Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky w/Hana Kabele Gala & Jesan Sorrells

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Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells,

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and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books

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podcast, episode number 188.

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Opening up with a selection

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from our. From our book today.

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We start with part one,

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Underground, and I quote,

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I’m a sick man. I’m a spiteful man. I am an

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unattractive man. I believe my liver

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is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease and do

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not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it and

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never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors.

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Besides, I’m extremely superstitious, sufficiently so

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to respect medicine. Anyway, I am well educated enough not to be superstitious, but

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I am superstitious. No, I refuse to consult a doctor from

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spite that you probably will not understand. Well, understand

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it. Though of course I can’t explain who it is precisely that I

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am mortifying in this case, by my spite. I am perfectly aware.

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Aware that I cannot pay out the doctors

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by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that by all this I am

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only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if

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I don’t consult a doctor, it is from spite. My liver is bad. Well,

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let it get worse. I’ve been going on like

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that for a long time. 20 years now. I am 40.

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I used to be in government service, but I’m no longer. I was a spiteful

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official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not

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take bribes, you see. So I was bound to find a recompense in

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that at least a poor Jess. But I will not scratch it out. I

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wrote it, thinking it would sound very witty. But now that I have

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seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way. I

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will not scratch it out on purpose. When petitioners

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used to come for information to the table at which I sat, I

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used to grind my teeth at them and felt intense enjoyment. When I succeeded in

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making anybody unhappy, I almost always did

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succeed, for the most part. They were all timid people, of course. They

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were petitioners. But of the uppish ones, there was one officer in particular I

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could not endure. He simply would not be humble and

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clanked his sword in a disgusting way. I carried on a feud with him for

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18 months over that sword. At last I got the better of him.

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He left off clanking it. That happened in my youth, though.

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But do you know, gentlemen, what was the chief point about my spite?

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Why, the whole point, the real sting of it lay in the fact that continually,

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even in the moment of the acutest spleen. I was

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inwardly conscious with shame that that I was not only not

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a spiteful but not even an embittered man, that I was simply

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scaring sparrows at random and amusing myself by it. I might foam at the

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mouth or bring me a doll to play with, give me a cup of tea

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with sugar in it, and maybe I should be appeased. I might

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even be genuinely touched. So probably I should grind my teeth

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at myself afterwards and lie awake at night with

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shame for months after.

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That was my way.

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Close Quote

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the Marketer the author, the blogger Seth Godin once

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infamously quipped, we are all marketers now.

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He said this or wrote this in one of his many books, I can’t remember

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which one, in response to the rise of social media and

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the penetration of the endlessly ubiquitous Internet into

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every single aspect of our lives.

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He was noticing that when ordinary people have access to the previously gatekept

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tools of broadcasting, they wouldn’t fail to begin to market themselves as

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aggressively as corporations marketed products to them for the majority of the

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industrial Revolution. What does that have to do with

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what I just read with our book today? Well,

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if we are all marketers now, then it naturally follows from that

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that we are all liars now.

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Cause if you know marketers, you know

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that all of them do two things without fail. One, they ruin everything they

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touch. And I’m saying this as a marketer, by the way. And two,

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they are usually lying to get you to buy something. But a

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society can’t exist on a steady diet of lies. Eventually,

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truth, capital T, truth crushed to earth, as my grandmother would have said back in

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the day, will rise again. And this is not

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a new situation. Back in the day, about

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2,000 years or so ago, a man was arguing with the dominant cultural power brokers

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of his time and he said something that took them by surprise then and continues

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to take us all by surprise even now. He said, and I quote

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or it was framed and I quote to the Jews who had

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believed on him. Jesus said, if you hold to my teaching, you

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are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth and the

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truth will set you free. John 8:31

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32 KJV

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the book we are covering today trans stands at a transitional

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moment, or is positioned at a transitional moment in the history of mankind

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when European society at a time and at that

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time the vanguard of the Western world was transitioning from

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individuals knowing the biblical truth, such as it

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were, and advocating it for vociferously and moving towards a time, the

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time in which we now live at the end of where individuals,

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communities, even the state struggle to state the truth in a time

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of comfortable, habitual and institutionalized

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lying. On the show today we are going to cover a

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book whose narrative links ideas about lying but Lives Inside of

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liars and the power of moral courage. That’s all the way at the end of

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this book. From the three books we’ve already covered this quarter. So

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we’ve looked at the Third man, we looked at east of Eden

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and Invitation to a Beheading. You should go back and listen to those

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episodes. And we are going to glean what we can from

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this book today. Notes from

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Underground by Fyodor

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Dostoyevsky Leaders

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I’m beginning to believe that the problem isn’t that all marketers

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are liars and that we are all marketers. Now I’m

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beginning to believe the problem is that we can’t or

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won’t find our way back to telling the truth.

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And today on our show we have a new

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guest co host. This is her very first

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episode. I want to welcome to the show

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Hannah Cabela Gala.

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Ahana tabella gala. Dr. Hana Cabela gala

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is a certified Executive coach and the creator of Rapid

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Transformational Neurocoaching. For more than a decade, she has helped high

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achieving professionals, especially tech leaders, entrepreneurs, particularly

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men in their 30s to their 50s, recover their identity and break through the

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patterns that keep them stuck. As a professor of

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business management at South Seattle College in the

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great state of Washington, she also

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shapes the next generation of professionals and entrepreneurs through courses in service

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operations, ethics and talent management, bringing the same

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blend of practical business experience and rigorous insight into both the

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classroom and the coaching room. Welcome to

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our show, Hana. How are you

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doing today? Thank you so much for having me. As you

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know, I love the concept of your podcast, so this

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is a super exciting time for me and thank you

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for having me. Absolutely. So I had a long intro there.

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I typically have a long intro. I do a lot of yammering to kind of

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set all this up. It’s just, it’s my want.

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I want to start off with, as I always do with talking a little bit

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about the author of our book. We have covered Crime

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and Punishment, but only like the first four chapters and we did that with Dave

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Bomb Rucker. Gosh. Now about a two years ago now

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we got to go back and re pick up Crime and Punishment Notes

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from Underground is significantly shorter, significantly shorter than Crime and

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Punishment or Brothers Karamazov. And I’m probably

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mispronouncing that so you can correct all of my pronunciations, if you would like.

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But Notes for Underground is a unique

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book by Dostoevsky. But let’s jump in a little bit into

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who he was.

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I know that you really like this book. You really enjoy Dostoevsky’s

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writing. What is it that jumps out to you about

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his life and talk a little bit about what you know about him because you.

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You hail from the part of the world that he wrote from. So. Yeah,

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yeah. So I. I was born and

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raised in the Communist Czechoslovakia, and

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there we actually had mandatory Russian

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from fourth grade. Everybody and

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I grew up literally surrounded by the Russian

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greats. It’s a privilege

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in a way, looking back. But my mother was a.

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She taught Russian and literature and

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history of art. And so the bookshelves in our

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living room were lined with the grades. Tolstoy,

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Dostoevsky, Chekhov, the lot.

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And I loved War and Peace and

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Tolstoy growing up. And I always

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shy away from Dostoevsky because he

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seemed so morose and

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sad and, you know, he is. That

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just. He is. But I was thinking about

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the. The difference between,

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say, War and Peace. And look, this is not

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a book from, like, for everybody. But I

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loved it because I’m the.

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The person who will just revel

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in these huge tableaus and the

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depictions of, you know, 45,000 characters

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and the Russian and French

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intertwining and all of that. It’s so epic. Right?

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But I thought, you know, when I discovered

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Dostoevsky, I thought

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the magnitude and the sort of the epic

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scale is there as well, but he

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turns it inwards. So to me,

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Dostoevsky is so profound

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because he has this ability to look inside

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one’s soul and really get into

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those ugly corners we don’t want other people to

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see and discover. And he has this

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laser sharp ability to just go in there and

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just keep pushing. And I will

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say, Brother Karamazov are or is

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my probably top three of all the books

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I’ve ever read in my life. And

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about the. You said something about Dostoevsky. I

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actually wrote about him

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writing Brothers Karamazov. Somebody can find it on my

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substack somewhere. But

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he reminds me a little bit of David

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Foster Wallace like this, you know, like, I

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see his writing. If I was to describe to another

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person what Brother Karamazov or

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Crime and Punishment is, to me,

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it would be. This is like David Foster Wallace in the

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19th century. Wow. Okay, I.

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I had never thought of. Well, no, but like, this is why I love

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inviting on folks coming from different

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nationalities, different ethnicities. Different, whatever, different

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regions. Because as an American, I can only

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look at the context of the books that we cover on this show

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through the, the lens, through the window of my American ness

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right now. That, of course, is going to break down into different structures

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in the United States, which is just sort of how it, how it, how it

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happens. And we’ve had tons of those kinds of conversations on this show.

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But we are, when we read books like

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Notes from Underground or we were going to tackle Brothers

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Karmazov last year, and I just, I looked at it and

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I was like, oh, this is 800 pages.

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And I put it down and I’m a, I’m a, I’m a, I’m a big

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boy. Like, I’ll get in there, I’ll wrestle with, with a text. I just, I

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didn’t have the will at that point to be able to go in there

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and really do that, really do that work fair.

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And so. And I appreciate the fact that, like, you’re, you’re a big fan, which

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means that might be your second book that you might come on for, because I

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might need a hand holding through the brother’s garments off.

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But, but Dostoyevsky is a writer for

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me because again, I’m coming at this through an American

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lens. And yes, you know, I’ve talked about this on the

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show. I’m, you know, I’m a Christian. You know, I was, you know, raised,

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embedded in sort of that, that. Not sort of in that environment,

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also being African American layers on top of that. And then there’s class

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structures that layer on top of that. So I bring all of that to the

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text right now. That doesn’t mean that

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I allow that or I try to allow that to

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disengage Dostoyevsky from the text, which is what a lot of deconstructionists will do.

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I reject all of that. The text has to stand on its own. It has

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to stand as it is. And then I have to look at it and go,

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okay, how do I bring this into, into the framework that I’m in?

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And so when I look at Dostoevsky, to

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your point, I see a. I do. I see a deeply pessimistic

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guy about human nature. I

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see a person who is struggling with their orthodox Christianity and trying to make

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that fit with what they see happening around them.

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But I also see a person who is really into. And I

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wrote something on my substack about this that you commented on. And by the way,

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if you have an opportunity, go look at Honda’s substack. It’s Great. It’s Tough Cookies.

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Fabulous name. Go, go check it out. We’ll have a link

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to it in the, in the, in the show notes. Go, go, go get it.

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It’s a nice plug. I’ll take it. Yeah, go subscribe.

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But I had written, you know, he, he also

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struggled with, with, with gambling and

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with playing poker and with the thrill of. And I, I

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understand. It’s. It’s the thrill of that.

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It’s a thrill of the chase. It’s the thrill of the getting. And, you know,

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it wasn’t until, you know, his wife kind of got a hold of him

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and even then, I don’t even think. I don’t know, she fell in love with

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his words. And I wonder about. I wonder if she really ever got a hold

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of the man or if it was just constant because men and women don’t change

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across culture. I wonder if it was just constant, just like, just like whipping

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him to keep him out of the gambling dens.

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Is this a question? Because. Yeah, this is. Yeah, this is a question.

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Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, you probably know more about this actually. You probably know more

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about this than I do. So his,

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his first. And the historians out there don’t, you

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know, hold this against me, but I believe that. So his

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first wife passed away kind of young,

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and then he married woman

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who was. And I wrote about this

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because I think that it’s just so.

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How, how shall I describe this? It’s such a great example

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of essentially technology allowing you

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to be productive. Bear with

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me where I’m going with this. When I read Brothers

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Karamazov and I had this, like, I’m so into this

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text, it just pulled me in. And yes, you’re

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correct. I think the audiobook is like 45 hours.

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And the, the, the book itself again, is like this big.

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And the. I had

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this feeling of, you know, when I think of

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David Foster Wallace, who I actually really, really like. He’s

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my, one of my most favorite American writers.

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But I always had this image of him sitting at the keyboard and

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just like typing in this

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headed trance. And, you

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know, he was not. He was an addict,

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kinda like he, he was playing with different

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drugs and, And I think that it kind of

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helped his writing, at least the productivity part.

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The genius was there always, but the delivery was

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definitely helped. And I thought, so how did

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Dostoevsky. Right. Brothers Karamazov. Because,

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like, with a pen, with a quill. What was happening?

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Like, how do you, how do you produce? I mean, I’m always. This

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is my toxic trait I’m always looking at, like, how was it

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literally delivered? Like, tell me the execution bit. How does

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this mechanically work? And

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so the story is that he was under a

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deadline, as he was always. Because he was always out of

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money or in debt, and the

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00:18:15,330 –> 00:18:19,090
creditors were onto him and he had to deliver like

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a book, short book, I think it was the

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Gambler, actually. And he found

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a. By recommendation, a young woman who was.

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She was studying and she was top of her class in

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stenography. And so he hired her

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and she would come in and. And take whatever he

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was dictating and do the

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shorthand, and then transcribed it

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on a typewriter, I think. Was it a

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typewriter? No, it was also by hand, but longhand, that’s what it was.

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There were no typewriters because I looked into it and wrote about it.

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Because eventually through the words and through the work,

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she transcribing his dictation,

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they fell in love. And she did

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00:19:13,810 –> 00:19:17,530
have a huge impact on his life in a sense that he

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00:19:17,530 –> 00:19:21,250
got way better. I can’t imagine living with

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some like a genius like this. And constantly,

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when he did publish something and he got money

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00:19:28,770 –> 00:19:32,530
or advances theory is, you know,

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00:19:33,770 –> 00:19:37,610
relatives would show up and ask for money. He was never able

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to say no. So they were constantly

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00:19:41,050 –> 00:19:44,850
struggling materially. But I think that she brought a

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lot of peace and

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00:19:48,010 –> 00:19:51,370
structure to his life and made him

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00:19:51,610 –> 00:19:55,450
better. And I think they had like three kids, two

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00:19:55,450 –> 00:19:59,010
survived. And I think, you know,

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this whole. Behind every great man there’s a woman.

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I. I kept thinking about that when. When I was looking into

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this particular story. Well, and I think.

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So Stephen King has a great book called On Writing, Right.

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And probably other than Ernest

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Hemingway’s Collected Quotes, you know, about writing that people have

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00:20:22,980 –> 00:20:26,100
sort of collected from things, interviews and things that he wrote over the course of

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00:20:26,100 –> 00:20:29,860
his life on writing by Stephen King is probably. And myself and other

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00:20:29,860 –> 00:20:33,630
guests have talked about this before for probably the best. This is how

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00:20:33,630 –> 00:20:37,270
the sausage is made book on writing ever published by a

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00:20:37,270 –> 00:20:39,870
major author. Right. And

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I do believe fundamentally that writers

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00:20:46,590 –> 00:20:48,990
really break into a bunch of different

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00:20:49,950 –> 00:20:53,230
categories, Right. So you have writers like Charles

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00:20:53,230 –> 00:20:56,030
Portis, who wrote True Grit. He

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literally lived in a cabin in Arkansas. After he published True Grit,

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he went off, he became a journalist for a little while in London and then

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he went into a cabin in Arkansas, wrote True Grit and then, well, actually wrote

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00:21:08,280 –> 00:21:10,160
a couple of other books and then wrote True Grit like it was his third

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00:21:10,160 –> 00:21:13,800
book, if I remember correctly, Charles Force’s third book. And that became a huge hit.

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And he Stayed in his cabin in Arkansas for the rest of his life, which

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00:21:18,160 –> 00:21:21,160
is amazing to me. That’s the ultimate sort of

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00:21:21,320 –> 00:21:25,160
writer’s revenge, like a comedian’s revenge, where they show

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00:21:25,160 –> 00:21:28,730
up to your house and heckle, you know, or they show up to your job

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and heckle you.

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Jerry Seinfeld tells that joke all the time. And it’s a great joke. I mean,

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because it’s. It’s spectacular. I don’t show up to your job and, heck, will you.

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I’m working here. Like, what are we doing?

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But writers tend to fall into. Or at least they tend to be

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framed. And Stephen King talks about this in terms of. To your point about

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addiction. The addiction is the thing that drives them. Like David Foster Wallace or

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Dostoyevsky, whatever the addiction is. The addiction is the thing where the genius has

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to. Has to live. Or writers are. And he talks about this again

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in On Writing. Writers are considered to be just typists, right?

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So, for instance,

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00:22:07,430 –> 00:22:11,030
it’s either Ray Bradbury or Isaac Asimov. I think it’s Ray Bradbury,

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actually, who wrote. No,

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00:22:14,830 –> 00:22:18,390
it was Isaac Asimov wrote a ton of books. A

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00:22:18,390 –> 00:22:20,960
ton of writing came out of Isaac Asimov.

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00:22:22,470 –> 00:22:26,190
And yet only a few of those things were hits because he just. Every

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day, just typed for four hours. And he would describe himself

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as a typist because it was the discipline. And he would type it whether

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00:22:33,790 –> 00:22:37,189
it was good. He’d type it whether it was bad. Sometimes you’re going to get

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a hit, sometimes you’re not. You do it for four hours

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00:22:40,790 –> 00:22:44,590
and you go home, right? And then, of course, you have the earliest Hemingway

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00:22:44,590 –> 00:22:47,670
types, where the weird sort of hybrid of both of those, where they have the

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discipline, but they also have the addictions that drive them in certain

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ways. When I look at Dostoevsky, I say all that to say this. When

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00:22:55,100 –> 00:22:58,900
I look at Dostoevsky’s life and when I look at how he. How he

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00:23:00,180 –> 00:23:03,940
produced his product, right? How he produced

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00:23:03,940 –> 00:23:06,660
his ideas, I often think of.

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00:23:09,380 –> 00:23:12,340
I wonder how much more productive he would have been

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00:23:13,220 –> 00:23:16,510
if he had had a typewriter. Like, would he have been the

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00:23:16,510 –> 00:23:20,150
obsessive that sat at the typewriter? Or would he

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00:23:20,150 –> 00:23:23,910
still have been. We still have been chasing the gambling bug. Like,

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00:23:23,910 –> 00:23:26,510
would that still have been a thing for him? And so

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I see something like Notes are Underground, which I’ll talk directly about the book here

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now, but I see something like Notes from Underground is sort of his first attempt

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to sort of wrangle his obsessions together and put them into one

376
00:23:37,070 –> 00:23:40,590
spot. That way he could do a Bunch of other different things later on.

377
00:23:42,390 –> 00:23:46,230
You know, maybe here is a good point

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00:23:46,470 –> 00:23:50,190
to say that if I have never read

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00:23:50,190 –> 00:23:53,110
Dostoevsky, I would

380
00:23:53,990 –> 00:23:57,630
not recommend reading Notes from the Underground as your first

381
00:23:57,630 –> 00:24:01,350
foray into Dostoevsky. And here’s why.

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00:24:01,830 –> 00:24:05,590
So it’s enticing because unlike all

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00:24:05,590 –> 00:24:09,440
the other, you know, beasts of a book,

384
00:24:10,000 –> 00:24:12,960
this is what, 300 pages less.

385
00:24:14,480 –> 00:24:18,000
And so it’s like, oh, I can feel

386
00:24:18,000 –> 00:24:21,720
smart, see what Dostoevsky is about, and

387
00:24:21,720 –> 00:24:25,240
I can read this slim book. And let me tell you,

388
00:24:25,240 –> 00:24:28,720
don’t. If this is your first attempt, I would

389
00:24:28,800 –> 00:24:32,570
discourage people from doing it because it

390
00:24:32,570 –> 00:24:36,090
is so bleak. It’s

391
00:24:36,170 –> 00:24:39,690
so bleak. It’s. I think that the structure

392
00:24:39,690 –> 00:24:43,490
is a bit of a challenge because the book is divided into two

393
00:24:43,490 –> 00:24:47,290
parts and the chronologically

394
00:24:47,930 –> 00:24:51,050
earlier part follows the later part.

395
00:24:51,770 –> 00:24:54,890
So you have to pay attention. But also

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00:24:56,650 –> 00:25:00,260
it really is. He is at his

397
00:25:00,260 –> 00:25:03,060
best describing the.

398
00:25:04,340 –> 00:25:08,140
The bad in humans. And I would maybe push back a

399
00:25:08,140 –> 00:25:11,900
little bit on the sort of the

400
00:25:11,900 –> 00:25:15,500
struggle with. With faith. And I think that you

401
00:25:15,500 –> 00:25:18,660
mentioned at the beginning, I think

402
00:25:19,140 –> 00:25:22,180
that, yes, his time,

403
00:25:22,820 –> 00:25:26,040
he was writing at this extremely

404
00:25:26,920 –> 00:25:30,120
violent, as in volatile time.

405
00:25:30,600 –> 00:25:33,960
You had the sort of social

406
00:25:34,840 –> 00:25:38,200
upheaval in Europe. You had the

407
00:25:38,520 –> 00:25:41,560
sort of. The changes with the

408
00:25:41,880 –> 00:25:45,640
serfdom and all the legal and

409
00:25:45,640 –> 00:25:49,440
practical consequences of changes

410
00:25:49,440 –> 00:25:53,190
in the tsarist Russia that he was living through.

411
00:25:53,750 –> 00:25:57,510
So he was noticing all of that. And he lived in Russia,

412
00:25:57,830 –> 00:26:01,550
but he also traveled to Europe. Right. His gambling took

413
00:26:01,550 –> 00:26:05,190
him to like Baden Baden and all these fancy

414
00:26:05,190 –> 00:26:08,870
casinos of the. Of the time. And so

415
00:26:08,950 –> 00:26:12,670
there’s this tension that is really

416
00:26:12,670 –> 00:26:15,110
present in his writing. And

417
00:26:16,710 –> 00:26:20,220
back to the. Back to the Notes from the

418
00:26:20,220 –> 00:26:23,700
Underground, I think that he is.

419
00:26:24,980 –> 00:26:28,740
The main character is awful.

420
00:26:29,300 –> 00:26:32,980
The main character is a bad guy. Now, you quoted

421
00:26:33,300 –> 00:26:36,980
different translation. Mine opens with

422
00:26:36,980 –> 00:26:40,420
I am a wicked man. And I mean, it

423
00:26:40,420 –> 00:26:43,460
starts with, I’m a bad.

424
00:26:45,250 –> 00:26:49,090
I’m a sick man, I’m a wicked man and an

425
00:26:49,090 –> 00:26:51,570
attractive man, et cetera, et cetera. And

426
00:26:53,490 –> 00:26:56,610
I think that the power of that book is in

427
00:26:57,570 –> 00:27:00,770
a lot of lessons, which I’m happy to

428
00:27:01,170 –> 00:27:05,010
dive into. But I think that it

429
00:27:05,010 –> 00:27:08,690
is also really hard to read

430
00:27:08,690 –> 00:27:12,100
a book where the main character or the

431
00:27:12,100 –> 00:27:15,820
hero is really the anti hero. So, like,

432
00:27:16,940 –> 00:27:20,540
I thought about this because as much as I love

433
00:27:20,540 –> 00:27:24,380
Dostoevsky, reading this book is a challenge. It’s, you know,

434
00:27:24,620 –> 00:27:28,300
and I don’t. And it reminded

435
00:27:28,300 –> 00:27:32,100
me of. I like movies and I’m

436
00:27:32,100 –> 00:27:35,790
a huge cinephile, yet there

437
00:27:35,790 –> 00:27:38,950
are stories that are really hard for me to get into

438
00:27:40,070 –> 00:27:43,670
because like all the mob, you Know, like,

439
00:27:44,070 –> 00:27:47,830
say what you want about Sopranos and this

440
00:27:48,070 –> 00:27:51,590
particular genre. I have such a hard

441
00:27:51,590 –> 00:27:54,830
time rooting for a

442
00:27:54,830 –> 00:27:58,310
murderer or a gangster. Like, it’s really hard for me.

443
00:27:58,950 –> 00:28:02,470
So. And. But there’s always a redemption.

444
00:28:02,750 –> 00:28:06,550
There’s always this humanity you

445
00:28:06,550 –> 00:28:10,350
can relate to. And I think in this book there is a

446
00:28:10,350 –> 00:28:14,030
recognition. I think it resonates with us because

447
00:28:14,030 –> 00:28:17,870
we can sometimes recognize some of the toxic traits,

448
00:28:19,790 –> 00:28:23,470
but there’s also no redemption. And I think that’s

449
00:28:24,270 –> 00:28:27,870
where it hits so hard. Yes, I would

450
00:28:27,870 –> 00:28:31,720
absolutely. So I would absolutely agree with that. We’ll get. We’ll

451
00:28:31,720 –> 00:28:32,760
get back to the book in a second.

452
00:28:36,760 –> 00:28:40,280
I. I absolutely agree with you. And I’m also a huge cinephile,

453
00:28:40,440 –> 00:28:44,280
so maybe we’ll. We’ll talk later about what are your top

454
00:28:44,280 –> 00:28:47,400
five directors of all time. If.

455
00:28:48,840 –> 00:28:51,000
Well, if Christopher Nolan isn’t on that list, I don’t know if we could be

456
00:28:51,000 –> 00:28:54,520
friends. I don’t know. I don’t know if you can come back. No, it’s fine.

457
00:28:54,760 –> 00:28:58,440
No, no, he absolutely is. I’m sure it’s fine. I know. No,

458
00:28:58,780 –> 00:29:02,540
um, but. But I think so. You’re

459
00:29:02,540 –> 00:29:05,460
right. There’s the arc of this book. If you’re. If you’re going to read this

460
00:29:05,460 –> 00:29:08,900
book, I. I agree with Hannah. If you’re going to read this book as a

461
00:29:08,900 –> 00:29:11,660
leader and you’re going to look for leadership lessons in this book,

462
00:29:13,020 –> 00:29:16,860
this is one of the harder books that we’ve. We’ve. We’ve addressed on this show.

463
00:29:16,860 –> 00:29:20,460
I would put it up there with Lolita

464
00:29:20,460 –> 00:29:23,660
by Vladimir Nabokov, a book that made me incredibly

465
00:29:23,660 –> 00:29:27,140
uncomfortable. A whole variety of reasons. I’ve talked about that before on this show.

466
00:29:27,540 –> 00:29:30,900
Go back and listen to that episode. We did that episode with Claire Chandler.

467
00:29:31,540 –> 00:29:34,340
I would also put this book on par with

468
00:29:35,700 –> 00:29:39,300
Adolf Eichman and the Hannah

469
00:29:39,300 –> 00:29:42,180
Arendt. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem,

470
00:29:42,820 –> 00:29:46,340
Another book that on the surface looks

471
00:29:46,660 –> 00:29:49,860
easy to get into. Or there. Right. Yeah,

472
00:29:50,100 –> 00:29:53,830
yeah. But. But reveals so many other

473
00:29:53,830 –> 00:29:57,670
things underneath, as Hannah Aaron is kind of going through this process of

474
00:29:57,670 –> 00:30:01,190
watching this trial and trying to figure out what.

475
00:30:02,070 –> 00:30:05,550
Well, what. What secular morality actually means when it’s

476
00:30:05,550 –> 00:30:09,230
unhooked fully from. From religion. And then the other

477
00:30:09,230 –> 00:30:11,910
book that I would put it on par with that we’ve covered on this show

478
00:30:12,310 –> 00:30:14,870
is. Is

479
00:30:16,230 –> 00:30:20,040
the Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havell. Another

480
00:30:20,040 –> 00:30:22,200
book, small. Right.

481
00:30:23,720 –> 00:30:26,520
And yes, I do see. I do see. You’ve got the biography of Hovel behind

482
00:30:26,520 –> 00:30:29,720
you. Yeah, yeah. Fascinating guy. But.

483
00:30:30,120 –> 00:30:32,600
But I worked for him. Oh, really?

484
00:30:35,080 –> 00:30:38,640
Okay, I’m sorry. Peeling away layers of the onions. No, it’s fine.

485
00:30:38,640 –> 00:30:42,240
Peeling away layers of the onion. No, this is good. Okay, I’m gonna take

486
00:30:42,240 –> 00:30:44,520
a. I can’t just let that go. How?

487
00:30:46,800 –> 00:30:49,280
I was like, this is, like finding out that you worked for, like, one of

488
00:30:49,280 –> 00:30:53,120
the. One of the disciples or whatever. Oh, yeah, I dictated. I dictated Peter’s

489
00:30:53,120 –> 00:30:56,320
Gospel. Oh, really? You might want to have dropped that earlier.

490
00:30:58,240 –> 00:31:01,960
I was the first intern there they

491
00:31:01,960 –> 00:31:05,520
ever had at the Prague Castle, which is where the president’s office

492
00:31:06,320 –> 00:31:10,160
is located. And I was studying political science

493
00:31:10,160 –> 00:31:12,990
at Charles University, and

494
00:31:13,790 –> 00:31:17,590
my aunt actually was like, why don’t you go? Because we

495
00:31:17,590 –> 00:31:20,190
were so high on the

496
00:31:20,590 –> 00:31:24,310
revolutionary spirit after the Berlin Wall fell. And, you

497
00:31:24,310 –> 00:31:28,029
know, we. We all kind of lived through it, and it was such

498
00:31:28,029 –> 00:31:31,830
an amazing experience. And I happened to be

499
00:31:31,830 –> 00:31:35,390
in Prague, and. And, you know, Havel was such

500
00:31:35,390 –> 00:31:39,040
a. An icon for. For us,

501
00:31:39,200 –> 00:31:42,800
and the fact that he was a playwright made a

502
00:31:42,800 –> 00:31:46,640
huge difference, and for

503
00:31:46,640 –> 00:31:50,080
a lot of people, me particularly. And so I just

504
00:31:50,240 –> 00:31:54,000
went in and I was like, I want to be an

505
00:31:54,000 –> 00:31:57,560
intern here. And they looked at me and they were like, we don’t know what

506
00:31:57,560 –> 00:32:01,080
an intern mean. What does that mean? And I said, I will do

507
00:32:01,080 –> 00:32:04,600
anything. I will stand by the copy machine, the

508
00:32:04,600 –> 00:32:08,400
Xerox machine. I will do whatever you need,

509
00:32:08,640 –> 00:32:11,980
and you don’t have to pay me. And they were like, okay, great. So I.

510
00:32:13,580 –> 00:32:15,980
That’s the part they heard was the I don’t have to pay you part. That’s

511
00:32:15,980 –> 00:32:19,540
the part. And. But, yeah, I ended up in the

512
00:32:19,540 –> 00:32:22,780
press office and worked there for a couple years, and it was

513
00:32:22,860 –> 00:32:26,620
absolutely amazing. And I have met a lot of very

514
00:32:26,620 –> 00:32:30,380
important people, and I have tons of lessons from that time,

515
00:32:30,380 –> 00:32:33,260
one of them being, we’re all people.

516
00:32:35,590 –> 00:32:39,390
And I think that. To take it back to the book we’re

517
00:32:39,390 –> 00:32:42,630
discussing, I think that’s what’s really hard, because

518
00:32:44,230 –> 00:32:47,990
similar to. I’m so glad that you brought up Hannah Arendt, because

519
00:32:48,870 –> 00:32:51,990
she struggles with that. You know, like, there’s. There’s this.

520
00:32:52,630 –> 00:32:56,470
We’re all children of God. We’re all.

521
00:32:57,350 –> 00:33:01,030
There is this knowledge for most of us that

522
00:33:01,290 –> 00:33:04,970
were part of the whole. There is

523
00:33:06,810 –> 00:33:10,650
shared consciousness. You are a bit of

524
00:33:10,650 –> 00:33:14,050
a villain, and you are a bit of a good person depending on your

525
00:33:14,050 –> 00:33:17,529
circumstances. There’s so much

526
00:33:17,530 –> 00:33:21,210
into this, about this sense of

527
00:33:21,210 –> 00:33:24,410
wanting to belong to humanity. And

528
00:33:25,770 –> 00:33:29,560
when you read about people like Eichmann or

529
00:33:29,800 –> 00:33:33,000
when you read the Notes from the Underground, you go,

530
00:33:33,800 –> 00:33:37,600
really? I’m part of that. That’s awful. I hate

531
00:33:37,600 –> 00:33:41,440
it. And, and there are moments when you go, oh, yeah, I have done

532
00:33:41,440 –> 00:33:45,200
that. That’s not comfortable at all. Well, and it gets

533
00:33:45,200 –> 00:33:47,720
to this idea. And I think this is where.

534
00:33:52,280 –> 00:33:55,530
The, the, the Christianity piece has to come back in because

535
00:33:57,210 –> 00:34:01,010
modern, and I can only speak to modern American evangelicalism, which

536
00:34:01,010 –> 00:34:04,810
is what I know modern American evangelicalism has,

537
00:34:05,290 –> 00:34:08,890
for better or worse in, in, in the post war,

538
00:34:09,610 –> 00:34:13,450
and by the way, post World War II, last 80 or

539
00:34:13,530 –> 00:34:17,330
90 years now of that history has fallen into

540
00:34:17,330 –> 00:34:21,090
the trap of just being nice,

541
00:34:21,090 –> 00:34:24,009
being the greatest commandment. If we’re just nice,

542
00:34:25,289 –> 00:34:29,129
then we don’t have to worry about all those other, I’m going

543
00:34:29,129 –> 00:34:32,609
to use an old school word here, sins. We don’t have to worry about all

544
00:34:32,609 –> 00:34:36,449
those other sins. We don’t have to worry about greed or lust

545
00:34:36,449 –> 00:34:39,969
or vanity. We don’t have to worry about pride, which we talk about on this

546
00:34:39,969 –> 00:34:43,609
show. Envy, which is of things, jealousy, which is of

547
00:34:43,609 –> 00:34:47,329
people. We don’t have to worry about any of those things. We don’t

548
00:34:47,329 –> 00:34:50,980
have to, we don’t have to comment culturally on

549
00:34:51,460 –> 00:34:55,260
coveting your neighbor’s wife or your neighbor’s stuff

550
00:34:55,260 –> 00:34:58,500
or your neighbor’s husband. We don’t have to comment on any of that. Just be

551
00:34:58,500 –> 00:35:02,140
nice. And that reduces Christianity

552
00:35:02,140 –> 00:35:05,220
to being a very personal thing without cosmic significance.

553
00:35:07,300 –> 00:35:10,980
And the second that an Eichmann shows up,

554
00:35:12,180 –> 00:35:15,920
just being nice doesn’t work. The second

555
00:35:16,000 –> 00:35:18,720
that the dyspeptic, and I’m being gentle here,

556
00:35:19,600 –> 00:35:21,360
underground man shows up,

557
00:35:23,280 –> 00:35:26,920
that doesn’t work. For dealing with her, for addressing that

558
00:35:26,920 –> 00:35:29,920
sort of person, we’re going to talk a little bit about Plato’s Cave because I

559
00:35:29,920 –> 00:35:33,680
think there’s, there’s a lot of parallels to the allegory of Plato’s cave in here.

560
00:35:34,800 –> 00:35:38,560
When people are happy in the cave, they’re happy looking

561
00:35:38,560 –> 00:35:41,360
at the shadows on the wall and they don’t want to see the real thing,

562
00:35:42,420 –> 00:35:46,220
that happiness in and of itself. And this is a, this

563
00:35:46,220 –> 00:35:49,980
is a philosophical jump here, folks, and I’m going to make that happiness in and

564
00:35:49,980 –> 00:35:53,780
of itself is evil, but we don’t have. It’s lying. It’s lying. We don’t

565
00:35:53,780 –> 00:35:57,459
have language for that when we’ve just decided in, again,

566
00:35:57,459 –> 00:36:01,220
in the United States of America, evangelical context that the

567
00:36:01,220 –> 00:36:04,260
highest sin that we can commit is to not be nice.

568
00:36:05,140 –> 00:36:08,830
Now, that sounds. When I say that, and I recognize that some of my evangelical

569
00:36:08,830 –> 00:36:11,790
listeners will be listening to this and they are going to get off the train

570
00:36:11,790 –> 00:36:15,590
and stop listening and some of my secular folks are going to be

571
00:36:15,590 –> 00:36:19,310
like, yeah, you guys Are. Whatever. No, stop. Because

572
00:36:19,310 –> 00:36:22,670
the secular people fall into the same trap too. You think that the highest thing

573
00:36:22,670 –> 00:36:26,510
is to just be nice. Just be nice and everything will be fine. And

574
00:36:26,510 –> 00:36:30,230
that’s not. That’s not the highest thing. So when evil does show

575
00:36:30,230 –> 00:36:34,040
up, and we talked about this in Eichmann in Jerusalem a little bit,

576
00:36:34,280 –> 00:36:37,400
but we also have talked about this in term. In 1984, we talked about this.

577
00:36:37,400 –> 00:36:40,560
We covered Brave New World. We even talked about this. We talked with the

578
00:36:40,560 –> 00:36:44,320
unreliable narrator in Lolita. When evil does

579
00:36:44,320 –> 00:36:47,760
show up, whether it’s seductive or

580
00:36:47,760 –> 00:36:50,920
deceptive or whatever, you have no.

581
00:36:52,280 –> 00:36:55,760
Heck, we talked about this last episode, an invitation to a beheading about the Nuremberg

582
00:36:55,760 –> 00:36:59,560
Trials. How are you going to judge evil if the only

583
00:36:59,640 –> 00:37:03,480
barometer you have is we have power and we’re

584
00:37:03,480 –> 00:37:07,240
not. And we’re. And we’re not. We have power and we’re nice. So

585
00:37:07,240 –> 00:37:11,040
that makes us better. That’s not enough. That’s thin. And I think

586
00:37:11,040 –> 00:37:14,840
Dostoyevsky saw the thinness of that coming, but he didn’t have

587
00:37:14,840 –> 00:37:18,280
an answer for how to solve that problem. He could just show you the problem.

588
00:37:20,200 –> 00:37:23,720
And so I actually see a great peril

589
00:37:24,280 –> 00:37:27,640
to not. I have two points, not just

590
00:37:27,880 –> 00:37:30,770
to the evangelical

591
00:37:31,250 –> 00:37:34,530
Christianity. I see this.

592
00:37:34,930 –> 00:37:38,650
Let’s be nice. And that overrides everything in every

593
00:37:38,650 –> 00:37:41,090
Single Corporation in 2020

594
00:37:42,530 –> 00:37:46,050
of, you know, like, it’s such a

595
00:37:48,130 –> 00:37:51,890
easy default that

596
00:37:52,130 –> 00:37:55,780
cannot stand because truth requires

597
00:37:55,780 –> 00:37:58,660
courage. They. These two are

598
00:37:59,940 –> 00:38:03,140
inseparable. And the moment you separate them,

599
00:38:04,260 –> 00:38:07,660
you are living a lie. You are the

600
00:38:07,660 –> 00:38:10,180
happy pig, you know, and.

601
00:38:11,300 –> 00:38:14,740
And it’s the sitting in the cave and watching

602
00:38:14,900 –> 00:38:18,620
the shadows. That’s not happiness, because it’s not

603
00:38:18,620 –> 00:38:22,190
truth. And I will say the second point

604
00:38:22,270 –> 00:38:25,950
is to me, because Brothers Karamazov

605
00:38:26,110 –> 00:38:28,510
is Dostoevsky’s last

606
00:38:30,190 –> 00:38:33,390
publication, I think that he

607
00:38:34,670 –> 00:38:38,190
is resolving this.

608
00:38:38,830 –> 00:38:42,190
I think that he leaned into his faith a lot more

609
00:38:42,350 –> 00:38:45,790
towards the end of his life, and he.

610
00:38:48,120 –> 00:38:51,840
He urged people, or at least it seemed to

611
00:38:51,840 –> 00:38:55,160
me through the reading that I,

612
00:38:55,560 –> 00:38:59,000
as. As a Christian, I too saw.

613
00:38:59,160 –> 00:39:02,600
And it doesn’t matter if it’s, you know, Catholic or Orthodox.

614
00:39:03,400 –> 00:39:06,640
The. The Christian spirit is. It

615
00:39:06,640 –> 00:39:10,200
requires you not only to act,

616
00:39:10,280 –> 00:39:13,570
but also there you cannot have a

617
00:39:13,810 –> 00:39:17,410
framework only based on morality that is

618
00:39:17,490 –> 00:39:21,170
civil. You absolutely have to have transcendence.

619
00:39:21,810 –> 00:39:25,330
And I think that is one of his

620
00:39:25,730 –> 00:39:29,490
most powerful messages. At least that’s what I took from

621
00:39:29,490 –> 00:39:32,530
it. Yeah, yeah. Civil morality will always

622
00:39:33,170 –> 00:39:36,850
fail. Eventually it’s going to run up against something it cannot deal

623
00:39:36,850 –> 00:39:39,340
with. And I don’t

624
00:39:40,620 –> 00:39:44,460
for leaders. I’m not Talking about civil morality, I

625
00:39:44,460 –> 00:39:47,900
want to be very clear. I’m not talking about civil morality in terms of

626
00:39:48,620 –> 00:39:51,820
what someone is doing in some governmental office somewhere over there.

627
00:39:52,620 –> 00:39:56,140
I’m talking about civil morality in terms of what you are doing in your organization

628
00:39:56,140 –> 00:39:59,420
right now, even if your organization is five people,

629
00:40:00,220 –> 00:40:03,940
that’s civil morale. You’ve created an environment where that

630
00:40:03,940 –> 00:40:07,780
has to exist. And by the way, most of us aren’t taught that, right? And

631
00:40:07,860 –> 00:40:11,500
so we’re not even trained in how to think that or even think

632
00:40:11,500 –> 00:40:14,100
in those kinds of terms. But because.

633
00:40:17,780 –> 00:40:21,020
Because uncivil and deeply

634
00:40:21,020 –> 00:40:24,700
unserious people are being pressed down upon us all the way

635
00:40:24,700 –> 00:40:28,540
down to the substrate level and their ideas and their posture

636
00:40:28,540 –> 00:40:32,100
and their perspective on the world. And by the way, deeply unserious

637
00:40:32,100 –> 00:40:35,780
people rely on lying to protect them and

638
00:40:35,780 –> 00:40:39,420
allow them to keep being unserious. That’s the state that they have to operate

639
00:40:39,420 –> 00:40:43,220
in when their power is pushed down to

640
00:40:43,220 –> 00:40:46,900
the substrate just because it’s power. Now, we

641
00:40:46,900 –> 00:40:50,260
at the community level, we at the, the level in

642
00:40:50,660 –> 00:40:54,060
Seattle or the level in north central Texas, where I live, right, where I’m recording

643
00:40:54,060 –> 00:40:57,140
this from right now, today, we have to live with that. We have to live

644
00:40:57,140 –> 00:40:59,540
with the outcomes of that. And we have to figure out how to face it,

645
00:41:01,310 –> 00:41:05,030
particularly when it shows up in our schools, it shows up in our churches, it

646
00:41:05,030 –> 00:41:08,830
shows up in a bunch of institutions that we thought were solid but

647
00:41:08,830 –> 00:41:11,150
maybe proved to not be as solid

648
00:41:12,590 –> 00:41:13,790
as we anticipated.

649
00:41:17,070 –> 00:41:20,790
But got something, I think, that will point this

650
00:41:20,790 –> 00:41:24,550
out even further. So I’m going to go back to the book, going to

651
00:41:24,550 –> 00:41:28,350
go back to Notes from Underground. I’m going to pick up

652
00:41:28,510 –> 00:41:32,110
from part one, and it’s going to be

653
00:41:32,190 –> 00:41:35,910
chapter seven. So the way this book is divided up, there’s

654
00:41:35,910 –> 00:41:39,510
multiple chapters in each part, and they

655
00:41:39,510 –> 00:41:43,310
are. They’re short.

656
00:41:43,550 –> 00:41:47,230
Right? And this is what Hannah is saying, and she’s exactly correct. It’s

657
00:41:47,230 –> 00:41:50,670
deceptively short. But the Titan, the writing is incredibly tight,

658
00:41:50,910 –> 00:41:54,290
even for someone like myself who’s like, I’m working my way through Ben Hur and

659
00:41:54,290 –> 00:41:58,130
Les Miserables for the show in June, right? I’m going to.

660
00:41:58,370 –> 00:42:02,210
I’m going to the barricades. Go look at

661
00:42:02,210 –> 00:42:06,050
the French Revolution and go to the barricades. But.

662
00:42:06,210 –> 00:42:09,890
But in looking at this book, it is definitely written.

663
00:42:10,130 –> 00:42:13,570
He definitely thought about every single sentence. And he, and he, he,

664
00:42:13,970 –> 00:42:17,010
he. I could see him sweating through every single sentence.

665
00:42:17,970 –> 00:42:21,610
And so the writing is tight, even though the, the passages or the

666
00:42:21,610 –> 00:42:25,440
chapters are short. So let me pick

667
00:42:25,440 –> 00:42:28,600
up here, like I said in Chapter

668
00:42:28,920 –> 00:42:32,680
seven. I marked this

669
00:42:32,680 –> 00:42:35,800
piece here. He’s.

670
00:42:38,040 –> 00:42:40,520
Well, the underground man is talking about

671
00:42:42,360 –> 00:42:46,080
the laws of nature and man. And this

672
00:42:46,080 –> 00:42:49,570
relates a little bit to what Hannah was saying about corporations.

673
00:42:52,290 –> 00:42:55,850
Then this is what you. This is all what you

674
00:42:55,850 –> 00:42:59,410
say. There we go. New economic relations will be established, already

675
00:42:59,490 –> 00:43:03,010
made and worked out with mathematical exactitude. He’s talking about the

676
00:43:03,010 –> 00:43:05,970
industrialists, by the way, who were beginning to

677
00:43:06,690 –> 00:43:08,850
rule in Europe during his time.

678
00:43:10,370 –> 00:43:14,170
So that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye simply

679
00:43:14,170 –> 00:43:17,810
because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then

680
00:43:17,810 –> 00:43:21,650
the quote unquote palace of Crystal will be built. Then. In fact,

681
00:43:21,650 –> 00:43:25,290
those will be the halcyon days. Of course, there is no guaranteeing, this is my

682
00:43:25,290 –> 00:43:28,770
comment, that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull then.

683
00:43:29,730 –> 00:43:33,330
For what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated,

684
00:43:33,730 –> 00:43:37,250
but on the other hand, everything will be extraordinarily rational?

685
00:43:38,130 –> 00:43:41,770
Of course, boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one

686
00:43:41,770 –> 00:43:45,610
sticking golden pins into people. But all that would not matter. What is bad,

687
00:43:45,690 –> 00:43:49,090
this is my comment again, is that I dare say people will be thankful for

688
00:43:49,090 –> 00:43:52,810
the gold pins then. Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally

689
00:43:52,810 –> 00:43:56,570
stupid. Or rather he is not at all stupid, but he is so ungrateful

690
00:43:56,570 –> 00:44:00,170
that you could not find another like him in all creation. I,

691
00:44:00,170 –> 00:44:03,890
for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all

692
00:44:03,890 –> 00:44:07,450
of a sudden, apropos of nothing in the midst of general

693
00:44:07,530 –> 00:44:10,860
prosperity, a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a

694
00:44:10,860 –> 00:44:14,260
reactionary and ironical countenance were to

695
00:44:14,500 –> 00:44:17,220
arise and put his arms akimbo and say to us all,

696
00:44:18,020 –> 00:44:21,420
I say, gentlemen, hadn’t we better kick over the whole show and scatter

697
00:44:21,420 –> 00:44:25,180
rationalism to the winds simply to send these logarithms to the devil

698
00:44:25,180 –> 00:44:27,940
and to enable us to live once at more,

699
00:44:28,740 –> 00:44:32,460
live once more at our own sweet, foolish will. That

700
00:44:32,460 –> 00:44:36,140
again, would not matter. But what is annoying is that he would be sure to

701
00:44:36,140 –> 00:44:39,720
find followers such as the nature of man. And all that

702
00:44:39,720 –> 00:44:43,160
for the most foolish reason, which one would think was hardly worth

703
00:44:43,160 –> 00:44:46,840
mentioning, that is that man, everywhere and at all times,

704
00:44:47,160 –> 00:44:50,880
whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the

705
00:44:50,880 –> 00:44:54,600
least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose

706
00:44:54,600 –> 00:44:58,400
what is contrary to one’s interests and sometimes one positively ought. That’s

707
00:44:58,400 –> 00:45:02,080
my idea. One’s own free, unfettered choice, one’s own

708
00:45:02,080 –> 00:45:05,720
caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to

709
00:45:05,720 –> 00:45:09,200
frenzy. That is the very most advantageous

710
00:45:09,200 –> 00:45:12,960
advantage which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which

711
00:45:12,960 –> 00:45:16,120
all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms.

712
00:45:17,000 –> 00:45:20,760
And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal,

713
00:45:20,840 –> 00:45:24,680
a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man

714
00:45:24,680 –> 00:45:28,240
must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man

715
00:45:28,240 –> 00:45:32,040
wants is simply independent choice, whatever that

716
00:45:32,040 –> 00:45:35,160
independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice,

717
00:45:35,860 –> 00:45:38,660
of course, the devil only knows

718
00:45:39,460 –> 00:45:41,140
what choice.

719
00:45:51,459 –> 00:45:55,300
I read things like this, and

720
00:45:56,740 –> 00:45:59,540
Hannah, you don’t know this, and I haven’t talked about it on the show in

721
00:45:59,540 –> 00:46:03,390
a long time, but I took a lot of philosophy classes in college, a

722
00:46:03,390 –> 00:46:07,070
lot. Matter of fact, I would have probably run off, become a philosophy major if

723
00:46:07,070 –> 00:46:10,430
my mom hadn’t told me, there’s no money in that. Go do something else.

724
00:46:10,750 –> 00:46:13,230
So I went and became an art student because, of course, that’s better.

725
00:46:16,990 –> 00:46:20,710
But I’m. I’m fascinated by what Dostoyevsky is

726
00:46:20,710 –> 00:46:23,870
doing here, because when you talk about

727
00:46:23,870 –> 00:46:27,670
independence and you talk about choice again, I think about this in an

728
00:46:27,670 –> 00:46:31,140
American context. We’re a weird country because

729
00:46:31,140 –> 00:46:34,900
we’ve staked our existence on

730
00:46:34,900 –> 00:46:38,580
a creed. And yes, the creed is, is

731
00:46:38,660 –> 00:46:42,460
most notably named in the Declaration of Independence. But then the thing that

732
00:46:42,460 –> 00:46:45,660
follows on from the creed, if that’s the vision statement, the

733
00:46:45,660 –> 00:46:49,380
mission is laid out in the Constitution, and the Constitution

734
00:46:49,380 –> 00:46:52,940
is staked on two amendments right at the beginning, right up

735
00:46:52,940 –> 00:46:56,590
front, there’s the First Amendment, which is. You can say

736
00:46:56,590 –> 00:47:00,110
whatever you want to say. Dave Chappelle has this great joke, right? I’m going to

737
00:47:00,110 –> 00:47:02,990
read it. I love that. Oh, my God. Yeah, you can say whatever you want

738
00:47:02,990 –> 00:47:05,710
to say, but here’s the Second Amendment. You’re going to need a gun.

739
00:47:06,750 –> 00:47:10,030
You need to arm yourself, because it,

740
00:47:10,270 –> 00:47:14,030
the Constitution fundamentally understands something that Dostoevsky is

741
00:47:14,030 –> 00:47:17,390
getting to here. You can give human beings independent choice.

742
00:47:18,110 –> 00:47:21,790
You can grant them all kinds of rights that, by the way,

743
00:47:23,040 –> 00:47:26,760
the government isn’t granting them, they come from God, which is a whole other conception

744
00:47:26,760 –> 00:47:30,240
there. But let’s just go with that. You’re granting them the rights

745
00:47:30,960 –> 00:47:34,680
and, and these people, if you give them free and unfettered access to

746
00:47:34,680 –> 00:47:38,480
these rights, they’re going to. They’re going to take

747
00:47:38,480 –> 00:47:42,240
advantage of them. With that being said, there will be consequences

748
00:47:42,240 –> 00:47:45,440
and repercussions. There always are.

749
00:47:46,320 –> 00:47:49,760
And Dostoyevsky gets. And, and, and to your point about the serfs earlier,

750
00:47:49,840 –> 00:47:52,820
he’s positioning this during a time when

751
00:47:54,020 –> 00:47:57,540
Russia is leaving its, for lack of a better term,

752
00:47:57,620 –> 00:48:01,460
slave state. I hate using that term, but it’s one that will resonate

753
00:48:01,460 –> 00:48:05,260
with my, with my Audience here, it’s leaving that state, it’s leaving that and

754
00:48:05,260 –> 00:48:09,060
going into some transitioning into something else that’s not fully

755
00:48:09,060 –> 00:48:12,860
defined. While these tensions from Europe, these

756
00:48:12,860 –> 00:48:15,860
industrialized tensions. And when he talks about, and the reason why I picked that section

757
00:48:16,300 –> 00:48:19,540
is because the way he talks about the industrialists are the exact same way we

758
00:48:19,540 –> 00:48:21,660
talk about the technologists right now.

759
00:48:24,140 –> 00:48:27,820
Yeah, this is true. Go ahead. No, no. So I guess my question here

760
00:48:27,820 –> 00:48:28,140
is.

761
00:48:32,940 –> 00:48:36,420
How do you, how do you

762
00:48:36,420 –> 00:48:40,260
navigate choice as a leader? And

763
00:48:40,260 –> 00:48:43,980
that’s a very deep philosophical question, but how do you navigate choice as a

764
00:48:43,980 –> 00:48:47,650
leader? How do you, how do you take something like notes from underground?

765
00:48:47,730 –> 00:48:51,410
You go, okay, the first part of this, to your point, which is philosophically heavy,

766
00:48:51,810 –> 00:48:55,530
is really focused around this idea of what man is going

767
00:48:55,530 –> 00:48:59,010
to choose to do versus what he’s going to be compelled to do.

768
00:48:59,570 –> 00:49:02,570
And then the second part is about how he lies to himself and compels himself

769
00:49:02,570 –> 00:49:06,210
to do different things. Okay, but let’s just focus on this. How do you,

770
00:49:06,210 –> 00:49:09,810
how do you, how do you navigate this world as a, as a leader or

771
00:49:09,810 –> 00:49:13,060
just as an individual? When the algorithm, not the

772
00:49:13,060 –> 00:49:16,860
logarithm, the algorithm now is designed to

773
00:49:16,860 –> 00:49:20,140
push you to engage in certain behaviors and to

774
00:49:20,140 –> 00:49:23,700
undermine your free will and to under, or at least to give you the idea

775
00:49:23,700 –> 00:49:27,139
that free will is non existent. How do we, how do we navigate this? Because

776
00:49:27,139 –> 00:49:29,300
I think Dostoevsky would look at the environment that we’re in now if we could

777
00:49:29,300 –> 00:49:33,020
transport him from back then to now. I think he would say we’re having

778
00:49:33,020 –> 00:49:36,860
the same problem. It’s just in a box that we carry around

779
00:49:36,860 –> 00:49:40,680
in our pocket. Yeah, the packaging

780
00:49:40,680 –> 00:49:44,160
is different, but the main questions remain very

781
00:49:44,160 –> 00:49:47,760
similar or are identical. I think that

782
00:49:47,920 –> 00:49:51,640
when it’s interesting, you’re phrasing it in terms of

783
00:49:51,640 –> 00:49:55,160
choice, I phrased it almost in terms of free

784
00:49:55,160 –> 00:49:58,320
will. And one of the things that

785
00:49:58,640 –> 00:50:02,320
I’m taking from the book, and I think any leader

786
00:50:02,560 –> 00:50:04,720
can take from the book, is

787
00:50:06,480 –> 00:50:09,840
that self awareness without mastery

788
00:50:10,240 –> 00:50:13,480
is hell self. So the main

789
00:50:13,480 –> 00:50:16,960
character is super self

790
00:50:16,960 –> 00:50:20,520
aware. Dostoevsky lets you

791
00:50:20,520 –> 00:50:24,320
see everything that goes on in his mind. He is

792
00:50:24,400 –> 00:50:28,240
super self aware. The self awareness is totally there.

793
00:50:28,560 –> 00:50:32,280
But because he, there’s a point, I don’t know where it is.

794
00:50:32,280 –> 00:50:36,120
But I think he, like, he’s awful. He knows it. And

795
00:50:36,120 –> 00:50:38,640
he says, I can’t help it.

796
00:50:40,000 –> 00:50:43,680
And it’s like, well, sure you can. Do

797
00:50:43,680 –> 00:50:47,480
you have agency? And that’s where. So to

798
00:50:47,480 –> 00:50:50,640
me it’s self awareness is not enough.

799
00:50:51,520 –> 00:50:54,640
Self awareness without mastery is meaningless.

800
00:50:55,600 –> 00:50:59,410
So we are I think societally at the point where thanks

801
00:50:59,410 –> 00:51:02,490
to immediate access to every little

802
00:51:03,050 –> 00:51:06,890
brain fart by billions of people we’re

803
00:51:06,890 –> 00:51:10,410
very self aware. But the question now what?

804
00:51:11,130 –> 00:51:14,890
That’s still unanswered. So self

805
00:51:14,970 –> 00:51:18,170
awareness without mastery is meaningless.

806
00:51:19,050 –> 00:51:22,850
He has. Back to your question about choices. The

807
00:51:22,850 –> 00:51:25,880
main character, the man in the underground, he

808
00:51:26,360 –> 00:51:30,040
had choices and he often

809
00:51:30,600 –> 00:51:34,120
made choices that were irrational. So

810
00:51:34,600 –> 00:51:38,400
back to the question about the leaders. You will

811
00:51:38,400 –> 00:51:41,400
have people who will do

812
00:51:42,920 –> 00:51:46,440
things that are essentially they will self destruct

813
00:51:47,960 –> 00:51:51,570
just not to give you the win. So I think

814
00:51:51,730 –> 00:51:54,770
that that’s something that like

815
00:51:55,250 –> 00:51:58,610
we have free will but we a

816
00:51:59,010 –> 00:52:02,130
don’t always follow it and act upon it.

817
00:52:02,770 –> 00:52:06,610
Two we. The. The

818
00:52:06,610 –> 00:52:10,210
power of spite is very strong.

819
00:52:11,170 –> 00:52:14,050
So he does so much in the book

820
00:52:15,570 –> 00:52:18,280
out of spite. He’s just

821
00:52:19,240 –> 00:52:22,960
annoyed with himself and he’s annoyed with everybody else and

822
00:52:22,960 –> 00:52:26,120
he knows that he’s going against his own

823
00:52:27,160 –> 00:52:30,840
proclamations and his own if he even has any

824
00:52:32,280 –> 00:52:36,080
moral standards, which he doesn’t. But

825
00:52:36,080 –> 00:52:38,920
he goes even against that

826
00:52:39,800 –> 00:52:42,760
because he’s so. And it’s almost like telling you

827
00:52:43,510 –> 00:52:47,270
I know I could, I’m not going to. He

828
00:52:47,270 –> 00:52:50,950
admits to lacking moral courage in part two. He outright

829
00:52:50,950 –> 00:52:53,670
admits to lacking a moral courage when he goes and sees the

830
00:52:55,030 –> 00:52:58,870
prostitute. The prostitute right after the, the party that by the way,

831
00:52:58,870 –> 00:53:02,230
I have a question about the party which I’ll ask you because again based on,

832
00:53:02,470 –> 00:53:05,990
you know, you know, your knowledge of Russian, there’s some cultural things going on in

833
00:53:05,990 –> 00:53:09,670
there that I could sense that I’m totally, completely missing as an American because to

834
00:53:09,670 –> 00:53:12,310
me that entire sequence seemed ridiculous.

835
00:53:13,190 –> 00:53:16,590
Also as a Gen Xer I’m like, I don’t care about these people. Like why

836
00:53:16,590 –> 00:53:18,590
do I, what do I care if they like me or not? Like I’m just

837
00:53:18,590 –> 00:53:22,230
going to go home. But I get it. It’s a different context. So

838
00:53:22,310 –> 00:53:26,150
I need to kind of understand that before I jump to the prostitute and

839
00:53:26,150 –> 00:53:29,990
the party. I want to close the loop on this idea.

840
00:53:30,310 –> 00:53:33,670
So I love what you said there. Self awareness without mastery as hell, I love

841
00:53:33,670 –> 00:53:36,910
that. That’s, that’s, that’s like clippable. We’re going to put that in. That’s going to

842
00:53:36,910 –> 00:53:39,670
wind up somewhere. The,

843
00:53:41,030 –> 00:53:44,870
the challenge of our. One of

844
00:53:44,870 –> 00:53:48,590
the challenges, one of the many challenges of our time is that we believe we

845
00:53:48,590 –> 00:53:52,390
have mastery. We’re deceived into thinking we have mastery because

846
00:53:52,390 –> 00:53:54,790
we have at our fingertips all this information

847
00:53:56,150 –> 00:53:59,990
but no practical wisdom to apply it.

848
00:54:01,520 –> 00:54:04,880
So the self aware person can be self deceived

849
00:54:05,600 –> 00:54:08,960
by their own self awareness, by Their lack of mastery

850
00:54:09,440 –> 00:54:11,200
and to your point, wind up in hell.

851
00:54:14,800 –> 00:54:15,680
What does the.

852
00:54:18,480 –> 00:54:21,400
How do you separate that out? Because I don’t think people need to know how

853
00:54:21,400 –> 00:54:24,640
to separate that out. I don’t. And I also think,

854
00:54:24,640 –> 00:54:28,490
weirdly enough that people are afraid to separate that out,

855
00:54:28,730 –> 00:54:31,570
because I think they’re afraid. And I think the reason they’re afraid to separate it

856
00:54:31,570 –> 00:54:33,850
out without going all Freudian is that

857
00:54:35,130 –> 00:54:38,490
the separating out process, I think, would

858
00:54:38,490 –> 00:54:42,210
deconstruct them. And they’re not prepared for

859
00:54:42,210 –> 00:54:44,770
where that. They’re not prepared for the cul de sac at the end. Not even

860
00:54:44,770 –> 00:54:48,250
the cul de sac, sorry, the clearing at the end of that path. So

861
00:54:48,250 –> 00:54:51,210
it’s so interesting because I have.

862
00:54:51,850 –> 00:54:55,680
I have personal professional experience with this. I work

863
00:54:55,680 –> 00:54:58,760
with people who. This is very important,

864
00:54:59,320 –> 00:55:01,880
have achieved tremendous success

865
00:55:03,720 –> 00:55:07,560
because. And they’re. They have certain personality,

866
00:55:07,560 –> 00:55:11,240
character beliefs about themselves based

867
00:55:11,240 –> 00:55:14,120
on external validation.

868
00:55:15,160 –> 00:55:18,840
And the main character is all about

869
00:55:18,840 –> 00:55:21,880
external validation. He goes after people who

870
00:55:23,370 –> 00:55:27,090
he despises, but he is so hungry for

871
00:55:27,090 –> 00:55:30,810
their approval throughout the whole book. Right. What

872
00:55:30,810 –> 00:55:34,410
you’re touching upon is so important because I think that he

873
00:55:35,610 –> 00:55:39,010
understands that he is. Modern

874
00:55:39,010 –> 00:55:42,610
psychology would call it disalignment or. I

875
00:55:42,610 –> 00:55:46,090
actually brought this book, so I have it handy.

876
00:55:46,250 –> 00:55:49,940
Martha Beck Talk has a great book called the Way of

877
00:55:49,940 –> 00:55:53,620
Integrity. And she basically describes the like

878
00:55:53,620 –> 00:55:57,420
in the aerospace, a plane being in

879
00:55:57,420 –> 00:56:01,220
integrity means that the sort of. The bolts

880
00:56:01,780 –> 00:56:05,460
have to align right. Perfectly with the.

881
00:56:05,540 –> 00:56:07,460
With the COVID of the. Or the

882
00:56:10,580 –> 00:56:14,230
shell of the aircraft in order to

883
00:56:14,230 –> 00:56:17,910
move properly. Right. Like, the aircraft has to

884
00:56:17,910 –> 00:56:21,310
be in integrity. And in a way,

885
00:56:21,950 –> 00:56:25,710
so do we. We have to figure out who we are

886
00:56:26,270 –> 00:56:28,590
and act in integrity. I think

887
00:56:29,310 –> 00:56:32,510
Shakespeare in Hamlet says, you know,

888
00:56:32,830 –> 00:56:36,630
integrity is being true to yourself and truly true

889
00:56:36,630 –> 00:56:40,200
to the others. Right. So there’s the dual being in

890
00:56:40,200 –> 00:56:43,800
integrity, being truthful. That takes incredible

891
00:56:43,800 –> 00:56:47,160
courage. And the main character in this book,

892
00:56:48,200 –> 00:56:51,840
he’s afraid, as you said, to deconstruct and

893
00:56:51,840 –> 00:56:55,640
then put together to be in alignment. Because he

894
00:56:56,040 –> 00:56:59,480
hates himself. He doesn’t like the person

895
00:56:59,720 –> 00:57:01,640
he thinks he is.

896
00:57:03,560 –> 00:57:07,320
And that makes it really, really hard to move through the

897
00:57:07,320 –> 00:57:10,960
world. Because if you don’t have clarity about yourself,

898
00:57:10,960 –> 00:57:14,600
if you don’t have this understanding of who you are without

899
00:57:14,680 –> 00:57:18,440
the external validation, you

900
00:57:18,440 –> 00:57:21,560
will always chase after what people

901
00:57:22,360 –> 00:57:26,040
tell you you should be. You will always try to sort of fill

902
00:57:26,040 –> 00:57:29,400
out the form that they are giving you, the mold that they’re giving you.

903
00:57:29,880 –> 00:57:33,520
And so, like, my clients are very successful,

904
00:57:34,400 –> 00:57:38,000
you know, accomplished individuals, high achievers.

905
00:57:38,720 –> 00:57:42,000
But at some point, if one of these things goes away,

906
00:57:42,720 –> 00:57:45,680
A bad deal, a marriage crumbles.

907
00:57:47,440 –> 00:57:51,040
You might not get, you know, you might get laid

908
00:57:51,040 –> 00:57:54,800
off. Who are you if you’re not who

909
00:57:54,800 –> 00:57:58,530
you thought you were based on the external validation? And so

910
00:57:58,530 –> 00:58:02,090
these are deeply existential, deeply existential

911
00:58:02,170 –> 00:58:06,010
questions. And I think that back to what you were

912
00:58:06,010 –> 00:58:09,570
saying about him, you know, having the

913
00:58:09,570 –> 00:58:13,410
courage to face who he is, he doesn’t have that courage and

914
00:58:13,410 –> 00:58:16,810
he’s afraid to look because it’s not pretty.

915
00:58:16,970 –> 00:58:20,250
It’s very ugly. Right. What he sees. And there are glimpses.

916
00:58:21,290 –> 00:58:24,970
And if I’m on this track, I will add another book

917
00:58:25,390 –> 00:58:28,910
that I thought I will bring to today, because

918
00:58:30,430 –> 00:58:34,230
your essay that you published on Substack

919
00:58:34,230 –> 00:58:36,910
was in reference to Dostoevsky and

920
00:58:38,190 –> 00:58:41,430
you talked about lying. And I think that there is a

921
00:58:41,430 –> 00:58:45,070
distinction between lying, which is,

922
00:58:45,310 –> 00:58:49,110
I’m a liar and I know that I’m telling a lie. I know

923
00:58:49,110 –> 00:58:52,830
that this cake requires three cups. And I’m going to tell you, you

924
00:58:52,830 –> 00:58:56,310
should use 2 cups of flour so that your cake comes out wrong.

925
00:58:56,390 –> 00:58:58,790
Right. Like I’m lying on purpose.

926
00:59:00,070 –> 00:59:03,790
But there is a wonderful essay by. You’ve

927
00:59:03,790 –> 00:59:07,230
Already Know Where I’m Going with this by Harry Frankfurt on

928
00:59:07,230 –> 00:59:10,870
bullshit. And I think that. And in

929
00:59:10,870 –> 00:59:14,670
his take, bullshitting is, as

930
00:59:14,670 –> 00:59:18,230
a verb, is believing your own lies.

931
00:59:18,990 –> 00:59:22,750
And I think that that’s really interesting and an important

932
00:59:22,990 –> 00:59:26,630
part of the psyche of the

933
00:59:26,630 –> 00:59:30,110
man in the underground, because he so often

934
00:59:31,150 –> 00:59:33,310
wants to believe his own

935
00:59:34,590 –> 00:59:38,310
fables, but he can’t. He knows deep down that

936
00:59:38,310 –> 00:59:42,030
he can’t. So there’s like these ventures into, oh,

937
00:59:42,030 –> 00:59:45,690
okay, I’m going to believe this. And then he

938
00:59:45,690 –> 00:59:49,170
realizes that his actions are actually completely

939
00:59:50,370 –> 00:59:53,970
not in integrity. Right. And that gets

940
00:59:53,970 –> 00:59:57,770
to exactly where. Where I was going in the second part. So part two picks

941
00:59:57,770 –> 01:00:01,490
up with him remembering.

942
01:00:02,210 –> 01:00:05,570
And I’m going to sort of summarize this, but him remembering or him recalling

943
01:00:06,450 –> 01:00:10,210
a series of incidents that occurred to him during a

944
01:00:10,210 –> 01:00:13,070
snowstorm. Interestingly enough, in.

945
01:00:13,710 –> 01:00:16,110
In, I believe he’s in Moscow

946
01:00:17,390 –> 01:00:17,790
and

947
01:00:21,070 –> 01:00:21,870
runs across.

948
01:00:25,790 –> 01:00:29,470
I don’t how to frame this. He runs

949
01:00:29,470 –> 01:00:32,990
across former associates. Let me frame that. Let me frame it that way.

950
01:00:33,390 –> 01:00:36,990
I think they are schoolmates. They’re schoolmates. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

951
01:00:37,230 –> 01:00:40,030
And. And the title, of course, of Part two is

952
01:00:41,450 –> 01:00:43,370
and when I. When I ran across. By the way, when I wrote just a

953
01:00:43,370 –> 01:00:47,130
side note, when I ran across. Apropos of Nothing, I double underlined that because actually

954
01:00:48,170 –> 01:00:51,610
I. I read Woody Allen’s band biography,

955
01:00:52,570 –> 01:00:56,289
autobiography, all 800 pages of it, looking for the things that would have

956
01:00:56,289 –> 01:01:00,130
made people go over. Clem didn’t want to cancel it. And of course

957
01:01:00,130 –> 01:01:03,650
his biography is Apropos of Nothing. That’s the title of it. I was like,

958
01:01:03,650 –> 01:01:07,450
oh, that’s where you got it from. Gotcha. Okay, so the joke

959
01:01:07,450 –> 01:01:10,970
goes deeper there, Woody. But part two in

960
01:01:10,970 –> 01:01:14,410
Notes of Underground is titled Apropos of the Wet Snow.

961
01:01:15,450 –> 01:01:18,570
And it of course opens up with this poem here,

962
01:01:19,530 –> 01:01:23,170
which I’m not going to read. But he starts off

963
01:01:23,170 –> 01:01:26,970
with remembering an incident that occurred

964
01:01:27,130 –> 01:01:30,970
to him when he was only 24. And he says, my life was even then

965
01:01:30,970 –> 01:01:34,450
gloomy, ill regulated and as solitary as that of the

966
01:01:34,450 –> 01:01:38,240
savage. I made friends with no one and positively avoided talking and buried myself

967
01:01:38,240 –> 01:01:41,400
more and more in my hole. At work, in the office. I never looked at

968
01:01:41,400 –> 01:01:45,000
one. And I was perfectly aware that my companions looked upon me not only as

969
01:01:45,000 –> 01:01:48,680
a queer fellow, but even looked upon me. I always fancied this with a sort

970
01:01:48,680 –> 01:01:52,240
of loathing. Right, so he’s got the self loathing, he’s,

971
01:01:52,240 –> 01:01:55,920
he’s again a gentle word, dyspeptic. In his

972
01:01:55,920 –> 01:01:59,680
temperament and his posture, he is not high achieving.

973
01:01:59,760 –> 01:02:03,480
To Hannah’s point, he has not achieved nothing. By the way, the

974
01:02:03,480 –> 01:02:07,200
first part of the book is written as a 40 year old, 40 year

975
01:02:07,200 –> 01:02:10,960
old looking back. And of course he’s still dyspeptic and believing that no one should

976
01:02:10,960 –> 01:02:14,760
live past 40. As a person who’s going to be in my

977
01:02:14,760 –> 01:02:18,600
late 40s, actually not going to be. I’m in my late 40s. I

978
01:02:18,600 –> 01:02:22,360
looked at that and I went, well, okay, sir,

979
01:02:22,360 –> 01:02:26,120
whatever. Okay, as a person over

980
01:02:26,120 –> 01:02:29,570
50, absolutely disagree.

981
01:02:29,810 –> 01:02:33,130
Yeah, like, whatever. I don’t, I don’t have anything for you, sir. I guess. Okay,

982
01:02:33,130 –> 01:02:36,290
that’s fine. This is my whole fine.

983
01:02:36,930 –> 01:02:40,570
But, but the incident that he, that he describes

984
01:02:40,570 –> 01:02:43,890
in getting together with those, with those former classmates, the

985
01:02:43,890 –> 01:02:47,250
desperation that he has in

986
01:02:47,250 –> 01:02:50,690
seeking their external validation, their external approval

987
01:02:52,450 –> 01:02:56,080
drives him to spending money he doesn’t have to

988
01:02:56,160 –> 01:02:59,880
robbing his servant. Well, not robbing, no denying his

989
01:02:59,880 –> 01:03:03,720
servant wages that were rightfully his. Drives

990
01:03:03,720 –> 01:03:07,560
him into this brothel house where he meets this prostitute

991
01:03:07,560 –> 01:03:11,240
who he also proceeds to sort of tear down. Not sort of

992
01:03:11,240 –> 01:03:15,040
to tear down. And there’s

993
01:03:15,040 –> 01:03:18,480
no, there’s no

994
01:03:18,480 –> 01:03:21,920
denouement. Nobody becomes better at the end of this.

995
01:03:22,440 –> 01:03:26,120
There’s no. It’s kind of like the bit from the

996
01:03:26,120 –> 01:03:29,440
movie adaptation with Nicolas Cage where he stands up at the Robert

997
01:03:29,440 –> 01:03:33,080
McKee Screenplay Writing Seminar

998
01:03:34,040 –> 01:03:36,520
and Robert McKee is played by the brilliant Brian Cox

999
01:03:37,960 –> 01:03:40,760
and he says, Nicholas Cage says,

1000
01:03:42,600 –> 01:03:46,120
what is, what, what happens if you’re going to write a story where Nothing happens

1001
01:03:46,440 –> 01:03:50,140
where nobody, nobody changes. Right? Nobody develops,

1002
01:03:50,140 –> 01:03:53,420
nobody grows, nobody, nobody, nobody

1003
01:03:53,420 –> 01:03:56,980
overcomes everything and succeeds in the end.

1004
01:03:57,460 –> 01:04:01,100
Like what happens if you have that story? And of course Bob McKee then

1005
01:04:01,100 –> 01:04:03,900
blows him off the stage and tells him to get the hell out because if

1006
01:04:03,900 –> 01:04:06,580
he has no conflict. Why am I going to watch your. Why am I going

1007
01:04:06,580 –> 01:04:08,980
to waste my time with your movie for two hours? Which is by the way

1008
01:04:09,220 –> 01:04:11,940
that is the correct answer. Why am I going to waste my time with your

1009
01:04:11,940 –> 01:04:15,620
movie for two hours? I don’t know what Bob would have done with Dostoyevsky

1010
01:04:17,100 –> 01:04:19,660
or this but he’s. He. There’s no

1011
01:04:20,140 –> 01:04:22,860
resolution with this. Right.

1012
01:04:24,780 –> 01:04:28,500
And you see a lot of people running around like this. You talk about

1013
01:04:28,500 –> 01:04:32,260
subset. We talked about substack several times. I have a substack. It’s called Crying Voice.

1014
01:04:32,260 –> 01:04:35,140
Crying in the wilderness. Go check it out. Go check out Hana substack. That’s the

1015
01:04:35,140 –> 01:04:38,260
second plug there. We talk a lot about substack. A lot of the writers I

1016
01:04:38,260 –> 01:04:41,580
follow on substack are very. They’re very

1017
01:04:42,890 –> 01:04:46,690
not depressed but they’re very much the 24 year old underground man

1018
01:04:46,690 –> 01:04:50,250
types and they’re just churning out content and much of it’s good analysis.

1019
01:04:50,570 –> 01:04:54,290
But to what end? What’s the denouement here? And I’ve reached a point in time

1020
01:04:54,290 –> 01:04:57,930
in my life where. And I don’t know if you have but I’ve reached a

1021
01:04:57,930 –> 01:05:00,410
point in time in my life and I try to talk to leaders who are

1022
01:05:00,410 –> 01:05:04,130
tired of masticating endlessly over problems and let’s get

1023
01:05:04,130 –> 01:05:07,970
to a solution already or at least a trade off that we

1024
01:05:07,970 –> 01:05:09,210
could then execute on. On.

1025
01:05:11,690 –> 01:05:14,770
He’s not at that stage and I don’t know how you get a person like

1026
01:05:14,770 –> 01:05:18,250
that from from there to here. I don’t even know if you can.

1027
01:05:19,450 –> 01:05:23,290
So I will push back on this in. In a way

1028
01:05:23,770 –> 01:05:25,690
and one is

1029
01:05:27,130 –> 01:05:30,730
absolutely agree let’s be real and give the leaders

1030
01:05:30,970 –> 01:05:34,610
something to go on and. And like take home and I

1031
01:05:34,610 –> 01:05:38,190
agree. So. So we already mentioned some of the things like

1032
01:05:38,190 –> 01:05:41,790
the you know, self awareness is nothing without

1033
01:05:41,790 –> 01:05:45,310
mastery. But also. And that despite is a great

1034
01:05:45,310 –> 01:05:48,830
motivator. But I think that we are circling

1035
01:05:48,910 –> 01:05:52,270
around the truth and how

1036
01:05:52,670 –> 01:05:56,390
it is meaningless without courage. Right. Like

1037
01:05:56,390 –> 01:06:00,030
you have to walk the talk and

1038
01:06:00,430 –> 01:06:03,780
the. The main issue here

1039
01:06:04,260 –> 01:06:07,940
is he is the main character in this book

1040
01:06:08,740 –> 01:06:12,460
is lying to himself and he

1041
01:06:12,460 –> 01:06:15,860
is completely dependent on external validation.

1042
01:06:16,100 –> 01:06:19,940
But I think that there is a development.

1043
01:06:20,820 –> 01:06:24,660
So it’s not a resolution but it is in a

1044
01:06:24,660 –> 01:06:28,200
way. And Dostoevsky really smartly flips

1045
01:06:28,510 –> 01:06:31,950
the timeline. And

1046
01:06:32,510 –> 01:06:36,350
when you meet the man in the underground, he’s a

1047
01:06:36,350 –> 01:06:39,910
miserable, miserable man, wicked man. He’s

1048
01:06:39,910 –> 01:06:43,710
spiteful, he hates himself, he

1049
01:06:43,710 –> 01:06:46,510
hates the world. He has all these ideas

1050
01:06:47,310 –> 01:06:50,590
and there’s this narcissism

1051
01:06:51,150 –> 01:06:54,870
and he kind of revels in his own misery, right?

1052
01:06:56,230 –> 01:06:59,510
But you look at the same person at

1053
01:06:59,510 –> 01:07:03,270
24, and I think that there are two things.

1054
01:07:03,430 –> 01:07:06,470
One, he didn’t have a bad life.

1055
01:07:07,110 –> 01:07:09,910
He was pretty well off with a servant.

1056
01:07:10,870 –> 01:07:13,990
He had a job that was pretty decent.

1057
01:07:15,910 –> 01:07:19,510
He was 24. So, you know, like

1058
01:07:20,190 –> 01:07:23,750
what’s. And he pretty healthy, right? Like, he opens with

1059
01:07:23,750 –> 01:07:26,750
this. He is healthy, he has means.

1060
01:07:27,710 –> 01:07:31,350
And. And yet he’s deeply miserable. And

1061
01:07:31,350 –> 01:07:35,030
I think that because he decides to

1062
01:07:35,030 –> 01:07:38,670
be miserable and just revel in his own misery,

1063
01:07:39,310 –> 01:07:41,230
to me, it was a great

1064
01:07:42,510 –> 01:07:46,250
example of how toxic and terrible

1065
01:07:46,250 –> 01:07:48,970
victimhood is. And he blames

1066
01:07:49,210 –> 01:07:53,050
everybody for where he is and he completely

1067
01:07:53,050 –> 01:07:56,810
lacks agency. So one of the. And

1068
01:07:57,210 –> 01:08:00,650
and because of that, he makes all these bad choices

1069
01:08:01,209 –> 01:08:04,730
and he ends up completely miserable. 40 year old,

1070
01:08:04,970 –> 01:08:08,730
right? So I think that it’s not that it’s a resolution

1071
01:08:09,210 –> 01:08:12,970
or a happy ending, but we see the end. Like,

1072
01:08:12,970 –> 01:08:16,690
you keep going, this is how you’re gonna end up.

1073
01:08:17,330 –> 01:08:21,010
And so to me, if I’m looking at people in

1074
01:08:21,010 –> 01:08:24,530
2026, leaders, you know, people who need to follow

1075
01:08:24,530 –> 01:08:26,850
you, I think one

1076
01:08:27,890 –> 01:08:31,650
message stands up really, or stands out for me.

1077
01:08:31,730 –> 01:08:35,250
And that’s. Truth is like a

1078
01:08:35,250 –> 01:08:38,860
verb, you know, to sound trite, but

1079
01:08:39,100 –> 01:08:42,660
it requires courage and it

1080
01:08:42,660 –> 01:08:45,820
has to be shown.

1081
01:08:46,300 –> 01:08:49,940
People will not trust you because of what you

1082
01:08:49,940 –> 01:08:53,540
say. Because the main character keeps saying all these things. When he

1083
01:08:53,540 –> 01:08:57,340
meets the prostitute Liza, he tells

1084
01:08:57,340 –> 01:09:00,980
her so much and then. And

1085
01:09:00,980 –> 01:09:04,780
tears her down, tells her her life is horrible and how is she

1086
01:09:04,780 –> 01:09:08,619
going to end up and blah, blah, blah. And then she

1087
01:09:08,939 –> 01:09:12,459
takes his word, comes to him for help

1088
01:09:12,699 –> 01:09:16,379
a couple days later, and he completely rejects her. Right?

1089
01:09:16,379 –> 01:09:19,739
Like this is an example of. These are words

1090
01:09:19,979 –> 01:09:23,699
I can keep yapping, but my actions don’t

1091
01:09:23,699 –> 01:09:27,339
follow. So the take for the leaders, to me

1092
01:09:27,899 –> 01:09:31,739
is you cannot rely on these

1093
01:09:32,540 –> 01:09:36,260
platitudes and mission statements that mean absolute

1094
01:09:36,260 –> 01:09:39,420
nothing. You have to tell people what it means.

1095
01:09:40,140 –> 01:09:43,900
And this is something that I’m really passionate about because I’ve met

1096
01:09:43,900 –> 01:09:47,540
a lot of people who, you know, were.

1097
01:09:47,540 –> 01:09:50,860
Are part of these big corporations and you have these

1098
01:09:51,500 –> 01:09:54,540
meaningless, you know, do no harm and

1099
01:09:55,500 –> 01:09:59,160
like, they’re all bullshit, because what does that mean? And

1100
01:09:59,160 –> 01:10:01,960
I actually am a big fan of

1101
01:10:02,920 –> 01:10:06,360
looking at actions and forcing leaders

1102
01:10:06,600 –> 01:10:10,440
to come up with specific actions. You can’t just tell me

1103
01:10:11,400 –> 01:10:15,240
what you want, what is the wish, but also what does

1104
01:10:15,240 –> 01:10:18,600
it look like in reality, right? So if you

1105
01:10:19,400 –> 01:10:23,240
say, I listened

1106
01:10:23,240 –> 01:10:26,960
to Ben Horowitz speaking about. He actually wrote a book

1107
01:10:26,960 –> 01:10:30,550
about this too. But you know that Andersen Horowitz has like

1108
01:10:30,550 –> 01:10:34,190
this list of things they

1109
01:10:34,190 –> 01:10:37,790
want you to do. Like their mission statement for the

1110
01:10:37,790 –> 01:10:41,550
employee. And one of them is you have to respect the founders, right?

1111
01:10:41,950 –> 01:10:45,070
And treat them with respect. But what does that mean?

1112
01:10:45,710 –> 01:10:49,470
And so he would say, Hurwitz was talking about, okay,

1113
01:10:49,790 –> 01:10:53,590
respect means that you’re never late to a meeting. And if you’re late, I’m going

1114
01:10:53,590 –> 01:10:57,210
to fine you like 20 bucks a minute, right? You cannot be

1115
01:10:57,210 –> 01:11:00,650
late. And that to me is very

1116
01:11:00,650 –> 01:11:04,330
meaningful. Not just what, but like how does that

1117
01:11:04,330 –> 01:11:08,090
look like? And so if you’re a leader, you can’t just say,

1118
01:11:08,090 –> 01:11:11,650
follow me because I’m telling the truth. You have to actually

1119
01:11:12,050 –> 01:11:15,690
demonstrate that you do. Because all the people around

1120
01:11:15,690 –> 01:11:19,090
the main character in the Notes from the Underground, they

1121
01:11:19,090 –> 01:11:22,140
sense how awful he is

1122
01:11:22,700 –> 01:11:25,980
because he never does what he says. And so that

1123
01:11:26,780 –> 01:11:30,460
gap is never bridged. He doesn’t bridge it inside

1124
01:11:30,460 –> 01:11:34,220
himself and he never bridges it with other people. And that makes

1125
01:11:34,220 –> 01:11:36,860
him a laughable, despicable character.

1126
01:11:37,580 –> 01:11:41,260
Okay, well, he’s full of, he’s, he’s full of

1127
01:11:41,660 –> 01:11:45,180
self. He’s,

1128
01:11:45,830 –> 01:11:49,270
he’s full of self righteousness, right? Because he.

1129
01:11:53,590 –> 01:11:56,630
In our own time, we have a lot of this, the self righteous.

1130
01:11:59,190 –> 01:12:02,550
Actually I wrote it. I wrote a blog post about this. Yes.

1131
01:12:03,110 –> 01:12:05,110
So we have a,

1132
01:12:06,870 –> 01:12:09,910
a growing problem,

1133
01:12:10,390 –> 01:12:13,760
right? And AI, it’s the first time we’re, we’re,

1134
01:12:14,080 –> 01:12:17,240
we’re about. Yeah, we’re about an hour and 20 minutes into our conversation here. So

1135
01:12:17,240 –> 01:12:19,920
now I’m going to mention AI. It’s a good spot. So

1136
01:12:21,280 –> 01:12:25,120
what AI allows us to do what the LLMs allow us to do

1137
01:12:25,120 –> 01:12:28,880
as mid career, like I’m, I would be considered mid career. Mid career

1138
01:12:28,880 –> 01:12:32,720
to senior leaders, right? What it allows us

1139
01:12:32,720 –> 01:12:35,840
to do is it allows us to

1140
01:12:36,810 –> 01:12:39,930
not have to deal with the self righteous 24 year old

1141
01:12:40,570 –> 01:12:44,170
who just graduated from maybe Seattle

1142
01:12:44,170 –> 01:12:47,810
College, maybe colleges I used to work at, I came out of higher education as

1143
01:12:47,810 –> 01:12:50,410
well, right? Who know everything

1144
01:12:51,610 –> 01:12:55,050
and are obnoxious and can say it louder and louder and louder,

1145
01:12:55,610 –> 01:12:59,410
but actually don’t have any life experience at all to back

1146
01:12:59,410 –> 01:13:02,650
up anything that they’re saying. And normally

1147
01:13:03,360 –> 01:13:06,840
as a mid career senior leader, my task from the

1148
01:13:06,840 –> 01:13:10,400
organization would be to develop those people to do the hard work of

1149
01:13:10,400 –> 01:13:12,480
knocking off all the obnoxious nonsense,

1150
01:13:15,200 –> 01:13:18,720
utilizing the tools of social shaming and embarrassment in their

1151
01:13:18,720 –> 01:13:22,320
appropriate forms to basically mold this person

1152
01:13:22,320 –> 01:13:25,920
into someone who is quite

1153
01:13:25,920 –> 01:13:29,360
frankly able to be managed by other people.

1154
01:13:30,390 –> 01:13:33,390
Um, that’s the job. That’s one of the main jobs of middle management and has

1155
01:13:33,390 –> 01:13:36,190
been the main job of middle management, I would assert, for the last 50 years

1156
01:13:36,190 –> 01:13:39,550
in American culture. The LLMs

1157
01:13:39,550 –> 01:13:42,630
eliminate all of that because for a thousand dollars a month

1158
01:13:43,590 –> 01:13:47,030
I can get an LLM stack that isn’t obnoxious.

1159
01:13:47,430 –> 01:13:50,510
I don’t need to knock anything off of it. I just have to write better

1160
01:13:50,510 –> 01:13:53,430
prompts. That’s all I have to do. I just have to write better prompts.

1161
01:13:54,310 –> 01:13:58,080
So on the one hand, we have the first generation of people

1162
01:13:58,080 –> 01:14:01,080
graduating college this year who

1163
01:14:01,800 –> 01:14:04,040
fully went through college with ChatGPT,

1164
01:14:06,120 –> 01:14:09,000
graduated by the way, which gives them confidence

1165
01:14:09,640 –> 01:14:12,440
to say things that they don’t have any experience about.

1166
01:14:14,040 –> 01:14:17,440
Layered on top of the fact that every obnoxious thought that has come out of

1167
01:14:17,440 –> 01:14:20,360
their head since kindergarten has been supported

1168
01:14:21,400 –> 01:14:24,800
by peers, parents, educational system

1169
01:14:25,440 –> 01:14:28,320
all the way up the ladder. And by the way, we’re in the second generation

1170
01:14:28,320 –> 01:14:31,920
of this now. This is no longer a passing millennial thing.

1171
01:14:32,000 –> 01:14:35,680
The zoomers were all raised in this way. And we’re busy working on the third

1172
01:14:35,680 –> 01:14:39,120
generation right now. Kids. I have a nine year old, so kids who are like

1173
01:14:39,120 –> 01:14:42,840
his age, right, we’re working on third generation of that. I’m watching it. I watch

1174
01:14:42,840 –> 01:14:46,680
it happen at soccer practice, like I coach my kids soccer team. I see it

1175
01:14:46,680 –> 01:14:50,490
how, I see how the kids show up. So it’s, there’s more of it coming

1176
01:14:50,490 –> 01:14:54,210
in, there’s more on the pipe, let’s just put it that way. So

1177
01:14:54,210 –> 01:14:58,010
we have that dynamic, right? And mid career and

1178
01:14:58,170 –> 01:15:02,010
senior professionals are correctly looking at the what’s

1179
01:15:02,010 –> 01:15:03,929
coming down the pipe and going, I don’t have to deal with it for a

1180
01:15:03,929 –> 01:15:06,650
thousand dollars a month. I don’t have to deal with it. It’s cheaper to spend

1181
01:15:06,650 –> 01:15:10,410
the thousand dollars a month now. We’ll be okay as mid career

1182
01:15:10,410 –> 01:15:12,810
and senior professionals for a while.

1183
01:15:15,300 –> 01:15:18,540
But here’s my point. The self righteous

1184
01:15:18,540 –> 01:15:22,220
obnoxious 24 year old in Notes for Underground, the

1185
01:15:22,220 –> 01:15:26,020
underground man who now has access to a cell phone and

1186
01:15:26,020 –> 01:15:29,739
LLMs in our time isn’t going

1187
01:15:29,739 –> 01:15:33,500
to become better in 25 years. They’re just

1188
01:15:33,500 –> 01:15:36,220
going to become more of what they already are and they’re going to become more

1189
01:15:36,220 –> 01:15:39,220
of what they already are without having been developed or

1190
01:15:39,780 –> 01:15:43,060
caught by the mid career and senior professionals. So

1191
01:15:43,700 –> 01:15:46,900
my assertion is, and I’m working on this idea and tell you can tell you

1192
01:15:46,900 –> 01:15:50,020
what you think of this. The mid career and senior professionals like the folks that

1193
01:15:50,020 –> 01:15:53,060
you coach, that you work with. I think the hardest job they have right now

1194
01:15:53,140 –> 01:15:56,900
is not developing the juniors. That’s actually not the

1195
01:15:56,900 –> 01:16:00,420
hardest job. The hardest job is resisting the temptation not

1196
01:16:01,140 –> 01:16:04,740
to develop the juniors because it’s

1197
01:16:04,740 –> 01:16:08,350
just easier to not do is it’s just easier.

1198
01:16:08,830 –> 01:16:12,430
And when you don’t have to put up with any nonsense. Why would I, I

1199
01:16:12,430 –> 01:16:15,310
don’t want, I don’t need to be told that like my language

1200
01:16:15,950 –> 01:16:19,630
isn’t culturally appropriate. Shut up.

1201
01:16:19,630 –> 01:16:23,190
You’re 24. What some tick tock video

1202
01:16:23,190 –> 01:16:26,310
shows you that? I don’t even go to that neighborhood. I don’t know anybody. I

1203
01:16:26,310 –> 01:16:29,510
don’t know her. I don’t live over there and I don’t have to, by the

1204
01:16:29,510 –> 01:16:32,670
way, I don’t have to live over there. But you do have to know,

1205
01:16:35,140 –> 01:16:38,820
you do have to know who Kevin Costner was in Waterworld. And yeah, he’s not

1206
01:16:38,820 –> 01:16:42,020
just a guy in Yellowstone. Like you do have to know. It’s part of your

1207
01:16:42,020 –> 01:16:45,700
cultural legacy. You do have to know what that means. So when you make

1208
01:16:45,700 –> 01:16:49,420
the, when I’m sitting in a marketing meeting and I make the reference

1209
01:16:49,420 –> 01:16:53,140
of we will build it and they will come and somebody goes,

1210
01:16:53,940 –> 01:16:56,500
you have to know what that means. And if you don’t know what that means,

1211
01:16:56,500 –> 01:17:00,300
if you’re like confused and I tell you, go watch a movie, you can’t get

1212
01:17:00,300 –> 01:17:03,260
offended. You don’t have room to get offended because I could replace you with an

1213
01:17:03,260 –> 01:17:06,900
LLM tomorrow. Go hang out with your mom or

1214
01:17:06,900 –> 01:17:09,980
whatever who came in on the interview with you when we still hired you. Like

1215
01:17:09,980 –> 01:17:13,460
go away, go, go away. Just get out, get out.

1216
01:17:13,780 –> 01:17:17,540
It’s still free association. I’m still not required to hire you. The state

1217
01:17:17,540 –> 01:17:20,900
isn’t like holding a gun to my head saying I must hire this 24 year

1218
01:17:20,900 –> 01:17:24,700
old who has this particular worldview. It’s still free association for

1219
01:17:24,700 –> 01:17:28,370
the time being. So get out, go find another job, go work at

1220
01:17:28,370 –> 01:17:32,210
7:11 or something. I don’t know. This is the

1221
01:17:32,210 –> 01:17:36,010
challenge for mid career professionals who I’m speaking for. And I don’t,

1222
01:17:36,010 –> 01:17:38,410
I don’t know if you’re seeing this but I’m working on a, working on a

1223
01:17:38,410 –> 01:17:41,170
thesis and eventually I’ll have a longer substack article about this because I’m working through

1224
01:17:41,170 –> 01:17:44,530
thoughts in my head. Am I seeing this correctly? I guess that’s the question. Am

1225
01:17:44,530 –> 01:17:48,290
I seeing this moat correctly, this growing delta or

1226
01:17:48,290 –> 01:17:51,770
is this something that I’ve overblown. And it’ll all go away tomorrow. Because this is

1227
01:17:51,770 –> 01:17:55,540
just cultural development. No, I think it

1228
01:17:55,540 –> 01:17:59,220
tracks. And the jobs that are disappearing

1229
01:17:59,300 –> 01:18:02,180
first are the entry level

1230
01:18:02,420 –> 01:18:05,740
positions. And that’s because the

1231
01:18:05,740 –> 01:18:09,300
LLMs work, you know, 247 and they are

1232
01:18:10,260 –> 01:18:13,780
infinitely cheaper than the people.

1233
01:18:15,700 –> 01:18:19,380
I think that a huge part of like my students

1234
01:18:19,700 –> 01:18:23,300
are coming through. Generally they would

1235
01:18:23,300 –> 01:18:26,980
have an associate degree from like a technical or

1236
01:18:26,980 –> 01:18:30,620
community college and then they would come back for their bachelor’s, which is the

1237
01:18:30,620 –> 01:18:34,260
management program I teach. But they usually have

1238
01:18:34,980 –> 01:18:38,820
a couple years of experience, then they

1239
01:18:38,820 –> 01:18:41,140
get their bachelor’s and they are

1240
01:18:41,860 –> 01:18:44,980
amazingly humble, which is a rare

1241
01:18:45,140 –> 01:18:47,620
quality in

1242
01:18:48,870 –> 01:18:52,590
their peers or in that generation. And

1243
01:18:52,590 –> 01:18:56,390
so they don’t struggle as much. But I, I

1244
01:18:56,390 –> 01:18:59,990
do see this as a problem. And it’s interesting. You’re talking about

1245
01:18:59,990 –> 01:19:03,710
almost like, you know, we are, we’re almost giving

1246
01:19:03,710 –> 01:19:06,710
up on the

1247
01:19:06,710 –> 01:19:10,070
responsibility to mold the new generation

1248
01:19:10,950 –> 01:19:14,430
because you run a 3

1249
01:19:14,430 –> 01:19:18,230
seconds cost benefit analysis and

1250
01:19:18,230 –> 01:19:21,950
you go, screw that. Nope. Right. Like again,

1251
01:19:22,190 –> 01:19:25,950
why? And the answer is because these people will, you

1252
01:19:25,950 –> 01:19:29,630
know, hopefully still work when, and pay your, your

1253
01:19:30,270 –> 01:19:33,710
retirement, but maybe not. And

1254
01:19:33,950 –> 01:19:36,750
you’re going to threaten me with Social Security? Don’t threaten me with, don’t threaten me,

1255
01:19:36,750 –> 01:19:40,590
Will not. I don’t, I

1256
01:19:40,590 –> 01:19:44,070
don’t need to threaten anybody. Social Security is disappearing in about seven

1257
01:19:44,070 –> 01:19:47,660
minutes. Right? Yeah. So like, what are you really, what are we threatening with?

1258
01:19:48,700 –> 01:19:52,060
But, but I think it’s a. I, I do

1259
01:19:52,780 –> 01:19:55,500
really like the point that you made about

1260
01:19:56,540 –> 01:20:00,300
agency and how it is the responsibility

1261
01:20:00,860 –> 01:20:04,580
of the others to, you know,

1262
01:20:04,580 –> 01:20:08,140
like, this man clearly has nobody. Right. And,

1263
01:20:08,540 –> 01:20:12,170
and by his own choice. But the question

1264
01:20:12,170 –> 01:20:15,730
is, if you’re the leader and you have a bunch of

1265
01:20:15,730 –> 01:20:18,690
younger people on your staff, are you

1266
01:20:19,730 –> 01:20:23,410
taking the time to mentor and build

1267
01:20:23,410 –> 01:20:26,930
that agency and do you have good system

1268
01:20:27,570 –> 01:20:31,410
for that to happen? And, and I think that

1269
01:20:31,650 –> 01:20:35,130
in a way it is a two way street that everybody keeps

1270
01:20:35,130 –> 01:20:38,050
forgetting, which is they need to want

1271
01:20:38,930 –> 01:20:42,570
to get coached. And when that is

1272
01:20:42,570 –> 01:20:46,410
lacking, you’re like, right, I’m sorry,

1273
01:20:46,410 –> 01:20:49,410
why again, why would I put myself in this?

1274
01:20:49,970 –> 01:20:53,330
And, and so it goes back to

1275
01:20:54,210 –> 01:20:57,970
looking for people not based on their skill set, but

1276
01:20:57,970 –> 01:21:00,530
based on their character. And

1277
01:21:01,650 –> 01:21:04,720
the willingness to be coached

1278
01:21:05,200 –> 01:21:08,240
is extremely important.

1279
01:21:08,960 –> 01:21:12,560
And you want people who not only will listen, but

1280
01:21:12,560 –> 01:21:16,080
also then apply. Yeah, yeah,

1281
01:21:16,080 –> 01:21:19,600
yeah. Looking for people based on the, the, the

1282
01:21:21,040 –> 01:21:24,680
way. There’s a way to frame this. You

1283
01:21:24,680 –> 01:21:28,040
know, Martin Luther King Jr. Said content of their character, not the color of their

1284
01:21:28,040 –> 01:21:31,760
skin. Right, okay, well, the, the content of their character,

1285
01:21:32,000 –> 01:21:35,760
not the, the the, not the nature of their

1286
01:21:35,760 –> 01:21:39,600
academic or credentialing. The degrees. The degrees. Yeah. Yeah.

1287
01:21:42,320 –> 01:21:45,119
Okay. So to the 24 year olds that I just like raked over the calls.

1288
01:21:45,119 –> 01:21:48,840
Okay. How it’s

1289
01:21:48,840 –> 01:21:52,600
hard. And I get it. I was 24, you were 24. I get

1290
01:21:52,600 –> 01:21:55,640
it. You’re out there, you’re unproven. You want to make your mark in the world.

1291
01:21:55,640 –> 01:21:59,370
You want to be taken seriously. You,

1292
01:21:59,770 –> 01:22:03,530
you, you do think you’re special and you do

1293
01:22:03,530 –> 01:22:06,610
think that you’re unique and you do think that everything that has ever happened to

1294
01:22:06,610 –> 01:22:09,690
you is the first time that it’s ever happened to any human being in the

1295
01:22:09,690 –> 01:22:13,489
history of the world. And by the way, I say this again just

1296
01:22:13,489 –> 01:22:17,050
to be fully transparent with you. You know, I’ve mentioned this on the show before.

1297
01:22:17,050 –> 01:22:20,010
I got four kids, you know, they’re in age range from like 30 all the

1298
01:22:20,010 –> 01:22:23,290
way down to nine. I have a 21 year old and a 16 year old.

1299
01:22:23,290 –> 01:22:27,000
They’re girls. So I’m dealing with this like I’m in the developmental loop of some

1300
01:22:27,000 –> 01:22:30,320
of this directly out of my own house, right. And so,

1301
01:22:30,720 –> 01:22:34,200
and I’m seeing it show up in their friends, right, that they, that they bring

1302
01:22:34,200 –> 01:22:37,520
to the house or, or when we go places and we interact with people. And

1303
01:22:37,520 –> 01:22:41,200
I, I see it, right? So I’m not talking about this in just sort of

1304
01:22:41,200 –> 01:22:44,800
like some ephemeral theory kind of thing that I saw maybe somewhere.

1305
01:22:46,160 –> 01:22:49,840
I get the frustration with the old heads, as we say in the

1306
01:22:49,840 –> 01:22:53,270
African American community. That’s the term. I get the frustration right.

1307
01:22:55,270 –> 01:22:59,070
To the 24 year olds, how do they put the self righteousness on

1308
01:22:59,070 –> 01:23:02,790
the back burner? How does that, how do you put the self righteousness and,

1309
01:23:03,670 –> 01:23:07,430
and the, the. I have all the knowledge, but I don’t

1310
01:23:07,430 –> 01:23:10,550
have the wisdom thing. How do you put all that on the back, back burner

1311
01:23:10,790 –> 01:23:14,430
in order to come humbly and ask

1312
01:23:14,430 –> 01:23:18,070
for coaching or ask for mentoring? How does that happen?

1313
01:23:18,070 –> 01:23:21,030
And ambitious people, by the way, will always do this. So I do think

1314
01:23:21,810 –> 01:23:25,490
there will be and I think, I think the, the strike,

1315
01:23:25,490 –> 01:23:29,010
the separations are already starting to happen. They’ve been happening for a while

1316
01:23:31,250 –> 01:23:34,690
in which you’ll have the top folks who understand the game

1317
01:23:35,410 –> 01:23:39,130
and they will pursue ruthlessly what they need to

1318
01:23:39,130 –> 01:23:42,850
pursue and the rewards will start to accrue to them. And

1319
01:23:42,850 –> 01:23:46,010
they’ve been pursuing it ruthlessly since they were 13. And good luck to you catching

1320
01:23:46,010 –> 01:23:49,810
them. They’re building them out. Then you’ll have all the people at the

1321
01:23:49,810 –> 01:23:53,250
bottom who are the man underground, the underground man

1322
01:23:54,050 –> 01:23:57,650
they, they’re going to tweet,

1323
01:23:57,810 –> 01:24:01,010
they’re going to go onto Blue sky, they’re going to have a substack,

1324
01:24:01,730 –> 01:24:05,170
scrape together a couple of subscriptions and like I said, go work at 7:11. They’re

1325
01:24:05,170 –> 01:24:08,890
angry. They’re never gonna, they’re gonna wind up a 40 year old civil servant with

1326
01:24:08,890 –> 01:24:12,730
a bad liver. That’s just where they’re gonna wind up at. Okay, but

1327
01:24:12,730 –> 01:24:15,370
then you have the vast majority of people in the middle who don’t understand what

1328
01:24:15,370 –> 01:24:19,180
the question is. So for

1329
01:24:19,180 –> 01:24:22,940
the vast majority of people in the middle, what can they do?

1330
01:24:22,940 –> 01:24:26,540
The vast majority of 24 year olds in the middle who know they have to

1331
01:24:26,540 –> 01:24:30,300
break through but don’t know how because senior leaders look like

1332
01:24:30,300 –> 01:24:34,060
they’re over there and it’s not. There’s no

1333
01:24:34,060 –> 01:24:37,740
mediator there. You got to go do it. But you also have to

1334
01:24:37,740 –> 01:24:41,500
pay your rent and figure out how to live and maybe

1335
01:24:41,500 –> 01:24:45,340
have a relationship and navigate modern dating and have all these

1336
01:24:45,340 –> 01:24:48,580
things you have desperately going on inside of yourself that no one understands.

1337
01:24:49,220 –> 01:24:53,020
And you of course have 50,000 people following you on Instagram reels every

1338
01:24:53,020 –> 01:24:56,660
time you post something because you’ve been posting on Instagram since you were like six.

1339
01:24:58,660 –> 01:25:01,540
What do we say to those people? Because they are living in it. They’re living

1340
01:25:01,540 –> 01:25:05,300
in an environment where every single thought, to your point earlier in this episode,

1341
01:25:05,380 –> 01:25:08,060
every single thought is public. Every single brain fart. I loved how you put that.

1342
01:25:08,060 –> 01:25:11,910
Can just come out. I’m a personal

1343
01:25:11,910 –> 01:25:14,750
believer that maybe everyone doesn’t. So thought you die in your own head.

1344
01:25:15,870 –> 01:25:19,550
That’s why I have this podcast and you know, I think about it a lot

1345
01:25:19,550 –> 01:25:22,710
and then I spout things out. But what do we do with that 24 year

1346
01:25:22,710 –> 01:25:26,229
old who has come up in that environment, who’s in the middle, who’s not

1347
01:25:26,229 –> 01:25:29,950
ambitious, but also not, not the underground

1348
01:25:29,950 –> 01:25:31,870
man. What does that person do?

1349
01:25:33,630 –> 01:25:37,380
So if I had a good answer, I wouldn’t

1350
01:25:37,380 –> 01:25:41,100
be sitting here. I would probably enjoy bajillions of dollars

1351
01:25:41,100 –> 01:25:44,580
somewhere in the French Alps.

1352
01:25:44,740 –> 01:25:45,140
But

1353
01:25:48,580 –> 01:25:51,380
I actually have started writing a book for teenagers

1354
01:25:52,659 –> 01:25:55,780
especially about like specifically about these topics.

1355
01:25:56,340 –> 01:26:00,020
So I think that if I may, I would bring it

1356
01:26:00,020 –> 01:26:03,780
back to one of the core topics we touched upon already, which

1357
01:26:03,780 –> 01:26:07,480
is self awareness and

1358
01:26:07,480 –> 01:26:11,160
integrity. So you want to be true

1359
01:26:11,160 –> 01:26:14,080
to yourself and the outside world.

1360
01:26:14,640 –> 01:26:18,280
And the part about being

1361
01:26:18,280 –> 01:26:22,000
true to yourself is really hard for a 24 year old. If you were

1362
01:26:22,000 –> 01:26:25,600
told that you are fantastic, special and the

1363
01:26:25,600 –> 01:26:29,040
best since you were a toddler,

1364
01:26:29,600 –> 01:26:32,940
which you know is and experienced, many

1365
01:26:33,500 –> 01:26:37,140
have, right? Like you’re great. You’re great. We,

1366
01:26:37,140 –> 01:26:40,820
you know, you don’t have to even work that hard to get decent

1367
01:26:40,820 –> 01:26:44,620
grades. You don’t have to like. It is true. I see

1368
01:26:44,620 –> 01:26:48,220
the lowering of standards in many

1369
01:26:48,460 –> 01:26:52,189
areas, right? Like you don’t do the chores that people did 50,

1370
01:26:52,271 –> 01:26:56,060
30, 20, 10 years ago. There’s a lot that is

1371
01:26:56,060 –> 01:26:59,110
happening, right? Even the activities are

1372
01:26:59,750 –> 01:27:03,550
less frequent because you’re spending a lot of time

1373
01:27:03,550 –> 01:27:07,270
on the electronics, blah, blah, blah. So I think

1374
01:27:07,350 –> 01:27:10,550
that the number one thing you need is

1375
01:27:11,510 –> 01:27:15,270
humility, right? This, this sort of like, well,

1376
01:27:15,270 –> 01:27:18,710
maybe I’m not as great as I thought I am and, or

1377
01:27:18,950 –> 01:27:22,780
I am great for who I am, but I want to be better. Right?

1378
01:27:22,780 –> 01:27:26,580
Like you don’t compare yourself with anybody but yourself ten

1379
01:27:26,580 –> 01:27:29,780
years from now. So I think

1380
01:27:30,340 –> 01:27:34,180
there, I took a note and I think there’s

1381
01:27:34,420 –> 01:27:37,940
two sources of wisdom for you.

1382
01:27:39,540 –> 01:27:43,180
And not just wisdom, but also action. The again, self

1383
01:27:43,180 –> 01:27:47,020
awareness without mastery means nothing. So you need

1384
01:27:47,020 –> 01:27:50,270
that the action piece.

1385
01:27:50,830 –> 01:27:54,430
And I think books are, again, I would send people

1386
01:27:54,430 –> 01:27:58,190
back to books because there’s so many

1387
01:27:58,270 –> 01:28:01,910
great lessons. And again, like you think you’re the first person going

1388
01:28:01,910 –> 01:28:05,550
through this. Guess what? There’s about, you know, 5 billion who

1389
01:28:05,630 –> 01:28:09,190
had that very same experience. So I think

1390
01:28:09,190 –> 01:28:12,270
going back to the classics and making yourself

1391
01:28:12,350 –> 01:28:16,080
ready is great starting

1392
01:28:16,080 –> 01:28:19,800
point. And then because I think that it also reminds you again of

1393
01:28:19,800 –> 01:28:23,320
the struggles and just physical struggles that people

1394
01:28:23,880 –> 01:28:27,440
had to live through. You know, at 24, you had usually six

1395
01:28:27,440 –> 01:28:31,240
kids already. So like, that’s

1396
01:28:31,240 –> 01:28:34,920
a different. That really gives you gratitude

1397
01:28:35,320 –> 01:28:38,680
and self awareness. So I would start there.

1398
01:28:39,490 –> 01:28:43,290
That should give you some again, knowledge and self awareness. But then

1399
01:28:43,290 –> 01:28:46,690
the second piece is you don’t know what you don’t know.

1400
01:28:47,250 –> 01:28:50,930
And there are others who can

1401
01:28:50,930 –> 01:28:54,690
lead you to more of a self discovery. And

1402
01:28:54,849 –> 01:28:58,570
the simplest trick is if

1403
01:28:58,570 –> 01:29:01,890
you want to do better, you know, ask your friends, hey,

1404
01:29:02,370 –> 01:29:06,220
like honest talk. What is it? Like, what do I do

1405
01:29:06,220 –> 01:29:10,020
great and where I could improve? Right. And if it’s somebody

1406
01:29:10,020 –> 01:29:13,740
with whom you have a close enough relationship and then,

1407
01:29:13,820 –> 01:29:17,420
then, okay, let’s start there. You can, you can kind of start improving.

1408
01:29:17,820 –> 01:29:21,460
And the second piece would be if

1409
01:29:21,460 –> 01:29:25,180
you’re surrounded with people like you, then they might not always give

1410
01:29:25,180 –> 01:29:28,380
you their like, valuable

1411
01:29:28,700 –> 01:29:31,700
feedback because they are in the same boat. Yeah,

1412
01:29:32,340 –> 01:29:35,980
but going to mentors and they

1413
01:29:35,980 –> 01:29:39,460
don’t have to be mentors, you know, it can be like,

1414
01:29:39,620 –> 01:29:42,900
I can talk to you as your professor and say,

1415
01:29:43,700 –> 01:29:47,500
great in class, writing is sloppy. I

1416
01:29:47,500 –> 01:29:51,180
would probably choose different words. But then, you know, you’re Always

1417
01:29:51,180 –> 01:29:54,420
late with your assignments. That cannot happen

1418
01:29:54,900 –> 01:29:58,470
in real life. Like we, you know, there are certain

1419
01:29:58,470 –> 01:30:02,190
expectations, and if you have three times a year,

1420
01:30:02,910 –> 01:30:06,110
you know, grandma died, emergency, I don’t trust your words.

1421
01:30:07,310 –> 01:30:10,990
Like, so I think you’re right

1422
01:30:10,990 –> 01:30:14,790
that knowledge and wisdom are completely different and you

1423
01:30:14,790 –> 01:30:17,790
can grow into wisdom later. But I still think

1424
01:30:18,670 –> 01:30:21,230
reading is. Is really, really valuable.

1425
01:30:22,840 –> 01:30:25,640
Checking in with other people and sort of

1426
01:30:27,800 –> 01:30:31,400
being open to the feedback. And the reason why I

1427
01:30:31,400 –> 01:30:35,000
suggest Friends first is because they will always

1428
01:30:35,080 –> 01:30:38,800
phrase it the kindest way. They will always try to make

1429
01:30:38,800 –> 01:30:42,520
it as palatable as possible, even though they’re delivering something

1430
01:30:42,520 –> 01:30:46,280
that it’s not that wonderful. And so if you

1431
01:30:46,280 –> 01:30:49,250
start learning that feedback

1432
01:30:50,050 –> 01:30:53,810
is not about you, it’s about your actions or it’s

1433
01:30:53,810 –> 01:30:56,930
not a. It’s not a reflection of your character

1434
01:30:57,970 –> 01:31:01,770
most of the time, but it’s about your abilities that you

1435
01:31:01,770 –> 01:31:05,370
can improve, then I think that eases

1436
01:31:05,370 –> 01:31:09,210
you into this state where you are able to take feedback. And when

1437
01:31:09,210 –> 01:31:11,970
somebody who’s your senior leader will say, hey,

1438
01:31:12,930 –> 01:31:16,580
this was not great, but I like the direction, do it differently.

1439
01:31:16,900 –> 01:31:20,180
You’re like, okay, great. It’s not a. I’m not gonna focus on the

1440
01:31:20,180 –> 01:31:23,900
90% that was. That was. You know, I will not

1441
01:31:23,900 –> 01:31:27,260
focus on the 10% that was bad. I’m gonna focus on the 90% that is

1442
01:31:27,260 –> 01:31:30,740
actually great, which is I still have a job and I have a second op.

1443
01:31:30,820 –> 01:31:34,580
You know, second chance. Yep. Yep. All right, I’m gonna pause

1444
01:31:34,580 –> 01:31:37,700
here because I gotta go to the restroom. Oh, yeah. I’m gonna get some.

1445
01:31:39,300 –> 01:31:41,210
All right. And we’re back. Okay.

1446
01:31:44,570 –> 01:31:48,170
Yeah. Truth is meaningless without courage. I

1447
01:31:48,170 –> 01:31:51,810
love how you’ve talked about that self awareness piece

1448
01:31:51,810 –> 01:31:54,090
without mastery being hell. I love that.

1449
01:31:56,330 –> 01:32:00,010
I also think you’re onto something here, because the underground man at

1450
01:32:00,010 –> 01:32:02,810
24 has no evidence of a.

1451
01:32:04,250 –> 01:32:07,650
There’s no evidence of a social structure around him of any kind.

1452
01:32:07,970 –> 01:32:11,530
And the friends that he does have going back to just the party for just

1453
01:32:11,530 –> 01:32:15,010
a second, not only do they dislike him

1454
01:32:15,010 –> 01:32:18,610
immensely, they. They

1455
01:32:18,610 –> 01:32:21,490
are shocked that he’s even still around, right?

1456
01:32:22,290 –> 01:32:25,930
As if they expected him to fade into the. Fade into the. The verge. Like

1457
01:32:25,930 –> 01:32:28,450
Homer in that. In that great. That great meme.

1458
01:32:29,570 –> 01:32:32,970
And maybe he did right when he went into the civil. A little surface, right?

1459
01:32:32,970 –> 01:32:36,810
Just sort of. Just sort of recedes. Just recedes. Seeds into

1460
01:32:36,810 –> 01:32:40,610
the distance. The question. One of the questions I wanted to ask very

1461
01:32:40,610 –> 01:32:44,050
briefly about that section in the book in the original

1462
01:32:44,050 –> 01:32:47,770
Russian, what are we missing there as an American reader? Like, are there a

1463
01:32:47,770 –> 01:32:51,050
loot? Is it. Is It a one for one translation. Are we getting everything or

1464
01:32:51,210 –> 01:32:54,570
are there things that we’re missing inside of that, that, that sequence? Because

1465
01:32:54,650 –> 01:32:58,240
there’s some class themes in there that, as I said

1466
01:32:58,240 –> 01:33:02,080
previously, don’t really

1467
01:33:02,080 –> 01:33:05,840
resonate with me because I, I don’t like what.

1468
01:33:06,400 –> 01:33:10,040
Well, so he has this whole thing about the money, right?

1469
01:33:10,040 –> 01:33:13,840
Like he’s ripping. He’s ripping off his, his, his. He’s not paying his, his.

1470
01:33:14,720 –> 01:33:18,440
His butler, basically. Polo is his name. Yeah. Of

1471
01:33:18,440 –> 01:33:22,280
all I know. So random. He’s

1472
01:33:22,280 –> 01:33:26,080
like, okay, well that’s fine. He’s not paying

1473
01:33:26,080 –> 01:33:29,200
him his wages and he’s doing this and doing that. And I thought,

1474
01:33:30,320 –> 01:33:33,680
you know, I would just go write the man in iou.

1475
01:33:34,080 –> 01:33:37,680
Like, what’s the problem here? Now I’m, again, I’m looking at this

1476
01:33:37,680 –> 01:33:40,160
through the framework of, you know,

1477
01:33:42,320 –> 01:33:45,320
we don’t really. I mean, if you’re going to pay somebody, you better pay them,

1478
01:33:45,320 –> 01:33:48,720
right? Like, this is, this is just sort of the reality of, of. Of life.

1479
01:33:49,680 –> 01:33:53,360
I don’t know that that was the reality of life that Dostoyevsky was seeing. Clearly

1480
01:33:53,360 –> 01:33:56,840
it wasn’t. But are there things that I’m

1481
01:33:56,840 –> 01:34:00,640
missing in the original Russian that are illusions or

1482
01:34:00,640 –> 01:34:03,400
that you would miss if you were reading a translation of it and it’s not

1483
01:34:03,400 –> 01:34:06,680
in the original Russian? I’m always curious about that with authors that write in different

1484
01:34:06,680 –> 01:34:10,000
languages, because I know there’s things we’re missing when it goes into English, but I

1485
01:34:10,000 –> 01:34:13,600
don’t know what they are. So a, you are

1486
01:34:14,240 –> 01:34:18,000
under the false assumption that I have read this in Russian, which

1487
01:34:18,000 –> 01:34:20,840
I have not. I can read

1488
01:34:21,880 –> 01:34:25,640
Cyrillics, however, that is now,

1489
01:34:26,920 –> 01:34:30,280
like, you know, I see a tombstone and I am able to read the name

1490
01:34:30,280 –> 01:34:33,800
and that’s about it. So not enough for

1491
01:34:33,800 –> 01:34:37,000
Dostoevsky. Okay, I will say,

1492
01:34:38,120 –> 01:34:41,560
and this would be for another podcast, but I would

1493
01:34:41,640 –> 01:34:44,840
love to talk about translations and how

1494
01:34:46,030 –> 01:34:49,630
immensely important they are and how. I think that the

1495
01:34:49,630 –> 01:34:53,470
reason why so many books that were

1496
01:34:53,470 –> 01:34:56,190
not English can still be

1497
01:34:58,750 –> 01:35:02,070
relevant is in a large part thanks to

1498
01:35:02,070 –> 01:35:05,070
translations that kind of modernize the,

1499
01:35:06,030 –> 01:35:09,230
the, the words.

1500
01:35:11,000 –> 01:35:14,520
And so the meaning remains, but the words might be different.

1501
01:35:16,280 –> 01:35:19,920
And I think that one of the reasons why today’s people, the

1502
01:35:19,920 –> 01:35:23,480
students struggle with, like, Shakespeare is because it’s

1503
01:35:23,560 –> 01:35:27,320
so hard. Like, thy. What? Like, I don’t.

1504
01:35:28,360 –> 01:35:32,120
But like, I grew up reading Shakespeare in translations and

1505
01:35:32,120 –> 01:35:35,800
it made it way more modern and way more relatable.

1506
01:35:35,960 –> 01:35:38,860
And, And I think there’s a huge

1507
01:35:40,380 –> 01:35:44,100
power in translations. So that’s

1508
01:35:44,100 –> 01:35:47,660
one point. Second point. So

1509
01:35:47,820 –> 01:35:50,060
money. I have noticed for

1510
01:35:50,940 –> 01:35:54,460
Dostoevsky is a huge topic.

1511
01:35:55,180 –> 01:35:58,780
And in. Yes, because he was

1512
01:35:59,100 –> 01:36:02,860
constantly in debt because, you know, like, this was a.

1513
01:36:03,910 –> 01:36:07,630
A very real personal situation

1514
01:36:07,630 –> 01:36:11,270
for him. But also what you’re

1515
01:36:11,590 –> 01:36:13,430
kind of picking up on is

1516
01:36:15,670 –> 01:36:18,390
the relationship between money

1517
01:36:19,270 –> 01:36:22,470
and personal

1518
01:36:22,710 –> 01:36:25,990
pride. And this.

1519
01:36:29,030 –> 01:36:32,140
How shall I describe this? Honor.

1520
01:36:32,620 –> 01:36:36,460
The sense of honor. And so that

1521
01:36:36,460 –> 01:36:39,980
like in Brothers Karamazov, one of the. The brothers

1522
01:36:40,300 –> 01:36:44,140
is like, he borrows money and then he has

1523
01:36:44,140 –> 01:36:47,780
this idea that he. He borrows money, he

1524
01:36:47,780 –> 01:36:51,500
spends half of it on his,

1525
01:36:51,500 –> 01:36:55,340
like, you know, women and booze and blah, blah, blah. But in

1526
01:36:55,340 –> 01:36:59,040
his mind there’s this, like, if I don’t spend it all,

1527
01:36:59,520 –> 01:37:03,360
I can still return it honorably, right? Like,

1528
01:37:04,560 –> 01:37:07,920
I can spend some of it, but if I don’t spend it all,

1529
01:37:08,480 –> 01:37:12,080
then I still retain some shred

1530
01:37:12,080 –> 01:37:15,800
of honor. And. And it

1531
01:37:15,800 –> 01:37:19,120
is the, in the

1532
01:37:19,120 –> 01:37:22,760
society, in the Russian society that he’s

1533
01:37:22,760 –> 01:37:25,510
described, Dostoevsky is describing. Another

1534
01:37:25,990 –> 01:37:29,430
angle about money is also that you were

1535
01:37:29,830 –> 01:37:33,550
often wined and dined based

1536
01:37:33,550 –> 01:37:37,030
on your pedigree.

1537
01:37:38,310 –> 01:37:42,030
And so even if you didn’t have

1538
01:37:42,030 –> 01:37:44,710
the money to pay because you were

1539
01:37:45,270 –> 01:37:48,550
nobility, people would

1540
01:37:49,270 –> 01:37:53,010
invite you and pay you because you

1541
01:37:53,010 –> 01:37:56,690
are the nobility. So there’s this idea that

1542
01:37:56,850 –> 01:38:00,650
when he goes out with his friends or the schoolmates,

1543
01:38:00,650 –> 01:38:04,410
the people he despises and who hates him, but, you know, that’s the

1544
01:38:04,410 –> 01:38:08,169
society or the set of people. In

1545
01:38:08,169 –> 01:38:11,610
the second part, there’s this Zverkov

1546
01:38:11,610 –> 01:38:15,290
character, somebody who is like a really accomplished

1547
01:38:15,290 –> 01:38:18,940
guy, and they all talk about paying

1548
01:38:18,940 –> 01:38:22,740
for his dinner, paying for him, even though he’s the most

1549
01:38:22,740 –> 01:38:26,540
accomplished. So there’s this. There’s this aspect of

1550
01:38:26,940 –> 01:38:28,380
borderline servility

1551
01:38:31,100 –> 01:38:34,780
and respect for money and, and

1552
01:38:34,780 –> 01:38:37,820
your pedigree, your social status,

1553
01:38:38,380 –> 01:38:41,660
that goes against logic. Right. And

1554
01:38:42,220 –> 01:38:43,740
so I noticed the,

1555
01:38:46,220 –> 01:38:49,260
the way I interpret the interaction

1556
01:38:49,820 –> 01:38:53,580
between the main character and his servant

1557
01:38:54,060 –> 01:38:57,820
is he could just say, hey, I’m. I’m

1558
01:38:57,820 –> 01:39:01,340
withholding the money. And essentially, you’re my servant. You’re my

1559
01:39:01,340 –> 01:39:04,900
serf. I can do whatever I want, but he

1560
01:39:04,900 –> 01:39:08,660
can’t do that. And he is ashamed in front of the

1561
01:39:08,660 –> 01:39:11,890
servant because it.

1562
01:39:12,210 –> 01:39:15,290
He’s aware that that’s bad. It’s

1563
01:39:15,290 –> 01:39:18,690
dishonorable. Right? Like, he needs to get money

1564
01:39:18,770 –> 01:39:22,370
from somebody who’s lower status.

1565
01:39:22,370 –> 01:39:26,210
And that’s so uncomfortable because it’s so dishonorable.

1566
01:39:28,370 –> 01:39:32,130
So, like a door in

1567
01:39:32,130 –> 01:39:35,890
the floor in my head just opened up with

1568
01:39:35,890 –> 01:39:37,010
what you just said there.

1569
01:39:40,380 –> 01:39:44,020
I would never have tied again. I’m an American. I

1570
01:39:44,020 –> 01:39:47,740
don’t. Wow. Yeah, Well, I mean, that’s. The depth of that’s the depth of the

1571
01:39:47,740 –> 01:39:51,180
cultural assumption there. So I would never tie

1572
01:39:51,420 –> 01:39:55,140
money to honor. So in

1573
01:39:55,140 –> 01:39:57,580
America, here’s the weird thing about America. And

1574
01:39:58,540 –> 01:40:00,300
Marxists often comment on this.

1575
01:40:02,300 –> 01:40:05,820
At least they did in the 20th century, not so much now because they’re younger

1576
01:40:06,180 –> 01:40:09,860
and they don’t know history. So, so stupid.

1577
01:40:10,100 –> 01:40:13,940
It’s, it’s fine. They’re, they’re going to learn. They’re going

1578
01:40:13,940 –> 01:40:17,660
to learn because human nature hasn’t changed. But Marxists in the 20th century would

1579
01:40:17,660 –> 01:40:21,140
often comment that the reason the first stage towards

1580
01:40:21,140 –> 01:40:24,940
Marxism never really worked the United States to their conception

1581
01:40:24,940 –> 01:40:28,780
of work is that everyone in America wanted to be middle

1582
01:40:28,780 –> 01:40:32,460
class and they had no way to overcome that. They had no solution for

1583
01:40:32,460 –> 01:40:36,300
that. Well, the reason why everyone in America wants to be middle

1584
01:40:36,300 –> 01:40:40,140
class is because we don’t tie money to honor. Money is this other thing

1585
01:40:40,140 –> 01:40:43,940
over here. And honor. If we even talk about honor,

1586
01:40:43,940 –> 01:40:46,780
which we don’t because we’re not an honor coded society anymore. We haven’t been an

1587
01:40:46,780 –> 01:40:50,460
honor coded society for 80 years. Honor is over

1588
01:40:50,460 –> 01:40:54,100
here somewhere. Honor is about a different thing. And so we

1589
01:40:54,100 –> 01:40:57,740
separate those two. And the door that

1590
01:40:57,740 –> 01:41:01,490
just like swung open in my brain was one of

1591
01:41:01,490 –> 01:41:05,290
the. Was related to something else that we read on the show. So we read

1592
01:41:05,930 –> 01:41:09,570
Lenin’s basically Lenin’s manifesto about how to

1593
01:41:09,570 –> 01:41:13,330
organize. How to organize the question of how to organize the

1594
01:41:13,330 –> 01:41:17,050
populace or something. I can’t remember the title of it. And

1595
01:41:19,850 –> 01:41:23,450
Lennon is a fascinating character to me because

1596
01:41:24,330 –> 01:41:27,780
he was absolutely a sadistic and

1597
01:41:27,780 –> 01:41:31,060
megalomaniacal tyrant who

1598
01:41:31,620 –> 01:41:32,500
also had.

1599
01:41:35,460 –> 01:41:39,300
Who also hated himself much like the underground, big time, big

1600
01:41:39,300 –> 01:41:42,900
time hated himself. And, and

1601
01:41:42,900 –> 01:41:46,540
somehow through. Not somehow through the exegesis of

1602
01:41:46,540 –> 01:41:50,220
history operating outside of him. Wound

1603
01:41:50,220 –> 01:41:53,900
up running the whole thing and then appointing somebody to replace him.

1604
01:41:53,900 –> 01:41:57,740
Well, not appointing, sorry, selecting someone to replace

1605
01:41:57,740 –> 01:42:01,380
him who. And

1606
01:42:01,380 –> 01:42:05,140
you wouldn’t think it would be worth. You could replace somebody worse with Lenin,

1607
01:42:05,140 –> 01:42:08,660
but he managed to do it. He managed to replace some. Somebody

1608
01:42:08,660 –> 01:42:12,420
who’s worse than him. And so one of the things that’s always

1609
01:42:12,420 –> 01:42:15,580
been fascinating to me is how he, how he

1610
01:42:15,580 –> 01:42:18,880
successfully took over an entire culture. And

1611
01:42:19,360 –> 01:42:23,120
the money and honor piece ties that. That’s why Marxism worked

1612
01:42:24,720 –> 01:42:28,520
as an overarching way of organizing, not as an economic theory, but as

1613
01:42:28,520 –> 01:42:32,080
an overarching way of organizing society in

1614
01:42:32,160 –> 01:42:35,840
Soviet Russia for 80 years because of that conception of honor

1615
01:42:36,080 –> 01:42:39,040
tied in. Or one of the factors was that conception of honor

1616
01:42:39,600 –> 01:42:43,400
tied into money and then how that then striates

1617
01:42:43,400 –> 01:42:47,160
through class. Whereas in America it

1618
01:42:47,160 –> 01:42:50,760
strikes totally differently and it’s Not a one to

1619
01:42:50,760 –> 01:42:54,440
one comparison. Even nowadays when Alexandria

1620
01:42:54,440 –> 01:42:58,200
Ocasio Cortez, the representative from Brooklyn, runs around in

1621
01:42:58,200 –> 01:43:01,560
a dress at the Met Gala that says Eat the Rich on it

1622
01:43:02,600 –> 01:43:05,640
or Tax the Rich or whatever the hell that dress said, like

1623
01:43:06,520 –> 01:43:09,640
everybody in America knows,

1624
01:43:12,030 –> 01:43:15,590
every American knows she’s playing a game. And ultimately one day

1625
01:43:15,590 –> 01:43:19,150
she’ll be, the next day she’ll be running down the street in sweats

1626
01:43:19,150 –> 01:43:22,710
and a T shirt, jogging like

1627
01:43:22,710 –> 01:43:26,389
anybody other, like any other 30 year old woman in, you know, in

1628
01:43:26,389 –> 01:43:30,230
Washington D.C. and she will be indistinguishable from Bill Gates, who will

1629
01:43:30,230 –> 01:43:34,030
show up at a grandma, you know, or a grandpa sweater, having a hot

1630
01:43:34,030 –> 01:43:36,810
dog at a stand. Like

1631
01:43:37,610 –> 01:43:39,450
everybody wants to be middle class here.

1632
01:43:41,370 –> 01:43:45,010
Which I get it, if you’re looking at that from

1633
01:43:45,010 –> 01:43:48,730
other countries, that makes zero sense how that works.

1634
01:43:50,010 –> 01:43:53,810
But we don’t tie the money to, not in that way anyway. We don’t tie

1635
01:43:53,810 –> 01:43:56,290
money to honor. So that was a huge insight for me. So like I said,

1636
01:43:56,290 –> 01:43:59,050
you swung open the door in my head. I got to think some word through

1637
01:43:59,290 –> 01:44:02,420
that idea, but I never heard it express, expressed that way.

1638
01:44:03,460 –> 01:44:06,900
And so there’s two things and, and just

1639
01:44:06,980 –> 01:44:09,380
quick point one is that

1640
01:44:10,580 –> 01:44:14,060
it’s not that the money is tied to

1641
01:44:14,060 –> 01:44:16,100
honor, it’s that he

1642
01:44:17,860 –> 01:44:21,300
sees it as a demonstration of

1643
01:44:22,100 –> 01:44:25,860
his own failure, right? So, so the real

1644
01:44:26,580 –> 01:44:30,410
he cannot unmask himself as a loser

1645
01:44:30,410 –> 01:44:33,730
in front of his servant.

1646
01:44:35,250 –> 01:44:37,970
And that is like he would rather

1647
01:44:39,730 –> 01:44:43,530
avoid that because it’s embarrassing. But I will say

1648
01:44:43,530 –> 01:44:47,170
the second point is money absolutely has been

1649
01:44:47,170 –> 01:44:50,770
tied to. Not in Russia,

1650
01:44:50,770 –> 01:44:54,310
not to honor per se, but definitely

1651
01:44:54,790 –> 01:44:57,910
goodness of some sort. And

1652
01:44:58,790 –> 01:45:01,990
a nobility, right? So like you have these,

1653
01:45:04,630 –> 01:45:07,910
you have almost like a character.

1654
01:45:11,350 –> 01:45:15,190
There’s something about your good character if you come

1655
01:45:15,190 –> 01:45:18,830
from money. And again, there’s this almost

1656
01:45:18,830 –> 01:45:22,520
servility right about this. But also

1657
01:45:23,160 –> 01:45:26,520
the situation in Russia has been so

1658
01:45:26,680 –> 01:45:30,480
vastly different from what was going on at the time

1659
01:45:30,480 –> 01:45:33,840
in the US and or in Europe, because. So the

1660
01:45:33,840 –> 01:45:37,480
serfs, the difference, like the chattel slavery, right? Like

1661
01:45:37,560 –> 01:45:40,680
people, slaves are objects, right?

1662
01:45:42,040 –> 01:45:45,360
You treat them as objects. They have zero rights, the

1663
01:45:45,360 –> 01:45:49,110
serfs. I actually talked about this in a context

1664
01:45:49,110 –> 01:45:52,510
of feudalism in Europe.

1665
01:45:53,390 –> 01:45:57,070
The people were tied to land. So the feudal

1666
01:45:58,270 –> 01:46:02,030
nobility owned land. And the village that sit on that

1667
01:46:02,030 –> 01:46:05,710
land, those people were your people, but they still

1668
01:46:06,430 –> 01:46:10,190
would have to ask you if they can marry. And

1669
01:46:10,190 –> 01:46:13,920
you had to work on that land, on that property for

1670
01:46:14,320 –> 01:46:17,760
six days a week or whatever for the master,

1671
01:46:18,080 –> 01:46:21,760
but you still had some rights, right? Like you could go and say,

1672
01:46:21,920 –> 01:46:25,600
I’M going to Italy to learn how to be a carpenter or whatever.

1673
01:46:26,640 –> 01:46:30,320
And maybe they would say yes, and then you would leave

1674
01:46:30,320 –> 01:46:34,160
and come back and build the church in your village. But then

1675
01:46:35,200 –> 01:46:38,750
in Russia the disparity was so

1676
01:46:38,750 –> 01:46:42,310
stark, right. Like the, the, the poverty was

1677
01:46:42,470 –> 01:46:45,830
so bad that the

1678
01:46:46,230 –> 01:46:49,990
sort of. And, and for life. So you were tied to the land

1679
01:46:50,390 –> 01:46:54,189
and you had way less rights. I almost. If there’s

1680
01:46:54,189 –> 01:46:57,950
a hierarchy, you have the, the slaves at the

1681
01:46:57,950 –> 01:47:01,670
very bottom being treated as objects. Then you have the Serbs in

1682
01:47:01,670 –> 01:47:04,940
Russia who have some rights,

1683
01:47:05,180 –> 01:47:08,940
but any master can overrule them anytime he wants.

1684
01:47:08,940 –> 01:47:12,660
And, and he will. And, and you’re tied to the

1685
01:47:12,660 –> 01:47:16,420
land. And then you have the, again, like the,

1686
01:47:16,420 –> 01:47:20,140
the nobility. Yeah, and, and, yeah,

1687
01:47:20,140 –> 01:47:23,860
and. Or the people in sort of the Western Eastern Europe, like Austro

1688
01:47:23,860 –> 01:47:27,700
Hungarian Empire, where we Also in like 18th century, they’re

1689
01:47:27,700 –> 01:47:31,550
there where some, some changes to the

1690
01:47:31,550 –> 01:47:35,030
system. But yeah, you were, you were essentially born, raised,

1691
01:47:35,030 –> 01:47:38,870
tied to the land. That’s it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then that whole system of

1692
01:47:38,870 –> 01:47:42,310
course fell apart in. Right in the trenches of World War I

1693
01:47:44,070 –> 01:47:47,350
and earlier for Russia. Yeah, yeah, but the.

1694
01:47:47,510 –> 01:47:49,990
Yeah, I, I can go into that

1695
01:47:50,870 –> 01:47:54,470
rabbit hole of the. But, but I, I think that if

1696
01:47:54,470 –> 01:47:57,940
your brother is hungry by the Tsar,

1697
01:47:58,500 –> 01:48:02,260
but which is what happened to Lenin. His brother was, was

1698
01:48:02,260 –> 01:48:06,060
killed for, you know, revolution against the Tsar and, and

1699
01:48:06,060 –> 01:48:09,740
it radicalized him and he was poor and, and I

1700
01:48:09,740 –> 01:48:13,420
think that the, the idea that again, like it’s a,

1701
01:48:13,420 –> 01:48:17,100
it’s a so enticing you can see today, like

1702
01:48:17,100 –> 01:48:20,620
let’s dismantle freaking everything. Okay. That’s

1703
01:48:20,620 –> 01:48:24,450
easy. And how are we going to build? Oh, we’re not. Okay. We don’t have

1704
01:48:24,450 –> 01:48:28,210
the plan. We just have the, like we’re fed

1705
01:48:28,210 –> 01:48:31,850
up and we’re gonna dismantle and we’re gonna like everything is bad.

1706
01:48:31,850 –> 01:48:35,490
And you’re like, is it? Well, and that gets back

1707
01:48:35,490 –> 01:48:39,050
to, I mean, the three revolutions, right. That made the modern

1708
01:48:39,050 –> 01:48:42,890
world. Right. So you’ve got the French Revolution, you have the American Revolution, you have

1709
01:48:42,890 –> 01:48:45,930
the British Revolution, all based on fundamentally different

1710
01:48:48,260 –> 01:48:51,820
conceptions of what reality, quite

1711
01:48:51,820 –> 01:48:55,660
frankly should be. And I look at the

1712
01:48:55,660 –> 01:48:59,260
Russian Revolution as a, the, the

1713
01:48:59,260 –> 01:49:02,820
follow on or the logical conclusion such as it were

1714
01:49:03,300 –> 01:49:07,060
from the French Revolution. And

1715
01:49:07,620 –> 01:49:10,580
I’m not quite. No, no, I’m not

1716
01:49:10,580 –> 01:49:14,270
quite. The

1717
01:49:14,270 –> 01:49:17,950
challenge that we try to approach or on this show is.

1718
01:49:18,110 –> 01:49:21,830
And with the kind of books that we, that we are covering here, we try

1719
01:49:21,830 –> 01:49:25,670
to look at things historically obviously, but then

1720
01:49:25,670 –> 01:49:28,870
also bring this down to individuals and try to, you know, there’s a hierarchy. Right.

1721
01:49:28,870 –> 01:49:32,550
You got to scale it up the hierarchy and scale it down. Right. And to

1722
01:49:32,550 –> 01:49:36,230
your point, deconstructing everything doesn’t work. Matter of fact, I, I would

1723
01:49:36,230 –> 01:49:39,310
assert that we’re at the end of a 25 year long

1724
01:49:40,010 –> 01:49:43,610
American deconstruction project. We actually rudely

1725
01:49:43,930 –> 01:49:47,410
ended it. I think January 6th was probably the end of the

1726
01:49:47,410 –> 01:49:51,250
deconstruction project. And now we’re in

1727
01:49:51,250 –> 01:49:54,450
a weird middle ground between the end of

1728
01:49:54,450 –> 01:49:57,370
deconstruction and the beginning of something else.

1729
01:49:58,410 –> 01:50:01,850
And there are people, not just politicians, but also cultural

1730
01:50:01,850 –> 01:50:05,450
folks, social leaders, economic folks who are looking

1731
01:50:05,450 –> 01:50:08,630
around going, we’re done with that. We’re done with the

1732
01:50:08,630 –> 01:50:12,470
deconstruction. Because to your point, you could deconstruct down to nothing and then what

1733
01:50:12,470 –> 01:50:16,190
do you have? You just have raw power. And even raw

1734
01:50:16,190 –> 01:50:19,510
power can be deconstructed. So you, so you wind up with nothing

1735
01:50:19,590 –> 01:50:22,230
basically. And nothing is not a forward.

1736
01:50:23,350 –> 01:50:27,030
Is that fuel in the momentum? There’s not fuel for forward momentum. Right.

1737
01:50:27,350 –> 01:50:31,150
And so now we have to begin the building, we have to begin the laying

1738
01:50:31,150 –> 01:50:34,300
of the rails for the building. So no more deconstruction. We’re done with that.

1739
01:50:34,700 –> 01:50:38,260
That’s it. It’s over. Maybe 80 years from now you could

1740
01:50:38,260 –> 01:50:42,020
deconstruct again. But we got to rebuild institutions, we’ve got to rebuild

1741
01:50:42,020 –> 01:50:45,020
systems, we have to rebuild structures. And

1742
01:50:45,820 –> 01:50:49,660
I, I, as a partisan for America, I think this is

1743
01:50:49,660 –> 01:50:53,020
the best place in the world to do that. Agree. But,

1744
01:50:53,340 –> 01:50:56,460
but other places, you know, I think they’re gonna have to go through the same

1745
01:50:56,460 –> 01:50:59,750
thing. You’re gonna have to do that because deconstruction and

1746
01:50:59,750 –> 01:51:03,310
revolution doesn’t work. It doesn’t lead to building.

1747
01:51:04,670 –> 01:51:08,350
So if I may, tied back to the

1748
01:51:08,350 –> 01:51:11,150
man in the underground. Yes. To me

1749
01:51:12,910 –> 01:51:16,350
the, the tearing down is easy

1750
01:51:17,070 –> 01:51:20,870
and the building is hard. Yeah. And so

1751
01:51:20,870 –> 01:51:24,590
we, what we have on display is somebody who’s like

1752
01:51:25,160 –> 01:51:28,840
tearing down and revealing. He’s, he’s showing

1753
01:51:28,840 –> 01:51:32,080
up like, he’s showing us how

1754
01:51:32,080 –> 01:51:35,720
rotten he is. Right. Like he has this infinite

1755
01:51:35,800 –> 01:51:39,320
self awareness. But we see

1756
01:51:39,320 –> 01:51:42,760
16 years later when he’s 40, that he

1757
01:51:42,760 –> 01:51:46,280
hasn’t done jack shit about where he is.

1758
01:51:47,080 –> 01:51:50,240
And, and, and we see the

1759
01:51:50,240 –> 01:51:53,740
complete utter despair that he,

1760
01:51:54,700 –> 01:51:58,220
that he is experiencing when he’s older.

1761
01:51:58,620 –> 01:52:02,340
And so I think the, the sort of,

1762
01:52:02,340 –> 01:52:04,620
the parallel to today is

1763
01:52:06,140 –> 01:52:09,860
now we know, okay, you told us how bad America is and you

1764
01:52:09,860 –> 01:52:13,340
told us how this is all, you know, failing

1765
01:52:13,420 –> 01:52:16,940
and how these institutions don’t work and how these

1766
01:52:17,370 –> 01:52:21,210
principles don’t work. But if you’re Going to sit in this

1767
01:52:21,530 –> 01:52:25,290
16 years later, you’re going to be rotten and

1768
01:52:25,370 –> 01:52:28,810
miserable and we’re not going to move an inch and

1769
01:52:29,050 –> 01:52:32,450
that’s not where we want to be. Right. So there needs to be this

1770
01:52:32,450 –> 01:52:35,930
agency, this bias for action.

1771
01:52:36,730 –> 01:52:40,410
And I think also the, and he doesn’t

1772
01:52:40,410 –> 01:52:43,590
talk about it in the book, but I think that eventually there needs be to,

1773
01:52:43,900 –> 01:52:47,540
to be the hunger for transcendence that, you know,

1774
01:52:47,540 –> 01:52:51,180
something that goes beyond what you’re doing. And in

1775
01:52:51,180 –> 01:52:54,540
reality, in 2026, I was just looking at some numbers and

1776
01:52:54,780 –> 01:52:58,420
like the, the turn to Christianity among young

1777
01:52:58,420 –> 01:53:01,180
people and particularly Catholicism,

1778
01:53:02,220 –> 01:53:05,780
like the old school Christianity is on the

1779
01:53:05,780 –> 01:53:09,260
rise. So I think that people do sense

1780
01:53:09,730 –> 01:53:13,410
that you need more than

1781
01:53:13,410 –> 01:53:16,850
just the rumination and self

1782
01:53:16,850 –> 01:53:20,450
analysis and ad nauseam, you know, like

1783
01:53:20,690 –> 01:53:24,330
revelations about our inner, like the navel

1784
01:53:24,330 –> 01:53:28,170
gazing that leads nowhere. Yeah, yeah, no,

1785
01:53:28,170 –> 01:53:31,570
I agree and I’m seeing those numbers too on the turn to

1786
01:53:31,570 –> 01:53:35,330
Catholicism, orthodox Christianity. And

1787
01:53:35,770 –> 01:53:39,370
you know, my particular group of Christians, the American evangelicals, have no

1788
01:53:39,370 –> 01:53:43,170
answer for this and they need to develop one. And there are

1789
01:53:43,170 –> 01:53:46,930
some that are beginning to sort of light bulb is kind of gone

1790
01:53:46,930 –> 01:53:50,410
off and, and I do believe

1791
01:53:50,410 –> 01:53:54,250
that fundamentally. I was actually have a conversation with somebody who’s

1792
01:53:54,250 –> 01:53:57,850
a good friend of mine this weekend about this, but I do believe that fundamentally,

1793
01:53:57,930 –> 01:54:01,770
you know, in America anyway, those three, those three

1794
01:54:01,770 –> 01:54:05,390
or four, four strands. And American Catholics, I hate to tell

1795
01:54:05,390 –> 01:54:09,150
you, you’re more Protestant than your European brothers. Just point

1796
01:54:09,150 –> 01:54:12,310
that out. But, but agreed, but just.

1797
01:54:13,830 –> 01:54:17,190
Anyway, we’re, we’re gonna have to figure out at a

1798
01:54:17,190 –> 01:54:20,710
theological level over the next 25 years what

1799
01:54:20,710 –> 01:54:23,990
does a uniquely American

1800
01:54:24,230 –> 01:54:27,830
theology with those, those strains influencing it

1801
01:54:27,830 –> 01:54:31,160
look like and what does it look like when it

1802
01:54:31,160 –> 01:54:34,920
builds both in opposition to and

1803
01:54:35,240 –> 01:54:39,000
in some cases hand in hand with a more secular,

1804
01:54:40,200 –> 01:54:43,880
materialist, reductionist culture, which by the way is just going to keep right on going

1805
01:54:43,880 –> 01:54:47,160
there. It’s not like the secular materialists are going to, are going to stop.

1806
01:54:48,920 –> 01:54:52,120
Okay, we got around the corner, we gotta, we gotta close this out. This has

1807
01:54:52,120 –> 01:54:55,930
been a great conversation, Hana. I’ve had a tremendous,

1808
01:54:56,090 –> 01:54:58,570
this has been tremendous. You opened up the. Like I said, you opened the door

1809
01:54:58,570 –> 01:55:01,290
on the floor in my head for a bunch of different things. I want to

1810
01:55:01,290 –> 01:55:04,570
invite you on, to have you back. We got to continue this conversation, keep this

1811
01:55:04,570 –> 01:55:08,290
rolling. I love the, the,

1812
01:55:08,290 –> 01:55:11,570
the quote from Thomas Sowell, the great Thomas Sowell, the, the

1813
01:55:11,570 –> 01:55:15,370
Economist. He says it’s amazing how much panic one honest

1814
01:55:15,370 –> 01:55:17,850
man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.

1815
01:55:19,850 –> 01:55:22,200
We are in a time where Foreign

1816
01:55:23,800 –> 01:55:27,560
that’s spreading. I believe we’re fundamentally in a time where people are

1817
01:55:27,960 –> 01:55:31,680
kind of like in the Matrix, kind of like waking up and we are

1818
01:55:31,680 –> 01:55:35,400
going into Plato’s cave. We are pulling out folks like the underground man. And we’re

1819
01:55:35,400 –> 01:55:38,840
bringing them up into the light and they’re fighting, they’re kicking and screaming all the

1820
01:55:38,840 –> 01:55:42,360
way, but we’re bringing them up and we’re saying, hey, this is the light. Now

1821
01:55:42,440 –> 01:55:45,920
there are some people you can’t pull out of there. They want to stay in

1822
01:55:45,920 –> 01:55:49,640
there. They want to stay in the cave of the Internet ordering doordash and

1823
01:55:50,650 –> 01:55:54,010
being self righteous and self aware all at the same time in equal measure.

1824
01:55:54,890 –> 01:55:58,290
But to be honest about it and to engage

1825
01:55:58,290 –> 01:56:02,010
effectively with those folks, books like Notes from the Underground give us a map

1826
01:56:02,170 –> 01:56:05,930
of where we can go and how we can maybe not a map of how

1827
01:56:06,170 –> 01:56:09,170
what we where we can go gives us a map of the territory that we

1828
01:56:09,170 –> 01:56:12,570
are facing in a way that’s manageable.

1829
01:56:12,890 –> 01:56:16,530
And a book is still the most subversive way to get

1830
01:56:16,530 –> 01:56:19,680
across ideas ever, the human beings have ever created.

1831
01:56:22,080 –> 01:56:25,800
How do, how can leaders. This is my last question. How can leaders stay

1832
01:56:25,800 –> 01:56:28,880
on the path? I think we’ve talked a lot about this today in one form

1833
01:56:28,880 –> 01:56:32,560
or another, but you get the last word as usual for guests on this show.

1834
01:56:33,360 –> 01:56:36,800
How can leaders stay on the path with.

1835
01:56:37,200 –> 01:56:40,360
With this book? If they’re going to pick this up for the first time, how

1836
01:56:40,360 –> 01:56:44,120
do they stay on the path? Reading this. Reading this very small but very

1837
01:56:44,120 –> 01:56:47,930
difficult book. Well, thank

1838
01:56:47,930 –> 01:56:51,610
you so much for having me. I will. This was such a blast

1839
01:56:51,690 –> 01:56:55,250
and I’d love to come back to answer your

1840
01:56:55,250 –> 01:56:58,850
question. How can leaders stay on the path

1841
01:56:58,850 –> 01:57:01,850
and what lessons they can take from this book

1842
01:57:02,490 –> 01:57:05,690
I’d say kind of to recap.

1843
01:57:06,250 –> 01:57:09,770
1. The Self

1844
01:57:09,770 –> 01:57:13,550
Awareness is nothing without

1845
01:57:13,710 –> 01:57:16,670
mastery. So I think

1846
01:57:17,150 –> 01:57:20,830
thinking about what’s inside is great and

1847
01:57:20,990 –> 01:57:24,510
important, but it cannot stop there.

1848
01:57:24,990 –> 01:57:28,630
The second lesson I think is really

1849
01:57:28,630 –> 01:57:32,390
about integrity. Dostoevsky shows

1850
01:57:32,390 –> 01:57:35,870
somebody who doesn’t have any integrity. He

1851
01:57:35,870 –> 01:57:39,540
lies to himself and he lies to everybody else.

1852
01:57:40,100 –> 01:57:43,940
And the lesson here is if you keep

1853
01:57:43,940 –> 01:57:47,540
doing this, you will end up alienated,

1854
01:57:48,100 –> 01:57:51,380
alone and miserable

1855
01:57:51,940 –> 01:57:55,700
later on. So it’s not a mirror

1856
01:57:56,260 –> 01:57:57,860
of what could be

1857
01:57:59,940 –> 01:58:03,540
as a good example, but it’s really a terrible example example

1858
01:58:03,620 –> 01:58:06,100
of what may happen. And I think

1859
01:58:08,500 –> 01:58:12,180
the last thing I would say is if I am

1860
01:58:12,180 –> 01:58:15,860
a leader today, the lesson I’m taking from the

1861
01:58:15,860 –> 01:58:19,580
Notes from the Underground is definitely that

1862
01:58:19,580 –> 01:58:23,300
you have to walk the talk and you cannot

1863
01:58:23,300 –> 01:58:26,660
bring people with you by Just talking.

1864
01:58:27,140 –> 01:58:30,970
You have to demonstrate your integrity in daily life,

1865
01:58:31,930 –> 01:58:35,610
in your daily actions, in the

1866
01:58:36,010 –> 01:58:39,290
everyday operation of

1867
01:58:39,530 –> 01:58:43,130
your small company, big company enterprise, what have you.

1868
01:58:44,970 –> 01:58:48,690
Either we come, you know, either we show up on

1869
01:58:48,690 –> 01:58:52,330
time or we don’t. And if we tolerate this, then

1870
01:58:52,730 –> 01:58:55,870
okay, that’s the company you have. If you

1871
01:58:57,150 –> 01:59:00,950
work hard and you want other people to work hard, then you better

1872
01:59:00,950 –> 01:59:04,750
work harder than them because you can

1873
01:59:04,910 –> 01:59:08,750
ask for things you’re not demonstrating. And I think that there is

1874
01:59:08,830 –> 01:59:12,430
and has been a gap between what the

1875
01:59:12,430 –> 01:59:16,190
management is telling us and what it feels like

1876
01:59:16,190 –> 01:59:19,310
on the ground. And I think that there is

1877
01:59:21,160 –> 01:59:24,920
now the reckoning of sort

1878
01:59:24,920 –> 01:59:28,640
of closing the gap and the companies. And it doesn’t

1879
01:59:28,640 –> 01:59:32,400
have to be great or enviable. And I think above

1880
01:59:32,400 –> 01:59:36,040
all, you can stay pretty unique, right? Like you

1881
01:59:36,040 –> 01:59:39,560
can be a company that does things certain way that

1882
01:59:39,560 –> 01:59:43,320
nobody else does. Nobody else is organized

1883
01:59:43,320 –> 01:59:46,810
the way you are. But if you have a

1884
01:59:46,810 –> 01:59:50,490
vision and you walk that talk and it is, you

1885
01:59:50,490 –> 01:59:53,690
will attract people who, who will fit that, that

1886
01:59:53,690 –> 01:59:57,330
culture and, and you can make it happen.

1887
01:59:57,490 –> 02:00:00,610
I think that the, the idea that everything needs to be

1888
02:00:00,610 –> 02:00:04,050
ubiquitous, you know, like we all have to,

1889
02:00:04,210 –> 02:00:07,930
and, and that is one of those, like it forces you to

1890
02:00:07,930 –> 02:00:11,410
be who you’re not. And so this, this courage

1891
02:00:12,190 –> 02:00:15,910
is a verb and truth is a verb

1892
02:00:15,910 –> 02:00:18,590
because you need to have the courage to sustain it

1893
02:00:20,190 –> 02:00:22,990
and be that sort of a sovereign

1894
02:00:23,790 –> 02:00:26,110
individual is really critical.

1895
02:00:27,549 –> 02:00:31,390
Awesome. Thank you Hana for coming

1896
02:00:31,390 –> 02:00:34,110
on the podcast. We will have links to

1897
02:00:34,750 –> 02:00:38,390
Hana’s substack and her LinkedIn profile. We’ll

1898
02:00:38,390 –> 02:00:42,230
also have links to a couple of the books that she mentioned and articles, as

1899
02:00:42,230 –> 02:00:45,390
you mentioned in the show notes below the

1900
02:00:45,790 –> 02:00:49,230
audio player where you are listening to this show

1901
02:00:49,710 –> 02:00:53,350
right now. Once again, I would like to thank Hannah for coming

1902
02:00:53,350 –> 02:00:56,830
on the podcast. And with that. Well, no, you’re welcome

1903
02:00:57,069 –> 02:00:59,630
with that. Well, we’re out.