Ukrainian drone strike comes in and I’m in,

726
00:45:55,780 –> 00:45:58,300
like, I don’t know, or a Russian drone strike comes in and I’m in Kiev,

727
00:45:58,860 –> 00:46:02,700
absolutely. I’m going to be cursing Russians. I, I just, I, I’m going to

728
00:46:02,700 –> 00:46:06,220
fall into that, that trap of human behavior, right?

729
00:46:08,140 –> 00:46:11,620
I’m going to be yelling about sneaky, blankety blank Russians the

730
00:46:11,620 –> 00:46:14,960
entire time, right? That’s going to absolutely

731
00:46:14,960 –> 00:46:18,520
color how I write about a thing, how I

732
00:46:18,760 –> 00:46:22,560
text back to my friends about a thing. That’s abs for

733
00:46:22,560 –> 00:46:26,280
me anyway. That’s absolutely. I’m going to fall into that Pit. I also

734
00:46:26,280 –> 00:46:30,000
think time, time of exposure matters, right? If I,

735
00:46:30,000 –> 00:46:33,840
if I go there, observe, see a bomb or

736
00:46:33,840 –> 00:46:37,640
two, come back, fine, that, that might be one thing, but

737
00:46:38,930 –> 00:46:42,770
embedding there, being there for weeks, months,

738
00:46:43,170 –> 00:46:46,850
etc. Experiencing this shoulder to shoulder with

739
00:46:46,850 –> 00:46:50,410
whomever you’re experiencing it with. To your point, if

740
00:46:50,410 –> 00:46:54,130
I’m, if I’m in Kiev, I might experience

741
00:46:54,210 –> 00:46:57,970
this completely different, as if I was sitting in Johannesburg

742
00:46:57,970 –> 00:47:00,610
or St. Petersburg. Like, so, again,

743
00:47:01,650 –> 00:47:05,420
I think, I think that context matters, right? Like, and

744
00:47:05,420 –> 00:47:09,140
I think the longer you’re exposed to that single

745
00:47:09,140 –> 00:47:12,860
side, I think, okay, like, for example, so let’s

746
00:47:12,860 –> 00:47:16,580
say I. And again, I think the perception here is greater than reality.

747
00:47:16,820 –> 00:47:19,860
Again, because take it, let’s take two people.

748
00:47:20,420 –> 00:47:24,260
You send one to the Russian, like to Russia, one to Ukraine

749
00:47:24,340 –> 00:47:27,940
for one month, and then swap them for one

750
00:47:27,940 –> 00:47:30,920
month and then have the two of them write their perspective.

751
00:47:32,030 –> 00:47:35,750
It’s going to be influenced by what hits them first versus what

752
00:47:35,750 –> 00:47:39,390
hits them. Like, all that’s going to matter. So to your point

753
00:47:39,390 –> 00:47:42,790
about, you know, and you can put yourself into these hypotheticals all you want, but

754
00:47:42,790 –> 00:47:46,470
unless you actually experience it, you have no idea how you’re going to respond to

755
00:47:46,470 –> 00:47:49,870
this. So this is, this is the point I was making about middle class assumptions.

756
00:47:49,870 –> 00:47:53,590
This is the point I was making about middle class assumptions. So we like

757
00:47:53,590 –> 00:47:56,430
to do these thought experiments and we like to say,

758
00:47:57,600 –> 00:48:00,160
well, if I were this or if I were that or if I did this

759
00:48:00,160 –> 00:48:03,920
or if I did that, people rip on

760
00:48:03,920 –> 00:48:07,520
Didion. This is one of the main critiques of her that.

761
00:48:08,880 –> 00:48:12,680
Matter of fact, a friend of mine, actually, who’s from New York City and

762
00:48:12,680 –> 00:48:15,280
is very well read, very literary,

763
00:48:16,880 –> 00:48:20,520
knows quite a bit about her and he just totally dismisses her. He’s like, no,

764
00:48:20,520 –> 00:48:24,230
she’s a New York Times, she’s a New Yorker writer, she’s irrelevant. She’s blah,

765
00:48:24,230 –> 00:48:27,950
blah, blah. She’s all these things. She, she in

766
00:48:27,950 –> 00:48:31,630
his brain. She check marks all of the boxes for

767
00:48:32,190 –> 00:48:34,350
white supremacy. Okay,

768
00:48:35,790 –> 00:48:39,550
all right, fine. That’s one man’s opinion. That’s fine. You’re allowed to have an opinion.

769
00:48:45,230 –> 00:48:46,350
I think that

770
00:48:49,640 –> 00:48:52,840
the fact that she was able to go to places

771
00:48:53,560 –> 00:48:56,680
where. No,

772
00:48:57,880 –> 00:49:01,680
let me wind this back. There’s a lot of talk about privilege, right? And privilege

773
00:49:01,680 –> 00:49:05,480
is tied to colonialization. And this is an argument that I, I know is probably

774
00:49:05,480 –> 00:49:08,400
close to your heart, Tom, because of just the things you do and all of

775
00:49:08,400 –> 00:49:11,880
that. I think privilege is the wrong term

776
00:49:12,600 –> 00:49:15,780
to use. I’ve long thought privilege is the wrong term, term to use. I think

777
00:49:15,780 –> 00:49:19,420
it’s, it’s the wrong language to use to describe a frustration that we

778
00:49:19,420 –> 00:49:22,460
feel. And the frustration that we feel is

779
00:49:23,340 –> 00:49:27,100
a person who looks or is a certain you of a certain economic

780
00:49:27,180 –> 00:49:30,780
status gets to, when I use that term in air quotes,

781
00:49:31,179 –> 00:49:35,020
go to someplace else, observe I use that term in

782
00:49:35,020 –> 00:49:38,740
air quotes again and then report back. And

783
00:49:38,740 –> 00:49:42,150
the people who that person is in air quotes observing,

784
00:49:42,390 –> 00:49:45,270
those people don’t get a voice. They don’t get to talk.

785
00:49:46,070 –> 00:49:49,790
And we somehow think that that is unfair. We somehow think that that is

786
00:49:49,790 –> 00:49:53,430
an unbalanced reporting or an unbalanced observation

787
00:49:53,910 –> 00:49:57,430
or an unbalanced witness.

788
00:50:00,150 –> 00:50:01,350
Except the thing is,

789
00:50:04,950 –> 00:50:08,690
and I got to be very careful how I frame this because

790
00:50:08,690 –> 00:50:11,930
it’s the truth, but this is going to be a truth that hurts like a

791
00:50:11,930 –> 00:50:12,210
lot.

792
00:50:18,530 –> 00:50:22,010
Throughout the entire history of the world, there have been billions, damn near

793
00:50:22,010 –> 00:50:24,930
trillions I would assert, of people who never got a voice

794
00:50:25,810 –> 00:50:29,490
regardless of their circumstances. So if there

795
00:50:29,490 –> 00:50:31,810
is a argument from.

796
00:50:33,420 –> 00:50:37,060
And again, I don’t like the word. If there’s an argument from advantage, I’m not

797
00:50:37,060 –> 00:50:40,300
going to use privilege. If there’s an argument from advantage to be made,

798
00:50:41,180 –> 00:50:45,020
it’s not an argument that argues with the particular, certain current

799
00:50:45,100 –> 00:50:48,899
cultural, historical or even past cultural historical circumstances that

800
00:50:48,899 –> 00:50:52,580
allowed that advantage to happen. I believe fundamentally the argument should

801
00:50:52,580 –> 00:50:56,260
be why haven’t those circumstances happened other places and

802
00:50:56,260 –> 00:50:57,020
why can’t they?

803
00:51:00,630 –> 00:51:04,230
But that’s considered to be, weirdly enough, when you make that argument, Tom,

804
00:51:04,390 –> 00:51:07,270
that’s considered to be a right wing argument. Yeah.

805
00:51:08,470 –> 00:51:11,790
And that, and this is not about wings, this is about human

806
00:51:11,790 –> 00:51:15,070
flourishing. And I don’t know that human

807
00:51:15,070 –> 00:51:18,470
flourishing is benefited by someone showing up, watching me

808
00:51:20,150 –> 00:51:23,990
suffer through a civil war, not lift a finger to help me

809
00:51:23,990 –> 00:51:27,090
and then go back and report. I’m more irritated about that.

810
00:51:32,290 –> 00:51:34,890
And I’m just going to kind of leave that argument there because that is the,

811
00:51:34,890 –> 00:51:38,290
that is the crux that people have a problem that people have

812
00:51:39,250 –> 00:51:43,010
on the left. If we’re going to make it about politics on the political left

813
00:51:43,010 –> 00:51:46,810
in America. That’s the crux of the problem they have with reporting. They

814
00:51:46,810 –> 00:51:49,170
think reporting isn’t activist enough,

815
00:51:50,370 –> 00:51:54,210
isn’t picking up the, the gun

816
00:51:54,210 –> 00:51:57,930
and shooting the, the Yankee funded rebels who you know are Yankee

817
00:51:57,930 –> 00:52:01,770
funded enough. Right. Or picking up

818
00:52:01,770 –> 00:52:05,410
a gun and supporting the Marxist rebels who are just trying to bring in the

819
00:52:05,410 –> 00:52:07,570
glorious revolution, fight the power.

820
00:52:09,410 –> 00:52:13,170
And then you layer in individual things like what’s going on in

821
00:52:13,170 –> 00:52:16,490
your own country, in your own backyard, from the siby, the

822
00:52:16,490 –> 00:52:20,280
Symbanese Liberation army and Patty Hearst all the way up to.

823
00:52:23,320 –> 00:52:27,080
Well, all the way up to people who we have currently

824
00:52:27,080 –> 00:52:30,760
running for political offices all over the country. I’ll just leave it at that.

825
00:52:32,120 –> 00:52:35,920
And this is a real problem in our time that

826
00:52:35,920 –> 00:52:39,520
we’ve politicized and we can’t get

827
00:52:39,520 –> 00:52:43,080
clarity on it. And I think Didian was caught in the middle of that as

828
00:52:43,080 –> 00:52:46,920
a writer. She was caught in the middle of that transition that occurred

829
00:52:47,440 –> 00:52:49,920
starting in Vietnam. That’s when all this carping really started

830
00:52:51,040 –> 00:52:54,720
and has continued on through our time, through the war on terror

831
00:52:54,720 –> 00:52:58,560
and through now the Russian Ukraine war. I mean, it came to a

832
00:52:58,560 –> 00:53:02,160
really sharp point with the Israeli Palestinian war that

833
00:53:02,960 –> 00:53:06,120
is now currently died down but eventually will flare back up at a certain point

834
00:53:06,120 –> 00:53:09,560
in time in the future or whatever it is we’re doing in Iran. It always

835
00:53:09,560 –> 00:53:13,080
shows up with geopolitical events. It always does. And it’s always the

836
00:53:13,080 –> 00:53:16,720
same, it’s the same argument. We don’t have the same argument since Vietnam.

837
00:53:19,200 –> 00:53:22,800
Interesting. So I, I don’t have. I don’t know, I

838
00:53:22,960 –> 00:53:26,680
guess I, I’ll try to use an

839
00:53:26,680 –> 00:53:29,840
example of that, like to your, to your point, the problem that,

840
00:53:30,320 –> 00:53:34,040
you know, advantage, etc, I’ll, I’ll try to use an example that I

841
00:53:34,040 –> 00:53:37,760
feel is like, really shouldn’t be politicized. And it’s,

842
00:53:37,920 –> 00:53:41,670
it’s kind of pretty matter of fact in my brain anyway,

843
00:53:41,910 –> 00:53:45,670
but yet it constantly gets bombarded with these kinds of

844
00:53:45,670 –> 00:53:48,630
political and left and right kind of things. Right. So

845
00:53:49,910 –> 00:53:52,470
sports, right. When you look at.

846
00:53:53,510 –> 00:53:57,350
I’ll just take the, the easiest example I can think of, which is the NBA

847
00:53:57,510 –> 00:54:01,150
versus the wnba. And there’s a lot of people out there that think

848
00:54:01,150 –> 00:54:04,790
that women should be paid equal and equivalent to

849
00:54:05,190 –> 00:54:08,800
men in every aspect of life. But when you look at

850
00:54:09,120 –> 00:54:12,720
the NBA versus the WNBA and you say, all right,

851
00:54:12,720 –> 00:54:16,360
the highest paid player in the NBA should be the same as the highest paid

852
00:54:16,360 –> 00:54:19,760
player in the wnba. The reality of it is the wnba,

853
00:54:20,080 –> 00:54:23,680
the whole league, doesn’t make enough money to pay that one player.

854
00:54:24,160 –> 00:54:27,600
So it’s, it’s a very, to me, it’s a very practical matter that the

855
00:54:27,600 –> 00:54:30,240
WNBA needs to be better at

856
00:54:31,120 –> 00:54:34,430
raising their revenue in order to pay their players. It’s,

857
00:54:34,740 –> 00:54:38,300
it’s that simple. You need revenue to pay your players. And the

858
00:54:38,300 –> 00:54:41,700
idea that somebody should just give you the money to do it,

859
00:54:41,860 –> 00:54:45,700
that is asinine to me. So because there’s been some, some

860
00:54:45,780 –> 00:54:49,540
chatter about the NBA essentially

861
00:54:49,940 –> 00:54:53,060
subsidizing the WNBA for some of this financial,

862
00:54:53,700 –> 00:54:57,500
some of the financial pieces, and I just don’t Understand

863
00:54:57,500 –> 00:55:01,220
the logic there. Like, so my what I, to your point about

864
00:55:02,970 –> 00:55:06,530
why can’t it happen elsewhere? Like, I don’t remember exactly the phrasing of it, but

865
00:55:06,530 –> 00:55:09,930
in my brain I’m sitting there thinking about it going, so why aren’t

866
00:55:10,090 –> 00:55:13,850
women who are super successful, there’s plenty

867
00:55:13,850 –> 00:55:17,290
of women that are super successful. Billionaires, billionaire women.

868
00:55:17,610 –> 00:55:21,450
Why aren’t they looking at the WNBA as something they can go help and

869
00:55:21,450 –> 00:55:25,250
they can inject advertising dollars, et cetera, whatever,

870
00:55:25,250 –> 00:55:28,100
into the league to make it better? Why do

871
00:55:28,500 –> 00:55:32,020
successful women not want to participate in the, in the

872
00:55:32,020 –> 00:55:35,740
wnba? Because successful men dump

873
00:55:35,740 –> 00:55:39,140
money into the NBA. Like, oh, I can tell you what the, I can tell

874
00:55:39,140 –> 00:55:41,980
you what the answer would be. The answer would be that those successful women have

875
00:55:41,980 –> 00:55:43,540
internalized to the patriarchy.

876
00:55:46,180 –> 00:55:49,940
That’s, that’s the answer that’s always given. Oh, no, but hold on, hold on. So

877
00:55:49,940 –> 00:55:53,660
you’re. Yes, yes and no. I’ll agree, I’ll agree to it if

878
00:55:53,660 –> 00:55:57,070
you just rephrase it in a sense that, that, that the, the women, those

879
00:55:57,230 –> 00:56:01,070
ultra successful women have bought into the late stage capitalism

880
00:56:01,070 –> 00:56:04,590
and they see that their money serves them better

881
00:56:04,670 –> 00:56:07,070
if they put it into the NBA too.

882
00:56:10,190 –> 00:56:13,990
That’s, that’s what I think the problem is. They’re, they’re not looking beyond

883
00:56:13,990 –> 00:56:17,790
like, okay, my money can earn more money, my money can earn

884
00:56:17,790 –> 00:56:21,480
more money if I give it to the NBA. The NBA. And as ass advertiser,

885
00:56:22,360 –> 00:56:26,160
I’ll take a discount and put it into the WNBA if it helps

886
00:56:26,160 –> 00:56:29,360
women. Right. Like, and I think that’s a

887
00:56:29,360 –> 00:56:33,200
microcosm of what I think you’re talking about here. Right? Like, why

888
00:56:33,200 –> 00:56:37,000
can’t people just help each other? Meaning like if, if I grew up

889
00:56:37,000 –> 00:56:40,120
in the ghetto and I make it rich, why am I not going back to

890
00:56:40,120 –> 00:56:43,800
that ghetto and developing programs for accelerating brilliant

891
00:56:43,800 –> 00:56:47,420
students or accelerating super athletes or whatever. But like,

892
00:56:47,500 –> 00:56:51,020
but we don’t think like that. We feel like once we cross a certain threshold,

893
00:56:51,100 –> 00:56:54,620
we now no longer belong in that group that’s being suppressed

894
00:56:54,700 –> 00:56:57,740
and we’re part of the advantage. So we’re just going to go run with the

895
00:56:57,740 –> 00:57:01,500
advantage. Right, Right, right, right. And so again, the people who would say,

896
00:57:01,740 –> 00:57:05,100
well, the problem is they just internalized name your

897
00:57:05,580 –> 00:57:08,860
patriarchy or they’ve internalized racism or they’ve internalized

898
00:57:08,860 –> 00:57:12,540
misogyny or whatever. Right. And I find

899
00:57:12,900 –> 00:57:16,660
the internalization counter to that to be

900
00:57:16,660 –> 00:57:20,420
thin on the ground. Yeah. Matter of fact, I find it to be

901
00:57:20,420 –> 00:57:23,940
so thin it’s almost non existent. What is

902
00:57:24,020 –> 00:57:27,820
far thicker is, and I don’t think

903
00:57:27,820 –> 00:57:30,740
we’re at late stage capitalism. I think there’s way more capitalism to be had in

904
00:57:30,740 –> 00:57:34,020
the bucket. But let’s go. I understand, but. I understand what you’re. But. But I’m

905
00:57:34,020 –> 00:57:36,820
going to use that framing. I’m going to use that framing because that framing, actually,

906
00:57:36,820 –> 00:57:39,380
I think if we’re going to talk about language

907
00:57:40,450 –> 00:57:44,290
more accurately and narrowly describes

908
00:57:44,770 –> 00:57:47,570
exactly what is occurring without

909
00:57:47,890 –> 00:57:51,610
reference to external

910
00:57:51,610 –> 00:57:54,450
factors that have been out of people’s control for

911
00:57:57,170 –> 00:58:01,010
time. Out of mind since. Since,

912
00:58:01,650 –> 00:58:05,250
in my opinion, yours. Yours will vary. I’m saying it’s my opinion since God

913
00:58:05,250 –> 00:58:08,860
created the earth. Been. Been. Been out. Out of our

914
00:58:08,860 –> 00:58:12,660
hands. Out of our hands. I can’t do.

915
00:58:16,820 –> 00:58:20,180
Race may be a social construct, but melanin content

916
00:58:20,500 –> 00:58:24,140
is a reality. It’s greater than

917
00:58:24,140 –> 00:58:24,740
reality.

918
00:58:28,660 –> 00:58:32,420
You know, my, my genes,

919
00:58:35,390 –> 00:58:38,270
you know, my chromosomes have determined certain things.

920
00:58:40,350 –> 00:58:44,110
You may have an opinion about what those certain things are. I may have

921
00:58:44,110 –> 00:58:47,310
an opinion about what those certain things are, but it doesn’t change the reality of

922
00:58:47,310 –> 00:58:50,830
the chromosomes. And if you’re paying attention, you know what I’m talking about.

923
00:58:51,550 –> 00:58:54,190
That’s why I’m kind of dancing around that one. Okay.

924
00:58:56,110 –> 00:58:58,670
Because I don’t feel like getting any more trouble than we’re wandering into getting into

925
00:58:58,670 –> 00:59:02,350
right now. As far as

926
00:59:02,350 –> 00:59:05,710
money and status and things that are changeable,

927
00:59:06,590 –> 00:59:10,430
the United States of America, pound for pound, is still the best

928
00:59:10,510 –> 00:59:14,190
system in the world for changing your status if you

929
00:59:14,190 –> 00:59:17,630
actually want to put in the work. And if you put in the work and

930
00:59:17,630 –> 00:59:21,390
your status doesn’t change. Individualism. Right. If you put in work and your

931
00:59:21,390 –> 00:59:22,990
status does not change.

932
00:59:26,200 –> 00:59:29,680
I don’t know what to tell you. I really don’t. But how many times have

933
00:59:29,680 –> 00:59:32,120
you seen that happen in your lifetime, though, Hasan? Oh, a lot.

934
00:59:33,400 –> 00:59:35,960
I see people who put in the work. Well, I won’t say a lot. No,

935
00:59:36,280 –> 00:59:40,120
no. In my opinion, it’s not often. Usually you’re finding people that

936
00:59:40,120 –> 00:59:43,320
are quote, unquote, putting in the work, but they’re not really. Right.

937
00:59:43,640 –> 00:59:47,400
They’re saying they’re putting in the work. But are they really? And that’s the problem

938
00:59:47,400 –> 00:59:51,090
that I think that most people, because running on a

939
00:59:51,090 –> 00:59:54,610
hamster wheel at 100 miles an hour is not putting in the work. No, no,

940
00:59:54,610 –> 00:59:57,850
it’s not stopping. Stepping out, understanding your strategy,

941
00:59:57,850 –> 01:00:01,610
reinventing yourself. Re like, that’s like, that’s putting in the work. Like

942
01:00:01,610 –> 01:00:05,370
you’re not, you can’t just. You can’t wake up and say, I want

943
01:00:05,370 –> 01:00:09,050
to be a millionaire, and then tomorrow you’re a millionaire. Like but well, to your

944
01:00:09,050 –> 01:00:12,730
point about the America being the best, it’s still the best system on the, on

945
01:00:12,730 –> 01:00:16,370
the planet. Well, that is 100 true.

946
01:00:16,370 –> 01:00:20,050
Because if you think about it, per Capa, we still

947
01:00:20,050 –> 01:00:23,690
have the highest number of billionaires, the highest number of

948
01:00:23,690 –> 01:00:27,210
millionaires and the highest number of people. Now, that being said, we

949
01:00:27,210 –> 01:00:31,050
probably, we also have the highest number of people living per capita in poverty.

950
01:00:31,290 –> 01:00:34,930
Correct. But that’s just because we’re also, population

951
01:00:34,930 –> 01:00:38,650
wise, in the top five of the world of population. We are a very large

952
01:00:38,650 –> 01:00:42,330
country. We’re not. That’s like saying India should have less poverty.

953
01:00:44,240 –> 01:00:47,480
Even more so than that. Even more so than that. There is a biblical principle

954
01:00:47,480 –> 01:00:51,040
that sits behind this. Matthew 25, you know,

955
01:00:51,280 –> 01:00:54,880
if you put in more, you’re going to get more. Jesus said

956
01:00:54,880 –> 01:00:58,600
this, if you put in more, you’re going to get more. And

957
01:00:58,600 –> 01:01:02,000
if you put in less or nothing, guess what? Even

958
01:01:02,160 –> 01:01:05,680
that that you had at the beginning will be taken away from you.

959
01:01:06,320 –> 01:01:09,880
It’s called the Matthew principle. Economists have tested

960
01:01:09,880 –> 01:01:13,360
this because it seems brutal,

961
01:01:13,680 –> 01:01:17,400
it seems vicious, and it seems. I’m

962
01:01:17,400 –> 01:01:19,600
going to say the word unfair,

963
01:01:21,520 –> 01:01:25,160
except, and I think I mentioned this before on the show, but

964
01:01:25,160 –> 01:01:26,560
it’s been a long while.

965
01:01:28,720 –> 01:01:32,080
In my house, we abandoned the word fair by the age of like 12.

966
01:01:32,640 –> 01:01:35,520
My 9 year old boy has another 3 years to use the word fair. And

967
01:01:35,520 –> 01:01:39,040
then we don’t talk about fairness anymore. We just talk about reality.

968
01:01:39,680 –> 01:01:43,240
You put in the work, you’re going to get an outcome. You may not be

969
01:01:43,240 –> 01:01:46,880
the outcome that you like and it may not be the outcome that you wanted

970
01:01:46,880 –> 01:01:50,400
in comparison to somebody else, but it is an. Is it an

971
01:01:50,400 –> 01:01:54,160
outcome that you got that is better than the outcome you could

972
01:01:54,160 –> 01:01:57,840
have gotten yesterday? That’s the only measurement. Are you

973
01:01:57,840 –> 01:02:01,560
better today than you were yesterday? If the answer is yes,

974
01:02:01,560 –> 01:02:04,080
great. If the answer is no, well, you got some things you want to work

975
01:02:04,080 –> 01:02:07,930
on. That’s, that’s. Now that

976
01:02:08,090 –> 01:02:11,850
people hear that and they go, well, that sounds brutal.

977
01:02:12,730 –> 01:02:16,330
No, that’s the reality that we are all

978
01:02:16,490 –> 01:02:19,810
facing out here. And so Didion, if I wanted just to bring it back to

979
01:02:19,810 –> 01:02:23,210
our book for just a minute, if I wanted the career that Didian had,

980
01:02:23,450 –> 01:02:27,250
I have to do the things that Didian did. Yeah. I

981
01:02:27,250 –> 01:02:30,410
have to make the decisions Didion made all the way from

982
01:02:32,570 –> 01:02:36,290
when she took her mother seriously about writing down her

983
01:02:36,290 –> 01:02:39,210
thoughts that her mother didn’t want her to bother with her when she was like

984
01:02:39,210 –> 01:02:42,970
nine or ten and gave her a notebook. Nine or

985
01:02:42,970 –> 01:02:46,610
ten, that’s when it started. It didn’t start when she got to go to San

986
01:02:46,610 –> 01:02:50,130
Salvador and write about rebels. She was just dropped into

987
01:02:50,130 –> 01:02:53,970
that. It was a step by step by step progression. You can

988
01:02:53,970 –> 01:02:57,620
argue privilege from that, but a, a notebook

989
01:02:58,020 –> 01:03:01,860
in California in the 1950s was probably

990
01:03:01,860 –> 01:03:05,700
5 cents. Now, did the mom have to scrape to get to the 5 cents?

991
01:03:05,700 –> 01:03:08,340
Sure. Because like the value of a dollar was more. It was pegged to the

992
01:03:08,340 –> 01:03:12,180
gold standard, blah, blah, blah. You can make all of these whatevers, but

993
01:03:12,260 –> 01:03:16,020
I mean, she would have given her two sheets of paper. Two sheets of

994
01:03:16,020 –> 01:03:19,780
paper. Now how many. Now the question

995
01:03:19,780 –> 01:03:22,820
of course you can ask is, well, how many other little girls at nine got

996
01:03:22,820 –> 01:03:24,890
notebooks from their mom? They didn’t become Joan Didion,

997
01:03:28,240 –> 01:03:31,960
play it as it lays to pray to

998
01:03:31,960 –> 01:03:35,760
give another book title. But like, those little girls didn’t make the correct decisions.

999
01:03:36,400 –> 01:03:39,760
And this is the brutal like reality of late stage

1000
01:03:39,760 –> 01:03:43,120
capitalism. And I think, and this is my concern,

1001
01:03:43,440 –> 01:03:46,960
I think it’s going to become more and more brutal as we go along. Not

1002
01:03:46,960 –> 01:03:50,680
less and less in a lot of different places.

1003
01:03:50,680 –> 01:03:54,340
Like we already mentioned the LLMs, but like the

1004
01:03:54,340 –> 01:03:58,020
moat. We said this last episode on the Optimist’s Daughter. The

1005
01:03:58,020 –> 01:04:01,140
moat between people who would understand how to operate the language machine and those who

1006
01:04:01,140 –> 01:04:04,580
treat it like a Magic 8 ball is just growing by. It’s just growing like

1007
01:04:04,580 –> 01:04:08,339
this. And all the people who, who treat the moat, who

1008
01:04:08,339 –> 01:04:12,180
treat the thing like a Magic 8 ball, they’re all going to be mad that

1009
01:04:12,180 –> 01:04:15,580
somehow the people who didn’t treat it like a Magic 8 ball, that somehow those

1010
01:04:15,580 –> 01:04:18,710
people did something wrong or

1011
01:04:19,270 –> 01:04:22,870
they’re going to start having the vantage point that, oh, well, they’re probably,

1012
01:04:23,270 –> 01:04:26,350
they’re just, they got better training than I did. They’re smarter than I am. They

1013
01:04:26,350 –> 01:04:29,230
get, they’re always, there’s always going to be an excuse as to why somebody advances

1014
01:04:29,230 –> 01:04:31,750
and you don’t. Right. They had privilege

1015
01:04:33,990 –> 01:04:37,430
or, or they are. They bought into the, the LLM driven

1016
01:04:37,430 –> 01:04:40,950
patriarchy. The llmicry or whatever it’ll be called in the future.

1017
01:04:41,350 –> 01:04:44,960
Is the LLM part of the patriarchy. I need to not understand this before I

1018
01:04:44,960 –> 01:04:48,680
get. Go much further down this pathway. You be

1019
01:04:48,680 –> 01:04:51,080
careful, Tom. We’re already down the path. We’re already in trouble.

1020
01:04:53,640 –> 01:04:55,320
That. Back to the book.

1021
01:04:57,640 –> 01:04:59,320
Back to the book. All right.

1022
01:05:02,200 –> 01:05:03,720
Want to sum up this book?

1023
01:05:06,280 –> 01:05:08,520
Towards the end of the book, we get to

1024
01:05:10,180 –> 01:05:14,020
the. The beginnings of. And I’m glad, I’m

1025
01:05:14,020 –> 01:05:17,540
glad Tom brought up capitalism. The beginnings of capitalism begin to invade Boca

1026
01:05:17,540 –> 01:05:21,380
Grande with the discovery of oil. Interestingly, Enough.

1027
01:05:21,380 –> 01:05:23,140
So Didion hit all the marks.

1028
01:05:24,900 –> 01:05:25,300
Right.

1029
01:05:28,580 –> 01:05:32,180
Book five opens up with. I love this line. It says,

1030
01:05:32,260 –> 01:05:35,940
oil wells about to come in have a sound that the attentive

1031
01:05:35,940 –> 01:05:38,940
ear can detect, as do earthquakes.

1032
01:05:40,300 –> 01:05:43,700
The only person who would know about this is someone who lived in California, where

1033
01:05:43,700 –> 01:05:46,460
there are both oil wells and earthquakes. That’s the only way she could write that.

1034
01:05:46,460 –> 01:05:49,780
Written that line. That’s brilliant. Like, I underlined that line twice. I was like, that’s

1035
01:05:49,780 –> 01:05:53,459
genius. And she inserted in here to

1036
01:05:53,459 –> 01:05:57,100
open up the door to the idea that,

1037
01:05:57,420 –> 01:06:01,020
you know, el Presidente is now

1038
01:06:02,620 –> 01:06:06,360
being seduced by oil companies and has to get

1039
01:06:06,360 –> 01:06:10,040
kidnap insurance, as do regular people, because now there’s so much

1040
01:06:10,040 –> 01:06:13,640
money that is beginning to flood into Boca Grande that it’s beginning to change

1041
01:06:13,640 –> 01:06:17,360
the tenor of how the Civil War actually occurs, or whether

1042
01:06:17,360 –> 01:06:19,520
there will be a civil war in the first. In the. In the. In the

1043
01:06:19,520 –> 01:06:23,200
first place at all, or whether we’re just going to all try to get rich

1044
01:06:23,200 –> 01:06:23,520
together.

1045
01:06:26,800 –> 01:06:30,480
Money warps everything, by the

1046
01:06:30,480 –> 01:06:33,690
way. With the money, of course, comes

1047
01:06:33,690 –> 01:06:36,890
boutiques and the idea of film

1048
01:06:36,890 –> 01:06:40,610
festivals that Charlotte is involved in writing the names

1049
01:06:40,610 –> 01:06:44,010
of actors and directors and agents. And as you

1050
01:06:44,170 –> 01:06:48,010
sort of flip through this book, there’s a sense

1051
01:06:48,010 –> 01:06:51,210
of solipsism from.

1052
01:06:52,410 –> 01:06:56,250
From Charlotte that Grace, as she’s documenting Charlotte’s life,

1053
01:06:56,740 –> 01:06:59,540
really begins to pick up on. And solipsism. I had to kind of look up

1054
01:06:59,540 –> 01:07:03,260
this term, right? It’s this idea of philosophical solipsism, and it’s

1055
01:07:03,260 –> 01:07:06,980
this idea that I’m reading directly from the Wikipedia. Solipsism is a

1056
01:07:06,980 –> 01:07:10,740
philosophical idea that only one’s mind is sure to exist.

1057
01:07:11,140 –> 01:07:14,140
There is no shared reality as an

1058
01:07:14,140 –> 01:07:17,900
epistemological position. Solipsism holds

1059
01:07:17,900 –> 01:07:21,460
that knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is

1060
01:07:21,460 –> 01:07:25,290
unsure the external world and other minds cannot

1061
01:07:25,290 –> 01:07:28,290
be known and might not exist outside the mind.

1062
01:07:29,490 –> 01:07:32,370
Close quote. Now, this is something that infants

1063
01:07:33,010 –> 01:07:36,850
tend to have as babies, but then they. They tend to mature

1064
01:07:36,850 –> 01:07:40,650
and they tend to grow into what’s called a theory of mind. And a theory

1065
01:07:40,650 –> 01:07:44,370
of mind is the idea that we all have running around. It’s the

1066
01:07:44,370 –> 01:07:48,180
idea that’s driving this. This podcast right now. I

1067
01:07:48,180 –> 01:07:51,700
believe that Tom has a mind with his own experiences and his own values and

1068
01:07:51,700 –> 01:07:55,540
his own context, but that I can tap into that mind. And while

1069
01:07:55,540 –> 01:07:59,340
I may not be able to 100% understand it, I can at

1070
01:07:59,340 –> 01:08:02,740
least make an effort towards that. And Tom believes the same thing about me. That’s

1071
01:08:02,740 –> 01:08:05,540
theory of mind. And by the way, I believe it about you all you listeners

1072
01:08:05,540 –> 01:08:09,060
out there, even though I cannot see you, and even though you may be listening

1073
01:08:09,060 –> 01:08:12,820
to this at some other. Some other place in time from when it was

1074
01:08:12,820 –> 01:08:16,510
originally recorded. So theory of mind is supposed to defeat

1075
01:08:16,510 –> 01:08:19,830
solipsism, because what theory of mind does is it brings along

1076
01:08:20,150 –> 01:08:23,910
empathy. Yeah. One of the challenges of our time

1077
01:08:23,910 –> 01:08:27,750
is that we are not the witnesses we want to be.

1078
01:08:27,750 –> 01:08:31,550
Because just like Grace with Charlotte and just like all

1079
01:08:31,550 –> 01:08:34,710
of us looking at things happening on our phones, this is one of the great

1080
01:08:34,710 –> 01:08:38,390
insights I had today that sort of turned my mind away from what I

1081
01:08:38,550 –> 01:08:42,340
originally submitted as the course material for today

1082
01:08:42,340 –> 01:08:45,620
to a different direction. You like that phrase? You like that phrase?

1083
01:08:45,940 –> 01:08:48,820
I do. Like that phrasing. I like that phrasing. I think we’re going to adopt

1084
01:08:48,820 –> 01:08:50,020
that. I think we’re going to keep that

1085
01:08:53,620 –> 01:08:57,420
we. I was drawn into the idea that. I

1086
01:08:57,420 –> 01:09:00,700
think the challenge or the thing that Didian was hitting on in A Book of

1087
01:09:00,700 –> 01:09:04,540
Common Prayer and in a lot of her other books up to. I think, particularly

1088
01:09:04,540 –> 01:09:07,189
when she wrote in the 80s and 90s. And then I think that sort of

1089
01:09:07,189 –> 01:09:10,949
stops with the Year of Magical Thinking, which was the. The book

1090
01:09:10,949 –> 01:09:14,109
that she wrote about the death of her son, or not her son, her husband

1091
01:09:14,189 –> 01:09:17,869
and daughter. And daughter. Yeah. Gregory Dunn. Yep. And Quintana,

1092
01:09:19,309 –> 01:09:22,188
which is a great book. I listened to that. I listened to that on audiobook,

1093
01:09:22,188 –> 01:09:25,909
by the way, your Magical Thinking, it’s one of the better memoirs I’ve ever read

1094
01:09:25,909 –> 01:09:29,749
about death and dying and about how like, you actually deal with that in

1095
01:09:29,749 –> 01:09:33,589
a way that wasn’t grief streaking or weep or weepy, but you could tell

1096
01:09:33,589 –> 01:09:37,079
she was grieving like it was. It was kind of amazing, actually, to sort of

1097
01:09:37,079 –> 01:09:37,999
see that kind of happen.

1098
01:09:42,639 –> 01:09:46,399
I think the problem is a lack of empathy. I think that’s our core

1099
01:09:46,399 –> 01:09:49,999
problem. I think we pretend we have

1100
01:09:49,999 –> 01:09:53,479
empathy these days. And that’s where the

1101
01:09:53,479 –> 01:09:57,239
phraseology like, well, that person has privilege or

1102
01:09:57,239 –> 01:10:00,799
that person doesn’t have privilege. And so we’re going to stand up for the underprivileged

1103
01:10:00,799 –> 01:10:03,599
or we’re going to stand up for the disadvantaged. I think that’s where that’s coming

1104
01:10:03,599 –> 01:10:07,130
from. But then the practical action behind that

1105
01:10:07,530 –> 01:10:11,370
doesn’t actually show empathy, even when the practical

1106
01:10:11,370 –> 01:10:15,090
action is protesting or standing in front of the cars of

1107
01:10:15,090 –> 01:10:18,770
ICE agents or whatever. Right. I don’t think

1108
01:10:18,770 –> 01:10:22,410
that’s a practical exhibition of

1109
01:10:22,410 –> 01:10:26,010
empathy, matter of fact. I think it’s actually more of a

1110
01:10:26,010 –> 01:10:29,610
exhibition of more solipsism. Not

1111
01:10:30,130 –> 01:10:33,410
narcissism, by the way. Narcissism is a. Is a

1112
01:10:33,410 –> 01:10:36,930
psychological diagnosis, right? It’s a. It’s a

1113
01:10:36,930 –> 01:10:40,770
medical diagnosis. And so we use the word narcissistic because we don’t, you know,

1114
01:10:40,770 –> 01:10:44,570
the word solipsistic. And they’re. They’re words

1115
01:10:44,570 –> 01:10:48,330
of describing two different. Not. No, they’re. They’re two

1116
01:10:48,330 –> 01:10:51,930
different words that are describing the same psychological thing or

1117
01:10:51,930 –> 01:10:55,610
philosophical thing that’s happening. But one I think is within our ability to

1118
01:10:55,610 –> 01:10:59,270
actually solve. The other one, I think is not in our

1119
01:10:59,270 –> 01:11:02,830
ability to actually solve and actually hardens. So I think narcissism hardens,

1120
01:11:03,070 –> 01:11:06,430
but I think solipsism, you can actually solve if. If,

1121
01:11:07,950 –> 01:11:08,350
if.

1122
01:11:13,070 –> 01:11:16,830
Well, I wrote it down here. If you’re faced

1123
01:11:16,830 –> 01:11:20,190
with resistance, challenges, and disagreements from other people

1124
01:11:21,470 –> 01:11:25,100
consistently over the course of time, I think that that is what

1125
01:11:25,100 –> 01:11:28,660
cures solipsism more. So many of us are, like, walled off into our little

1126
01:11:28,660 –> 01:11:32,500
gardens on our phones and our little whatever that we don’t have, and

1127
01:11:32,500 –> 01:11:35,900
we’re surprised by the way when someone comes in from the outside and challenges us,

1128
01:11:36,060 –> 01:11:38,460
and then we just wall it off a little bit more and a little bit

1129
01:11:38,460 –> 01:11:41,380
more and a little bit more. And the algorithm likes that because, like, that just

1130
01:11:41,380 –> 01:11:44,740
means they could sell us more ads inside of that little. Inside of that little

1131
01:11:44,740 –> 01:11:48,340
garden. But the other downside of that is that we’re no longer

1132
01:11:48,340 –> 01:11:51,860
shocked into incoherence when we do actually see genuinely tragic things. Things.

1133
01:11:52,820 –> 01:11:56,460
And I think back to the example that popped in my

1134
01:11:56,460 –> 01:12:00,100
brain is the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

1135
01:12:01,460 –> 01:12:04,420
Like, we weren’t but five minutes away from that before the meme started.

1136
01:12:06,260 –> 01:12:09,780
It was disgusting. We should have all been shocked into incoherence.

1137
01:12:11,060 –> 01:12:14,900
And I think many of us were, but

1138
01:12:14,900 –> 01:12:18,580
not nearly enough and not for long enough. And

1139
01:12:18,660 –> 01:12:22,260
that’s what solipsism gets you, is a lack of practical empathy.

1140
01:12:23,700 –> 01:12:27,420
I think this is a real problem for leaders, Tom. I think

1141
01:12:27,420 –> 01:12:30,500
it’s the problem that’s the poison that

1142
01:12:31,060 –> 01:12:34,900
never gets talked about, because it’s really complicated and it’s really

1143
01:12:34,900 –> 01:12:38,660
hard to spot. I also think that we don’t want to acknowledge that it might

1144
01:12:38,660 –> 01:12:41,780
be inside of us. We may not

1145
01:12:42,580 –> 01:12:46,280
be all that empathetic. And if we admit to that out

1146
01:12:46,280 –> 01:12:48,680
loud, then that means we’re not nice. And that’s the big sin of our time,

1147
01:12:48,680 –> 01:12:52,200
is that we just are not nice. Oh, God forbid you don’t be

1148
01:12:52,200 –> 01:12:55,440
nice. You know, I guess you’re into a lot of trouble.

1149
01:12:58,320 –> 01:13:00,960
So kind of stumbling on this and thinking about this.

1150
01:13:02,880 –> 01:13:06,600
Science can tell us, like, the what of human behavior,

1151
01:13:06,600 –> 01:13:10,360
but it cannot tell Us the why. And I think philosophy could tell us the

1152
01:13:10,360 –> 01:13:13,280
why. And philosophy is where solipsism comes from or that idea.

1153
01:13:17,110 –> 01:13:20,910
And the story that you told us in the last episode about, about

1154
01:13:20,910 –> 01:13:24,470
the n. The native dances like that has really stuck with

1155
01:13:24,470 –> 01:13:28,230
me because I really do think that that’s emblematic of what

1156
01:13:28,230 –> 01:13:31,910
I’m talking about here. I think all those things click together. The,

1157
01:13:32,950 –> 01:13:36,350
the lack of understanding from the 14 year old that can just watch it on

1158
01:13:36,350 –> 01:13:39,630
YouTube, links into the

1159
01:13:39,630 –> 01:13:43,270
solipsism that we’re all experiencing online. And they’re just a second generation of

1160
01:13:43,270 –> 01:13:46,950
that. Which also links into the inability to be shocked into

1161
01:13:46,950 –> 01:13:50,790
incoherence by genuine. I mean a murder that

1162
01:13:50,790 –> 01:13:54,630
occurred in public that would have, in any, any

1163
01:13:54,630 –> 01:13:57,550
other time in our culture would have rocked us into incoherence for at least a

1164
01:13:57,550 –> 01:14:01,310
couple of years. Like I think about after Kennedy got shot, like the country didn’t

1165
01:14:01,310 –> 01:14:04,870
come back from that for 10 years. Right. And that wasn’t even, I mean it

1166
01:14:04,870 –> 01:14:08,290
was in public, but it was recorded on the Zapruder film. But like it wasn’t

1167
01:14:08,290 –> 01:14:11,970
an immediate like trauma. It was a gradual trauma

1168
01:14:11,970 –> 01:14:15,090
that rolled out over time if people were still sensitive enough to be shocked into

1169
01:14:15,090 –> 01:14:17,170
incoherence by even just hearing about it.

1170
01:14:18,850 –> 01:14:22,530
So that’s a big

1171
01:14:22,770 –> 01:14:26,530
hairy. I’ve linked a lot of big hairy ideas together and that’s

1172
01:14:26,530 –> 01:14:30,330
what we do on this show. You can’t see

1173
01:14:30,330 –> 01:14:32,690
him on the video right now if you’re listening to this on audio. But Tom

1174
01:14:32,690 –> 01:14:35,570
is looking at me like, where are you going to land this plane? Well, no,

1175
01:14:35,570 –> 01:14:38,690
no, no, not at all, not at all. Because I’m thinking like again, as you’re,

1176
01:14:38,690 –> 01:14:42,410
as you’re walking down this, this, there’s, to your point, there’s so

1177
01:14:42,410 –> 01:14:46,130
many things that are popping into my head, like just to give you

1178
01:14:46,130 –> 01:14:49,610
snippets of it, like, I think

1179
01:14:49,610 –> 01:14:53,370
sometimes we confuse sympathy and empathy. Like I think, I think

1180
01:14:53,610 –> 01:14:56,890
being sympathetic to somebody’s plight is different

1181
01:14:57,290 –> 01:15:01,010
than being empathetic and understand. Like being able to understand and

1182
01:15:01,010 –> 01:15:04,590
put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and like all that stuff that’s, those are two

1183
01:15:04,590 –> 01:15:08,310
different things. But yet I think society as a whole sometimes confuses the two.

1184
01:15:08,470 –> 01:15:12,190
And I think sometimes that confusion not being explained to, to

1185
01:15:12,190 –> 01:15:15,830
people at a younger age is a

1186
01:15:15,830 –> 01:15:19,510
problem. So to your point about the phones and all that other stuff, like, I,

1187
01:15:19,510 –> 01:15:22,710
I agree with that. I agree with the, I, I think the difference,

1188
01:15:23,190 –> 01:15:26,750
some of the differences between the Charlie Kirk thing and the in the

1189
01:15:26,750 –> 01:15:30,290
JFK thing, I think there’s several, several layers of

1190
01:15:30,290 –> 01:15:34,130
issues as to why it, it impacted us differently.

1191
01:15:34,210 –> 01:15:38,010
One of which, as you said, the rollout right today, everybody

1192
01:15:38,010 –> 01:15:41,850
knew about Charlie Kirk literally within minutes. The entire country knew about

1193
01:15:41,850 –> 01:15:45,010
it within minutes. So you get that incoherent.

1194
01:15:45,810 –> 01:15:49,450
Ex, that incoherent, Sorry, how do you

1195
01:15:49,450 –> 01:15:52,770
phrase that? The, the shock to do a coherence like that.

1196
01:15:53,330 –> 01:15:57,110
The shock of incoherence happened basically all at once

1197
01:15:57,110 –> 01:16:00,870
and then diminished all at once versus Kennedy kind of.

1198
01:16:00,870 –> 01:16:03,630
It happened and then it happened and then it happened and then you were talking

1199
01:16:03,630 –> 01:16:06,910
to people. Did you hear? Did you hear? Did you hear? And you were experiencing

1200
01:16:06,910 –> 01:16:10,430
it over and over and over. You yourself were experiencing it over and over.

1201
01:16:10,430 –> 01:16:14,270
Now, I wasn’t alive when Kennedy was shot, but I’m just, I

1202
01:16:14,270 –> 01:16:17,950
know it wasn’t the same thing, but for me, like, when Reagan got shot, I

1203
01:16:17,950 –> 01:16:21,430
was still in school. Same idea. We didn’t have this,

1204
01:16:21,650 –> 01:16:25,290
this social media stuff that when Reagan got shot. So I heard it in school,

1205
01:16:25,290 –> 01:16:27,850
then I heard it at home, and then I heard it like it was all

1206
01:16:27,850 –> 01:16:30,130
this thing like, and I was young enough to,

1207
01:16:31,570 –> 01:16:35,410
to not really give a crap who the president was. Right. Like at that age,

1208
01:16:35,970 –> 01:16:39,490
but it was still the president. So to me, it didn’t matter whether it was

1209
01:16:39,490 –> 01:16:42,850
a Democrat or Republican or it was. To me, that position

1210
01:16:43,010 –> 01:16:46,810
of power was all that mattered. Like, somebody in that

1211
01:16:46,810 –> 01:16:50,320
sense, seat could get shot than anybody in the world could get shot. Right? Like,

1212
01:16:50,320 –> 01:16:53,280
it was, like it was impact, to your point, it was impactful. It was hugely

1213
01:16:53,280 –> 01:16:57,040
impactful. So I think that there’s, that, that speed of

1214
01:16:57,040 –> 01:17:00,840
information is something that impacted that dramatically. And again, whether,

1215
01:17:01,480 –> 01:17:04,880
whether I think that the Charlie Kirk assassination was

1216
01:17:04,880 –> 01:17:08,680
impactful or not impactful is not relevant to my statement because I,

1217
01:17:08,680 –> 01:17:12,480
I don’t. Quite honestly, I, I am a little

1218
01:17:12,480 –> 01:17:16,190
surprised it didn’t impact us a little longer. I, I, you

1219
01:17:16,190 –> 01:17:19,150
know, again, whether you’re right or left, it doesn’t matter. This is a human being

1220
01:17:19,150 –> 01:17:22,910
we’re talking about that just got killed for no, no good reason. It’s not like,

1221
01:17:22,910 –> 01:17:26,750
it’s not like he was in the process of doing, committing a crime. It wasn’t

1222
01:17:26,750 –> 01:17:30,190
like somebody literally just didn’t agree with him politically and shot him. That to me,

1223
01:17:30,190 –> 01:17:33,190
is the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard of in my life. So again,

1224
01:17:34,070 –> 01:17:37,590
I did have some shock and a, like in. Right, right, whatever.

1225
01:17:37,830 –> 01:17:41,440
But to your point, I think there’s also. And you, you and I

1226
01:17:41,440 –> 01:17:44,960
talk a lot on these podcasts about film and tv, and

1227
01:17:45,440 –> 01:17:49,120
I think there’s been a huge Desensitization based on what we

1228
01:17:49,120 –> 01:17:52,240
see on our phones and in the movies. And like, we

1229
01:17:52,560 –> 01:17:56,360
glorify certain things that we see in

1230
01:17:56,360 –> 01:17:59,840
real life and go, well, yeah, like, because

1231
01:18:00,000 –> 01:18:03,600
we just saw, we just saw Jason Statham do it or we just saw.

1232
01:18:03,600 –> 01:18:07,210
Yeah. You know what I’m saying? Like, yeah, we glad. Glorify these

1233
01:18:07,210 –> 01:18:10,890
things in video so that. Why are we now surprised when

1234
01:18:10,890 –> 01:18:14,570
something happens in real life and people are desensitized to it? So, yeah,

1235
01:18:14,570 –> 01:18:18,010
again, I’m not suggesting it’s a good thing either. I, I think this is absolutely

1236
01:18:18,010 –> 01:18:21,730
horrendous. I think it’s dreadful that people blur the

1237
01:18:21,730 –> 01:18:25,490
line between reality and, and fantasy. And

1238
01:18:25,490 –> 01:18:29,130
I think that line is getting more and more blurry the more and more we

1239
01:18:29,130 –> 01:18:32,900
look into these things and we, you know, and the more and more

1240
01:18:32,900 –> 01:18:36,500
that, the more and more we. We don’t

1241
01:18:36,500 –> 01:18:40,260
teach our kids. You, you and I have had this conversation I

1242
01:18:40,260 –> 01:18:44,060
don’t even know how many times at this point. All of the stems at home.

1243
01:18:44,060 –> 01:18:47,740
I hate to tell you this, people, but all. If you are relying on

1244
01:18:47,740 –> 01:18:51,540
the, on, on general media or the general

1245
01:18:51,540 –> 01:18:55,180
population or the government, or if you’re relying on somebody else

1246
01:18:55,180 –> 01:18:58,910
to, to fortify your children with morals and ethics, ethical. Or

1247
01:18:59,230 –> 01:19:02,670
ethics and a moral compass, you’re going to fail as a parent.

1248
01:19:03,230 –> 01:19:06,950
All of this stuff starts at home. So again, stupid, small

1249
01:19:06,950 –> 01:19:10,350
little things. When we sit down as a family at the dinner table,

1250
01:19:10,350 –> 01:19:13,790
nobody has their cell phone. It’s not allowed. Cell phones are not allowed at the

1251
01:19:13,790 –> 01:19:17,550
table. And by the way, my children are now all adults and they still

1252
01:19:17,550 –> 01:19:21,270
don’t bring their cell phones to the dinner table. Like, it’s stuff like that,

1253
01:19:21,270 –> 01:19:24,640
that, like, even if it seems small, it’s

1254
01:19:24,640 –> 01:19:28,360
impactful. Like, so again, I, I have

1255
01:19:28,360 –> 01:19:31,960
five children. They’re all over the place when it comes to political

1256
01:19:32,200 –> 01:19:36,040
views. I did not raise five Democrats

1257
01:19:36,040 –> 01:19:39,480
or five Republicans. They’re all over the place. But yet

1258
01:19:39,560 –> 01:19:43,320
every one of the five of them were a little shocked that Charlie

1259
01:19:43,320 –> 01:19:46,680
Kirk got shot. All five of them. That’s,

1260
01:19:46,920 –> 01:19:50,760
that’s, that’s the success. That’s it. And I can’t talk about. But

1261
01:19:50,760 –> 01:19:54,600
that doesn’t happen if you’re allowing public schools to tell your kids what morals and

1262
01:19:54,600 –> 01:19:58,280
ethics are. And that’s not what happens here, people. This starts

1263
01:19:58,280 –> 01:20:01,600
at home. You should be starting this stuff at home now, by the way, I’m

1264
01:20:01,600 –> 01:20:05,000
not suggesting that if you’re a Republican, that you should raise a group of Republican

1265
01:20:05,000 –> 01:20:08,560
children or if you’re a Democrat, you should raise a group of Democrats. No,

1266
01:20:08,640 –> 01:20:12,360
you should empower them to be able to

1267
01:20:12,360 –> 01:20:16,120
go and make their own decisions, look at differences. But they have a

1268
01:20:16,120 –> 01:20:19,840
foundation of right and wrong. They have a foundation of what’s ethical, and they

1269
01:20:19,840 –> 01:20:23,680
have a moral compass. And that moral compass again. In our

1270
01:20:23,680 –> 01:20:27,280
family, whether you’re left or right, you view each other as a human being

1271
01:20:27,280 –> 01:20:30,880
first. You view each other as family first. No matter what

1272
01:20:30,880 –> 01:20:34,640
happens in that political arena, you are family. And you can

1273
01:20:34,640 –> 01:20:38,280
agree to disagree anytime you want and walk away. But we’re losing touch with that

1274
01:20:38,280 –> 01:20:41,080
type of stuff with strangers. We just are.

1275
01:20:42,230 –> 01:20:46,030
And that’s how you combat solipsism. That’s how you combat it hardening

1276
01:20:46,030 –> 01:20:48,230
into narcissism. That’s how you.

1277
01:20:49,750 –> 01:20:53,350
There’s a commentator, years ago, I, I can’t remember his

1278
01:20:53,350 –> 01:20:57,110
name, but he talked about how, how people

1279
01:20:57,110 –> 01:21:00,870
were divided. People were divided. People are divided by the narcissism

1280
01:21:00,870 –> 01:21:04,470
of small differences. And

1281
01:21:04,790 –> 01:21:08,480
that’s exactly correct. This is what. Is what, Tom? This is what you’re talking

1282
01:21:08,480 –> 01:21:12,320
about, right? Like, I don’t know of any other laboratory

1283
01:21:12,960 –> 01:21:16,240
in the world that’s better for fixing this problem than the family.

1284
01:21:17,120 –> 01:21:19,920
Because guess what? That’s where it all starts, too.

1285
01:21:20,720 –> 01:21:24,160
To Tom’s point, I’m going to back him up. When you outsource

1286
01:21:25,040 –> 01:21:28,720
your children to the government,

1287
01:21:31,280 –> 01:21:34,910
some of those teachers are really, really good. Don’t get me wrong, there’s many teachers

1288
01:21:34,910 –> 01:21:37,710
in the public school system. They’re really, really good. And they’re doing humans work.

1289
01:21:38,910 –> 01:21:42,710
There’s also some who are not good and are not doing the

1290
01:21:42,710 –> 01:21:46,550
yeoman’s work. Yeah, Case in point, the guy who just tried

1291
01:21:46,550 –> 01:21:49,709
to assassinate Donald Trump at the White House correspondence dinner.

1292
01:21:50,990 –> 01:21:54,390
Not a lot of conversation going on about the fact that that guy was like

1293
01:21:54,390 –> 01:21:58,190
a middle school teacher up until the day before he decided that it would be

1294
01:21:58,190 –> 01:22:02,010
a really good idea to storm the Secret Service and shoot everybody at the dinner.

1295
01:22:02,570 –> 01:22:06,330
What do you think he was standing next to your kids saying when you weren’t

1296
01:22:06,330 –> 01:22:09,930
there? Because this stuff doesn’t stay

1297
01:22:09,930 –> 01:22:12,850
contained inside of a container. And this is what a Book of Common Prayer is

1298
01:22:12,850 –> 01:22:16,570
about. This is. This is what Joan Didion was even talking about back in the

1299
01:22:16,570 –> 01:22:19,530
70s. People knew that it doesn’t stay

1300
01:22:20,170 –> 01:22:23,450
inside of the container. Technology

1301
01:22:23,690 –> 01:22:27,540
is just another facilitator of getting it out.

1302
01:22:28,740 –> 01:22:32,540
But it’s the problem. Horatio doesn’t lie in the

1303
01:22:32,540 –> 01:22:34,820
phones. It lies in ourselves.

1304
01:22:36,820 –> 01:22:40,060
That’s the thing we have to fix. That’s the thing we got to work on.

1305
01:22:40,060 –> 01:22:43,260
That’s the thing. If we want to have Real empathy. If we want to start

1306
01:22:43,260 –> 01:22:47,100
having really awesome conversations around the dinner table, then, yeah,

1307
01:22:47,100 –> 01:22:50,340
we’ll be contentious and, yeah, there will be disagreement and yes, we will. May have

1308
01:22:50,340 –> 01:22:53,380
to agree to disagree. And by the way, agreeing to disagree, agree, that’s okay.

1309
01:22:54,100 –> 01:22:57,780
That means that I may not like them for a minute, but this isn’t going

1310
01:22:57,780 –> 01:22:59,700
to rise to the level of, like,

1311
01:23:02,100 –> 01:23:04,900
whatever level it is that we think it should rise to,

1312
01:23:05,700 –> 01:23:09,380
like, the. The amount of. Of caterwauling that I see online,

1313
01:23:09,380 –> 01:23:13,220
particularly around, you know, major public holidays like Thanksgiving or July 4th,

1314
01:23:13,380 –> 01:23:17,220
you know. Oh, oh, should I go spend time with my family because,

1315
01:23:17,220 –> 01:23:20,320
like, they’re all Republicans and I’m a Democrat, or should I go spend time with

1316
01:23:20,320 –> 01:23:23,800
my family because I’m a Republican and they’re all Democrats? What are we

1317
01:23:23,800 –> 01:23:27,560
talking about? You. Are you telling you have

1318
01:23:27,560 –> 01:23:31,400
no other relationship out with your family outside of politics? Yeah,

1319
01:23:31,400 –> 01:23:34,960
like that. That, like, hurts inside. That hurts

1320
01:23:34,960 –> 01:23:38,760
deep. Like, really, if I just couldn’t imagine. I

1321
01:23:38,760 –> 01:23:42,440
could not imagine one of my kids not coming home for. For visiting, like,

1322
01:23:42,440 –> 01:23:46,120
because I had a little bit too far of a

1323
01:23:46,120 –> 01:23:49,240
right or a little bit too far of a left opinion about something.

1324
01:23:49,640 –> 01:23:52,440
Right. It should happen. It shouldn’t matter.

1325
01:23:54,760 –> 01:23:58,480
I’ll close with this, by the way. Go pick up a book

1326
01:23:58,480 –> 01:24:01,160
of common prayer. It’s going to open up all these kinds of doors in your

1327
01:24:01,160 –> 01:24:04,920
head. Didian doesn’t resolve anything at the end with

1328
01:24:04,920 –> 01:24:07,000
Charlotte, nor with Grace.

1329
01:24:08,920 –> 01:24:12,360
Grace determines that she has not been the witness that she wanted to be,

1330
01:24:13,690 –> 01:24:17,370
because Grace is looking for something that’s definitive. She’s looking for.

1331
01:24:20,570 –> 01:24:24,330
She’s looking for a very specific solution to human problems that are

1332
01:24:24,330 –> 01:24:27,970
messy. She’s bought into the scientific idea that, by the way, the

1333
01:24:27,970 –> 01:24:31,730
technologists bring us as well, that if we just put everything inside

1334
01:24:31,730 –> 01:24:35,290
of these nice, clean boxes with clean lines, everything will just cleanly work

1335
01:24:35,290 –> 01:24:39,060
out. And it isn’t the boxes of the lines. It work because human

1336
01:24:39,060 –> 01:24:42,860
beings, as we pointed out in Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky, go listen

1337
01:24:42,860 –> 01:24:46,620
to that episode. Human beings will break those boxes out of

1338
01:24:46,620 –> 01:24:50,340
spite. They’ll break those boxes because they want to prove themselves to be

1339
01:24:50,340 –> 01:24:53,220
human. We don’t like to be in boxes,

1340
01:24:53,939 –> 01:24:57,660
and we like the fight. Pointed that out in east of

1341
01:24:57,660 –> 01:25:01,500
Eden, too. And that’s okay. We

1342
01:25:01,500 –> 01:25:05,190
were wired to do that by God or evolution

1343
01:25:05,190 –> 01:25:08,350
or whoever. We were wired for that.

1344
01:25:08,910 –> 01:25:12,630
Which means if you want innovation and creativity, if you

1345
01:25:12,630 –> 01:25:16,230
want to move things forward, you’ve got to accept the good with the

1346
01:25:16,230 –> 01:25:19,310
bad. That’s also part of reality.

1347
01:25:20,750 –> 01:25:23,230
And Didian gets to that in a Book of Common Prayer.

1348
01:25:25,310 –> 01:25:27,670
We kind of wandered all over the place. Tom. This was a heck of an

1349
01:25:27,670 –> 01:25:31,240
episode. Final thoughts what should leaders take from this book?

1350
01:25:31,960 –> 01:25:34,920
I think there’s a lot leaders can take from the book, but I think, I

1351
01:25:34,920 –> 01:25:38,680
think that if you go and you think about the, the,

1352
01:25:38,840 –> 01:25:42,680
like, what we just went through on, on, like what,

1353
01:25:42,680 –> 01:25:46,520
what we just talked through throughout all this, I think, I think there’s a couple

1354
01:25:46,520 –> 01:25:50,360
of things that pop out to me. You talked about regionality, so I do think

1355
01:25:50,360 –> 01:25:54,200
from a business perspective, understanding local context matters.

1356
01:25:54,200 –> 01:25:57,790
I think if you, you’re. And again, especially from my world, if you’re marketing

1357
01:25:57,790 –> 01:26:01,390
and you’re putting up geofences for your SEO or you’re putting up.

1358
01:26:01,550 –> 01:26:05,390
I think that you really have to understand, if you are a nationwide company,

1359
01:26:05,710 –> 01:26:09,510
how to market and speak to the people of particular regions. And

1360
01:26:09,510 –> 01:26:12,110
I think that, like, we’ve talked a little bit about that, so I think that’s

1361
01:26:12,110 –> 01:26:15,950
a lesson they can learn based on what our conversation in this book about making

1362
01:26:15,950 –> 01:26:19,470
sure you understand the locality and the localness of certain

1363
01:26:19,550 –> 01:26:23,320
conversation pieces. I think there’s other things, like the fact that the book

1364
01:26:23,320 –> 01:26:27,120
has a narrator. It often, oftentimes reminds me of things like don’t

1365
01:26:27,120 –> 01:26:30,120
fall in love with your own narrative and make sure you’re making business

1366
01:26:30,520 –> 01:26:34,160
decisions on what actual data is telling you to do.

1367
01:26:34,160 –> 01:26:37,800
And don’t fall in love with the, the, the experience

1368
01:26:37,960 –> 01:26:41,760
of your own, you know, theories. And, and, you

1369
01:26:41,760 –> 01:26:45,560
know, don’t revolutionize the circle. It’s. Circle’s still a circle. So if

1370
01:26:45,560 –> 01:26:48,870
somebody’s looking for circles, circle, sell them a circle, don’t sell them a square. You

1371
01:26:48,870 –> 01:26:51,870
know what I mean? Like, don’t, don’t fall in love with it. You have to

1372
01:26:51,870 –> 01:26:55,230
be on. So there are certain things like that, that if you are reading this

1373
01:26:55,230 –> 01:26:58,430
book and you’re listening to this podcast and you’re thinking about it from a leadership

1374
01:26:58,430 –> 01:27:02,070
perspective, I think there’s several layers of things like that that you can kind of

1375
01:27:02,070 –> 01:27:05,790
pull out from here. But overall, I

1376
01:27:05,790 –> 01:27:09,550
just think, you know, we, it’s, it’s, you know, you

1377
01:27:09,550 –> 01:27:13,110
just gotta stay true to yourself and stay true to your. Your

1378
01:27:13,350 –> 01:27:17,110
stay true to your customers. Don’t worry about what your thoughts and

1379
01:27:17,110 –> 01:27:20,950
your narrative is and what your story is and all that stuff. It’s.

1380
01:27:21,030 –> 01:27:24,350
You gotta, you gotta know what you’re selling, who you’re selling it to and why

1381
01:27:24,350 –> 01:27:27,270
they buy it. If you know those three things, you’ll be fine.

1382
01:27:28,470 –> 01:27:32,190
Well, and that’s and that’s real empathy with your customers, by the way. Yeah, that’s

1383
01:27:32,190 –> 01:27:35,950
real empathy. That’s real, practical empathy that will allow you,

1384
01:27:35,950 –> 01:27:39,390
when your customer is wrong, to actually treat your customer like a human being when

1385
01:27:39,390 –> 01:27:42,350
they’re wrong, rather than like a data point or a number.

1386
01:27:44,270 –> 01:27:47,470
All right, I’d like to thank Tom Libby for coming on the show today.

1387
01:27:48,350 –> 01:27:50,910
We gotta wrap up. I got a hard stop at the top of the hour.

1388
01:27:52,350 –> 01:27:56,029
Thank you for coming by, my friend. I will see you in a couple

1389
01:27:56,029 –> 01:27:59,750
weeks. Always my pleasure. All right, take care. Thank

1390
01:27:59,750 –> 01:28:01,790
you. And we’re out.