Leadership Lessons From The Great Books #70 – The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe w/Tom Libby

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Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership

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Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number

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70, with, of course, our

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usual guest host, Tom Libby.

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Hey, everyone. I’m doing fantastic. Tom’s doing

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fantastic. It feels like it’s been a while since we talked to Tom, but we

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just talked to him. I mean, we just talked to him last month. So as

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we go into the month of August, we are going to begin

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going down a particular road here. We’ve already started exploring some of this in our

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shorts episodes, talking about geography and place

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and talking about the impacts of geography and place on the

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psychology of not only writers but also on the psychology

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of leaders. And we’re going to start this

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wandering meditation well, where

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I’m at anyway, the triple-digit degree heat of

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the summer. We’re going to start this in a little

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bit more of well, a little bit more of a

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northeasterly place, a little bit northeasterly location and a little

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bit of a colder environment.

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And the author that we are going to bring to you today

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is delivering a

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meditation on madness, nervousness,

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melancholy and the transcendent power of place.

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And it’s a story that we probably should have covered in October, but what

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the hell, we’re going to do it in August because that’s how I roll.

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The Fall of the House of Usher by

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that great creepy writer

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Edgar Allan Poe

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from The Fall of the House of Usher. By the way, I’m

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reading from the Project Gutenberg version of this. Your

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Mileage Will Vary by Edgar

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Allan Poe. And I quote during the

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whole of a dull, dark and soundless day on the autumn of the year, when

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the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone on

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horseback through a singularly dreary tract of country and at

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length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the

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melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it

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was, but with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of

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insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say

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insufferable, for the feeling was unrelieved by any of the of that half

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pleasurable because poetic sentiment with which the mind

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usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or

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terrible. I looked upon the scene before me upon the

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mere house and the simple landscape features of the domain upon the bleak

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walls upon the vacant eyelike windows upon a few rank sedges and

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upon a few white trunks of decayed trees with an utter depression of soul which

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I could compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the afterdream

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of the reveler upon opium, the bitter lapse into

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everyday life, the hideous dropping off of the veil.

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There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart,

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an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the

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imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.

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What was it? I paused to think. What was it that so unnerved me in

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the contemplation of the House of Usher?

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It was a mystery all insoluble. Nor could I grapple with the shadowy

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fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered, I was forced to

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fall back upon this unsatisfactory conclusion that while beyond doubt, there

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are combinations of very simple, natural objects which have the power of thus affecting

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us, still, the analysis of this power lies among

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considerations beyond our depth. It was possible,

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I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of

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the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its

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capacity for sorrowful, impression. And

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acting upon this idea, I reigned my horse to the precipitous brink of

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a black and lurid tarn that lay an unruffled luster by the dwelling, and

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gaze down, but with a shudder

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even more thrilling than before, upon the remodeled and

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inverted images of the gray sedge and the

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ghastly tree stems and the vacant

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eyelike windows.

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Edgar Allan Poe when I

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say that name, it conjures up several things in your head,

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not only the writer, but it also conjures up

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the character that the writer has become over the course of time.

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As a matter of fact, we talked a little bit about Edgar Allan

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Poe. We referenced Edgar Allan Poe’s great poem, The

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Raven when we were talking about Albert Camus

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and the Myth of Sisyphus with Claire Chandler. Go listen to that episode. I believe

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that’s episode number 66.

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But when you think about Poe, you think about, like I said, the

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character, and you also think about the writer, and you sort of merge those two

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things together. He’s that weird person in American literature, and

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it could only have come out of American literature where the writer began to

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transcend even his own work, even while becoming part of

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his own work in subsequent years.

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Partially, this is because of the terms of his life. So he

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was a writer, a poet, an editor, and a literary critic who

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was best known for his poetry and his short stories, particularly Tales of

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Mystery and, of course, The Macabre. And I’m thinking of this

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in terms I don’t know why, but as I talk about Edgar Allan Poe and

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I talk about his literary life, I’m seeing a combination in my head

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of the tiny, toons animated series

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version of Edgar Allan Poe where they did The Raven on that

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cartoon combined with Vincent Price’s voice. And if you don’t know who Vincent

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Price was, go look it up on YouTube.

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Born in 1819 and dying under

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unusual circumstances in 1849, poe was

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a writer shaped by existential distress and

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trauma, rarely placed alongside the

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fellow romantic New England writers of his time, including Emerson,

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Hawthorne and Melville, who we’ll also be covering on the podcast we’re going to

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read Moby Dick coming up here in a couple of weeks. Poe stands in a

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league all his own where he’s become both a myth and, like I said, as

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a character as well. In the American literary history.

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He was a writer of strict conventions and convictions.

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He infamously reviewed Hawthorne’s books. Twice Told Tales

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and Moses from an Old Man’s. And with an assessment

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partly informed by his contempt for allegory and moral tales

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and his chronic accusations of plagiarism, he admitted

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in this critical review, and I quote, the style of Mr.

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Hawthorne is purity itself. His tone is singularly

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effective, wild, plaintiff, thoughtful, and in full accordance with his

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themes. We look upon him as one of the few men of indisputable

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genius to whom our country has yet given

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birth. By the way, that was about the

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last nice thing he said about

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Hawthorne. Paul was known

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to have his literary fights

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and he engaged in battles

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in the pen with poets such as Henry

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wasworth Longfellow. And most notoriously, he got into

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it with Ralph Waldo Emerson,

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kind of like the celebrity death match between Elon Musk and Mark

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Zuckerberg. That’s coming up here fairly soon

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in our history. Good fight and good night. All right

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on that. So we’re going to talk

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about Poe. We’re going to talk about place. We’re going to talk about

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geography. We’re going to talk about maybe we’ll even talk about literary fights.

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Who would win in a fight? Poe versus

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Emerson. Who do you take on that one with?

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Of course, our usual RaconTour, usual man about

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town. The indispensable. Indisputable.

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Because who else would dispute him? Tom Libby.

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So, Tom, talk a little bit about the

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reputation because you live in the Northeast. I kind of picked these

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guys, and I started with Poe. Because you live in the Northeast, we’ll leave it

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at an undisclosed location. But you live in the Northeast in an undisclosed

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location, kind of close to where Poe might have potentially

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wandered around. And so you’re

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knee deep in this, right? A little bit. So talk a little bit

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about the writing and the reputation of Edgar Allan Poe, what you know about him

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from high school, maybe, or maybe, you know, nothing. I don’t know. But let’s sort

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of break apart this. A little bit of this for our listeners.

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Mean, first things first, right?

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I do know a little bit about

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and then think of other authors from the

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have Walden. We have Walden Pond right here. Right? Like right down

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the road. Yeah. Row, right? Frost. There’s like a

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whole museum dedicated to Frost right down the street as well.

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But I feel like it’s one of these

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weird things and this is going to sound very morbid and I

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don’t mean it this way but I think he did himself a

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service. By dying.

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Early, stopping when he did. Right. Because think

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about this. If he had continued on, his

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credibility probably would have continued to go downward, spiral, not up.

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Because he’s attacking these authors and writers that have been,

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I mean, super glorified. Right? Like some of these writers are,

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from a historical perspective, the tops of the

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tops of the best of the best of whatever, right? Like, we reference them

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all the time. So if he was continuously just crapping on them all the time,

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eventually people would have stopped listening to him, right? Number one,

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and he wasn’t well respected. In his time anyway. He wasn’t his literary

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criticism. And then he had to wait a while to get published. And then the

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biggest thing that he got published that he got recognition for in

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his time wasn’t any of his short stories. It was the Raven. The raven,

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right? Yeah. But again, to your point,

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he was he was like that I don’t even know how to explain it, but

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he was like that kid that just he just did enough of this jabbing. And

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then when he stopped jabbing, everyone was like, oh, wait, where’d that noise go? We

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should probably go look. What was that noise about? And then they listened to it

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and they go, oh, maybe he did know a little bit of something, what he

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was talking about. And then it was like almost like a backward thing, right?

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Let me just give you the modern day version of this, right? Which what

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could have been I feel like the same thing could have potentially happened

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to he had stopped if he had stopped writing

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right after Pet did Chris, he

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did Christine and The Shining and Carrie and then the Pet

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Sematary. If he just stopped right there, we would have been like, oh, where’d that

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go? And then we would have started lifting him on some sort of

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pedestal. Because we don’t really talk about Stephen King. We all

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like his writing. We all read it. When is he ever

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involved in conversation outside of real literary people? Like people who really

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like literature, right? But I don’t talk about Stephen King on

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a day to day basis ever. But Edgar Allan Poe pops up every once in

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a while. Like he still pops up. I just feel like Stephen King could

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have been that guy of this generation if something happened to him. So

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Stephen King and,

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you know, I follow, as you probably would guess, I follow literary

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Twitter, I would imagine

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it comes with its own problems, but it comes

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with its own challenges, I should say. And Stephen King

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is huge on Twitter. He’s huge, as you would

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expect. Now, there’s three phase. It’s interesting you brought up Stephen

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King, because I would not have made that intuitive

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leap. So that’s good way to bring that to me because I would not have

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made that intuitive know you had early Stephen King

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which know Cujo which was his first book

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all the way through I would say the cocaine fueled and he’s even admitted

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cocaine fueled tommy knockers, which if you ever read that

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book you have to be high out your mind.

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Oh, my God, like glowing

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aliens. It’s a whole thing.

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Never read TommyKnockers. Go read it. My God.

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I think this is what the Northeast winter does to people. Think about

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like they’re all from here. This is what I want to talk about. This is

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the power of place. And then you have like mid career Stephen King

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who’s, who goes from, I would say Tommy

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Knockers. And I can’t remember what came after Tommy Knockers,

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like different seasons. He starts writing like the Richard Bachman Tales and things like that.

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Stand By Me was probably the most infamous kind of short story that got turned

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into a film right out of that group. But

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he goes from there to I would say mid

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career Stephen King is right where he got hit where he had the car accident

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in Bangor, where he got hit by the side of the road, right? And at

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that time he was working on Gunslinger, which is my personal favorite series of

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his. I love the gunslinger. It’s an amazing series.

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You should go read it. Except kind of at the end where it kind of

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falls apart. But anyway, he gets hit in the middle of writing that and

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then that’s where you go. You have mid career Stephen King

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end. And now we’re into late career Stephen King and late career

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Stephen King. I, and I’m going

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to publicly admit this, I have not read a whole lot of

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late career Stephen King. I look at his books and I go

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and I kind of walk away. And it’s terrible because there was a time,

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and this is also for Poe, where King

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hit me at a particular visceral level from about the age of maybe

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like, I think maybe ten or eleven

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all the way up to probably about

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17 or 18. And then after that

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I was done and posed the same way, where,

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don’t get me wrong, I’ve read Cask of a Montelado and I’ve

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read oh gosh, it was another few,

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one of few of the Gold bug story where he explored

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cryptography. Read that now, followed House of Usher.

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Read that now a couple of times now. But

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you get to a certain point with Poe where you’re like, I could probably just

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leave

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place. Okay, so let’s get this out early because

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we are going to talk about this a little bit again. But I want to

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sort of explore it early and then get back to it. The melancholy

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of

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the fall of the House of Usher,

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which by the way, is going to be turned into a Netflix series. You might

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want to pay attention to that, folks. I can’t wait. It’s going to be amazing.

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Starts from the unnamed

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narrator getting a letter from his friend, right? And he has to

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go visit him. For those of us who are living in other

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places geographically, that’s not the Northeast.

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Is it really that creepy? Like, really, is it really

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past like September? I mean, if I’m

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being 100% honest, because I’ve

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born and raised in the Northeast, lived here pretty much my whole life,

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right. But I’ve visited everywhere else. Like, I’ve been around the country

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all the way. I think the only state, US.

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State I’ve never been to is Hawaii. Right. I’ve been to pretty much every other

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state, including Alaska. So I’ve literally been around

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the and throughout the Caribbean, certain

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parts of Central, and I’ve been I’ve been all over the place. And I got

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to be honest with you. Yeah. The only

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place I can think of, honest to God, the only place I can think of

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that is even on the same

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level. It might be a little bit less, but not tremendously less. But it’s like

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that New Orleans southern plantation kind of environment

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where you get like a decrepit building and that one building

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is super creepy and it’s probably like the creepy part of town or whatever. In

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New England, you get like that all over the place. You got to remember you

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got to remember we have homes that were built here in the 16 and 17.

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Hundreds still up. And if you don’t take care of them when I tell

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you they look creepy, man, I’m telling you, it’s stuff horror movies are made out

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of. It really went we just recently

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went to see Haunted Mansion, right. And whatever, if you like

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Disney or not, it doesn’t really matter. But I know you’ve seen at least the

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preview of the house that’s in the movie. Oh, yeah. I looked at that and

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I was like, what’s so scary about that? I could fix that up. That’s a

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00:17:04.584 –> 00:17:07.700
fixer upper. Where’s Chipping, Joanne Gaines when you need them?

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That’s like a New England fixer upper. No big deal. It’s a

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no demo Renault in the Northeast. I will say,

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though, the same house that looks super creepy in October,

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november is, like, beautiful. In June and

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July, it’s literally the same house. But

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the time of year matters. It really does. The time of year matters around

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here. And again, once you hit late December,

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January, and early February, everything snow covered.

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Who cares? Nothing looks creepy when it’s snow covered. It just looks freaking cold.

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It looks like day after tomorrow stuff.

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Way to put in the climate change reference. Yeah, go ahead. Right? Anyway,

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I thought I’d throw it in there anyway, but you know what I’m saying, right?

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It’s either super cold

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cold can also be creepy, but it isn’t necessarily creepy

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because cold also can come across as crisp and clean,

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right? So sometimes, like in New England, when you get that first

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snow cover and it’s like 18 degrees outside, and you step outside and

294
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the air just seems more clean than normal, right? Because

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the snow just pulled all the pollutants out of the air, and you walk out

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there and it looks almost pristine, like this snow covered

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landscape, and it’s beautiful in the fall. You don’t get that.

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Is this a function. And I’ll ask you this. This is sort of

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touching on a little bit of and we have on previous podcast episodes,

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00:18:37.190 –> 00:18:40.958
touched on this, your Native American heritage, right? Your Native

301
00:18:40.974 –> 00:18:44.020
American background. So is this part of

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I wonder how the Native Americans dealt with it when they were there

303
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back in the 15th century, before all these

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random let me be blunt. All these random puritans started showing up and

305
00:18:58.652 –> 00:19:02.458
putting up buildings and houses and all that nonsense. How are

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you dealing with did they have super creepy.

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00:19:09.630 –> 00:19:13.126
Know because think of this, right? Think of this. And up here in the Northeast,

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00:19:13.158 –> 00:19:16.974
we had either Wigwams wiki ups. Those are the dwelling types, right?

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00:19:17.012 –> 00:19:20.560
And even like the long houses of the Iroquois or the Honda Shoney people,

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00:19:21.570 –> 00:19:25.166
when that framework was done, you just collapsed it back down into the earth

311
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and it was biodegradable, 100%

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00:19:28.536 –> 00:19:32.260
biodegradable. You didn’t get the creepiness that you get with some of these

313
00:19:32.790 –> 00:19:36.166
cement and stone buildings, and you

314
00:19:36.188 –> 00:19:39.458
got the creeping

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00:19:39.554 –> 00:19:43.174
vines up when Mother Earth decides to take

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00:19:43.212 –> 00:19:46.694
over a building that won’t fall because it’s not biodegradable, it looks

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00:19:46.732 –> 00:19:50.246
creepy, as opposed to, oh, Mother Earth said, oh, you’re done with that wood. We’ll

318
00:19:50.278 –> 00:19:53.834
just put that back into the yeah, but I will say, though,

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still, I think that’s kind of where my interpretation

320
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I let me half a step back. I think

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00:20:01.536 –> 00:20:05.206
my native side like the deep roots to the native

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community I have here. I think that’s why I view the winter the way I

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00:20:08.948 –> 00:20:12.522
do, right? Because the winter, to me, it’s

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purifying, it’s clean, it’s beautiful, it’s really nice. And

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00:20:16.312 –> 00:20:19.938
by the way, when native people were required to hunt in the

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winter, it was also slightly easier to track animals. They

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left trails in the snow. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure

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00:20:26.888 –> 00:20:29.720
out that the moose went that way or the deer went this way.

329
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Not that it made it easier. It didn’t make it easier to hunt and actually

330
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kill them. But I’m just saying, like, you could track them better.

331
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That elk or whatever the hell you’re tracking, that shows up really

332
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well against the white snow, like it really does. Yeah.

333
00:20:47.230 –> 00:20:50.938
Okay, so the other follow up

334
00:20:50.944 –> 00:20:54.686
question to this is and we’ll kind of explore a little

335
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bit of this, but when we get to the next part coming up here,

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but Paul was a master of

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understanding psychology before Freud

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psychology of the creepy, which I think is what?

339
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Well, his

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00:21:12.232 –> 00:21:13.090
lifetime,

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the events of his lifetime and the writing of his lifetime occurred

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during the beginning and the middle of what we

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call in the United States at a religious level, the Second Great Awakening,

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right? So there was a lot of very powerful preachers working their way through the

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Northeast talking about the Holy Spirit and

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transcendence and all that kind of stuff. By the way, a lot of the

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00:21:38.912 –> 00:21:42.654
modern churches that we have today came out of the Second

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00:21:42.692 –> 00:21:46.430
Great Awakening. And the modern religious denominations like Baptists,

349
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Mormons, presbyterians. Presbyterians.

350
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Right. All of them came out of that. And we’re going to get into that,

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a little bit of that coming up here. But Poe was

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around for the beginning parts of all of that, right?

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He’s also considered to be a romantic writer who

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sort of previewed the worst excesses of the Second Great Awakening. And some of the

355
00:22:11.004 –> 00:22:13.640
worst excesses of the Second Great Awakening were in

356
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Seances and trying to summon people back

357
00:22:18.252 –> 00:22:21.340
from the dead and get them to talk to you. And

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Poe sort of anticipated some of this. Sort

359
00:22:25.728 –> 00:22:29.318
of interestingly enough, so did Nathaniel Hawthorne. A lot of what’s in The Scarlet Letter,

360
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which we’re going to cover in our next couple of episodes coming up on the

361
00:22:32.884 –> 00:22:36.522
podcast this month. Hawthorne

362
00:22:36.586 –> 00:22:40.234
struggled massively with the nature

363
00:22:40.282 –> 00:22:43.774
of his puritan ancestors and how

364
00:22:43.892 –> 00:22:47.666
judgmental and persecutorial he perceived them to be. And

365
00:22:47.688 –> 00:22:51.154
then he went full bore into nihilism, which is a whole other kind of thing

366
00:22:51.192 –> 00:22:54.958
that you get into with Hawthorne. We’ll cover that again. We’ll cover that on

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a later podcast. But got to have all those people

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00:22:58.476 –> 00:23:01.702
dynamics happening at the same time that you are

369
00:23:01.756 –> 00:23:05.480
building between 1819 and 1849,

370
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Boston out, which is

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I mean, the Founding Fathers didn’t consider boston

372
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was never a city that was under consideration to be the capital of the United

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States. It was never under consideration. Unlike

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00:23:20.682 –> 00:23:24.254
Philadelphia. Philadelphia was under consideration. New York was

375
00:23:24.292 –> 00:23:27.774
under know, but

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Boston never and I’ve always wondered,

377
00:23:32.610 –> 00:23:35.780
um, and I wonder if it’s because of that

378
00:23:36.150 –> 00:23:39.310
puritanical religious

379
00:23:39.390 –> 00:23:43.118
streak that sort of honestly

380
00:23:43.214 –> 00:23:46.642
still exists in Boston, but it’s so

381
00:23:46.696 –> 00:23:50.422
muted that if you I mean, you could walk through

382
00:23:50.476 –> 00:23:54.310
Boston. And I’ve visited Boston several times, and I’ve always said the interesting

383
00:23:54.380 –> 00:23:58.178
thing about the biggest problem with Boston is it’s full of Irish people. That’s

384
00:23:58.194 –> 00:24:02.038
the biggest problem. And all my listeners from

385
00:24:02.044 –> 00:24:04.826
Boston cannot come for me. It’s fine. All you boys from Southeast. Yeah, you all

386
00:24:04.848 –> 00:24:07.706
come for me. It’s fine. It’s fine. Whatever. I got something for you. I’m not

387
00:24:07.728 –> 00:24:11.454
afraid of any of you. Any of you schmucks from Lowell. Anybody

388
00:24:11.492 –> 00:24:15.230
wanted to handle me? What? Anybody? Anyhow.

389
00:24:16.130 –> 00:24:19.966
But Boston is its own thing. Like, even as a

390
00:24:19.988 –> 00:24:23.806
sports town, my God,

391
00:24:23.828 –> 00:24:27.618
if you didn’t have the Patriots for the last, like, 20 years, be the

392
00:24:27.624 –> 00:24:29.140
worst sports town ever.

393
00:24:32.090 –> 00:24:35.606
Oh, what? Am I wrong? Am I wrong in my

394
00:24:35.628 –> 00:24:39.450
analysis? There’s something

395
00:24:39.520 –> 00:24:43.290
in the place. Self

396
00:24:43.360 –> 00:24:47.066
misery. In the last 20 years, all

397
00:24:47.088 –> 00:24:50.314
three of the other major sports have at least won championships. In the last 20

398
00:24:50.352 –> 00:24:53.806
years. All three? Yeah. Now, I’m not saying they win

399
00:24:53.988 –> 00:24:57.646
in tier point. I mean, the Patriots have won, what, six Super Bowls? They’ve been

400
00:24:57.668 –> 00:25:01.486
to ten. Right? So it’s like they’re always in it. But if you

401
00:25:01.508 –> 00:25:04.686
even take that out of the equation, the Celtics have won in the last 20

402
00:25:04.708 –> 00:25:08.322
years. They’re in it just about every year now. I had no

403
00:25:08.376 –> 00:25:12.178
delusional thought into thinking they were going to win the championship this year. Some of

404
00:25:12.184 –> 00:25:15.906
my colleagues did, some of my co Bostonians or whatever did, and I was

405
00:25:15.928 –> 00:25:19.126
like, they’re not going to win anyway. I was actually surprised they made it through

406
00:25:19.148 –> 00:25:22.806
the first round, but whatever. The Bruins the same

407
00:25:22.828 –> 00:25:26.614
thing. The Bruins the same thing. They’re always in the conversation, but they have won

408
00:25:26.652 –> 00:25:30.386
a championship in the last 20 years. Actually, two, if I’m correct. If I remember

409
00:25:30.428 –> 00:25:34.266
correctly, they’ve won two. And they’re always in the conversation. But I knew they

410
00:25:34.288 –> 00:25:38.090
weren’t going to win this year either. I just knew it. But that sense

411
00:25:38.160 –> 00:25:41.354
right there. Like, I know we’re in the conversation, but we’re not going to win.

412
00:25:41.472 –> 00:25:45.210
That chip on your shoulder stuff, that comes from somewhere.

413
00:25:45.650 –> 00:25:48.766
No, but I’m not expecting to win. If you talk to 25 other people from

414
00:25:48.788 –> 00:25:51.294
Boston, they’re like, yeah, we’re going to win it this year. Yeah, we got it.

415
00:25:51.332 –> 00:25:55.070
We got this. And I’m the one sitting there going, we got what?

416
00:25:55.140 –> 00:25:57.506
They’re going to be decent. They’re going to be good, they’re going to be in

417
00:25:57.528 –> 00:26:01.042
the conversation, but they’re not going to like, who do you think we are?

418
00:26:01.176 –> 00:26:04.994
We’re not New York. Well,

419
00:26:05.032 –> 00:26:08.678
and that’s fundamentally the thing that you get the sense of on the

420
00:26:08.684 –> 00:26:12.438
East Coast, that there’s three cities on the

421
00:26:12.444 –> 00:26:15.560
East Coast that are constantly it’s like three little kids in a.

422
00:26:17.690 –> 00:26:20.234
Like, I know where you’re going with this. You know where I’m going with this,

423
00:26:20.272 –> 00:26:22.730
right? You got Philly,

424
00:26:24.190 –> 00:26:27.834
you got New York and you got Boston. Those are your

425
00:26:27.872 –> 00:26:31.294
three cities, right? And that’s it. That’s it. And New York

426
00:26:31.332 –> 00:26:34.986
City, like, Boston would love to get New York City’s

427
00:26:35.018 –> 00:26:38.798
attention. It’s like the ugly, the ugly second. Kid that would love

428
00:26:38.804 –> 00:26:42.126
to New York’s. Like the big brother, that

429
00:26:42.308 –> 00:26:45.758
middle child is always trying to get like, look what we can do, look what

430
00:26:45.764 –> 00:26:48.206
we can do, look what we can do. But you’re not paying attention. And Philadelphia

431
00:26:48.238 –> 00:26:51.954
is like the youngest one of them going F you to all of you, and

432
00:26:51.992 –> 00:26:54.386
I’m going to do whatever I want because I’m a punk and I’m a this

433
00:26:54.408 –> 00:26:57.240
and I’m of that. Hey, Philly fans, listen,

434
00:26:58.170 –> 00:27:01.122
I love the Eagles, just to let you know. They’re one of my favorite teams.

435
00:27:01.186 –> 00:27:04.642
Even though I live in New England, I love the Philadelphia Eagles.

436
00:27:04.786 –> 00:27:07.880
So I’m just letting that out there right now.

437
00:27:08.490 –> 00:27:12.198
It’s one of my favorites. Listen, if the NFC is I’m

438
00:27:12.214 –> 00:27:16.058
rooting for Philly or my two my two NFC teams, I

439
00:27:16.064 –> 00:27:19.754
love both of those two teams anyway. But anyway, my point

440
00:27:19.792 –> 00:27:23.594
is but Philadelphia, you think Boston’s those people are nuts,

441
00:27:23.642 –> 00:27:27.482
man. The police department had to grease

442
00:27:27.546 –> 00:27:31.306
the lamp pole so people didn’t climb up and do stuff to

443
00:27:31.348 –> 00:27:34.370
them. You don’t have to do that in Boston

444
00:27:35.110 –> 00:27:37.140
anyway. But you’re right.

445
00:27:39.670 –> 00:27:43.394
There are three towns that really make

446
00:27:43.432 –> 00:27:47.014
the sports community the sports community. Now, don’t get me wrong. There are other

447
00:27:47.052 –> 00:27:50.838
towns that want to be there. They’ll put their hand up every once in a

448
00:27:50.844 –> 00:27:54.150
while. But they’re like that cousin. Like Baltimore.

449
00:27:57.610 –> 00:28:01.306
We got a football team. We’ve won a championship before. Yeah. Nobody listens. No

450
00:28:01.328 –> 00:28:04.010
one cares. Nobody cares.

451
00:28:05.150 –> 00:28:08.826
You got Toronto, which is your weird Canadian cousin. Why do you always show

452
00:28:08.848 –> 00:28:12.666
up? Who is that? Those are out

453
00:28:12.688 –> 00:28:15.930
of town. We still have family in other countries.

454
00:28:16.670 –> 00:28:20.478
Anyway, back to Poe. We could talk about this all day.

455
00:28:20.484 –> 00:28:23.280
Long, but anyway, welcome back from Swartz. Talk on me.

456
00:28:24.390 –> 00:28:27.714
I think you’re heading down a question here as to why was Boston never

457
00:28:27.752 –> 00:28:30.500
considered in the conversation of

458
00:28:31.190 –> 00:28:34.946
national capitals. Honestly, I think part of it was just

459
00:28:34.968 –> 00:28:38.598
location. If you think about where Philadelphia is and where

460
00:28:38.764 –> 00:28:42.390
eventually Washington, DC. Ended up, it’s more middle

461
00:28:42.540 –> 00:28:45.638
ground. Like, it’s more middle toward the middle of the country, even though it’s on

462
00:28:45.644 –> 00:28:49.466
the coast, but it’s, like, middle. So I think Boston was never and by

463
00:28:49.488 –> 00:28:53.194
the way, think about the time frame, the time of this, right

464
00:28:53.232 –> 00:28:56.822
in the 1718 hundreds. When you’d have literal

465
00:28:56.886 –> 00:29:00.734
icebergs in the harbors, you don’t want your delegates from other

466
00:29:00.772 –> 00:29:04.574
countries coming into Boston in Been.

467
00:29:04.772 –> 00:29:08.560
That’s terrible. That’s why none of

468
00:29:09.330 –> 00:29:13.054
these World Summits are not held in Oslo in January.

469
00:29:13.182 –> 00:29:16.146
Like, if you’re going to Oslo for a summit, it’s in

470
00:29:16.248 –> 00:29:18.660
August. There’s a reason for.

471
00:29:21.830 –> 00:29:25.186
It. Klaus Schwab doesn’t want to rent

472
00:29:25.218 –> 00:29:28.280
an icebreaker. Exactly. To

473
00:29:28.890 –> 00:29:32.694
get through Boston Harbor. And I think New York was at least

474
00:29:32.732 –> 00:29:36.342
in the conversation because it was just south enough that it doesn’t quite

475
00:29:36.396 –> 00:29:40.090
get that bad. New York’s cold in the winter, don’t get me wrong. But

476
00:29:40.160 –> 00:29:43.466
it’s always like when we’re having a

477
00:29:43.488 –> 00:29:46.438
Northeastern, which is one of the worst storms we can have up here, and we’re

478
00:29:46.454 –> 00:29:49.770
getting dumped with 3ft of snow. New York is like

479
00:29:49.840 –> 00:29:53.326
3ft. We got three inches. You guys have good luck with

480
00:29:53.348 –> 00:29:57.006
that. Whatever. So they’ll get snow, they’ll get cold, but it

481
00:29:57.028 –> 00:30:00.750
doesn’t quite get as bad as Boston. I think that’s more of the reason.

482
00:30:00.820 –> 00:30:03.342
Somebody might have brought up Boston one time and they would have been like, yeah,

483
00:30:03.396 –> 00:30:07.038
shut that down real quick because we’re not having the King of France

484
00:30:07.214 –> 00:30:10.914
and the King of Spain coming over to Boston in December. It’s not

485
00:30:10.952 –> 00:30:14.180
happening. I think it was more of a logistical thing.

486
00:30:15.270 –> 00:30:18.834
And then the delegate from Massachusetts went off and decided he was going to split

487
00:30:18.882 –> 00:30:22.438
Maine off of Maine off and just have them go be their own thing.

488
00:30:22.524 –> 00:30:26.358
Okay. That was his revenge. All right. I think we’ve covered a lot of

489
00:30:26.364 –> 00:30:30.166
things here. I think we’ve gone around the horn. I’m sorry. What story we were

490
00:30:30.188 –> 00:30:32.540
reading? Yeah, back to the book.

491
00:30:36.510 –> 00:30:39.706
Actually, back to the story. Back to the fall of the House of Usher. This

492
00:30:39.728 –> 00:30:42.480
is what we were. Reading. That’s what it was.

493
00:30:43.090 –> 00:30:46.462
No, you’re not listening to sports talk. You have not stumbled into the wrong

494
00:30:46.516 –> 00:30:49.918
podcast. We just went down a road there, as we often do sometimes

495
00:30:50.004 –> 00:30:53.806
here, just to explore some things. All right.

496
00:30:53.988 –> 00:30:56.958
Back to The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. So we’re

497
00:30:56.974 –> 00:31:00.606
going to pick up at this idea of place, and I quote,

498
00:31:00.798 –> 00:31:04.374
although as boys and it’s the narrator talking about

499
00:31:04.412 –> 00:31:07.974
himself and Roderick Usher, the second

500
00:31:08.012 –> 00:31:11.746
character here. Although as boys we had been even intimate

501
00:31:11.778 –> 00:31:14.360
associates, yet I really knew little of my friend.

502
00:31:17.710 –> 00:31:21.142
His reserve had been always excessive and habitual.

503
00:31:21.286 –> 00:31:24.746
I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been

504
00:31:24.768 –> 00:31:28.230
noted time out of mind for peculiar sensibility of temperament

505
00:31:28.310 –> 00:31:31.934
displaying itself through long ages in many works of exalted art and

506
00:31:31.972 –> 00:31:35.342
manifested of late in repeated deeds of municent yet

507
00:31:35.396 –> 00:31:38.798
unobtrusive charity as well as in a passionate devotion to the

508
00:31:38.804 –> 00:31:42.494
intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily

509
00:31:42.542 –> 00:31:46.386
recognizable beauties of musical science. I had

510
00:31:46.408 –> 00:31:50.014
learned, too, the very remarkable fact that the stem of the Usher

511
00:31:50.062 –> 00:31:53.826
race, all time honored as it was, had put forth at

512
00:31:53.848 –> 00:31:57.574
no period any enduring branch, in other words, that the entire family lay

513
00:31:57.612 –> 00:32:01.446
in the direct line of descent and had always, with very trifling and

514
00:32:01.468 –> 00:32:05.174
very temporary variation, so lame. It was

515
00:32:05.212 –> 00:32:08.978
this deficiency I considered while running over in thought the perfect keeping

516
00:32:09.074 –> 00:32:12.378
of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the

517
00:32:12.384 –> 00:32:15.866
people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the

518
00:32:15.888 –> 00:32:19.738
one in the long lapse of centuries might have exercised upon the other.

519
00:32:19.904 –> 00:32:23.486
It was this deficiency, perhaps of collateral issue and the

520
00:32:23.508 –> 00:32:26.926
consequent undeviating transmission from sire to sun of the

521
00:32:26.948 –> 00:32:30.686
patrimony with the name which had at length so identified the two

522
00:32:30.788 –> 00:32:34.606
as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal

523
00:32:34.638 –> 00:32:38.434
appellation of the House of Usher. An

524
00:32:38.472 –> 00:32:42.242
appellation which seemed to include in the minds of the peasantry who used

525
00:32:42.296 –> 00:32:45.654
it both the family and the

526
00:32:45.692 –> 00:32:47.750
family mansion.

527
00:32:50.970 –> 00:32:54.454
As we were just talking about, this is part of the melancholy of

528
00:32:54.492 –> 00:32:58.306
place, right or subtitled. Never go visit

529
00:32:58.338 –> 00:33:01.398
your sick friend whom you haven’t seen in many years. You don’t know what you’re

530
00:33:01.414 –> 00:33:02.620
going to be running into

531
00:33:05.070 –> 00:33:08.842
geography like we were just talking about and just kind of breaking down in place

532
00:33:08.976 –> 00:33:12.790
where you happen to be on the map carries as much meaning in

533
00:33:12.800 –> 00:33:16.638
your life as other elements do. And I want to talk about this, yes, in

534
00:33:16.644 –> 00:33:20.238
the context of the Northeast, which we’ve kind of broken down,

535
00:33:20.324 –> 00:33:23.806
but then also because I’m as well traveled as Tom is in the

536
00:33:23.828 –> 00:33:27.598
context of the rest of the United States. I, too, have visited

537
00:33:27.774 –> 00:33:30.900
almost every single state in the Union. I’ve been to

538
00:33:31.590 –> 00:33:34.338
haven’t been fortunate enough to go to Central America. Oh, yes, I have. I’ve been

539
00:33:34.344 –> 00:33:37.894
to Central America and the Caribbean. I have not been to

540
00:33:37.932 –> 00:33:41.478
alaska, but I have been to Hawaii, most recently this year, so we’re kind of

541
00:33:41.484 –> 00:33:44.662
flip flopping on that. But

542
00:33:44.716 –> 00:33:48.514
geography and place mean things to people. Geography

543
00:33:48.562 –> 00:33:52.234
shapes. We don’t in our

544
00:33:52.272 –> 00:33:55.978
very modern, very sophisticated world, we don’t really pay too

545
00:33:55.984 –> 00:33:58.586
much attention to this. And I think that’s one of the knock on effects of

546
00:33:58.608 –> 00:34:02.394
globalization. And if people do

547
00:34:02.432 –> 00:34:06.094
think about it, it’s sort of in a transient, flittering sort of thinking that

548
00:34:06.132 –> 00:34:09.546
doesn’t really land on the whole of the problem or the whole of the nut

549
00:34:09.578 –> 00:34:13.418
to crack. Where you are on the

550
00:34:13.444 –> 00:34:17.060
map matters for who you are as well as for what you like,

551
00:34:17.670 –> 00:34:21.220
and it matters for what you write, if you’re a writer. So

552
00:34:22.390 –> 00:34:25.846
you have a country, and this is the big thing to consider here, and for

553
00:34:25.868 –> 00:34:29.302
my international listeners as well, you may want to think about

554
00:34:29.356 –> 00:34:32.710
this. The United States of America

555
00:34:33.050 –> 00:34:36.690
spans a third of the okay,

556
00:34:36.860 –> 00:34:40.470
I believe it’s the second largest continental

557
00:34:40.550 –> 00:34:43.260
landmass on Earth after

558
00:34:43.710 –> 00:34:46.794
okay, we’re a third of that

559
00:34:46.832 –> 00:34:50.506
landmass. And so the United States, of

560
00:34:50.528 –> 00:34:53.786
course, is going to produce writers as varied as Edgar Allan

561
00:34:53.818 –> 00:34:57.534
Poe all the way to Charles Portis. And we just

562
00:34:57.572 –> 00:35:00.846
sort of take that as being well, we take that for granted here in this

563
00:35:00.868 –> 00:35:04.706
country. We just do. And yet think

564
00:35:04.728 –> 00:35:08.334
about it with other countries. Indian writers you can definitely identify

565
00:35:08.382 –> 00:35:11.294
as being from India. Russian writers,

566
00:35:11.342 –> 00:35:14.994
Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Chekhov, like, those are the big

567
00:35:15.032 –> 00:35:17.666
three, right? And then you come to the 20th century and you’ve got

568
00:35:17.688 –> 00:35:21.478
solzhenitsyn. I’m not going to say

569
00:35:21.484 –> 00:35:25.266
that that’s about it, but you’ve got solzhenitsen, right, in the 20th century.

570
00:35:25.378 –> 00:35:28.918
And maybe there are more excellent Russian writers that I’m

571
00:35:28.934 –> 00:35:32.010
unaware of, but they would be clearly distinctively Russian.

572
00:35:32.910 –> 00:35:36.614
Swedish writers, like the guy who wrote or the person who wrote

573
00:35:36.742 –> 00:35:40.534
the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, they are distinctly

574
00:35:40.582 –> 00:35:44.160
Swedish. Or amitav ghosh. Right?

575
00:35:45.410 –> 00:35:49.086
The Indian writer who wrote a series of

576
00:35:49.108 –> 00:35:52.674
books that has been compared to the Moby Dick of books from

577
00:35:52.712 –> 00:35:56.350
India. Right. He’s a distinctly Indian

578
00:35:56.430 –> 00:36:00.178
writer, or other international writers that we’ve covered on

579
00:36:00.184 –> 00:36:03.234
this podcast from places as varied as Nigeria and

580
00:36:03.272 –> 00:36:06.774
Brazil, Japan, and, of

581
00:36:06.812 –> 00:36:10.662
course, Germany. But those

582
00:36:10.716 –> 00:36:14.230
writers coming from those places have distinctive voices. But America.

583
00:36:15.290 –> 00:36:18.954
The United States of America, specifically. My God,

584
00:36:18.992 –> 00:36:22.826
we’re all over the map. Literally all over the

585
00:36:22.848 –> 00:36:26.522
map. So, Tom,

586
00:36:26.576 –> 00:36:30.266
we’ve got a country that’s got Cormac McCarthy, that could hold Cormac McCarthy,

587
00:36:30.378 –> 00:36:34.030
who just recently passed away, who can write about

588
00:36:34.100 –> 00:36:36.830
being in New Mexico and being in the high desert,

589
00:36:38.770 –> 00:36:42.574
but who can also hold the creepiness of Poe. Right. Or the judgmentalism

590
00:36:42.622 –> 00:36:46.334
of Nathaniel Hawthorne all in the same bucket.

591
00:36:46.382 –> 00:36:50.094
Right? For leaders, this is a real challenge, right. And leaders

592
00:36:50.142 –> 00:36:53.810
don’t really think too much about it, but talk about

593
00:36:53.880 –> 00:36:57.430
the power of place. And again, this is something I think maybe you resonate with

594
00:36:57.580 –> 00:37:00.726
from your background and your experience you resonate with, but talk about the power of

595
00:37:00.748 –> 00:37:04.534
place in geography and how that all has come together for

596
00:37:04.572 –> 00:37:07.080
the United States. Well,

597
00:37:07.930 –> 00:37:11.658
and also how it changes

598
00:37:11.744 –> 00:37:15.466
you and your interaction with those other places, right? So it’s not

599
00:37:15.488 –> 00:37:19.114
just about you and your place. It’s about you and your place interacting with them

600
00:37:19.152 –> 00:37:22.746
and their places, right? So what I mean by that is, it’s

601
00:37:22.778 –> 00:37:26.446
brought up to me often that literally born and raised here in

602
00:37:26.468 –> 00:37:29.978
Boston, but people have a hard time hearing the accent that they’re

603
00:37:30.074 –> 00:37:33.634
thinking should be coming out of my mouth. But that’s very

604
00:37:33.672 –> 00:37:37.474
purposeful, right? Because the very first so

605
00:37:37.512 –> 00:37:39.986
for those of you who don’t know me, I also spent a lot of time

606
00:37:40.008 –> 00:37:43.666
in sales and marketing. But my very

607
00:37:43.688 –> 00:37:47.526
first sales job was fine. It was a local job, so I was only

608
00:37:47.548 –> 00:37:50.120
talking to local people, and I can say CAD and whatever,

609
00:37:52.730 –> 00:37:56.534
but the very first role that I took, where

610
00:37:56.572 –> 00:38:00.326
I interacted with multiple people throughout

611
00:38:00.358 –> 00:38:03.260
the country and multiple layers of people throughout the country,

612
00:38:03.950 –> 00:38:07.738
it hit me. Like, it hit me really hard. Where so I was a

613
00:38:07.744 –> 00:38:11.566
major account rep. I had very big companies as my clientele, and

614
00:38:11.588 –> 00:38:15.406
they were scattered throughout the United States. And I was talking to somebody from

615
00:38:15.508 –> 00:38:19.358
Irvine, California, or another person the very next day was from

616
00:38:19.524 –> 00:38:23.358
whatever, right? So but this woman I got on

617
00:38:23.364 –> 00:38:27.098
the call with, and she’s like,

618
00:38:27.124 –> 00:38:29.938
oh, how’s everything doing up there in the in the Northeast? Or whatever? And I

619
00:38:29.944 –> 00:38:33.602
was like, oh. It was literally the first time I ever had ever heard somebody

620
00:38:33.656 –> 00:38:37.460
single me out, because listening to the sound of my voice, right?

621
00:38:38.230 –> 00:38:41.778
And again, I was a kid, so, again, in fairness to me, I was a

622
00:38:41.784 –> 00:38:45.618
kid. I was, like, 25. I didn’t know diddly squat from anything.

623
00:38:45.784 –> 00:38:48.538
And and I was like I’m like, oh, how did you know that? She was

624
00:38:48.544 –> 00:38:50.378
like, oh, I can hear it in your accent. I’m like, I don’t have an

625
00:38:50.384 –> 00:38:52.998
accent. You have an accent. Like, I can hear your accent a mile away. It’s

626
00:38:53.014 –> 00:38:56.746
some Southern accent or whatever. And she’s like, oh, sweetie, we all

627
00:38:56.768 –> 00:39:00.426
have accents depending on where we’re from. And I went, oh. And it made me

628
00:39:00.448 –> 00:39:03.898
think, right? Like, it really made me think. And I went, first of all, let’s

629
00:39:03.914 –> 00:39:06.320
get this Boston accent right out of my mouth right now.

630
00:39:07.890 –> 00:39:11.614
Somebody be able to tell where I’m from just because of the

631
00:39:11.652 –> 00:39:14.894
word, a single word that comes out of my mouth. They go, oh, I can

632
00:39:14.932 –> 00:39:18.626
tell. But I will tell you, as much as I’ve tried to

633
00:39:18.648 –> 00:39:22.258
work it out, it still pops up every once in a while. Either if I

634
00:39:22.264 –> 00:39:26.066
get super excited or super mad, or if any emotion goes

635
00:39:26.088 –> 00:39:29.782
to an extreme happy, sad, mad, glad, doesn’t matter. Any

636
00:39:29.836 –> 00:39:33.554
emotion goes to the extreme. My control of the English language

637
00:39:33.602 –> 00:39:36.390
goes right out the window, and the Boston accent just comes flying

638
00:39:38.330 –> 00:39:41.580
to I just wanted the listeners to understand where I’m coming from when I

639
00:39:42.190 –> 00:39:45.194
this is where. You get Matt Damon in goodwill hunting. This is where in the

640
00:39:45.232 –> 00:39:48.060
bar when he’s like, go get your.

641
00:39:50.350 –> 00:39:53.820
Like, you want to hear me talk about my car and have it? Like,

642
00:39:55.810 –> 00:39:59.454
I never realized how odd it sounded until

643
00:39:59.492 –> 00:40:01.826
she said that to me. And then I was like, oh. I was like, oh,

644
00:40:01.848 –> 00:40:05.554
damn. I’m never letting that happen ever again. Right? So I started making

645
00:40:05.592 –> 00:40:09.374
a very conscious effort to enunciate pronunciate

646
00:40:09.422 –> 00:40:13.060
all that stuff better. Now, that being said,

647
00:40:13.610 –> 00:40:17.122
I didn’t want a Southern accent where they’re

648
00:40:17.186 –> 00:40:20.646
over accentuating certain vowels and

649
00:40:20.668 –> 00:40:24.166
letters either. And then I’m told the

650
00:40:24.188 –> 00:40:27.958
Midwest has no accent. So I was like, well, I don’t want that. I

651
00:40:27.964 –> 00:40:30.586
want somebody to know I’m a person like, that. I come from somewhere in the

652
00:40:30.608 –> 00:40:33.946
United States. But anyway, but to your

653
00:40:33.968 –> 00:40:37.674
point, back to the question again, I just wanted to lay some foundation for why

654
00:40:37.712 –> 00:40:41.200
people that being said,

655
00:40:42.050 –> 00:40:45.630
I do think especially in business, right? So if you’re talking about business

656
00:40:45.700 –> 00:40:49.038
leaders, I think it’s super important, even with the

657
00:40:49.044 –> 00:40:52.746
globalization of things, even with the commodity of communication

658
00:40:52.778 –> 00:40:56.574
that we have right now, right? So I, as a consultant,

659
00:40:56.622 –> 00:41:00.354
can do business with anybody in the world real time, right? Like, it doesn’t even

660
00:41:00.392 –> 00:41:04.218
matter. I have clients right now around the globe. I have clients

661
00:41:04.254 –> 00:41:08.098
in India. I have clients here in the US. Southeast,

662
00:41:08.114 –> 00:41:11.846
as a matter of fact. Anyway, just thought I’d bring that up for

663
00:41:11.868 –> 00:41:15.160
you. That’s fine. I’m okay. That’s fine.

664
00:41:16.570 –> 00:41:19.858
They’re not going to care anyway. They’re not going to find me. Yeah, that’s

665
00:41:19.874 –> 00:41:23.706
true. But the

666
00:41:23.728 –> 00:41:27.130
globalization of communication, I think it makes it really interesting.

667
00:41:27.280 –> 00:41:31.086
Now, again, that being said, I

668
00:41:31.108 –> 00:41:34.922
think it’s interesting that my attitude,

669
00:41:34.986 –> 00:41:38.650
my thought process, the way that I approach

670
00:41:38.730 –> 00:41:42.462
problem solving changes depending on who I’m talking to

671
00:41:42.516 –> 00:41:46.162
from around the country, people down

672
00:41:46.216 –> 00:41:49.934
south. Again, when I’m talking down south, my brother moved

673
00:41:49.982 –> 00:41:53.170
from here in Massachusetts. My brother moved down to North Carolina,

674
00:41:53.670 –> 00:41:57.458
and after being there for about 15 years, I mean, to me, he’s north

675
00:41:57.474 –> 00:42:00.998
Carolina. I’m sorry. He’s a hurricane now. I don’t care. He’s not from

676
00:42:01.004 –> 00:42:04.854
Massachusetts anymore, because his whole

677
00:42:04.892 –> 00:42:08.502
mentality of how to deal with things changed, right? They have a little bit more

678
00:42:08.556 –> 00:42:12.154
relaxed attitude. They have a little bit more relaxed way of

679
00:42:12.192 –> 00:42:15.546
approaching things. They have a little bit more relaxed. So when I deal with a

680
00:42:15.568 –> 00:42:19.318
customer that’s down in that area of the country, I can’t come at them

681
00:42:19.344 –> 00:42:23.178
with the Northeast mentality of bull in the China.

682
00:42:23.354 –> 00:42:27.198
We just are the Northeast is very fast,

683
00:42:27.284 –> 00:42:30.974
very highly motivated, very challenged. We just think and it’s not just

684
00:42:31.012 –> 00:42:34.766
Boston, by the way. It is that I tell people all the

685
00:42:34.788 –> 00:42:38.462
time, if you take the Northeast from Philadelphia north,

686
00:42:38.526 –> 00:42:41.266
we’re basically the same people. I’m sorry. I hate to tell you that in New

687
00:42:41.288 –> 00:42:44.826
York. But you’re the same as us. We’re the same as you. So is Philadelphia.

688
00:42:44.878 –> 00:42:48.438
We’re all the same people. But if you go after

689
00:42:48.524 –> 00:42:51.958
Philadelphia and down toward that southern part of the country,

690
00:42:52.124 –> 00:42:55.874
minus Florida, and I’ll explain in a minute if you minus

691
00:42:55.922 –> 00:42:59.706
Florida from that, you talk about the southeast. You

692
00:42:59.728 –> 00:43:03.546
talk about, like, south of Pennsylvania to Florida line,

693
00:43:03.568 –> 00:43:06.934
to the Georgia Florida line. Florida is its own little entity

694
00:43:06.982 –> 00:43:10.670
because Florida has its influx from a lot of different places.

695
00:43:11.410 –> 00:43:14.320
There’s a tremendous amount of northeasterners that retire to

696
00:43:15.410 –> 00:43:18.874
so Florida’s a little different. Florida’s got, like, a weird mix

697
00:43:18.922 –> 00:43:22.666
mentality. But again, so northeast, southeast. But if the northeast is dealing

698
00:43:22.698 –> 00:43:26.226
with the southeast, and again, the perspective of are you the

699
00:43:26.248 –> 00:43:29.954
customer or the client? Matters, because if the

700
00:43:29.992 –> 00:43:33.490
customer is in the northeast and I need to make sure that I mold my

701
00:43:33.640 –> 00:43:37.378
viewpoints to try to match their viewpoints or vantage points. I

702
00:43:37.384 –> 00:43:41.042
shouldn’t say viewpoints, their vantage points, so I can at least see and understand

703
00:43:41.096 –> 00:43:44.786
where they’re coming from, right? So I can’t come for example, I have a

704
00:43:44.808 –> 00:43:48.266
gentleman down in the south east right now that I’m dealing with. I can’t just

705
00:43:48.288 –> 00:43:50.906
hit him between the eyes with something that I feel like that I can do

706
00:43:50.928 –> 00:43:54.086
with. Somebody here from the northeast, right? I’m going to sell you this phone. I’m

707
00:43:54.118 –> 00:43:57.866
like, listen, dumbass, this phone is what you’re asking for. I’m going to sell you

708
00:43:57.888 –> 00:44:01.180
the phone. Give me the $1,000. Take the phone, you’re done.

709
00:44:01.890 –> 00:44:05.486
You gave me all the parameters this phone fits. You’re selling it.

710
00:44:05.588 –> 00:44:08.974
The guy from North Carolina says the same thing, and they’re like,

711
00:44:09.092 –> 00:44:10.880
so here’s the

712
00:44:13.490 –> 00:44:17.314
it. Why don’t you take it out of my hands? You hold it. You hold

713
00:44:17.352 –> 00:44:21.106
it for a minute, and you tell me how that feels. Does it feel good?

714
00:44:21.208 –> 00:44:24.658
All right, we’re ready to do business now, right? And I’m not making fun of

715
00:44:24.664 –> 00:44:27.800
them. I’m not. That’s not my intent. My intent is just that

716
00:44:29.210 –> 00:44:32.886
the point of business is a little different now. Again, same

717
00:44:32.908 –> 00:44:36.534
thing. You can say the same thing going across the entire country, right? Where you

718
00:44:36.572 –> 00:44:40.282
grow up and how you do business as a young

719
00:44:40.336 –> 00:44:43.946
entrepreneur matters. Like where you go to school matters. Again,

720
00:44:44.048 –> 00:44:47.514
we have people. My daughter’s first roommate come from

721
00:44:47.552 –> 00:44:51.258
La. Her first winter in Boston, I thought the poor girl was going to have

722
00:44:51.264 –> 00:44:54.640
a heart attack. She was like, what is going on right now?

723
00:44:55.890 –> 00:44:58.800
This stuff coming from the sky. I don’t know what

724
00:44:59.810 –> 00:45:03.102
she’s like, what? I didn’t realize the thermostats went down

725
00:45:03.156 –> 00:45:06.978
below. That’s actually an honest to God statement, by the way.

726
00:45:07.064 –> 00:45:10.814
She thought that the thermostat went to zero and stopped like nothing went colder

727
00:45:10.862 –> 00:45:13.140
than zero. And I was like, what? Are you kidding me?

728
00:45:14.410 –> 00:45:17.894
The wind chill out there is negative 22. The thermostat has to tell you

729
00:45:17.932 –> 00:45:21.702
that. Anyway,

730
00:45:21.836 –> 00:45:24.280
but again, back to the point at hand, right? So

731
00:45:25.530 –> 00:45:29.286
I think it’s important not only to understand where you

732
00:45:29.308 –> 00:45:32.886
are and where you’re from and how business happens where you’re

733
00:45:32.918 –> 00:45:36.554
from, but I think it’s also important to understand if you’re going to go

734
00:45:36.592 –> 00:45:40.186
outside of that comfort zone and you’re king to sell from the northeast to any

735
00:45:40.208 –> 00:45:43.670
other part of the country, it’s up to you. It’s your responsibility to know and

736
00:45:43.680 –> 00:45:47.086
understand how business is done. In the rest of it, you cannot force them to

737
00:45:47.108 –> 00:45:50.874
fit your if they’re the customer, if they’re the customer, you can’t force

738
00:45:50.922 –> 00:45:54.466
them to fit into your box. You have to make sure you fit into their

739
00:45:54.488 –> 00:45:58.226
box. And the sale goes a lot faster. The

740
00:45:58.248 –> 00:46:01.986
interaction goes a lot better. If you are the seller and you

741
00:46:02.008 –> 00:46:05.570
understand the buyer, you understand the buyer better. Now,

742
00:46:05.640 –> 00:46:09.266
again, the other way around, if somebody from outside of the northeast tries to call

743
00:46:09.288 –> 00:46:11.734
me and sell me something and they do what I just did with the cell

744
00:46:11.772 –> 00:46:14.840
phone, I’m hanging up on just I’m hanging up on them.

745
00:46:15.370 –> 00:46:17.606
I don’t need to hold the phone. Tell me what it does. Tell me what

746
00:46:17.628 –> 00:46:19.906
it does. Tell it how it works, if it works, if it does what it

747
00:46:19.948 –> 00:46:22.938
I’ll do it. I’ll buy it. I’ll buy it, and then let me buy it

748
00:46:22.944 –> 00:46:26.154
and go away. So it’s interesting that you’re bringing this up,

749
00:46:26.192 –> 00:46:28.540
because I just had

750
00:46:31.010 –> 00:46:32.430
not a revelation.

751
00:46:35.810 –> 00:46:39.454
So here’s how I’ll frame this. Somebody gave me feedback about

752
00:46:39.492 –> 00:46:42.942
doing business. So I’m in texas,

753
00:46:43.006 –> 00:46:46.530
right? Different than tom and I came out of the northeast and came to texas

754
00:46:48.790 –> 00:46:52.340
in the great american move around known as

755
00:46:54.630 –> 00:46:58.438
so I was part of the great american move around, right? And so I

756
00:46:58.444 –> 00:47:02.054
came here three years ago, and I am in a

757
00:47:02.092 –> 00:47:05.606
spot in the core training and development business right

758
00:47:05.628 –> 00:47:09.366
now where, weirdly, I’m back in startup mode

759
00:47:09.398 –> 00:47:12.140
because of having to re

760
00:47:13.710 –> 00:47:17.450
move my business out of the northeast, the business structure, and move the structure

761
00:47:17.950 –> 00:47:21.614
into texas and do all those kinds of transitions. And tom

762
00:47:21.652 –> 00:47:25.470
is exactly correct. The way business happens in texas

763
00:47:25.970 –> 00:47:29.406
is radically different than the way business happens in the northeast. And

764
00:47:29.588 –> 00:47:33.438
the thing that struck me was that I was actually told this by a

765
00:47:33.444 –> 00:47:36.338
real estate agent when I was shopping for a house here. And one of the

766
00:47:36.344 –> 00:47:39.826
things he said was and he was exactly correct

767
00:47:39.928 –> 00:47:43.570
he’s like, you in the northeast, you do the business first,

768
00:47:43.640 –> 00:47:47.282
and then you have the relationship. US here,

769
00:47:47.336 –> 00:47:50.686
we need to have the relationship first before we do the business. And at the

770
00:47:50.728 –> 00:47:53.206
time, I was like, oh, that’s a good piece of feedback. I’ll keep it, and

771
00:47:53.228 –> 00:47:56.360
I put it in the back of my head. But it took like three years.

772
00:47:56.970 –> 00:48:00.438
It’s like yeast working its way through the dough. It took three years for the

773
00:48:00.444 –> 00:48:04.294
yeast to work its way through the dough. And I had a revelation. Gosh.

774
00:48:04.342 –> 00:48:07.206
Probably about two or three weeks ago. So this is interesting that Tom is bringing

775
00:48:07.238 –> 00:48:10.814
this up because I had the exact same revelation. Now, the emotional impact of

776
00:48:10.852 –> 00:48:14.000
that statement has now hit me where

777
00:48:15.330 –> 00:48:19.054
it’s not necessarily about the relationship. It’s the

778
00:48:19.092 –> 00:48:22.880
way in which trust is established is different in different regions. Here

779
00:48:23.330 –> 00:48:27.026
you talk about the southeast Texas. For all of you who are

780
00:48:27.048 –> 00:48:30.306
listening, Texas is so big, it’s the size of

781
00:48:30.328 –> 00:48:34.050
Germany that it can actually be divided up into four different regions.

782
00:48:34.490 –> 00:48:38.242
And the region that I live in is closer

783
00:48:38.306 –> 00:48:41.906
in posture to the northeast,

784
00:48:42.018 –> 00:48:45.670
closer in posture to the northeast, but it’s still Texas.

785
00:48:46.510 –> 00:48:50.326
So you still have guys walking around in cowboy

786
00:48:50.358 –> 00:48:53.974
hats and cowboy

787
00:48:54.022 –> 00:48:57.526
boots and jeans in, like, 110 degree heat,

788
00:48:57.638 –> 00:49:00.080
unironically, and they’re doing just fine

789
00:49:02.050 –> 00:49:05.806
with no irony at all whatsoever. This is how they dressed this

790
00:49:05.828 –> 00:49:07.760
morning when they got up to go to work,

791
00:49:09.970 –> 00:49:12.560
like they just do. And so

792
00:49:14.050 –> 00:49:17.394
the piece of feedback that I got from that person, that real estate agent, now

793
00:49:17.432 –> 00:49:20.626
clicks together in my head with something that I heard from, and Tom will like

794
00:49:20.648 –> 00:49:24.454
this, from the great sales coach and leadership development and

795
00:49:24.492 –> 00:49:27.922
motivational speaker guy or not guy, but professional,

796
00:49:28.066 –> 00:49:31.446
who died probably about ten years ago now. Twelve years ago now.

797
00:49:31.548 –> 00:49:35.346
Zig Ziglar. He’s a huge zig ziglar

798
00:49:35.378 –> 00:49:39.066
guy. Huge, love Zig Ziglar. And he was telling a story because he was from

799
00:49:39.088 –> 00:49:42.726
Yazoo City, Mississippi, which Mississippi is fundamentally

800
00:49:42.758 –> 00:49:44.780
different even than Texas. My God.

801
00:49:47.950 –> 00:49:50.854
He wasn’t from Yazoo City, but he was born there, and he went to Arkansas

802
00:49:50.902 –> 00:49:54.558
and spent a lot of time his sales career back in the 1950s and 60s

803
00:49:54.564 –> 00:49:58.346
when you had to drive around to talk to people and knock on doors

804
00:49:58.378 –> 00:50:01.120
and go do demonstrations in people’s homes and things like that,

805
00:50:03.830 –> 00:50:07.506
selling what was it? Cast iron cookware, door to

806
00:50:07.528 –> 00:50:11.086
door. And Tom’s a salesperson, so he’ll

807
00:50:11.118 –> 00:50:14.594
appreciate the difficulty of exactly how hard that was. No, thank

808
00:50:14.632 –> 00:50:18.459
you, but what are you. Going to do back in the day? What are you

809
00:50:18.459 –> 00:50:21.798
going to do? There was no Internet. Like, no phone. Like, what are you going

810
00:50:21.804 –> 00:50:25.320
to do? You got to get out. There no ecommerce platform. What?

811
00:50:25.770 –> 00:50:28.950
I got to go to people’s house. It’s insane.

812
00:50:29.610 –> 00:50:33.174
Can’t just go to Amazon. Anyway, so

813
00:50:33.212 –> 00:50:36.938
Zeke told a story about his wife, and this

814
00:50:36.944 –> 00:50:40.186
is how this relates about his wife and how she supported him during the time

815
00:50:40.208 –> 00:50:43.946
that he was launching basically Zig Ziglar Industries and turning himself

816
00:50:43.978 –> 00:50:47.694
into a speaking and motivational person. And he know during

817
00:50:47.732 –> 00:50:51.322
the five years that I was doing this, all I was in was

818
00:50:51.396 –> 00:50:55.140
deals, no money, exchanged hands for five

819
00:50:55.750 –> 00:50:59.586
years. And at the time when I first heard

820
00:50:59.608 –> 00:51:03.346
this, I was a young person, relatively young, younger than I am

821
00:51:03.368 –> 00:51:06.946
now, driving around upstate New York trying to make deals happen, right? And I heard

822
00:51:06.968 –> 00:51:10.418
this, and I couldn’t comprehend because I was in the Northeast. I was in upstate

823
00:51:10.434 –> 00:51:14.086
New York. I couldn’t comprehend how you could just have deals for five years and

824
00:51:14.108 –> 00:51:17.686
not have any money exchange hands. Because I was in

825
00:51:17.708 –> 00:51:21.306
deals for four months or nine months or six months or eight

826
00:51:21.328 –> 00:51:23.818
months, and then money would exchange hands and it would be fine. Like, how do

827
00:51:23.824 –> 00:51:27.546
you hold on for five years? But when

828
00:51:27.568 –> 00:51:31.406
I moved my business here to Texas, then all those

829
00:51:31.428 –> 00:51:34.106
three data points started to click together in my head and they started to layer

830
00:51:34.138 –> 00:51:37.754
together. And it’s true in north

831
00:51:37.802 –> 00:51:41.454
central Texas, the relationship has to come before the

832
00:51:41.492 –> 00:51:45.298
business and no one’s really too concerned. I won’t say no one’s really

833
00:51:45.304 –> 00:51:48.820
too concerned how you eat for five years is your business.

834
00:51:51.030 –> 00:51:54.410
You didn’t get the sale today. Sucks to be you. Good Luck.

835
00:51:54.590 –> 00:51:57.862
You need to have my trust before I’ll give you

836
00:51:57.916 –> 00:52:01.686
money. In the Northeast. They don’t care. I won’t say

837
00:52:01.708 –> 00:52:05.414
don’t care, but in the Northeast, the

838
00:52:05.452 –> 00:52:09.106
business and this is to Tom’s point the business brings

839
00:52:09.138 –> 00:52:12.938
the trust, and the relationship can come later if it’s going to

840
00:52:12.944 –> 00:52:16.746
come at all. But here where I live now. And this is,

841
00:52:16.768 –> 00:52:19.866
again, something that I had to get my emotions around because it is an emotional

842
00:52:19.898 –> 00:52:23.582
state. You got to get around, too. In sales. The

843
00:52:23.636 –> 00:52:27.006
relationship has to happen to build the trust

844
00:52:27.108 –> 00:52:30.910
before the business can just

845
00:52:30.980 –> 00:52:34.750
it’s a major adjustment. It’s taken me, like, three years to kind of

846
00:52:34.820 –> 00:52:38.466
really turn that boat in my head. And

847
00:52:38.488 –> 00:52:41.874
it does shift, by the way, to Tom’s point again, how I deal with people

848
00:52:41.912 –> 00:52:44.690
from other parts of the country. So if I’m dealing with people from the Northeast,

849
00:52:45.430 –> 00:52:48.326
I can literally go right to, like I’m having a sales meeting this week with

850
00:52:48.348 –> 00:52:51.880
someone from the Northeast. I can literally go to

851
00:52:53.610 –> 00:52:56.890
well, I won’t say, like, goodfellas. I’m not king to say f you pay me,

852
00:52:56.960 –> 00:53:00.698
but pay. Like, I can literally say that,

853
00:53:00.864 –> 00:53:03.690
but I would never say that to a client in Texas.

854
00:53:04.750 –> 00:53:08.460
The door closes. Well and by the way, it’s not that

855
00:53:09.150 –> 00:53:12.480
not to contradict what you’re saying, but there’s a little bit of, like

856
00:53:13.090 –> 00:53:16.640
I think there’s a sped up process. Right.

857
00:53:17.250 –> 00:53:20.846
So here in the Northeast, I’m not going to just hand somebody money for a

858
00:53:20.868 –> 00:53:23.778
phone. Like I used the phone as an example earlier. I’m not just going to

859
00:53:23.784 –> 00:53:27.266
hand somebody money and take their word for it. The phone’s going to

860
00:53:27.288 –> 00:53:31.026
work. There are certain things that we do. And

861
00:53:31.048 –> 00:53:34.882
again, to your point, building a relationship with somebody first

862
00:53:34.936 –> 00:53:37.906
and really getting and understanding them and trusting them and all that stuff. And it’s

863
00:53:37.928 –> 00:53:41.474
wonderful. And it’s great. In the Northeast, we’re like, no, show me.

864
00:53:41.592 –> 00:53:44.878
There’s a guarantee. A warranty? I can return it. If it doesn’t do what you’re

865
00:53:44.894 –> 00:53:47.146
saying it’s going to do, I’m giving it right back to you. And I want

866
00:53:47.168 –> 00:53:49.786
that in writing. I Don’t Need To Trust You I just need to trust that

867
00:53:49.808 –> 00:53:52.954
that legal document is going to give me permission to go take my money back.

868
00:53:52.992 –> 00:53:56.538
Right, but the relationship

869
00:53:56.624 –> 00:53:59.626
after the fact is when it does what you say it’s going to do, when

870
00:53:59.648 –> 00:54:02.670
it does work the way you promise it’s going to work now, they’ll buy anything

871
00:54:02.740 –> 00:54:05.870
from you, it opens floodgates

872
00:54:06.290 –> 00:54:09.982
where you guys do that in reverse. Right. So, again, there has to be trust

873
00:54:10.036 –> 00:54:13.390
involved, but we get our trust in the Northeast from fact

874
00:54:13.460 –> 00:54:17.210
figure legal, right? Fact figure legal. It’s like if you

875
00:54:17.220 –> 00:54:19.762
can prove it, you can show it. We can do all right, I’ll buy it.

876
00:54:19.816 –> 00:54:23.394
I don’t care. Because quite honestly, the other philosophy that we have up here

877
00:54:23.432 –> 00:54:26.814
is I don’t need to like you to do business with you. If you solve

878
00:54:26.862 –> 00:54:30.466
my problem, I will give you money to solve this problem, even if I

879
00:54:30.488 –> 00:54:32.866
don’t ever have to talk to you ever again. I don’t care. I don’t need

880
00:54:32.888 –> 00:54:35.618
to like you. Now. If I happen to like you after the fact, all the

881
00:54:35.624 –> 00:54:38.460
better. Which is where the relationship after comes.

882
00:54:39.230 –> 00:54:41.882
If you if you do what you say you’re going to do and it works

883
00:54:41.936 –> 00:54:44.380
and everything’s great, and I like

884
00:54:47.790 –> 00:54:50.960
like you. We don’t have to like you to solve a problem.

885
00:54:51.650 –> 00:54:55.406
And in major cities, I would argue Texas, and

886
00:54:55.428 –> 00:54:59.214
in the west, yes, in major cities, it

887
00:54:59.252 –> 00:55:02.834
works. Kind of like that. Similar. Yeah, absolutely. But I

888
00:55:02.872 –> 00:55:06.706
live adjacent to Dallas Fort Worth and doing business in

889
00:55:06.728 –> 00:55:10.242
a town that’s adjacent to Dallas Fort Worth where it is a touch

890
00:55:10.296 –> 00:55:10.900
more.

891
00:55:13.910 –> 00:55:17.646
Sorry, I’m not going to give you don’t.

892
00:55:17.758 –> 00:55:20.326
And by the way, this is why I like Westerners, too. I like people from

893
00:55:20.348 –> 00:55:22.566
the west, too, a little bit more than people from the Northeast, because people from

894
00:55:22.588 –> 00:55:26.358
the Northeast will sometimes snow you with the smile and be like

895
00:55:26.524 –> 00:55:28.858
and the Upper Midwest, oh, my God, they’ll do the same thing. I lived in

896
00:55:28.864 –> 00:55:32.300
Minnesota for ten years. Oh, my God. They’ll do the same thing. But here

897
00:55:33.470 –> 00:55:36.460
they’ll tell you straight up, I don’t like you.

898
00:55:37.150 –> 00:55:38.140
Go away.

899
00:55:41.730 –> 00:55:45.120
I like that. I like the directness I’d be like. All right,

900
00:55:46.130 –> 00:55:49.774
now at least I know where I stand, right? Thank you,

901
00:55:49.812 –> 00:55:53.634
sir. I will get right in my truck and drive away. You have a good

902
00:55:53.672 –> 00:55:57.406
day. And after that, they’re

903
00:55:57.438 –> 00:56:01.218
basically done. And by the way, they won’t give you a

904
00:56:01.224 –> 00:56:04.562
bad review. They’re not going to go do some passive aggressive stuff on like,

905
00:56:04.616 –> 00:56:08.034
Yelp. They’re not going to do any of that nonsense. They’re going to tell you

906
00:56:08.072 –> 00:56:11.894
I don’t like you. I don’t like the way you showed up. I don’t like

907
00:56:11.932 –> 00:56:15.718
the way you presented yourself. I had a person tell me, you’re a

908
00:56:15.724 –> 00:56:19.378
little bit of a fast talker. I don’t like that. And I was like,

909
00:56:19.484 –> 00:56:23.098
this is just a speech. Okay, you know what? You have a good day. No,

910
00:56:23.184 –> 00:56:26.540
you have a good day. I’m having a good day. I’m leaving about.

911
00:56:28.670 –> 00:56:30.430
You kind of have. Those conversations

912
00:56:32.530 –> 00:56:36.366
from a sales perspective, but this also applies to how you

913
00:56:36.388 –> 00:56:40.000
lead leaders or how you lead followers, right. How you lead groups. Because

914
00:56:40.370 –> 00:56:44.126
if you’re leading a group of people who are maybe from it’s easy

915
00:56:44.148 –> 00:56:47.810
to pick on Texas. Let’s not pick on Texas. Let’s say rural Montana, right.

916
00:56:47.960 –> 00:56:51.054
You’re going to have to understand the geography of rural

917
00:56:51.102 –> 00:56:54.946
Montana and how that has led to, particularly in a country like

918
00:56:54.968 –> 00:56:58.120
the United States, how that geography has led to

919
00:56:59.210 –> 00:57:02.966
not arrogance and not hubris, but it’s more like a sense of

920
00:57:02.988 –> 00:57:06.758
self reliance, because who’s going to I try to explain this to folks in the

921
00:57:06.764 –> 00:57:10.426
Northeast. The reason and this is parallel to a lot of things with like you

922
00:57:10.448 –> 00:57:14.042
see in gun culture in the western United States, who’s going to show

923
00:57:14.096 –> 00:57:16.700
up to save you?

924
00:57:18.430 –> 00:57:22.202
The cops aren’t four minutes away. The cops are 28

925
00:57:22.256 –> 00:57:25.998
minutes away. I mean, let’s face it, though, downtown. I mean, if

926
00:57:26.004 –> 00:57:29.726
you’re in New York City, the cops aren’t four minutes away. Well,

927
00:57:29.748 –> 00:57:33.406
yeah, the cops aren’t showing up anyway, right. That’s another thing for another day.

928
00:57:33.428 –> 00:57:37.258
But we’re being broad. But I know what you mean. Right. And so

929
00:57:37.284 –> 00:57:39.586
that gets to a sense of self reliance. Well, how are you going to lead

930
00:57:39.608 –> 00:57:43.074
a bunch of self reliant people from Montana? You’re going to have to make

931
00:57:43.112 –> 00:57:46.886
appeals to that in some kind of meaningful way. Well, it kind of goes back

932
00:57:46.908 –> 00:57:50.274
to something. So I’ve made this comment on your podcast

933
00:57:50.322 –> 00:57:54.086
now probably at least two times, probably maybe three, and this

934
00:57:54.108 –> 00:57:57.846
might be the third or fourth, but again, if

935
00:57:57.868 –> 00:58:01.158
you’re leading people from different parts of the country so I’m here from the Northeast.

936
00:58:01.174 –> 00:58:04.666
If somebody picked me up and said, tom, we love how

937
00:58:04.688 –> 00:58:07.802
you we’re going to hire you. We want you to come lead our sales team

938
00:58:07.856 –> 00:58:11.446
in Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, pick a state, doesn’t

939
00:58:11.478 –> 00:58:15.246
matter. And if I have the mentality of, well, I’m the

940
00:58:15.268 –> 00:58:18.958
boss, I’m the leader, I’m in charge, I’m going down there and I’m going to

941
00:58:18.964 –> 00:58:22.682
tell them to do this and that you’re going to fail, you’re going to fail.

942
00:58:22.746 –> 00:58:26.426
So I’ve said this a couple of times on your podcast, whereas don’t just do

943
00:58:26.468 –> 00:58:30.306
something. Stand there, which is the complete opposite. We’re taught when we’re kids, right?

944
00:58:30.328 –> 00:58:33.442
We’re always taught, don’t just stand there, do something. Like, oh, people are freaking out.

945
00:58:33.496 –> 00:58:37.166
Don’t just stand there, do something. Well, I was always taught the opposite

946
00:58:37.198 –> 00:58:40.726
effect, which is don’t just do something, stand there. Meaning don’t just go in there

947
00:58:40.748 –> 00:58:44.358
and start making policy changes and changing processes and all that

948
00:58:44.364 –> 00:58:48.086
stuff without knowing and understanding the dynamics, the landscape, the whatever. That’s not

949
00:58:48.108 –> 00:58:51.926
to say that you can’t, but it’s weird. This

950
00:58:51.948 –> 00:58:54.698
is going to sound really funny because I literally just had this conversation with a

951
00:58:54.704 –> 00:58:58.540
client at noon. I got off the call with. Them at about 01:00 today

952
00:58:59.150 –> 00:59:02.958
because she said, I was on a call with a salesperson. This is a

953
00:59:02.964 –> 00:59:06.634
sales engineer. So they have sales engineers and BDR

954
00:59:06.682 –> 00:59:10.366
type people, whatever. So they called me because they wanted my

955
00:59:10.388 –> 00:59:14.142
advice. The BDR was just talking to talk,

956
00:59:14.196 –> 00:59:17.360
and they wouldn’t let the customer finish their sentences. They wouldn’t let

957
00:59:17.910 –> 00:59:21.234
how do I deal with that? And I go, well,

958
00:59:21.432 –> 00:59:25.026
first things first. Don’t just go at them with it. Don’t just go in there

959
00:59:25.048 –> 00:59:27.906
and be like, listen, don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t do this. If you

960
00:59:27.928 –> 00:59:31.266
just beat them up, you could potentially lose that person as an

961
00:59:31.288 –> 00:59:35.086
employee. And before you do that, ask yourself, do I want to lose

962
00:59:35.118 –> 00:59:38.058
that person? Do I care if that person? If you don’t care, then go ahead

963
00:59:38.064 –> 00:59:39.946
and hit them with a ton of bricks. Like, go ahead and hit them with

964
00:59:39.968 –> 00:59:43.626
everything. If you do care, if you don’t want to lose this person, if this

965
00:59:43.648 –> 00:59:47.402
is the first time that you’ve had this experience with them, you have to

966
00:59:47.456 –> 00:59:51.210
stop and step back for a second, maybe ask them a few questions.

967
00:59:51.360 –> 00:59:54.798
They might know something that you didn’t. For example, they’re a

968
00:59:54.804 –> 00:59:58.622
BDR. They’ve been on the calls with this particular customer two or three times

969
00:59:58.676 –> 01:00:02.382
before they bring a sales engineer into the call. So for all you know,

970
01:00:02.436 –> 01:00:06.066
that’s normal interaction with them. So why are you going to ridicule a

971
01:00:06.088 –> 01:00:09.634
salesperson for doing what is normal for their relationship

972
01:00:09.752 –> 01:00:13.490
with that client, with that customer? I said, so don’t just react.

973
01:00:14.230 –> 01:00:17.858
Listen, ask some questions. Understand. Make sure you understand

974
01:00:17.944 –> 01:00:20.486
the dynamics of what’s going on before you just go in there and say so.

975
01:00:20.508 –> 01:00:23.798
I would say the same thing to leaders going into different areas of the

976
01:00:23.804 –> 01:00:26.838
country. Don’t just go in there like a bull in a china shop. Don’t just

977
01:00:26.844 –> 01:00:30.630
go in there and King from the Northeast, believe me, it takes some

978
01:00:30.700 –> 01:00:34.426
reserve. Like, it takes some talent for you to not do that, because I walk

979
01:00:34.448 –> 01:00:36.746
in there and I’m like, no, I see 100 things I want to change because

980
01:00:36.768 –> 01:00:40.234
these people suck. Whatever. But I can’t, right? I go in there, I

981
01:00:40.272 –> 01:00:43.518
stop, take a second, understand the dynamics, understand the

982
01:00:43.524 –> 01:00:47.086
landscape, make sure I understand who they’re selling to,

983
01:00:47.188 –> 01:00:51.034
because who they’re selling to may make a difference in the way I react to

984
01:00:51.172 –> 01:00:54.786
process changes or process improvement or whatever. Right? So,

985
01:00:54.888 –> 01:00:57.010
again, the landscape matters.

986
01:00:58.630 –> 01:01:01.246
It matters geographically. It matters

987
01:01:01.438 –> 01:01:05.198
hierarchically. Depending on where in the hierarchy that you’re

988
01:01:05.214 –> 01:01:08.578
selling to, you could be selling to direct managers, could be selling

989
01:01:08.594 –> 01:01:12.214
to, you know, mid level, C level C

990
01:01:12.252 –> 01:01:16.054
suite, whatever. Like, Allan, that you you need to really know and

991
01:01:16.092 –> 01:01:19.100
understand before you absolutely.

992
01:01:19.470 –> 01:01:22.986
Absolutely. Well, back to the Fall of the House of

993
01:01:23.008 –> 01:01:26.278
Usher by Edgar

994
01:01:26.454 –> 01:01:29.946
Allan Poe. We’re going to kind of switch

995
01:01:29.978 –> 01:01:32.560
gears a little bit here. We’re going to talk about well,

996
01:01:33.490 –> 01:01:37.194
let’s talk about depression. With a New England

997
01:01:37.242 –> 01:01:40.986
touch, which you have to when you’re talking about

998
01:01:41.108 –> 01:01:43.090
Edgar Allan Poe.

999
01:01:45.270 –> 01:01:49.054
Upon my entrance, Usher this is him now walking

1000
01:01:49.102 –> 01:01:52.658
in and first meeting Roderick. This is where we’re at in the

1001
01:01:52.664 –> 01:01:56.326
story. Upon my entrance, Usher rose from a sofa which he had

1002
01:01:56.348 –> 01:02:00.150
been lying at full length and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which

1003
01:02:00.220 –> 01:02:03.414
had much in it. I at first thought of an

1004
01:02:03.452 –> 01:02:05.430
overdone cordiality,

1005
01:02:07.070 –> 01:02:10.826
speaking of going directly to the thing overdone cordiality of the

1006
01:02:10.848 –> 01:02:14.620
constrained effort of the enui man of the world.

1007
01:02:15.390 –> 01:02:19.066
A glance, however, at his countenance convinced me of

1008
01:02:19.088 –> 01:02:22.762
his perfect sincerity. We sat down, and for

1009
01:02:22.816 –> 01:02:25.998
some moments, while he, poe not I, gazed upon him with a feeling half of

1010
01:02:26.004 –> 01:02:29.834
pity, half of awe. Surely a man never before so terribly

1011
01:02:29.882 –> 01:02:33.614
altered in so brief a period as had Roderick Usher. It was

1012
01:02:33.652 –> 01:02:36.482
with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the man before

1013
01:02:36.536 –> 01:02:39.842
me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face

1014
01:02:39.896 –> 01:02:42.770
had been at all times remarkable.

1015
01:02:44.730 –> 01:02:48.518
A cadaverousness of complexion that’s a word,

1016
01:02:48.604 –> 01:02:52.434
an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison, lips

1017
01:02:52.482 –> 01:02:55.750
somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful

1018
01:02:55.820 –> 01:02:59.546
curve, a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but

1019
01:02:59.568 –> 01:03:03.130
with a breath of nostril unusual in

1020
01:03:03.200 –> 01:03:07.046
similar formations, by the way, pause. That’s Poe’s gentle

1021
01:03:07.078 –> 01:03:10.890
way of telling the paying attention reader,

1022
01:03:10.970 –> 01:03:14.446
or the attentive reader of the 19th century that Roderick Usher is

1023
01:03:14.468 –> 01:03:17.982
Jewish. Just want to point that out. Going

1024
01:03:18.036 –> 01:03:21.854
back. A finely molded chin, speaking in its

1025
01:03:21.892 –> 01:03:25.134
want of prominence, of a want of moral

1026
01:03:25.182 –> 01:03:28.674
energy, hair, of a more than weblike softness and

1027
01:03:28.712 –> 01:03:32.466
tenuity. These features within inordinate expansion above the regions of the

1028
01:03:32.488 –> 01:03:36.306
temple, made of altogether accountenance not easily to be forgotten. And

1029
01:03:36.328 –> 01:03:39.606
now, in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the

1030
01:03:39.628 –> 01:03:43.266
expression they were wanted to convey, lay so much of the change that I doubted

1031
01:03:43.298 –> 01:03:47.046
to whom I spoke. The now ghastly, pale pallor of

1032
01:03:47.068 –> 01:03:50.746
the skin and the now miraculous luster of the eye above all things startled and

1033
01:03:50.768 –> 01:03:54.442
even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow

1034
01:03:54.496 –> 01:03:58.246
all unheeded, and as in its wild gossamer

1035
01:03:58.278 –> 01:04:01.486
texture, it floated rather than fell about the face. I could not even with an

1036
01:04:01.508 –> 01:04:05.214
effort connect its arabesque expression with any

1037
01:04:05.252 –> 01:04:08.958
idea of simple humanity. In the

1038
01:04:08.964 –> 01:04:12.206
manner of my friend, I was at once struck with an incoherence and

1039
01:04:12.228 –> 01:04:16.014
inconsistency, and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble

1040
01:04:16.062 –> 01:04:19.890
and futile struggles to overcome a habitual trapeendency and

1041
01:04:19.960 –> 01:04:23.634
excessive nervous agitation. By the way, pausing. What that

1042
01:04:23.672 –> 01:04:27.358
means is the guy was suffering from anxiety. Going back

1043
01:04:27.384 –> 01:04:30.806
to that for something of this nature, I had indeed been prepared no less by

1044
01:04:30.828 –> 01:04:33.910
his letter than by reminiscence of a certain boyish trait

1045
01:04:34.330 –> 01:04:38.054
and by conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical confirmation

1046
01:04:38.102 –> 01:04:40.860
and temperament. His action was

1047
01:04:41.230 –> 01:04:45.046
alternatively vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly

1048
01:04:45.078 –> 01:04:48.898
from a tremulous indecision when the animal spirits seemed utterly

1049
01:04:48.934 –> 01:04:52.506
in abeyance to that species of energetic concision

1050
01:04:52.618 –> 01:04:56.094
that abrupt, weighty, unhurried and hollowed sounding enunciation that

1051
01:04:56.132 –> 01:04:59.978
leaden self balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance

1052
01:05:00.154 –> 01:05:03.906
which may be observed in the lost drunkard or in

1053
01:05:03.928 –> 01:05:07.618
the irreclaimable eater of opium during

1054
01:05:07.704 –> 01:05:10.846
the periods of his most intense

1055
01:05:11.038 –> 01:05:12.210
excitement.

1056
01:05:18.800 –> 01:05:20.780
Let’s have a chat

1057
01:05:23.280 –> 01:05:24.620
about opium.

1058
01:05:28.240 –> 01:05:31.544
So Poe there is describing

1059
01:05:31.592 –> 01:05:35.376
Roderick Usher, right? And he’s describing and by the way, a lot of the

1060
01:05:35.398 –> 01:05:38.336
sentences in Fall of the House of Usher and Tom Can attest to this, as

1061
01:05:38.358 –> 01:05:42.116
he did his homework before this podcast and read the

1062
01:05:42.138 –> 01:05:45.892
story. A lot of the lines in there are

1063
01:05:45.946 –> 01:05:49.350
complicated, multilayer sentences, right, with a lot of

1064
01:05:50.360 –> 01:05:53.976
semicolons, a lot of M dashes being used to

1065
01:05:53.998 –> 01:05:57.624
separate ideas radically different than the ways in which we

1066
01:05:57.662 –> 01:06:01.384
consume written material or even the ways in which we

1067
01:06:01.422 –> 01:06:04.728
speak now, right? It’s almost written in a

1068
01:06:04.734 –> 01:06:08.584
Shakespearean fashion, or, if you will, a poetic fashion,

1069
01:06:08.632 –> 01:06:12.328
which is why, again, Poe got fame for The Raven

1070
01:06:12.504 –> 01:06:16.236
and sort of laggard in fame for his prose. I think he was

1071
01:06:16.258 –> 01:06:19.120
probably a much better poet than a prose writer,

1072
01:06:20.020 –> 01:06:23.216
but he was also a Romanticist. And this goes along

1073
01:06:23.318 –> 01:06:27.164
with conceptions

1074
01:06:27.292 –> 01:06:31.076
of the Second Great Awakening and the ideas that came out

1075
01:06:31.098 –> 01:06:34.836
of the Second Great Awakening religiously that led, of course, to the

1076
01:06:34.858 –> 01:06:38.228
creation of the Baptists and the Episcopalians and the

1077
01:06:38.234 –> 01:06:41.796
Pentecostals and other folks in the

1078
01:06:41.818 –> 01:06:44.948
19th century. But the

1079
01:06:45.034 –> 01:06:48.804
subplot underneath there, right, was a plot

1080
01:06:48.852 –> 01:06:52.632
of or the sub idea underneath the Second Great Awakening was this idea of

1081
01:06:52.686 –> 01:06:56.124
Romanticism. By the way, this was even a thing in Europe at the time, right?

1082
01:06:56.162 –> 01:06:59.944
So the Romantics were folks who believed

1083
01:06:59.992 –> 01:07:03.724
in the ability of

1084
01:07:03.762 –> 01:07:06.664
feeling and emotion to overcome

1085
01:07:06.792 –> 01:07:10.252
rationality and logic. And

1086
01:07:10.386 –> 01:07:14.216
they believed that feeling and emotion were a better particularly

1087
01:07:14.248 –> 01:07:17.840
feeling and emotion through art were a better measure of

1088
01:07:17.910 –> 01:07:21.492
the impact of a piece of literature, a piece of

1089
01:07:21.546 –> 01:07:24.470
art than rationality itself.

1090
01:07:25.880 –> 01:07:29.664
Romanticism in literature showed up in Poe. Romanticism in the visual

1091
01:07:29.712 –> 01:07:32.704
art showed up in a guy like Gabriel

1092
01:07:32.752 –> 01:07:36.324
Rossetti over in Europe. Let’s

1093
01:07:36.372 –> 01:07:40.072
see. Romanticism in music showed up

1094
01:07:40.126 –> 01:07:43.352
early in a guy like, I would say,

1095
01:07:43.406 –> 01:07:44.010
probably

1096
01:07:48.230 –> 01:07:51.974
well, no, I’ll go a little bit later in German music, in Wagner. Actually,

1097
01:07:52.012 –> 01:07:55.238
that’s where Romanticism showed up, was in Wagner, in music. So kind

1098
01:07:55.244 –> 01:07:59.026
of think of Romanticism in that arc, as I mentioned, these kinds

1099
01:07:59.058 –> 01:08:02.858
of ideas that I have here. But Romanticism also had a dark side to

1100
01:08:02.864 –> 01:08:06.506
it, and Poe explored a lot of this. And it was a dark side that

1101
01:08:06.528 –> 01:08:10.214
was focused around depression, around anxiety, nervous,

1102
01:08:10.262 –> 01:08:14.046
agitation, anui, which we would just call

1103
01:08:14.148 –> 01:08:17.790
a depressive state, basically, and existential crises

1104
01:08:19.010 –> 01:08:22.762
that were kind of welded onto this feeling of Romanticism,

1105
01:08:22.826 –> 01:08:26.142
right? It was this idea that you could romanticize

1106
01:08:26.286 –> 01:08:30.034
depressive feelings and depressive states that they would become part of your character and make

1107
01:08:30.072 –> 01:08:32.100
you, in essence, interesting.

1108
01:08:35.430 –> 01:08:38.982
But there was a tool for these depressive states that was

1109
01:08:39.036 –> 01:08:42.550
used. And David Courtwright,

1110
01:08:43.450 –> 01:08:46.918
the author of Dark Paradise a History of Opiate Addiction in

1111
01:08:46.924 –> 01:08:50.374
America, estimates that the annual total of opium

1112
01:08:50.422 –> 01:08:54.010
imports for all of the US. Ports between

1113
01:08:54.080 –> 01:08:56.970
1827 and 1842 was over

1114
01:08:57.040 –> 01:09:00.300
27,000 pounds a year.

1115
01:09:01.890 –> 01:09:05.386
That’s insane. And Boston merchants,

1116
01:09:05.498 –> 01:09:08.922
according to Mr. Court Wright in his book, were the dominant

1117
01:09:08.986 –> 01:09:10.990
American opium traders.

1118
01:09:13.170 –> 01:09:16.394
Boston was ground zero. All right.

1119
01:09:16.452 –> 01:09:20.290
Untrambled opium addiction in the 19th century.

1120
01:09:20.950 –> 01:09:24.020
Let’s just clarify one thing here. At that time,

1121
01:09:24.790 –> 01:09:28.546
people thought of it as medicine. I understand it was an addictive thing. I

1122
01:09:28.568 –> 01:09:31.958
understand it was a property. But they were used in hospitals and

1123
01:09:32.124 –> 01:09:35.270
Boston even to this day. So before you get all defensive,

1124
01:09:36.250 –> 01:09:39.882
the Bostonian gets all defensive, let me point out that,

1125
01:09:39.936 –> 01:09:41.580
yes, you are correct.

1126
01:09:43.550 –> 01:09:46.700
I just want to make sure it’s different than the opiate imports today.

1127
01:09:49.950 –> 01:09:53.646
These are legal imports because they thought they

1128
01:09:53.668 –> 01:09:57.466
were doing the right thing. Medicine. Again, I’m

1129
01:09:57.498 –> 01:10:00.846
not defending Boston per se. I’m defending the country as a whole at that

1130
01:10:00.868 –> 01:10:04.606
point. Well, opium was importing a lot of opium. The

1131
01:10:04.628 –> 01:10:08.466
country as a whole was importing opium. Poe lived and came to his

1132
01:10:08.488 –> 01:10:12.194
maturity in his writing on the edge of the beginning of

1133
01:10:12.232 –> 01:10:16.046
an untrammeled opium addiction problem that was beginning in the 19th century.

1134
01:10:16.078 –> 01:10:19.080
And so he got to see ground zero, this sort of develop.

1135
01:10:20.170 –> 01:10:24.002
And by the way, he had personal experience with this because the typical

1136
01:10:24.066 –> 01:10:26.966
treatment for maladies such as

1137
01:10:27.068 –> 01:10:29.750
tuberculosis, depression,

1138
01:10:30.250 –> 01:10:33.946
anxiety, and by the way, his 13 year old wife that he

1139
01:10:33.968 –> 01:10:37.354
married, his 13 year old cousin, that he married. More on that

1140
01:10:37.392 –> 01:10:41.062
later. But he married his 13 year old cousin, she eventually

1141
01:10:41.126 –> 01:10:44.490
died eleven years later of tuberculosis or consumption.

1142
01:10:44.990 –> 01:10:48.094
And the number one treatment, or not the number one, but one of the main

1143
01:10:48.132 –> 01:10:51.866
treatments for tuberculosis, if you could not go out west to the Western

1144
01:10:51.898 –> 01:10:55.300
territories and dry yourself out and this is where

1145
01:10:55.670 –> 01:10:58.914
folks like, oh, what’s his

1146
01:10:58.952 –> 01:11:02.526
name that rode with Wyatt

1147
01:11:02.558 –> 01:11:06.206
Earp after the Civil War anyway, doesn’t

1148
01:11:06.238 –> 01:11:09.166
matter. It’ll come to me in a minute. But the gunslinger that rode with Wyatt

1149
01:11:09.198 –> 01:11:12.882
Earp back in the day, he went west, right, because the New Mexico territories

1150
01:11:12.946 –> 01:11:16.498
had opened, but there was no territory at the beginning of the opium addiction

1151
01:11:16.594 –> 01:11:20.038
or the beginning of the opium importation in the 19th

1152
01:11:20.054 –> 01:11:23.834
century. So you just died of tuberculosis. Well, there was a ton of

1153
01:11:23.872 –> 01:11:26.860
pain involved in that. And so, of course,

1154
01:11:27.790 –> 01:11:31.274
the doctors opioid, prescribing opioids, exactly. Were

1155
01:11:31.312 –> 01:11:33.820
prescribing opium. Now, the other thing,

1156
01:11:35.170 –> 01:11:38.702
it’s not that dramatically different than today. Than today, that’s right,

1157
01:11:38.756 –> 01:11:42.474
exactly. Or you have some sort of surgery

1158
01:11:42.522 –> 01:11:45.374
and the first thing they give you is some sort of painkiller after the fact.

1159
01:11:45.412 –> 01:11:47.950
Right. Like, oh, you’re going to be in a lot of pain. Take this opioid.

1160
01:11:48.030 –> 01:11:51.794
And if they’re not careful with getting you off of it quickly, that

1161
01:11:51.832 –> 01:11:55.566
transition from percocet or Demerol

1162
01:11:55.598 –> 01:11:58.734
or any of those other can very quickly turn into something that’s

1163
01:11:58.782 –> 01:12:02.006
uncontrollable. Absolutely. And then you wind up in the bottom of

1164
01:12:02.028 –> 01:12:05.862
fentanyl, right? So then you have literally the same problem in

1165
01:12:05.916 –> 01:12:08.310
2023 that they had in 18.

1166
01:12:10.090 –> 01:12:13.526
It’s insane to me. This is the point that David

1167
01:12:13.558 –> 01:12:17.258
Courtwright makes in his book, where I pulled that statistic from

1168
01:12:17.424 –> 01:12:20.570
talking about how basically and you’ve said this on the podcast,

1169
01:12:21.070 –> 01:12:24.894
you know how more things change the more they are the same. Right?

1170
01:12:25.012 –> 01:12:28.750
It’s literally the exact same cycle. The only difference

1171
01:12:28.820 –> 01:12:32.574
between now and then is the pharmaceutical companies are

1172
01:12:32.612 –> 01:12:36.418
now, shall we say, or were anyway. Well, and

1173
01:12:36.424 –> 01:12:39.810
it’s been proven in court, too, compensating doctors

1174
01:12:40.630 –> 01:12:44.210
for the pushing of these prescriptions. And the other major difference

1175
01:12:44.280 –> 01:12:47.794
is when the prescriptions can no longer be had these days, people

1176
01:12:47.832 –> 01:12:50.790
immediately or not immediately, but people can go to fentanyl,

1177
01:12:51.530 –> 01:12:54.710
which, by the way, interestingly enough, most opium

1178
01:12:55.610 –> 01:12:59.298
came out of China and was imported back into China by the British in

1179
01:12:59.324 –> 01:13:03.110
order to addict the Chinese. And now the Chinese

1180
01:13:03.190 –> 01:13:06.746
have turned around and are making fentanyl and exporting it through

1181
01:13:06.768 –> 01:13:09.660
Mexico into the United States.

1182
01:13:10.910 –> 01:13:14.746
Just think about that, folks. So opium addiction and

1183
01:13:14.768 –> 01:13:18.158
poe. So he was around all of this, right? And the typical treatment, by the

1184
01:13:18.164 –> 01:13:21.886
way, for tuberculosis was laudnum. Laudnum was almost, I think,

1185
01:13:21.908 –> 01:13:25.598
like 80% opium. It was just literally straight opium that you could

1186
01:13:25.604 –> 01:13:29.394
drink. You could just go get it if you were a person who

1187
01:13:29.432 –> 01:13:33.266
needed it. Mostly women were addicted to opium. And

1188
01:13:33.288 –> 01:13:36.914
so that’s the other sort of insinuation that he’s making

1189
01:13:36.952 –> 01:13:40.630
about Roderick Gusher, is that he is sort of a feminine temperament.

1190
01:13:42.810 –> 01:13:46.246
This is one of those things where every detail in the story matters. This is

1191
01:13:46.268 –> 01:13:50.006
one of those stories like no detail is sort of thrown

1192
01:13:50.038 –> 01:13:53.882
away or wasted. And so the question

1193
01:13:53.936 –> 01:13:57.514
becomes, Tom, why do Americans like their

1194
01:13:57.552 –> 01:14:00.906
addictive substances? Why do we seem to

1195
01:14:00.928 –> 01:14:04.666
like, if it’s not bad food, that we shouldn’t be eating from,

1196
01:14:04.688 –> 01:14:07.678
like, McDonald’s? And no, we shouldn’t be eating McDonald’s. They’re not a sponsor on the

1197
01:14:07.684 –> 01:14:10.798
show. So I could say, like, we shouldn’t be eating McDonald’s. Like, fried foods are

1198
01:14:10.884 –> 01:14:14.702
like, everybody knows this. Everybody knows. And yet from

1199
01:14:14.756 –> 01:14:18.546
fried foods, which are socially acceptable, by the way, no one’s boycotting McDonald’s or

1200
01:14:18.568 –> 01:14:21.746
shutting down McDonald’s, but from fried foods to

1201
01:14:21.768 –> 01:14:25.522
fentanyl and that’s gap, we really

1202
01:14:25.576 –> 01:14:29.046
like our addictive substances. And by the way, with social media, we really like our

1203
01:14:29.068 –> 01:14:32.194
addictive TikToks. We really like our addictive Netflix

1204
01:14:32.242 –> 01:14:34.680
shows. Why are we so

1205
01:14:36.170 –> 01:14:39.686
well, first things first. I don’t think that’s an

1206
01:14:39.708 –> 01:14:43.478
American thing, right? For those of you who don’t

1207
01:14:43.494 –> 01:14:47.274
know, my son moved to Spain, so he lives

1208
01:14:47.312 –> 01:14:51.094
in Europe right now, and he deals with similar things over in Europe,

1209
01:14:51.142 –> 01:14:54.138
right? So I think it’s a human thing. I don’t know my point. I think

1210
01:14:54.144 –> 01:14:57.854
it’s a human thing, right? Not an American thing. But I think and

1211
01:14:57.892 –> 01:15:01.582
if you watch the movie The Social Dilemma, I think that does actually

1212
01:15:01.636 –> 01:15:05.274
explain a little bit of it. I think that movie

1213
01:15:05.322 –> 01:15:08.834
explains the addiction to social media, but I don’t think the rules are

1214
01:15:08.872 –> 01:15:12.414
different until you get to a physical

1215
01:15:12.462 –> 01:15:15.620
addiction. Those are a little bit different, obviously. Like when you’re talking about

1216
01:15:16.150 –> 01:15:19.846
Opioids Fentanyl, that’s a physical addiction, that you need

1217
01:15:19.868 –> 01:15:23.160
medical help to get rid of those addictions. But

1218
01:15:25.130 –> 01:15:28.630
habits can come across as addictions.

1219
01:15:29.770 –> 01:15:33.586
I get into these conversations with my kids a lot. They’re like, I’m addicted

1220
01:15:33.618 –> 01:15:37.066
to this, or I’m addicted to that. And I’m like, no, you have created a

1221
01:15:37.088 –> 01:15:40.426
habit around that that is not an addiction. Because if you stop doing it right

1222
01:15:40.448 –> 01:15:44.286
now, nothing happens to you, right? Addiction addiction is when

1223
01:15:44.308 –> 01:15:48.094
you have a physical reaction to the stopping of something that you’re doing,

1224
01:15:48.132 –> 01:15:51.646
right? So, again, Opioids Fentanyl, that’s truly an

1225
01:15:51.668 –> 01:15:55.458
addiction. That’s a problem. You go through withdrawal symptoms. You go

1226
01:15:55.464 –> 01:15:59.266
through real hardship on yourself, on your body, on your

1227
01:15:59.288 –> 01:16:02.626
psyche. There’s hardships involved in that when you try to come off of those

1228
01:16:02.648 –> 01:16:06.126
substances. I guarantee

1229
01:16:06.158 –> 01:16:09.894
you, anybody listening to this podcast right now has had some sort

1230
01:16:09.932 –> 01:16:13.602
of experience with this, whether them themselves or a family member.

1231
01:16:13.666 –> 01:16:17.478
But I don’t know a single person I do not

1232
01:16:17.484 –> 01:16:21.254
know a single person that has never had experience or been through some sort of

1233
01:16:21.292 –> 01:16:24.998
addiction problem with a family member or something like that. It’s heart wrenching. It’s

1234
01:16:25.014 –> 01:16:28.026
heart wrenching when you are not the one that’s addicted to these things. And you

1235
01:16:28.048 –> 01:16:31.746
have to watch your family member go through this. It’s terrible.

1236
01:16:31.878 –> 01:16:35.678
But I want to change this conversation a

1237
01:16:35.684 –> 01:16:39.454
little bit to be more productive about your

1238
01:16:39.492 –> 01:16:42.270
question, which is, like, why do Americans like their addictive?

1239
01:16:43.170 –> 01:16:46.340
Why do Americans like their habits? I’d like to talk because

1240
01:16:46.870 –> 01:16:49.060
I think that’s more appropriate, right? Because.

1241
01:16:50.950 –> 01:16:53.460
Let’S talk about why we like our habits, right?

1242
01:16:56.310 –> 01:17:00.146
This goes back hundreds of years, right? Because everything that we

1243
01:17:00.168 –> 01:17:03.398
do has to be systematic, right? Like, you want to change a law, you have

1244
01:17:03.404 –> 01:17:05.606
to do this, you have to do that, you have to do this. There’s like,

1245
01:17:05.628 –> 01:17:09.094
these systems involved. So in order for you to get this

1246
01:17:09.132 –> 01:17:12.310
habit, you have to form this habit into a system. Because,

1247
01:17:12.460 –> 01:17:15.738
again, your TV program I’m going to watch this TV program because I like this

1248
01:17:15.744 –> 01:17:17.338
TV program. I’m going to watch it. I’m going to watch it. I’m going to

1249
01:17:17.344 –> 01:17:19.770
watch it every night. Tuesday, Tuesday, 08:00.

1250
01:17:21.310 –> 01:17:25.062
I’ll use myself as an example because I am a lunatic

1251
01:17:25.126 –> 01:17:28.926
when it comes to Jeopardy. I love it. I watch Jeopardy every night. I

1252
01:17:28.948 –> 01:17:32.526
have to I plan my dinners around it. This is a habit of

1253
01:17:32.548 –> 01:17:35.726
mine, not an addiction, because if I stop doing it, it’s not going to cause

1254
01:17:35.748 –> 01:17:38.738
me any visceral harm, right? Like, it’s not going to cause me any problem, but

1255
01:17:38.904 –> 01:17:42.226
I love it. I love jeopardy. I’m going to watch it every time. Now, I

1256
01:17:42.248 –> 01:17:46.018
justify this by saying I learned something. I learned stuff. When I

1257
01:17:46.024 –> 01:17:49.686
watch Jeopardy. I learn it. I learn stuff. Do I really? I don’t know. But

1258
01:17:49.708 –> 01:17:53.426
I’m just going to go with it because that’s

1259
01:17:53.458 –> 01:17:57.046
my justification. That’s my justification for forming the habit that I

1260
01:17:57.068 –> 01:18:00.534
formed, and I don’t think anyone’s ever going to talk me out of it.

1261
01:18:00.572 –> 01:18:04.186
Now, when you form habits that are not able to be

1262
01:18:04.208 –> 01:18:07.162
justified that easily, and you defend them based on

1263
01:18:07.216 –> 01:18:10.998
emptiness, I e. I’m king to eat McDonald’s because I love McDonald’s.

1264
01:18:11.014 –> 01:18:14.774
McDonald’s is awesome. I’m addicted to McDonald’s. I love no, no, you’re not addicted

1265
01:18:14.822 –> 01:18:18.414
to McDonald’s. If you stopped eating McDonald’s tomorrow, nothing’s going to happen to you. And

1266
01:18:18.452 –> 01:18:22.266
what exact argument are you using for eating McDonald’s? Because it’s useless. It’s

1267
01:18:22.298 –> 01:18:25.166
pointless, and it’s not going to work. You’re not going to be able to justify

1268
01:18:25.278 –> 01:18:26.450
it’s healthy.

1269
01:18:30.310 –> 01:18:34.034
What justification could you use? I

1270
01:18:34.072 –> 01:18:37.618
really like the yellow and

1271
01:18:37.704 –> 01:18:41.446
red logo. You can’t take

1272
01:18:41.468 –> 01:18:44.946
that away from me. Sure I can. What if McDonald’s changed their logo

1273
01:18:44.978 –> 01:18:48.646
tomorrow? McDonald’s could change their logo tomorrow. You don’t know it’s not the

1274
01:18:48.668 –> 01:18:52.190
logo you’re attached to. I’m going to go to Long John Silvers.

1275
01:18:52.370 –> 01:18:54.570
Exactly. Because it’s got the yellow.

1276
01:18:56.990 –> 01:18:59.980
But you see where I’m going with this, right? I see where you’re

1277
01:19:00.590 –> 01:19:04.318
like, we form these habits, and then I

1278
01:19:04.324 –> 01:19:07.770
think the bigger problem is how we’ve

1279
01:19:07.850 –> 01:19:11.694
manipulated the idea or concept of habits to

1280
01:19:11.732 –> 01:19:15.506
addiction. Okay. Because addiction is a

1281
01:19:15.528 –> 01:19:18.740
real medical problem. It’s a real problem.

1282
01:19:22.310 –> 01:19:26.126
Do you think that this is because do you think we’ve mapped addiction

1283
01:19:26.158 –> 01:19:29.478
to habits? Because now this is something that occurred to me. Has now occurred to

1284
01:19:29.484 –> 01:19:32.326
me a couple of times while you’ve been talking. Do you think that we’ve done

1285
01:19:32.348 –> 01:19:35.970
that? Because unlike the romantics

1286
01:19:36.050 –> 01:19:39.000
of the last of a couple of centuries ago,

1287
01:19:39.790 –> 01:19:43.290
we don’t really romanticize habits,

1288
01:19:43.710 –> 01:19:47.466
and we don’t romanticize addiction. We don’t think

1289
01:19:47.488 –> 01:19:51.194
that there’s some higher good that we can get to by doing

1290
01:19:51.232 –> 01:19:55.066
these things. Now, partially that’s because we live in the wake of in the 21st

1291
01:19:55.088 –> 01:19:58.778
century. We live in the wake of the death of God. So we’ve talked about

1292
01:19:58.784 –> 01:20:01.882
that on the podcast. Before you kick out the transcendent, then what do you got?

1293
01:20:01.936 –> 01:20:04.980
Right? You just got your addictions, and you got your or

1294
01:20:05.590 –> 01:20:09.314
your habits. That’s all you have. But they don’t raise you up to any

1295
01:20:09.352 –> 01:20:12.500
higher level. And by the way, other people know that,

1296
01:20:13.510 –> 01:20:17.346
and so they have no appeal to

1297
01:20:17.368 –> 01:20:21.126
you at a higher philosophical level. So if I come to you and

1298
01:20:21.148 –> 01:20:24.198
you really like McDonald’s, what arguments am I going to make to you to get

1299
01:20:24.204 –> 01:20:27.702
you to stop eating McDonald’s? Exactly. Yeah.

1300
01:20:27.836 –> 01:20:31.562
That’s the point I make, right? Yeah. But if you give somebody

1301
01:20:31.616 –> 01:20:35.370
an alternative habit so, again,

1302
01:20:35.440 –> 01:20:39.274
if you said to me, I don’t know, Tom, did you know

1303
01:20:39.312 –> 01:20:43.114
that in order to get all those hamburgers, McDonald’s kills little

1304
01:20:43.152 –> 01:20:46.894
babies in Afghanistan? I don’t know, whatever, right? And I went wait, what?

1305
01:20:46.932 –> 01:20:50.606
And you go, but yeah, Burger King doesn’t do that. Burger King. Same food. You

1306
01:20:50.628 –> 01:20:54.138
can eat the same shitty stuff. Burger King

1307
01:20:54.234 –> 01:20:57.978
donates money to those same children’s organizations, and you’re like, Screw it, I’m

1308
01:20:57.994 –> 01:21:01.746
in Burger King now. My habit changed like that. Right, but that’s the

1309
01:21:01.768 –> 01:21:04.994
power of right, right? Yes, yes. But

1310
01:21:05.032 –> 01:21:08.870
addiction addiction, tom, you’re hooked on cocaine.

1311
01:21:09.770 –> 01:21:13.414
Take, know, pseudophed or whatever, like this

1312
01:21:13.452 –> 01:21:16.840
pill, because, no, it doesn’t work. That

1313
01:21:17.290 –> 01:21:20.866
addictive. If you’re truly addicted to something, you can’t get off of it by replacing

1314
01:21:20.898 –> 01:21:24.406
it with something else. Okay, so how do

1315
01:21:24.428 –> 01:21:27.978
we a better. Example of that would probably be heroin and, like, Suboxone and

1316
01:21:27.984 –> 01:21:31.690
methadone and those kinds of things. Yeah, you’re just trading one addiction for the other.

1317
01:21:31.760 –> 01:21:35.438
Granted, one’s probably a little better for your long term health, but

1318
01:21:35.604 –> 01:21:39.262
you’re still trading one addiction for another. Sure. And everybody who goes through

1319
01:21:39.316 –> 01:21:43.054
or not everybody, but a lot of people who go through AA or

1320
01:21:43.092 –> 01:21:46.466
go through Narcotics Anonymous or

1321
01:21:46.488 –> 01:21:50.290
who. Exactly. And to your point,

1322
01:21:50.440 –> 01:21:53.794
I’ve had friends who have gone through those processes. I have friends who

1323
01:21:53.832 –> 01:21:57.478
have anyway, I’ve had my own personal history

1324
01:21:57.644 –> 01:22:01.094
with that, and even in my own family had history with

1325
01:22:01.132 –> 01:22:04.600
that. And even me, myself,

1326
01:22:07.130 –> 01:22:10.806
I flirted with being on the edge of addictive. Not only behaviors

1327
01:22:10.838 –> 01:22:14.620
that could have led to potential addictive problems,

1328
01:22:17.070 –> 01:22:20.746
but we’re on that line of what you’re talking about between habit and

1329
01:22:20.768 –> 01:22:24.330
addiction, where that physical need now kicks in, and now we’re in another

1330
01:22:24.400 –> 01:22:25.740
spot. Right, okay.

1331
01:22:28.850 –> 01:22:31.726
And by the way, just for the purposes of our listeners, just so we can

1332
01:22:31.748 –> 01:22:34.430
be completely transparent here, alcohol

1333
01:22:35.350 –> 01:22:38.930
has always been, in America, the number one

1334
01:22:39.000 –> 01:22:42.322
addictive substance. It’s always been, hands down going

1335
01:22:42.376 –> 01:22:44.660
away, ever since people.

1336
01:22:46.650 –> 01:22:49.842
I don’t think it is anymore. I think today, if you look at the statistics,

1337
01:22:49.906 –> 01:22:52.520
it might be caffeine. Okay,

1338
01:22:55.850 –> 01:22:59.654
but alcohol, it’s the big Boy, right? Yes, for

1339
01:22:59.692 –> 01:23:03.414
sure. And we did prohibition. Caffeine has never ruined

1340
01:23:03.462 –> 01:23:06.522
families, and alcohol has. So we’ll just leave it at that.

1341
01:23:06.656 –> 01:23:10.426
Right. And we did Prohibition in this country in the

1342
01:23:10.448 –> 01:23:13.840
1920s that didn’t work.

1343
01:23:14.210 –> 01:23:17.886
And then we sort of wandered into this area where we kind of

1344
01:23:17.908 –> 01:23:21.040
talk but don’t talk about alcohol. Okay. Yeah, exactly.

1345
01:23:22.610 –> 01:23:26.226
We romanticize it. Now you’re talking about romanticizing. Think about the

1346
01:23:26.248 –> 01:23:29.330
marketing commercials and stuff that come out after about alcohol.

1347
01:23:30.630 –> 01:23:33.890
We don’t talk about the problem, but we certainly romanticize

1348
01:23:35.030 –> 01:23:38.786
the partying. Not even just that,

1349
01:23:38.808 –> 01:23:42.454
but the affluentness of certain alcohol marketing has

1350
01:23:42.492 –> 01:23:45.606
ruled the world when it comes to alcohol. Are you kidding me? That is true.

1351
01:23:45.628 –> 01:23:49.278
No, I agree with that. No, that’s a point we’re

1352
01:23:49.314 –> 01:23:51.660
taking. I’ll take that point for sure.

1353
01:23:54.510 –> 01:23:55.900
So how do we

1354
01:24:02.490 –> 01:24:05.894
if we don’t know the difference between our addictions and our habits and I think

1355
01:24:05.932 –> 01:24:09.174
your broader point is absolutely true. I think people don’t know the addiction, the difference

1356
01:24:09.212 –> 01:24:12.506
between their addictions and their habits. I think people merge it all together because they’re

1357
01:24:12.528 –> 01:24:16.298
merging different stuff in the hierarchy, in their head. Right. They’re just collapsing it all

1358
01:24:16.304 –> 01:24:19.918
together. So when I’m I’ll use myself as an

1359
01:24:19.924 –> 01:24:23.706
example, when I’m laying in bed at night watching reruns

1360
01:24:23.738 –> 01:24:27.518
of NYPD Blue on Hulu, which, by the

1361
01:24:27.524 –> 01:24:30.500
way, yes, ladies and gentlemen, I do sometimes do this

1362
01:24:31.270 –> 01:24:35.058
show instead of reading Moby Dick, and

1363
01:24:35.144 –> 01:24:38.546
my wife comes in and gives me this look like, what are you doing? And

1364
01:24:38.568 –> 01:24:42.366
then walks out. I have a choice

1365
01:24:42.398 –> 01:24:45.766
there that I can make. I can either turn off NYPD Blue and go to

1366
01:24:45.788 –> 01:24:49.474
sleep, or I can watch the rest of the episode

1367
01:24:49.602 –> 01:24:53.366
and then watch another episode, or then now I’m

1368
01:24:53.388 –> 01:24:57.174
into binge watching. Or I can turn off NYPD blue. I can pick

1369
01:24:57.212 –> 01:24:59.718
up my copy of Mopey Dick that I have by the side of my bed,

1370
01:24:59.804 –> 01:25:03.398
read a couple of pages of Moby Dick, and then I can leave. I can

1371
01:25:03.404 –> 01:25:06.120
go to sleep, or I can

1372
01:25:06.930 –> 01:25:10.206
turn off I can never turn on NYPD Blue in the first place, and I

1373
01:25:10.228 –> 01:25:12.958
could read Moby Dick. Right. And my wife will ask me a different kind of

1374
01:25:12.964 –> 01:25:15.854
question, which is, what are you reading there? You read Moby Dick. Okay. And then

1375
01:25:15.892 –> 01:25:19.402
she’s going to walk out. Okay. Those are all of the options that I have

1376
01:25:19.556 –> 01:25:22.798
for various pursuing various

1377
01:25:22.894 –> 01:25:23.730
habits.

1378
01:25:27.190 –> 01:25:30.978
Is there an argument to be made that leaders need to

1379
01:25:30.984 –> 01:25:34.822
pay attention to their habits and the habits of their followers? Oh, good

1380
01:25:34.876 –> 01:25:38.646
God, yes. Absolutely. You know, the one

1381
01:25:38.668 –> 01:25:42.086
thing that we don’t talk about anymore that I think when I first came into

1382
01:25:42.108 –> 01:25:45.922
the workforce was talked about a lot. It was valuable,

1383
01:25:46.066 –> 01:25:49.206
and for some reason, we don’t talk about it anymore. And a lot of it’s

1384
01:25:49.238 –> 01:25:52.794
remote working, and there’s a lot of things. But do you remember talking about the

1385
01:25:52.832 –> 01:25:56.550
conversations at the water cooler? Right, and you didn’t necessarily have to have a

1386
01:25:56.560 –> 01:26:00.398
water cooler, but I’m just saying leaders could learn a lot

1387
01:26:00.484 –> 01:26:04.234
by overhearing conversation from their employees,

1388
01:26:04.282 –> 01:26:07.566
talking to each other about what’s going on, their habits, their

1389
01:26:07.588 –> 01:26:11.060
work. Absolutely. I think we can not only that,

1390
01:26:11.430 –> 01:26:14.580
we can learn a lot about our people knowing what

1391
01:26:14.950 –> 01:26:18.782
their personal habits are, like watching NYPD versus

1392
01:26:18.846 –> 01:26:20.820
reading a book versus whatever, because

1393
01:26:22.310 –> 01:26:25.954
let’s talk about this for a half a second. When people

1394
01:26:25.992 –> 01:26:29.494
ask me, how do I motivate my salespeople better? Like, how do I get my

1395
01:26:29.532 –> 01:26:32.486
salespeople to do this, do that, more this, more that, whatever, and I go, we

1396
01:26:32.508 –> 01:26:36.194
have to find out what motivates them. And they go, well, they’re salespeople. They’re motivated

1397
01:26:36.242 –> 01:26:39.566
by money. Nobody is motivated by money. Nobody,

1398
01:26:39.698 –> 01:26:43.354
zero. People are motivated by money. You have to figure

1399
01:26:43.392 –> 01:26:47.082
out what motivates them to earn their pay. They make money

1400
01:26:47.136 –> 01:26:50.906
to live. They make money to do the things that they

1401
01:26:50.928 –> 01:26:53.534
want to do, to spend the time the way that they want to spend it.

1402
01:26:53.572 –> 01:26:57.354
I e reading Moby Dick or watching NYPD Blue or whitewater

1403
01:26:57.402 –> 01:27:00.080
Rafting or whatever the hell it is that they want to go do.

1404
01:27:00.930 –> 01:27:04.718
They work so that they have enough money to do that. You

1405
01:27:04.884 –> 01:27:07.858
occasionally will have somebody who has thoughts of grandeur and say, I’m going to be

1406
01:27:07.864 –> 01:27:11.074
the best salesperson in the world. I’m going to make millions of dollars selling whatever.

1407
01:27:11.192 –> 01:27:14.566
So my goal is to be the number one salesperson in the world because I

1408
01:27:14.588 –> 01:27:17.718
know that person makes $10 million a year. That’s my

1409
01:27:17.804 –> 01:27:21.554
barometer. But think about what I just said there. What’s really driving

1410
01:27:21.602 –> 01:27:25.318
that person is making $10 million a year driving that person

1411
01:27:25.404 –> 01:27:29.018
or being number one in the world driving that person.

1412
01:27:29.104 –> 01:27:32.634
Because everybody mistakes it for money, right? So to your point about what

1413
01:27:32.672 –> 01:27:35.980
leaders? I think leaders can learn a tremendous amount

1414
01:27:36.590 –> 01:27:40.026
about their people by listening to and understanding their

1415
01:27:40.048 –> 01:27:43.726
habits. And it doesn’t even have to be their work habits, but it should

1416
01:27:43.748 –> 01:27:45.998
be. I’m just saying it doesn’t have to be. It could be a lot of

1417
01:27:46.004 –> 01:27:49.834
things outside of work. But if you really, truly know and understand what motivates

1418
01:27:49.882 –> 01:27:53.474
people, and some people get motivated by different things at different places and different

1419
01:27:53.512 –> 01:27:57.298
times, meaning when I’m at work, maybe I just want

1420
01:27:57.304 –> 01:28:00.980
to be recognized as a good employee. Maybe that motivates me. Really,

1421
01:28:01.510 –> 01:28:04.822
I will go above and beyond my job every single

1422
01:28:04.876 –> 01:28:07.560
time somebody says something to me like,

1423
01:28:08.570 –> 01:28:12.054
man, Tom, that was unbelievable. You’re one of the best employees we

1424
01:28:12.092 –> 01:28:15.878
have. Trigger habit. I’m going to go do it again. I’m going

1425
01:28:15.884 –> 01:28:19.658
to go find whereas at home it’s different. My motivation at home might be a

1426
01:28:19.664 –> 01:28:23.514
little different. So learning and understanding all of those dynamics might be a little

1427
01:28:23.552 –> 01:28:26.822
much. Unless you’re one of those kinds of employers

1428
01:28:26.886 –> 01:28:30.186
where you think of your employees as family. Great.

1429
01:28:30.288 –> 01:28:33.886
Then go figure out go know all their wives names and husband’s names and

1430
01:28:33.908 –> 01:28:37.614
kids names and dogs names and what motivates them is go for

1431
01:28:37.652 –> 01:28:41.278
it. But at the very minimum, the minimum bar to hit

1432
01:28:41.364 –> 01:28:44.686
should be knowing and understanding what motivates them at work. And if it happens to

1433
01:28:44.708 –> 01:28:47.854
be their family, then let them know that you care about them, that you care

1434
01:28:47.892 –> 01:28:51.590
about that family. I know you’re here to earn a paycheck, to take care of

1435
01:28:51.620 –> 01:28:54.662
have family. I’m going to help you do that. Here’s how I help you be

1436
01:28:54.716 –> 01:28:57.318
an employee that’s never going to be at risk of getting fired. You’re always going

1437
01:28:57.324 –> 01:28:59.986
to have a job here because you’re going to do this, this and this. Motivate

1438
01:29:00.018 –> 01:29:03.846
them the way that they want to be motivated. Don’t motivate them the way you

1439
01:29:03.868 –> 01:29:07.306
think they want to be motivated. That’s not a good leader. That’s a

1440
01:29:07.328 –> 01:29:08.780
dictator. Come on.

1441
01:29:11.310 –> 01:29:15.062
You’ve seen these memes a thousand times. On social media, right? Where the leaders

1442
01:29:15.126 –> 01:29:18.300
standing in the sled whipping the people

1443
01:29:18.750 –> 01:29:22.398
sorry. The dictate like the boss, right? My way or the

1444
01:29:22.404 –> 01:29:25.866
highway. It’s my company. I own it. I’m going to whip everybody into shade

1445
01:29:25.978 –> 01:29:29.786
standing up versus a leader that’s in front of them pulling

1446
01:29:29.818 –> 01:29:33.338
the sled with them, right? There’s a big difference to that. Well, that leader that’s

1447
01:29:33.354 –> 01:29:36.866
in front of them pulling the sled with them is asking them about themselves the

1448
01:29:36.888 –> 01:29:39.506
whole time. How do I make you better? How do I help you out? How

1449
01:29:39.528 –> 01:29:42.770
do I help you help me? Mr. Jerry Maguire.

1450
01:29:44.410 –> 01:29:48.054
You don’t know what it’s like for me being out here for you. That’s two

1451
01:29:48.092 –> 01:29:51.400
movie references in one podcast. I don’t know what’s going on.

1452
01:29:53.290 –> 01:29:56.280
We’re going to challenge each other here about movies in a minute. But

1453
01:29:57.370 –> 01:30:01.158
back to the book. Back to Fall of The House of Usher by Edgar Allan

1454
01:30:01.174 –> 01:30:03.786
Poe. We’re going to turn a corner here on this one because I think we

1455
01:30:03.808 –> 01:30:07.018
probably squeezed about as much out of this as we possibly can. But there’s a

1456
01:30:07.024 –> 01:30:10.010
little more juice left in the bottom of the rind

1457
01:30:10.830 –> 01:30:14.538
on this one. And by the way, it is a short story. So when it’s

1458
01:30:14.554 –> 01:30:18.014
printed out, it’s only around seven pages. You can go burn through it really very

1459
01:30:18.052 –> 01:30:21.874
quickly. A short story that’s going to take you 20 minutes to read and us

1460
01:30:21.912 –> 01:30:24.980
2 hours to talk about. That’s right. Exactly. That’s correct.

1461
01:30:25.990 –> 01:30:29.522
It’s a little services that we provide here on the leadership lessons from the Great

1462
01:30:29.576 –> 01:30:33.298
Books podcast. All

1463
01:30:33.304 –> 01:30:35.558
right. The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. Back to the

1464
01:30:35.564 –> 01:30:39.074
book or the short story around in the corner

1465
01:30:39.122 –> 01:30:42.566
here. I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work and of

1466
01:30:42.588 –> 01:30:46.134
its probable influence upon the hypochondriac, when one evening, having

1467
01:30:46.172 –> 01:30:50.006
informed me abruptly that the Lady Madeline was no more by the way, the Lady

1468
01:30:50.038 –> 01:30:53.786
Madeline is Roderick Usher’s sister. He stated his

1469
01:30:53.808 –> 01:30:57.046
intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight

1470
01:30:57.238 –> 01:31:00.974
previously to his final internment in one of the numerous vaults within

1471
01:31:01.012 –> 01:31:04.670
the main walls of the building. By the way, pause.

1472
01:31:05.330 –> 01:31:08.982
Poe really, really liked vaults and tombs and caves

1473
01:31:09.066 –> 01:31:12.610
and basements. The power of place.

1474
01:31:12.760 –> 01:31:16.338
Well, because in the northeast, all of those things are creepy. All of them are

1475
01:31:16.344 –> 01:31:17.940
creepy. All of them.

1476
01:31:20.550 –> 01:31:24.094
Back to the book. The worldly reason, however, assigned for this singular

1477
01:31:24.142 –> 01:31:27.926
proceeding, was one which I did not feel at

1478
01:31:27.948 –> 01:31:31.542
liberty to dispute. The brother had been led to his resolution. So he told me

1479
01:31:31.596 –> 01:31:35.414
by consideration of the unusual character of the malady of the deceased of

1480
01:31:35.452 –> 01:31:38.806
certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical men and of the

1481
01:31:38.828 –> 01:31:42.614
remote and exposed situation of the burial ground of the family. I will not deny

1482
01:31:42.662 –> 01:31:45.594
that when I called to mind the sinister countenance of the person whom I met

1483
01:31:45.632 –> 01:31:49.086
upon that staircase on the day of my arrival at the house I had no

1484
01:31:49.108 –> 01:31:52.718
desire to oppose what I regarded as at best but a

1485
01:31:52.724 –> 01:31:56.510
harmless and by no means an unnatural precaution.

1486
01:31:58.130 –> 01:32:01.274
At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements of the temporary

1487
01:32:01.322 –> 01:32:04.834
entombment. The body having been encoffened, we too,

1488
01:32:04.872 –> 01:32:08.578
alone bore it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it, by the

1489
01:32:08.584 –> 01:32:12.034
way, he also liked vaults, and which had long been so

1490
01:32:12.072 –> 01:32:15.890
unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere,

1491
01:32:15.970 –> 01:32:19.554
gave us little opportunity for investigation, was small, damp, and entirely

1492
01:32:19.602 –> 01:32:23.074
without means of admission for Light King at great depth.

1493
01:32:23.122 –> 01:32:26.962
Immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping

1494
01:32:27.026 –> 01:32:30.858
apartment. It had been used, apparently in remote feudal times for the

1495
01:32:30.864 –> 01:32:34.646
worst purposes of a dungeon keep, and in later days as a place of deposit

1496
01:32:34.678 –> 01:32:38.314
for powder or some other highly compostable substance. As a portion of its

1497
01:32:38.352 –> 01:32:41.854
floor and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it were

1498
01:32:41.892 –> 01:32:45.342
carefully sheathed with copper. The door of

1499
01:32:45.396 –> 01:32:49.046
massive iron had been also similarly protected. Its immense weight

1500
01:32:49.098 –> 01:32:52.638
caused an unusually sharp grating sound as it moved

1501
01:32:52.734 –> 01:32:56.430
upon its hinges. Having deposited

1502
01:32:56.510 –> 01:33:00.318
our mournful burden upon trestles within this region of horror,

1503
01:33:00.414 –> 01:33:04.246
we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin and

1504
01:33:04.268 –> 01:33:08.114
looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking

1505
01:33:08.162 –> 01:33:11.714
similitude between brother and sister now first arrested

1506
01:33:11.842 –> 01:33:15.366
my attention, and Usher divining. Perhaps my

1507
01:33:15.388 –> 01:33:19.094
thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that deceased

1508
01:33:19.142 –> 01:33:22.646
himself had been twins and that sympathies of a scarcely

1509
01:33:22.678 –> 01:33:26.294
intelligible nature had always existed between them. Our glances,

1510
01:33:26.342 –> 01:33:29.434
however, rested not long upon the dead, for we could not regard her

1511
01:33:29.472 –> 01:33:33.118
unawed. The disease which had thus entuned the lady in the

1512
01:33:33.124 –> 01:33:36.894
maturity of youth had left, as usual, in all

1513
01:33:36.932 –> 01:33:40.686
maladies of a strict catalyptical character the mockery of

1514
01:33:40.708 –> 01:33:44.194
a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that

1515
01:33:44.232 –> 01:33:47.794
suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in

1516
01:33:47.832 –> 01:33:51.566
death. We replaced and screwed down the lid and having

1517
01:33:51.608 –> 01:33:55.366
secured the door of iron, made our way with toil into the

1518
01:33:55.388 –> 01:33:58.706
scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper

1519
01:33:58.738 –> 01:34:02.040
portion of the house.

1520
01:34:10.680 –> 01:34:12.740
Vaults, crypts,

1521
01:34:13.640 –> 01:34:14.660
basements.

1522
01:34:20.160 –> 01:34:23.132
Something interesting when you move to other parts of the country. So you mentioned

1523
01:34:23.186 –> 01:34:27.036
Florida. I do know people in Florida, and I’ve been to

1524
01:34:27.058 –> 01:34:29.230
Florida a couple times. Florida is an interesting state.

1525
01:34:31.680 –> 01:34:35.100
It is a conglomeration of about eight different things altogether,

1526
01:34:36.480 –> 01:34:39.550
all of which, I’m shocked, work in one geographic area

1527
01:34:40.640 –> 01:34:44.230
and are probably barely held together with spit and

1528
01:34:45.640 –> 01:34:48.660
tape and super string.

1529
01:34:51.080 –> 01:34:54.340
But in Florida, there are no basements.

1530
01:34:55.160 –> 01:34:58.948
Now, there’s a reason for that. The reason is that Florida is

1531
01:34:58.954 –> 01:35:02.040
a peninsula. You try to dig a basement, you go down

1532
01:35:02.110 –> 01:35:05.768
15ft, you’re going to hit the Gulf of Mexico, okay? Or the

1533
01:35:05.774 –> 01:35:09.310
Atlantic Ocean, depending upon which side of the peninsula you happen to be on.

1534
01:35:10.880 –> 01:35:14.716
In Texas, where I live, there are very few people who

1535
01:35:14.738 –> 01:35:17.964
are any expertise in building houses, in building

1536
01:35:18.002 –> 01:35:21.816
basements. And it’s not because you couldn’t build a basement in Texas. You actually

1537
01:35:21.858 –> 01:35:25.676
can. It’s because the dirt that Texas sits

1538
01:35:25.708 –> 01:35:29.200
on top of is so fine and sifting that

1539
01:35:29.270 –> 01:35:33.024
concrete and cement actually don’t hold up. Friend of mine actually just

1540
01:35:33.062 –> 01:35:36.884
put in a walkout basement and he had to pour in, get

1541
01:35:36.922 –> 01:35:40.224
this, $120,000 of concrete just to do a walkout

1542
01:35:40.272 –> 01:35:43.750
basement. Oh, my good Lord. Yeah.

1543
01:35:45.160 –> 01:35:48.536
Now, in the Northeast, you could have a basement from Vermont all the way to

1544
01:35:48.558 –> 01:35:52.056
Philadelphia because it’s all granite. Well, not

1545
01:35:52.078 –> 01:35:55.796
only could you, but it’s very highly recommended. Highly

1546
01:35:55.828 –> 01:35:59.588
recommended, right. But that’s because you’re

1547
01:35:59.604 –> 01:36:03.404
in the northern ranges of the Appalachian Mountains, right? The Alleghenies and

1548
01:36:03.442 –> 01:36:07.244
all of that, all of y’all geographically are placed up against that

1549
01:36:07.282 –> 01:36:11.128
rock. And of course, if you go out to Colorado

1550
01:36:11.304 –> 01:36:15.116
and points further west, which are closer to the Rocky Mountains

1551
01:36:15.148 –> 01:36:18.656
or the Sierra Nevadas, you will run into basements there. And this is just an

1552
01:36:18.678 –> 01:36:21.650
example I’m just bringing this up as an example of something,

1553
01:36:22.340 –> 01:36:26.116
a function of a house, a function of your home that

1554
01:36:26.138 –> 01:36:29.956
is fundamental to how people live. But

1555
01:36:29.978 –> 01:36:32.550
it’s driven by geography. It’s driven by place.

1556
01:36:36.440 –> 01:36:40.276
Roderick Usher put his sister in

1557
01:36:40.298 –> 01:36:43.848
a tomb. And I don’t want to ruin the surprise, but let’s I was going

1558
01:36:43.854 –> 01:36:46.632
to. Say something about that, too. I was like, oh, you left out the last

1559
01:36:46.686 –> 01:36:50.356
part of the story. I did. Let’s

1560
01:36:50.388 –> 01:36:54.124
just say, in true Poe fashion. Well, what

1561
01:36:54.162 –> 01:36:57.996
is all things aren’t what they seem. All things aren’t what they seem? No. And

1562
01:36:58.098 –> 01:37:01.724
the mockery of faint blush upon the bosom and face in the strictly

1563
01:37:01.772 –> 01:37:05.168
cataleptical character well,

1564
01:37:05.334 –> 01:37:09.104
that strictly cataleptical character reveals itself towards the

1565
01:37:09.142 –> 01:37:11.010
end of the story.

1566
01:37:16.120 –> 01:37:19.844
We just took a story here that

1567
01:37:19.962 –> 01:37:23.352
on the surface doesn’t really have that much, but allows us to jump off into

1568
01:37:23.406 –> 01:37:27.064
other things. And this is one of the conceits of this podcast, is that

1569
01:37:27.182 –> 01:37:30.924
we can actually do this. And in

1570
01:37:30.962 –> 01:37:34.796
thinking about the end of the

1571
01:37:34.818 –> 01:37:38.236
story, which we did not get to when we talked about addiction, a bunch of

1572
01:37:38.258 –> 01:37:41.800
other things, there’s a poem in here about dragons,

1573
01:37:41.880 –> 01:37:45.648
right? And Poe does an interesting layering piece, not in the piece that I

1574
01:37:45.654 –> 01:37:49.404
was reading, but he does an interesting layering piece after Madeline is entombed

1575
01:37:49.532 –> 01:37:53.184
and tells an entire story about dragons and about

1576
01:37:53.302 –> 01:37:56.832
the lady, basically the lady fair being saved from a dragon.

1577
01:37:56.976 –> 01:38:00.564
There’s a whole Poe in there. The lady fair being saved from a dragon. And

1578
01:38:00.602 –> 01:38:04.368
of course, Poe is bringing in elements

1579
01:38:04.464 –> 01:38:08.028
of this mythical story to indicate that Roderick

1580
01:38:08.064 –> 01:38:11.816
Usher was trying to position himself or

1581
01:38:11.838 –> 01:38:15.160
maybe it was the narrator trying to position himself, I can’t really tell.

1582
01:38:15.310 –> 01:38:18.656
But one of those gentlemen was trying to position himself

1583
01:38:18.708 –> 01:38:22.444
as sort of a Sir Lancelot type, right.

1584
01:38:22.482 –> 01:38:25.916
He was going to save Madeline and then that all sort

1585
01:38:25.938 –> 01:38:29.516
of inverts on itself. When you’re running,

1586
01:38:29.618 –> 01:38:30.540
screaming,

1587
01:38:35.140 –> 01:38:38.784
the question becomes if

1588
01:38:38.822 –> 01:38:42.608
dead things don’t stay dead. William Faulkner, infamously back in

1589
01:38:42.614 –> 01:38:46.356
the day, that great Southern writer from Mississippi who

1590
01:38:46.378 –> 01:38:50.036
served in World War I, he said, you know, the past ain’t the

1591
01:38:50.058 –> 01:38:52.870
past. It ain’t even done with us yet, basically.

1592
01:38:53.640 –> 01:38:57.232
It’s not done right. Poe took that or began

1593
01:38:57.296 –> 01:39:00.836
really that idea and know longfellow and then

1594
01:39:00.858 –> 01:39:04.296
folks who came after the Civil War, by the way, point of order,

1595
01:39:04.398 –> 01:39:07.736
civil War is when opium addiction really kicked up in the United States because now

1596
01:39:07.758 –> 01:39:11.132
you could deliver it in syringe form to Civil War

1597
01:39:11.186 –> 01:39:14.796
folks, right? And it was the only thing that helped when you

1598
01:39:14.818 –> 01:39:17.980
were amputating people to stop infection,

1599
01:39:20.480 –> 01:39:23.890
which when I read that, I was like, oh, okay.

1600
01:39:28.260 –> 01:39:31.680
How do we as leaders, what do we as leaders

1601
01:39:32.500 –> 01:39:36.036
take from the Fall of the House of Usher about geography and

1602
01:39:36.058 –> 01:39:39.876
place? A lot of this story is driven by

1603
01:39:39.898 –> 01:39:43.380
hypochondria. So it’s driven by the idea that something’s happening

1604
01:39:43.450 –> 01:39:47.284
when our scientific rational materialism in our

1605
01:39:47.322 –> 01:39:50.840
day tells us nothing’s happening there. You’re just winding yourself up over nothing.

1606
01:39:50.990 –> 01:39:54.776
It’s hypochondria built up and ramped up to the level

1607
01:39:54.798 –> 01:39:58.584
of a mental illness. And I think this, by the way,

1608
01:39:58.622 –> 01:40:02.204
resonates in our time, particularly coming out of COVID I think this

1609
01:40:02.242 –> 01:40:06.076
resonates in our time because it’s the things that we can’t see that

1610
01:40:06.098 –> 01:40:09.868
get us and the things that we can’t see. And by the

1611
01:40:09.874 –> 01:40:13.376
way we struggle with this this is the other aside thought here. We struggle with

1612
01:40:13.398 –> 01:40:17.216
this as postmoderns because we think that we’ve mastered everything that can be

1613
01:40:17.238 –> 01:40:20.976
seen, but we know or

1614
01:40:20.998 –> 01:40:24.484
we have an intuition in our hearts that there’s all this other

1615
01:40:24.522 –> 01:40:27.110
stuff underneath the water

1616
01:40:28.200 –> 01:40:29.830
and at a certain point

1617
01:40:32.120 –> 01:40:35.604
Madeline’s going to come up and she’s going to want to have a conversation with

1618
01:40:35.642 –> 01:40:38.790
us. So how do leaders deal with

1619
01:40:39.480 –> 01:40:43.016
that dynamic on their teams? We’ll kind of

1620
01:40:43.198 –> 01:40:46.756
close out with that question for you, Tom. How do we deal with that dynamic

1621
01:40:46.788 –> 01:40:50.600
of all the other stuff underneath the surface that could get us the boo? Creepy.

1622
01:40:55.020 –> 01:40:57.710
Mean, I don’t mean to sound repetitive here, but

1623
01:40:59.120 –> 01:41:02.796
you don’t know what you don’t know. So don’t create something that isn’t

1624
01:41:02.828 –> 01:41:06.512
there. Which is what hypochondria is, by the way.

1625
01:41:06.566 –> 01:41:10.336
It really is. Yeah, but how

1626
01:41:10.358 –> 01:41:14.060
do you stop yourself from doing that? It’s by asking questions

1627
01:41:14.150 –> 01:41:17.460
and getting involved with the right people and making sure you’re

1628
01:41:17.960 –> 01:41:21.604
listen. I’m not a business coach, but I’m going to tell you right

1629
01:41:21.642 –> 01:41:24.980
now that the best

1630
01:41:25.130 –> 01:41:28.584
athletes in the world still have coaches. I don’t care if you’re a Tom

1631
01:41:28.622 –> 01:41:32.324
Brady fan or a Michael Jordan fan or LeBron James, Michael

1632
01:41:32.372 –> 01:41:35.944
Phelps, pick some all the Wayne Gretzky, whatever

1633
01:41:35.982 –> 01:41:39.544
sport you want. There’s always like the greatest of the greats of the greats. Guess

1634
01:41:39.582 –> 01:41:43.148
what all of them have in common? They all have a good coach. They all

1635
01:41:43.154 –> 01:41:46.524
have coaches that were there for them. Even if it’s not to

1636
01:41:46.642 –> 01:41:50.364
perfect them, even if it’s them for them to bounce ideas off of and

1637
01:41:50.402 –> 01:41:54.168
say, again, I go back to business. Right? It’s

1638
01:41:54.184 –> 01:41:57.010
like, go find a business coach that

1639
01:41:58.100 –> 01:42:00.976
you can use as a sounding board. Now, by the way, it doesn’t have to

1640
01:42:00.998 –> 01:42:04.272
be a business coach. It could also be somebody. If you’re a bigger company, use

1641
01:42:04.326 –> 01:42:08.052
somebody on your C level team. You’re the CEO. President.

1642
01:42:08.106 –> 01:42:11.316
CEO. Talk to your COO, your chief operator, or your

1643
01:42:11.338 –> 01:42:15.156
CFO. Make sure that one of those two guys are checking and

1644
01:42:15.178 –> 01:42:18.596
balancing your brain, making sure that you’re not seeing stuff that isn’t there

1645
01:42:18.698 –> 01:42:22.408
or you’re not creating a mountain out of a

1646
01:42:22.414 –> 01:42:25.576
molehill. Maybe there’s something small that you are all of a sudden thinking it’s a

1647
01:42:25.598 –> 01:42:28.916
big deal or that kind of stuff. But it doesn’t have to be an external

1648
01:42:28.948 –> 01:42:32.684
source. It can be somebody on your team. If you don’t have that, go get

1649
01:42:32.722 –> 01:42:36.572
somebody outside of your team. If your team’s too small or you feel

1650
01:42:36.626 –> 01:42:40.364
they’re too close to the problem, go get somebody who is.

1651
01:42:40.482 –> 01:42:44.144
I’m sorry, I hate to say this, but pay them. Pay somebody

1652
01:42:44.182 –> 01:42:47.776
to be your Jiminy Cricket, to be your extra set of eyes or

1653
01:42:47.798 –> 01:42:49.840
ears. Fourth movie reference.

1654
01:42:51.620 –> 01:42:55.072
All right, let me make a fizz movie reference. Office Space.

1655
01:42:55.206 –> 01:42:58.948
Bill Lumberg did not know how to deal with Milton with

1656
01:42:58.954 –> 01:43:02.624
the stapler. Milton was considered a creepy guy. Milton was a character

1657
01:43:02.672 –> 01:43:05.268
right out of Poe. And if he hadn’t been out of Poe, Poe would have

1658
01:43:05.274 –> 01:43:08.250
written him. Okay?

1659
01:43:09.740 –> 01:43:13.304
Lumberg had no clue how to deal with that guy other than to fire him

1660
01:43:13.342 –> 01:43:16.904
and put him in, ironically, the basement. Basement. Go

1661
01:43:16.942 –> 01:43:20.556
figure. And yet,

1662
01:43:20.738 –> 01:43:24.220
not to ruin the surprise on Office Space, one of the greatest work

1663
01:43:24.290 –> 01:43:27.656
movies of our time, bar none.

1664
01:43:27.768 –> 01:43:30.540
Totally agree. Bar none.

1665
01:43:31.920 –> 01:43:35.376
He burned the entire place down, just like he

1666
01:43:35.398 –> 01:43:39.212
threatened he would. But no one wanted to deal with Milton.

1667
01:43:39.276 –> 01:43:43.008
Why? Because Milton was considered to be what? By the people in

1668
01:43:43.014 –> 01:43:46.390
the office. It’s a C word, and it rhymes with EP.

1669
01:43:49.240 –> 01:43:52.630
He was too creepy. That’s right. Nobody wanted to deal with him.

1670
01:43:53.560 –> 01:43:57.156
So should Lumberg have gotten a coach? Definitely

1671
01:43:57.258 –> 01:44:01.048
deal with Milton. Well, no, in that case I mean, if they’re that creepy. Come

1672
01:44:01.054 –> 01:44:04.344
on, dude, just fire the guy. I mean, you know, if you know, you know.

1673
01:44:04.462 –> 01:44:08.276
I was talking about jumping to conclusions about things that you don’t

1674
01:44:08.308 –> 01:44:11.068
know, right? By the way, that was a game that was created in Office Space

1675
01:44:11.154 –> 01:44:14.536
by the guy who got his neck broken in the car accident. Jump to conclusions.

1676
01:44:14.728 –> 01:44:17.470
They would jump on the dots. Jump on the dots. Yeah.

1677
01:44:19.120 –> 01:44:21.710
But in all seriousness, right,

1678
01:44:24.640 –> 01:44:28.000
there’s reasons why the best of the best still have coaches.

1679
01:44:28.340 –> 01:44:31.776
So even if you feel like you’re at the top of your game in your

1680
01:44:31.798 –> 01:44:35.616
industry, that does not mean that a person with a fresh set of eyes

1681
01:44:35.638 –> 01:44:39.348
and ears can’t give you something, something that’s worth it for you

1682
01:44:39.434 –> 01:44:43.236
to make. Maybe it’s not about making you or your company better. Maybe it’s just

1683
01:44:43.258 –> 01:44:47.012
simply about making your people better, like making you a better

1684
01:44:47.066 –> 01:44:50.536
leader. Maybe you don’t get more profit out of it, but maybe you

1685
01:44:50.558 –> 01:44:53.800
get easier profit. Maybe it’s like something

1686
01:44:53.870 –> 01:44:57.320
doesn’t come naturally to you so you figure out a way.

1687
01:44:57.390 –> 01:45:00.010
Again, I think part of it is just like,

1688
01:45:00.780 –> 01:45:04.492
listen, we all have blind spots. All of us have blind spots in everything

1689
01:45:04.546 –> 01:45:08.252
that we do. It’s not a matter of being

1690
01:45:08.386 –> 01:45:11.932
perfect. It’s just a matter of getting a little bit better every

1691
01:45:11.986 –> 01:45:14.930
day, improving every day, right?

1692
01:45:15.940 –> 01:45:18.608
That’s really what it’s all about. And if you can’t do that on your own,

1693
01:45:18.694 –> 01:45:21.840
you can’t do that by reading a book, by reading

1694
01:45:23.220 –> 01:45:26.500
or watching a motivational speaker,

1695
01:45:27.000 –> 01:45:30.772
listening to podcasts, whatever, then you should go and

1696
01:45:30.826 –> 01:45:34.436
find somebody who can help you walk through this. And again, it

1697
01:45:34.458 –> 01:45:37.430
doesn’t listen. You don’t have to pay them.

1698
01:45:38.440 –> 01:45:41.784
It could be your wife, your husband. It could even be one of your

1699
01:45:41.822 –> 01:45:45.656
kids. I found this fascinating at the

1700
01:45:45.678 –> 01:45:49.480
time. My now 24 year old son was about eight years old,

1701
01:45:49.550 –> 01:45:52.830
and I was going through this weird phase at work with like,

1702
01:45:53.680 –> 01:45:57.516
I felt like I had hit as many home runs as I was going to

1703
01:45:57.538 –> 01:46:01.244
hit in the job that I was in. And no matter what I did

1704
01:46:01.282 –> 01:46:05.036
was it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered to what I did.

1705
01:46:05.058 –> 01:46:08.656
I was going to maintain that level of this is where I’m going to be

1706
01:46:08.758 –> 01:46:12.576
for money or for whatever. So my son eight years old

1707
01:46:12.598 –> 01:46:16.364
at the time. Him and I were I was bringing him to baseball

1708
01:46:16.412 –> 01:46:19.668
practice or something like that, and we’re just shooting the breeze. He’s like, what’s the

1709
01:46:19.674 –> 01:46:23.124
matter, dad? I’m like, Work’s just been tough. This is an eight year old kid,

1710
01:46:23.162 –> 01:46:26.230
and he goes, Tell me about it. I’m like wait, what?

1711
01:46:27.640 –> 01:46:31.240
So I told him. I was like, you know what, bud?

1712
01:46:31.740 –> 01:46:35.528
Screw it. I’ll tell you. Because I

1713
01:46:35.534 –> 01:46:38.616
was also at the thought, like, if I say it out loud, if I get

1714
01:46:38.638 –> 01:46:41.788
it off my chest, maybe it won’t bother me. Maybe it won’t bother me as

1715
01:46:41.794 –> 01:46:45.644
much that I’m going to stay stagnant that whole therapy thing,

1716
01:46:45.682 –> 01:46:49.180
right? Whatever. And I’m not downplaying therapy.

1717
01:46:50.880 –> 01:46:54.190
You’re just putting in it. You’re just using a term that you’re fine, right?

1718
01:46:55.040 –> 01:46:58.800
I tell my son about this whole thing, and I’m like, listen, and I

1719
01:46:58.870 –> 01:47:02.528
translate it because we’re going to baseball practice. I was like they’ll be like, do

1720
01:47:02.534 –> 01:47:05.488
you know how sometimes when you play a game of baseball, you only get up

1721
01:47:05.494 –> 01:47:09.012
to bat, like, four times? If you hit a home run all four of those

1722
01:47:09.066 –> 01:47:12.612
times, that’s it, you’re done. That’s the game,

1723
01:47:12.746 –> 01:47:15.796
right? Like, you don’t get to hit another time just because you hit a home

1724
01:47:15.818 –> 01:47:19.044
run, right? I go, that’s kind of like the way I’m feeling at work. And

1725
01:47:19.082 –> 01:47:22.888
he goes, yeah, but you can’t start the day like that. And I go, what

1726
01:47:22.894 –> 01:47:26.616
do you mean? He goes, what if you go into extra innings? And

1727
01:47:26.638 –> 01:47:30.312
I went, okay, but that doesn’t mean anything to me, right? Whatever,

1728
01:47:30.366 –> 01:47:33.948
right? Okay. And I go, yeah, but what if you don’t? And he

1729
01:47:33.954 –> 01:47:37.432
goes, yeah, but you don’t know that when the day starts, when the game starts,

1730
01:47:37.496 –> 01:47:40.876
you don’t know if there’s extra innings. You can hit two more home runs. If

1731
01:47:40.898 –> 01:47:43.148
they hit two more home runs, it’s like somebody else on the other team hits

1732
01:47:43.164 –> 01:47:45.650
two more. I’m like, okay,

1733
01:47:47.460 –> 01:47:51.232
now I’m exploring this with my eight year old son, okay?

1734
01:47:51.286 –> 01:47:53.570
I’m like, So tell me more.

1735
01:47:56.500 –> 01:48:00.116
But what I got out of that conversation honestly, what I got out of that

1736
01:48:00.138 –> 01:48:02.976
conversation had nothing to do with baseball. It had nothing to do with home runs.

1737
01:48:03.008 –> 01:48:06.832
It had more to do with my own preconceived notion

1738
01:48:06.896 –> 01:48:10.676
that I don’t know what I don’t know. I don’t know

1739
01:48:10.698 –> 01:48:12.648
what tomorrow is going to bring. I don’t know what the next day is going

1740
01:48:12.654 –> 01:48:15.850
to bring. But I walked into every day thinking I knew

1741
01:48:16.700 –> 01:48:20.216
I walked into every day thinking, this is it. This is the end. This

1742
01:48:20.238 –> 01:48:23.764
is judgment day. This is it. Not realizing

1743
01:48:23.812 –> 01:48:27.544
that I’ll even tell you what ended up the

1744
01:48:27.582 –> 01:48:31.408
end of the story was so I was

1745
01:48:31.414 –> 01:48:34.432
at a maxed out client level, right? The way that the job that I had,

1746
01:48:34.486 –> 01:48:37.676
I could only have so many clients. I was at the maxed out job client

1747
01:48:37.708 –> 01:48:41.504
level, and they were at like, I maxed out their budgets, man. I’m like when

1748
01:48:41.542 –> 01:48:44.210
I figured out a way for them to spend all their money.

1749
01:48:45.220 –> 01:48:49.024
What happened about, I don’t know, two months, three months after my son’s

1750
01:48:49.072 –> 01:48:52.628
conversation was one of my clients split off

1751
01:48:52.714 –> 01:48:56.564
into another company and refused to work with any other person than

1752
01:48:56.602 –> 01:49:00.296
me. So even though, as a company policy,

1753
01:49:00.398 –> 01:49:04.200
we had a max at the level of customers that we were supposed to have,

1754
01:49:04.350 –> 01:49:08.148
I kind of broke that by the customer saying, we’re

1755
01:49:08.164 –> 01:49:11.976
not dealing with your company unless we deal with Tom, right? So then I

1756
01:49:11.998 –> 01:49:14.008
looked at my boss, and I was like, all right, well, if I have to

1757
01:49:14.014 –> 01:49:17.796
lose, my first thought was, which client are you taking from me? And he’s

1758
01:49:17.828 –> 01:49:20.616
like, I’m not taking any of them from you. They’re all spending all their money.

1759
01:49:20.718 –> 01:49:24.352
If I take them from you and we drop our revenue because of it,

1760
01:49:24.406 –> 01:49:28.176
I’m going to get fired, right? I’m just going to add him to

1761
01:49:28.278 –> 01:49:32.048
your account database. But isn’t that against the company rules? He

1762
01:49:32.054 –> 01:49:35.808
goes, Screw it. I’m like, oh, so in other words, there’s no rules. I

1763
01:49:35.814 –> 01:49:38.564
was like, all right, now that I know that, I’m going to go find more

1764
01:49:38.602 –> 01:49:42.388
companies to do business with so I can be better at what I do.

1765
01:49:42.554 –> 01:49:45.510
Anyway, I guess the point I’m making here is

1766
01:49:47.080 –> 01:49:50.916
you should never be thinking you’re alone in any of this. Because you can

1767
01:49:50.938 –> 01:49:54.776
use your wife, your husband, your kids, your cousin, your friend, go

1768
01:49:54.798 –> 01:49:57.848
to the bar and talk to the bartender. Don’t give away trade secrets. But you

1769
01:49:57.854 –> 01:50:01.608
know what mean. But like, you need a sounding board. You

1770
01:50:01.614 –> 01:50:05.276
are only one person. You’re only one human being. Your conceptual mind can only go

1771
01:50:05.298 –> 01:50:09.116
so far by itself. I don’t care if you’re Elon Musk or if

1772
01:50:09.138 –> 01:50:12.464
you’re Mark Zuckerberg, as you talked about your celebrity death match

1773
01:50:12.502 –> 01:50:16.336
earlier. Those guys did not do that

1774
01:50:16.358 –> 01:50:19.984
by themselves. They just didn’t. I’m sorry. Facebook was not designed by Mark

1775
01:50:20.022 –> 01:50:22.690
Zuckerberg all by himself, nor was

1776
01:50:23.780 –> 01:50:27.604
SpaceX designed by or Tesla or Twitter, whatever

1777
01:50:27.642 –> 01:50:30.756
the hell the Twitter thing is now. I stopped keeping track of it. But you

1778
01:50:30.778 –> 01:50:34.596
know what, guys? None of these people did

1779
01:50:34.618 –> 01:50:38.244
this by themselves. None of yep. So don’t feel like you have

1780
01:50:38.282 –> 01:50:39.370
to. That’s all.

1781
01:50:42.060 –> 01:50:45.816
I think that’s a good place to stop. I’m going to ask Tom to

1782
01:50:45.838 –> 01:50:48.920
hang around a little bit here because we’re going to have a little bonus

1783
01:50:49.340 –> 01:50:52.856
deal here. Talking about not being able to build something by yourself, you may want

1784
01:50:52.878 –> 01:50:56.324
to hang around for, but if you can’t,

1785
01:50:56.452 –> 01:51:00.104
that’s okay. So this is

1786
01:51:00.142 –> 01:51:03.916
our regular episode of Leadership lessons

1787
01:51:03.948 –> 01:51:07.056
from the Great Books podcast. I’d like to thank Tom Libby for coming on and

1788
01:51:07.078 –> 01:51:10.530
talking with us today, always. And with that

1789
01:51:11.700 –> 01:51:14.190
for right now. Anyway, we’re out.