Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion w/ Nicky Billou & Jesan Sorrells

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Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and this

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is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,

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episode number 191.

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Opening with a brief selection from our

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book today, and I quote,

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this book is called Slouching Towards Bethlehem because for several years

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now certain lines from the Yeats poem, which appear two pages back, have reverberated

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in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there.

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The widening gyre, the falcon which does not hear, the falconer, the gaze blank

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and pitiless as the sun. Those have been my points of reference, the only

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images against which much of what I was seeing and hearing and

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thinking seemed to make any pattern.

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem is also the title of one piece in the book, and that

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piece, which derived from some time spent in the Haight Ashbury district of San

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Francisco, was for me both the most imperative of all these

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pieces to write and the only one that made me despondent after it

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was printed. It was the first time I had dealt

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directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization,

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the proof that things fall apart. I went to San

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Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months and had been

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paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that

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the world, as I had understood it, no longer

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existed. And we’re going to skip down a little

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bit and I’m going to pick up this one. I suppose almost everyone who writes

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is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening.

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But it seemed to me then, perhaps because the piece was important to me,

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that I had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the

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point that I’m going to flip down

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a little bit further and I’m going to go to this. I

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was in fact as sick as I have ever been when I was riding slouching

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towards Bethlehem. The pain kept me awake at night. And so

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for 20 and 21 hours a day I drank gin and hot water to blunt

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the pain and took Dexatrin to blunt the gin and wrote the piece of I

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would like to tell you, I would like you to believe that I kept working

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out of some real professionalism to meet the deadline. But

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that would not be entirely true. I did have a deadline, but it was

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also a troubled time, and working did to the trouble what Jen did

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to the pain. What else is there to tell?

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I am bad at interviewing people. I avoid situations in which I have

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to talk to anyone’s press agent. This precludes doing pieces on most

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actors, a bonus in itself. I do not like to

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make telephone calls and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on

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some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through the

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call to the district to the Assistant district attorney. My

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only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small,

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so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate

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that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best

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interests. And it always does.

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That is one last thing to remember.

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Writers are always selling

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somebody out.

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Here’s on my own thoughts on this before I introduce my guest

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today. My special guest today, his first time

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on the show. Betraying a person’s

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confidence to gain personal advantage, and yet not being sure why you were doing

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it and what end it serves is where the beginning of the

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erosion of trust starts.

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And once trust in a high trust society bound by traditions, family

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bonds and the surety of community is riven by such erosion, the

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beginning of social chaos is not far behind.

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But a society that is eroding a trust can survive chaos, adapt to it, and

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emerge on the other side with a different sort of trust schema altogether together

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by individuals just refusing to play the game of selling out their principles,

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their values or their relationships. It’s a lot of

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psychological, moral and emotional weight for individuals to carry during times of

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chaos, when it seems as though every bond around them is

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fraying, tearing and breaking.

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But it’s only the act of buying in, not

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opting out, that works to preserve not what was in the past,

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but the circumstances, fragile though they may be,

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for a different and potentially far better future.

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Otherwise, the Hobbesian war of

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all against all breaks out and then nothing

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worth preserving remains. And it’s

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monstrously difficult to cobble together a high trust society again

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out of nothing. Today on

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the show, we are going to take a second crack at this book

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that launched our author into public consciousness as a literary talent

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in the early 1960s, documenting the coming unraveling

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of American culture, an unraveling that eventually would lead to

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the cultural chaos we in 2026 are

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just beginning to exit at the end of our

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fourth turning. Today on the show,

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we are going to pull cautions for leaders around

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communication, around negotiation, around

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tradition, around family, around what’s worth preserving, and around how you

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behave during an unraveling. We’re going to pull these

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cautions for leaders from our book today. Slouching

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towards Bethlehem by the late great

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Joan Didion

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leaders, there are four patterns in an 80 year historical

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cycle and in the fall of an unraveling

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period, no One can really figure out what

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the heck is going on.

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And joining us on our journey today is my special guest, first time on the

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show, Nikki Ballou.

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Nikki is the host of the Thought Leader Revolution podcast and he works

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with and coaches consultants. He works with coaches consultants

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and, and entrepreneurs to help them scale their

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revenue. He is also the world’s expert on

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podcast guesting. He, he actually reached out to me

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via, via Matchmaker FM and which is

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where I sometimes, sometimes get guests from. That’s some deep inside baseball for those of

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you who are listening. And he reached out to me and we started

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talking and he was really excited about the concept of the show. So I challenged

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him to, to take a crack at this book which he’d never read before. And

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he went out, he bought the book, he read it, he had some interesting insights

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for me in our pre production call and he has

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agreed to join us today to have a much longer and probably a

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lot deeper conversation here. Moving into Slouching

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Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. Welcome to the show, Nikki, how are you doing

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today? Hey,

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Sal, my brother, thanks for having me on the show, man. It’s truly an honor

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to be here. So tell us a little

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bit about yourself. I always like to do that at the beginning because folks don’t,

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don’t know you, they don’t know what your interests are. So tell us a little

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bit about yourself.

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You know, I have a standard introduction of myself that I give when

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I come on shows and I’m not going to give that today because

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I want to talk about me as a lover of books.

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Okay? Okay.

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So I’m originally

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an immigrant from the Middle East. I’m a Christian from Iran.

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And growing up in Iran, my parents

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enrolled me and my brothers in the

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American Community School in Tehran. So I went and was schooled primarily in

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English. We also had to take Farsi there as well. And I

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had a number of teachers that

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really were fabulous. One was Ms. Sally Flaherty

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who just passed, I think late last year, God

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rest her soul. And she

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introduced me to the idea of

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loving reading books. And

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by the time I was eight or nine years old,

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I was reading every day for fun.

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And I would read stories, I would read novels, and

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I would read history. And

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by the time I was 11, I read

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my first adult level book, which, which

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was the Eagle has Landed

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by Jack Higgins, one of the great

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thriller novels of all time. It was published originally in

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1974. And then I read the Crash of

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79, a whole bunch of other books like that. And I was Just hooked

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and saw my brother.

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I track the books that I read and

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I’ve been using a website called

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goodreads.com Now I started using

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goodreads.com in 2015, but something

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got messed up in my account and they lost

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nine or nine or ten years of my, of

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my books that I’d been

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tracking. But I can tell you this, that over a

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ten year period I, I read over a thousand

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physical paper books. And for the last seven

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straight years, I’ve never read under 103

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books. And my best year was last year when I

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read 159 books. I love books, I

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adore books. I think books

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ennoble the soul and I think books

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are just a darn good time. So that is my story

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as a reader. Books are,

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and this is one of the reasons why I do this show. Books are

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everything that you’ve mentioned. They are also a

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really, really awesome way. They’re the best way.

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We’ve actually found the best technology I think humanity has found

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to smuggle ideas across generations.

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And I like to write that down. That is so well said.

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Smuggle ideas across generations. Okay, I gotta. Either books

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are the best way to smuggle ideas. Dude, that’s

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genius, man. Well, when you look at it,

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even books, like, even books that don’t appear to have much

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weight to them, right? So we’ve read all kinds

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of books on this show. We’ve read everything from the

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Homers, the odyssey translated by T.E. shaw,

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Lawrence of Arabia, he translated his version of the Odyssey. We read that

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on the show all the way to. Oh gosh.

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I mean, we’ve read Crime and Punishment, right? The first four chapters

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of Crime and Punishment. But we’ve also read lighter fare, right?

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Like we once read for the kids. We once read a Click Clack

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Moo by Doreen Cronin.

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A cardboard, not a cardboard, but a small book for, for

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kids. I actually brought my son on and, and we talked a little

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bit about Click Clack Moon. This is back when he was probably 6 or 7.

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Because that book is so subversive about leadership and

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about what it actually means to like struggle

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and to build a team. And then what happens when that

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doesn’t work? Books are a way to

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smuggle ideas, like I said, across generations, across time.

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So when I pick up Click Clack Moo with my six year old,

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I can also hold on to this physical book, this physical thing in the world

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and then I can hand this off to, you know, my kids

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when they have kids, or I can hand this off to, to My, to my

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grandkids directly. And I can smuggle that idea about leadership directly

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into them. And it’s, it’s, it’s a miracle

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that we even came up with this technology.

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And it’s a real shame that

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people aren’t reading physical books as much as they were. But I don’t think

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the physical book in and of itself will ever fully go away. I think it’s

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about to transform. I think it’s about to transmogrify

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into, into something else because it’s just, it’s too

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good a technology to kill it. It

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is. And I also think

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that there’s going to be a

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large cohort of the younger generation

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that is going to hit 30, 35 and 40 and

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is going to start discovering the value of paper books.

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Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I agree with that. Well, and

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we’re already starting to see this move in the younger generation,

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the gen zers, the zoomers, such as they are sometimes called.

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And they like old things. They like,

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well, what they perceive as old. Right. Pre Internet things.

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Right. Pre social media, pre digital things. And so

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that’s one of the reasons why I do this show, because I can introduce a

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book. I can have a conversation with somebody who’s really interesting about that

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book and about the ideas in it. Yes. For leaders,

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obviously, but then for everybody. Right.

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Like, it’s amazing when you go on my YouTube channel, the number of comments I

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have just on a couple of books that I did last year are just phenomenal

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for people who actually, you know, when are like, they actually say to me, I’m

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going to go out and buy this physical book. Or I, or I’ve had this,

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I’ve had this physical book for years. I’ve never heard anybody talk about it until,

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until you, you brought it up, you brought it up on the show. So it

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allows us to make connections again across time. That’s just, it’s

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amazingly subversive. Amazingly

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subversive. Speaking of which,

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Ms. Didion. So we just covered, we just covered

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A Book of Common Prayer. That was our last episode. If you haven’t had a

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chance to listen to that, go back and listen to that with Tom Libby. And

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this follows along with us covering

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this month, Eudora Welty and the Optimist’s Daughter.

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So go back and listen to that episode as well. These three books

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kind of go together because they are fundamentally about

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communication. They are fundamentally about communication across time.

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And the, the, the, the next essay I’d like to

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pull from to sort of set the next piece of our conversation here. Is

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from John Wayne, A Love Song. I love this essay.

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Me too. And, and I want to just pull a couple of different pieces

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about this and then have a conversation with Nikki, because those of you who

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don’t know Nikki, Nikki hosts his own

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podcast. And Nikki is very engaged with, with men

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and with masculine masculinity and masculine encoded communication.

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And there’s, there’s an element in here that I want to. I want to explore

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with Nikki here in just a moment. So from John

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Wayne, A Love Song. I’m going to quote this from Ms.

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Didion. In the summer of 1943, I was eight, and my

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father and mother and small brother and I were at Peterson Field in Colorado Springs.

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A hot wind blew through that summer blue until it seemed that before

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August broke, all the dust in Kansas would be in Colorado, would have

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drifted over the tar paper barracks in the temporary strip and stopped only when

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it hit Pike’s Peak. There was not much to do, a summer like

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that. There was the day they brought in the first B29, an event to

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remember, but scarcely a vacation program. There was an officers club,

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but no swimming pool. All the Officers club had of

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interest was an artificial blue rain behind. Was artificial blue rain behind the bar.

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The rain interested me a good deal, but I could not spend the summer watching

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it. And so we went, my brother and I, to the movies.

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Now that’s, that’s our. That’s our open. And then I’m going to

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move down. As it happened, I.

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No, I don’t want to. I don’t want to do that one. So they went

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to go. They went to go and see a John Wayne movie. And,

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and she says this, a picture called War of the Wildcats.

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And then she says this a little later on in the essay. In John Wayne’s

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world, John Wayne was supposed to give the orders. Let’s ride,

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he said, and saddle up. Forward, ho. When a man’s got to

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do. When a man’s got to do. Hello there,

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he said when he first saw the girl in a construction camp or on a

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train or just standing around on the front porch waiting for somebody to ride up

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through the tall grass. When John Wayne spoke, there was no

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mistaking his intentions. He had a sexual authority so

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strong that even a child could perceive it. And in a

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world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt

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and paralyzing ambiguities. He suggested another world,

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one which may or may not have existed ever, but in any case

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existed no more. A place where a man could move free,

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can make his own code and live by it. A world in which if a

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man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and

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go riding through the draw and find himself home free. Not in a hospital

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with something going wrong inside, not in a high bed with flowers and drugs and

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the four smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river,

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the cottonwoods shining in the early shimmering in the early

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morning sun. And then I’m gonna go down a little

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bit further. He talks, she talks about how John Wayne was

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born Marian Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, the son of a

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druggist and moved as a child to Lancaster, California,

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and then played football and then became this

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actor, right? She says this

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there a meeting on the old Fox lot with

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John Ford, one of the several directors who were to sense that

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into this perfect mold might be poured the inarticulate longings of

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a nation wondering at just what pass the trail had been lost.

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Damn it, Raul said. Raul Walsh, later, the son of

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a looked like a man.

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Yeah. Masculine coded communication,

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Nikki, that’s what Joan Didian is talking about in this essay.

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At the core of it, and the reason why I wanted to talk with

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you about this today is because a rebellion

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began in Didian’s time against masculine coded communication.

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And it’s a rebellion that has continued on even into our day.

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One of the things that, and I don’t want to get too far into your

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other projects, one of the things that I noted

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in the meeting that I attended on Thursday was how

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deeply masculine coded the communication was. That was one of the things that just

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immediately jumped off the page to me, even in how you checked people

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and how you changed what they were doing, the

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difference between second person and first person in terms of

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ownership and accountability and attempting to get people to engage in accountability.

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And I was struck in my observation,

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particularly considering that I was just, just gone through Satchi towards Bethlehem.

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And we’re going through a month of books that are written by women.

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Women and men communicate radically different. And

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the coding that’s underneath our language

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is so fundamentally different, but we don’t

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notice the difference until someone comes along who

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is communicating in totally the opposite direction and sort of jars

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us out of our assumptions, Right? And so

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there’s currently in America an attempt to reassert masculine

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coded communication. And I think that that’s part of the reason why Donald

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Trump is so popular. I think it’s one of the unstated reasons why he’s popular.

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He’s a return to masculine coded communication. It’s

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also the reason why he’s genuinely hated by people who genuinely

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hate him. And they don’t know why. They’ll assign it to a political thing

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or they’ll sign it to a policy thing, but in reality, it’s not about policy

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and it’s not about politics. In reality, it is about

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how he communicates the language he chooses to use,

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because he could do the exact same policies, have the exact same politics, and if

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he were Mitt Romney, no one would have any problems.

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But Mitt Romney’s communication is coded much more feminine than

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Donald Trump’s is, even though they are both men

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and they come from the same generation, which is also very interesting to me.

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Now, the question here is for Nikki and I

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wanted to tee this up for you.

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Sure. What, what can we learn about masculine communication

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from John Wayne? A Love Story by Joan Didian? What can we learn

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from that chapter?

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It’s interesting. They, some of the pieces that you

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read from showed me that Joan has a bit of

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a love hate relationship with John Wayne, right? She does? Oh, yeah, for

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sure. I mean, she can’t help loving him because

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she was a woman and at the time she wrote this, she was a very

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young woman. She was in her late 20s or early 30s,

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and still in the bloom

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of her feminine essence,

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her hormones and whatnot. And John Wayne, even at that

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point in time, when he was in his 60s and not

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what he used to be when he was much younger, but was still

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a masculine man. And the feminine essence

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cannot but help be drawn to and attracted to

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a masculine essence in a very masculine man like John Wayne. And it’s

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obvious she’s trying not to like him, but she can’t help herself. She

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can’t help herself. She just can’t. It’s,

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it’s, you know, she’s the kind of woman who’d walk up

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to him and say, I hate your guts, and then kiss him passionately and rip

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his clothes off. And, you know, that’s,

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that’s the sense that I got from her writing about John Wayne

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and the piece where you talked about that he

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suggested this other world that may or may not have existed. Well, of course it

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existed. It still existed at the time that she wrote about it. And

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outside of the west, it existed everywhere in the world.

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And the kind of man that John

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Wayne portrayed himself as in the movies

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that he made was that man who made his own code and

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lived by it. And what was incredible about the United States of

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America, and in my opinion still is incredible about the United States of

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America, is that a free society like The United States

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gives men an opportunity to

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define that code and to live by it if they so

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choose. What made John Wayne so popular

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is because Americans, and really

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men and women all over the world were drawn to this.

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They want that kind of man to be an

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exemplar in the world. The kind of man that is

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black and white in his view of things. The

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kind of man that believes in a code, that

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defines a code and lives by it. The kind of man

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that inspires the rest of us to get out of our own

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doldrums and strongly move forward

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in life, living our best lives

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because we’ve identified a code by which we live our life.

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The reason why the last 60 odd years

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have been hard for Western civilization

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as a whole is because society as a whole and

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the culture as a whole doesn’t cotton to that anymore.

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John Wayne is a demonstration

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of a bygone and better era for most men.

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And those of us that are lucky enough to have known who he is,

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to have seen his movies and watched his interviews,

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understand this. And Joan Didion at some level

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00:24:42,310 –> 00:24:46,150
understands this. But unfortunately, Joan came of age

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in an era where young women were starting to be told

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that, hey, there’s a patriarchy out there and you don’t have to listen to men

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and Kumbaya, get out there and seek your own freedom,

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burn your bra and all that stuff. And

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that was a very beguiling, a false message that a

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lot of those women were fed and bought into.

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But I’m telling you right now, in 2026,

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every woman I know who’s over the

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age of 50 who was brought up with that

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message is either publicly or privately

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00:25:25,810 –> 00:25:29,609
starting to doubt it very strongly. And I think Joan

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00:25:29,609 –> 00:25:32,130
Didion didn’t have an opportunity to doubt it

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00:25:33,010 –> 00:25:36,850
intellectually because all the rest of this book

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00:25:37,170 –> 00:25:40,450
is written from the point of view of a 60s feminist,

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00:25:41,010 –> 00:25:44,290
right, the patriarchy as she defined it.

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But in this particular essay, there’s a part

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of her essence that’s rebelling against her rebellion. And

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that’s what I noticed. So this is why

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I say this book is part of. It’s the documenting of the

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00:25:59,690 –> 00:26:03,330
beginning of the unraveling of American culture. Right.

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00:26:03,410 –> 00:26:06,930
So I’m a big fan of Strauss and Howe’s

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00:26:06,930 –> 00:26:10,590
generational theory of like 80 years seculum cycles, right.

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And. And Didian wrote and spent

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the majority of her writing career and wrote her most

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interesting books and essays

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00:26:22,630 –> 00:26:26,350
and contributions to the culture during that

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00:26:26,350 –> 00:26:30,070
unraveling time that started, quite

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00:26:30,070 –> 00:26:33,630
frankly, if we want to be really blunt about it, it started quite frankly, with

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00:26:33,630 –> 00:26:37,120
the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That’s when the unraveling really started.

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00:26:37,520 –> 00:26:40,960
And the unraveling ended with September

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00:26:40,960 –> 00:26:44,680
11th. That’s the, that’s the, that’s the framework that, that

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00:26:44,680 –> 00:26:48,200
the. And, and that’s about a 25 year. That’s about 25 year unraveling

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00:26:48,200 –> 00:26:52,040
cycle that occurred there. And then everything that’s

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been post September 11th, I would say, up to January.

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00:26:55,920 –> 00:26:59,680
January, sorry, July of 2024. And the Assembly,

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00:26:59,760 –> 00:27:03,130
Pennsylvania. Yeah. Yep. That was chaos.

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00:27:03,290 –> 00:27:06,610
That’s the chaos. That’s the winter of chaos that always comes after the fall of

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00:27:06,610 –> 00:27:10,330
an unraveling. Gideon was born

429
00:27:10,410 –> 00:27:14,130
in a secular spring coming

430
00:27:14,130 –> 00:27:17,890
out of World War II. Right. A place of calm,

431
00:27:17,890 –> 00:27:21,330
a place of rebirth, a place of

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00:27:21,330 –> 00:27:25,170
renewal, and moved very much into like was called a 68, the

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00:27:25,170 –> 00:27:28,460
Summer of Love. Right. And so she is a young woman, to your point. And

434
00:27:28,460 –> 00:27:32,100
most young people at that time, they never thought the summer would ever end,

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00:27:32,260 –> 00:27:35,820
which is why. And I don’t get into like the

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00:27:35,820 –> 00:27:39,620
generational sniping back and forth thing on this podcast because I don’t think that’s useful.

437
00:27:40,260 –> 00:27:44,060
However, I will say this. This is why boomers are confused at the end

438
00:27:44,060 –> 00:27:47,860
of their lives overall as a generation by what’s happening now, because

439
00:27:47,860 –> 00:27:51,620
three generations went through unraveling and chaos. I’m part of the Gen X generation.

440
00:27:51,780 –> 00:27:55,540
We were knee. We’ve been knee deep in chaos ever since late time out of

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00:27:55,540 –> 00:27:59,350
mind. Yeah, exactly. It’s just, it’s been defined by chaos. And one of the

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00:27:59,350 –> 00:28:02,910
points I make on this show is we have

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to rebuild for the next secular spring, which is coming

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00:28:06,670 –> 00:28:09,110
up. We’re coming into a spring cycle and

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we have to look back at things like this and go,

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00:28:14,309 –> 00:28:18,030
what is worthwhile that we can pull forth from this? And so that’s why

447
00:28:18,030 –> 00:28:21,110
this, this mem. This, this sort of essay fascinates me because.

448
00:28:21,670 –> 00:28:25,440
Well, for a couple of reasons. One, I think we will

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00:28:25,440 –> 00:28:28,640
have a return to, to the sort of. Maybe not in the same way, but

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00:28:28,640 –> 00:28:32,360
a return to the sort of John Wayne coded communication style. I do

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00:28:32,360 –> 00:28:34,800
think we are going to. We’re going to do that. I think it’s gonna be

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00:28:34,800 –> 00:28:38,000
the younger generation that’s going to guide us in that direction because they want that,

453
00:28:38,000 –> 00:28:41,360
they want that assuredness, that black and white, that, to your point, they do

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00:28:42,720 –> 00:28:46,360
that, that there’s a definite right, there’s a definite wrong, there’s a definite

455
00:28:46,360 –> 00:28:50,040
answer. But it’s going to be really hard to kind of get that, that

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00:28:50,040 –> 00:28:53,680
sort of personality or that sort of communication launch because we have something that

457
00:28:53,680 –> 00:28:57,240
Didyon didn’t have in her time. We’ve got fragmentation with the Internet,

458
00:28:57,400 –> 00:29:01,000
and we’ve got fragmentation with multiple channels and multiple voices. So it’s really hard to

459
00:29:01,000 –> 00:29:04,720
push through, but it can be done. And then the other thing

460
00:29:04,720 –> 00:29:08,480
that I see happening is this is in our business and

461
00:29:08,480 –> 00:29:12,120
among our leaders, we’re seeing this sort of

462
00:29:13,640 –> 00:29:16,860
transformation post Covid where

463
00:29:19,820 –> 00:29:22,380
not to put too fine a point on it, and I’ll just go for this.

464
00:29:22,540 –> 00:29:26,380
The feminine coded language hit a wall, as it always does in a

465
00:29:26,380 –> 00:29:30,100
crisis, because feminine coded language is about social

466
00:29:30,100 –> 00:29:33,900
status and keeping everybody calm and keeping everybody cohesive and making sure

467
00:29:33,900 –> 00:29:36,940
everybody gets along. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You want to have that. That’s

468
00:29:36,940 –> 00:29:40,140
how you build. That’s how you build a town in the Old West. That’s how

469
00:29:40,140 –> 00:29:43,800
you build a society and a culture. But during a

470
00:29:43,800 –> 00:29:47,400
time of, of, of. Of chaos

471
00:29:47,400 –> 00:29:51,240
and strife, masculine coded communication

472
00:29:51,240 –> 00:29:54,920
is what becomes dominant at that moment. And

473
00:29:54,920 –> 00:29:58,760
that’s why I go back to Trump is the highest example

474
00:29:58,760 –> 00:30:02,320
of this. But that’s why his reelection campaign worked,

475
00:30:02,480 –> 00:30:06,000
because it was the strongest example of signal to noise ratio

476
00:30:06,640 –> 00:30:10,260
in terms of communication. Whether to your point about

477
00:30:10,260 –> 00:30:13,300
Didion, whether you wanted to kiss him or slap him, it doesn’t matter.

478
00:30:13,940 –> 00:30:17,300
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. You know,

479
00:30:17,700 –> 00:30:21,420
and I don’t know how many folks are

480
00:30:21,420 –> 00:30:24,900
actually going to. How many leaders are actually picking up on this example and

481
00:30:24,900 –> 00:30:27,780
seeing it and understanding what they’re seeing.

482
00:30:28,500 –> 00:30:32,260
And I think this essay gives you a sort of framework to understand what

483
00:30:32,260 –> 00:30:35,780
you’re seeing, not to repeat it maybe necessarily in your own business or your own

484
00:30:35,780 –> 00:30:39,450
family, your own community, maybe you might want to take a different tact,

485
00:30:39,930 –> 00:30:43,050
but you are going to want to use this as a frame.

486
00:30:43,930 –> 00:30:47,610
Yeah, just another thought that I have there. No, it’s a good thought. And

487
00:30:49,210 –> 00:30:52,650
people who weren’t alive when John

488
00:30:52,810 –> 00:30:56,570
Wayne was alive just don’t understand

489
00:30:58,010 –> 00:31:01,290
truly how revered and popular this man was

490
00:31:01,610 –> 00:31:04,560
across the globe. Across.

491
00:31:05,280 –> 00:31:08,840
This man is quite possibly the

492
00:31:08,840 –> 00:31:11,360
biggest celebrity of all time,

493
00:31:12,400 –> 00:31:16,120
right? Quite possibly. I mean, there’s a few people that you

494
00:31:16,120 –> 00:31:19,840
can say, well, what about them? But not many. Not many. I mean, I don’t

495
00:31:19,840 –> 00:31:23,200
know. Michael. Michael Jackson might have Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan,

496
00:31:23,440 –> 00:31:27,040
maybe Elvis. Look, but they

497
00:31:27,040 –> 00:31:30,650
did all that’s true. But let me say this about John

498
00:31:30,650 –> 00:31:34,370
Wayne. There was a 25 consecutive year

499
00:31:34,370 –> 00:31:38,010
period where John Wayne was top 10

500
00:31:38,010 –> 00:31:41,770
box office in Hollywood, right? Top 10.

501
00:31:42,010 –> 00:31:45,610
Nobody else has ever come close to achieving that. Nobody.

502
00:31:46,170 –> 00:31:49,930
Nobody. Well, okay, Michael, Mike.

503
00:31:49,930 –> 00:31:53,690
Michael Jackson had a couple of massive albums, but there were

504
00:31:53,690 –> 00:31:56,970
a couple of massive albums. His entire career wasn’t the John Wayne’s level.

505
00:31:57,310 –> 00:32:00,870
And I love Michael Jackson. Michael Jordan, you know, one of the

506
00:32:00,870 –> 00:32:04,590
goats in professional basketball in the 90s,

507
00:32:04,590 –> 00:32:08,150
certainly was at that level. In the Bulls run for that one

508
00:32:08,150 –> 00:32:11,910
decade. John Wayne was 25 years. Here’s another thing I want

509
00:32:11,910 –> 00:32:15,510
to tell you. There was an annual poll

510
00:32:15,510 –> 00:32:18,670
taken of the most popular actor in America

511
00:32:19,390 –> 00:32:23,120
starting in the early 60s. Okay. Who do you

512
00:32:23,120 –> 00:32:26,520
think won that poll every year for

513
00:32:26,600 –> 00:32:29,880
55 straight years? Oh, John.

514
00:32:30,440 –> 00:32:33,320
John Wayne. Yeah. Dude. He died in

515
00:32:33,320 –> 00:32:37,160
1979. The last year where he was still the number

516
00:32:37,160 –> 00:32:40,540
one actor in the United States was 2006.

517
00:32:40,873 –> 00:32:44,440
2006, 27 years

518
00:32:44,440 –> 00:32:47,880
after his death, the number one actor.

519
00:32:50,050 –> 00:32:53,810
People don’t understand how huge he was. Why was he such a big

520
00:32:55,090 –> 00:32:58,770
celebrity? Why? There was something

521
00:32:58,770 –> 00:33:02,050
about the type of man he portrayed on the screen

522
00:33:02,530 –> 00:33:06,210
that instantly, instantly connected

523
00:33:07,490 –> 00:33:11,090
with the essence and soul of men and women

524
00:33:11,250 –> 00:33:14,780
around the globe. John

525
00:33:14,780 –> 00:33:18,580
Wayne was famously a Republican. You know this, right? Famously a

526
00:33:18,580 –> 00:33:22,220
Republican. Yes. Jimmy Carter,

527
00:33:23,980 –> 00:33:27,260
39th President, United States. Famously a Democrat.

528
00:33:27,580 –> 00:33:30,700
Famously a Democrat. When he was asked,

529
00:33:31,340 –> 00:33:34,620
who would you like to invite to your

530
00:33:34,620 –> 00:33:38,380
inauguration? The only name he

531
00:33:38,380 –> 00:33:42,150
said, he said, whoever you want. John Wayne’s got to be there. He said,

532
00:33:42,390 –> 00:33:46,190
I want John Wayne at my inauguration. I don’t care what it takes. I

533
00:33:46,190 –> 00:33:49,830
know he’s a Republican. He’s got to be there. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. He’s got

534
00:33:49,830 –> 00:33:53,630
to be there. He’s got to be there. Look, I, I. Okay,

535
00:33:53,630 –> 00:33:57,470
so look, I’ll just lay it all on the table. When I was younger, I

536
00:33:57,470 –> 00:34:00,710
was not a massive fan of John Wayne. I was much more of a fan

537
00:34:00,710 –> 00:34:04,470
of Clint Eastwood. Good, Bad and the Ugly High Plains Drifter.

538
00:34:04,960 –> 00:34:07,600
All that. Right. You know,

539
00:34:09,120 –> 00:34:11,520
and over the course of time,

540
00:34:13,360 –> 00:34:16,160
I’ve appreciated John Wayne more. As a matter of fact,

541
00:34:17,360 –> 00:34:21,120
I watched a movie a couple weeks ago, John Wayne movie

542
00:34:21,120 –> 00:34:24,880
on, on hbo. Tall in this. Well, not

543
00:34:24,880 –> 00:34:28,640
on hbo. Tcm. Tall in the Saddle. I never even heard

544
00:34:28,640 –> 00:34:32,190
of this movie before, Right? And I think it’s from like

545
00:34:32,190 –> 00:34:34,080
1948,

546
00:34:34,500 –> 00:34:38,310
49, somewhere around there. And it’s

547
00:34:38,310 –> 00:34:41,590
John Wayne doing John Wayne things. He’s probably in his, like,

548
00:34:41,590 –> 00:34:45,430
mid-30s. And there’s a, there’s a, there’s

549
00:34:45,430 –> 00:34:49,110
a sequence in the movie, right, where he gets into this

550
00:34:49,110 –> 00:34:51,910
fist fight with this other, with this other guy. And

551
00:34:53,350 –> 00:34:57,070
the other guy, I believe, played a role in, in the Quiet Man. I

552
00:34:57,070 –> 00:34:59,950
recognized him from the Quiet Man. I can’t remember this, this actor. Great movie. I

553
00:34:59,950 –> 00:35:03,430
love the Quiet Man. Great movie. I love the Quiet Man. Yeah. And.

554
00:35:04,070 –> 00:35:06,790
And they both have a. They. I mean, they have a real donnybrook. Like, they’re

555
00:35:06,790 –> 00:35:10,310
tearing up the room and they’re getting after it. And Wayne was what,

556
00:35:10,310 –> 00:35:13,910
64250? He was a big boy. He was a big boy.

557
00:35:14,550 –> 00:35:18,070
He’s a big boy. And if John Wayne hit you

558
00:35:18,310 –> 00:35:20,430
like you were going to know it. You’re going. You’re going to get your. Your

559
00:35:20,430 –> 00:35:24,110
bell rung, right? Yeah. And that guy didn’t. He did not

560
00:35:24,110 –> 00:35:27,750
back down to John Wayne. It’s like, okay, we’re gonna have ourselves a

561
00:35:27,750 –> 00:35:30,880
Donny Brook. Let’s have ourselves a donnybrook. Let’s go ahead. And

562
00:35:31,840 –> 00:35:35,360
the, The. The whole dynamic of that, of that one, that fight,

563
00:35:36,240 –> 00:35:39,600
and they did cut it in two different angles. It was. Was really well done.

564
00:35:40,560 –> 00:35:44,400
At the end of the fight, the. The skinny, scrawny old man walks

565
00:35:44,400 –> 00:35:47,920
in and basically he says to. To the guy who was fighting John Wayne, he

566
00:35:47,920 –> 00:35:50,680
says, so, were you guys? Are you guys all right in here? Like, what’s going

567
00:35:50,680 –> 00:35:54,320
on? He’s like. And the guy says, and this is again, masculine coded

568
00:35:54,480 –> 00:35:57,990
communication. He doesn’t say, I have a fight. He didn’t say,

569
00:35:58,150 –> 00:36:00,710
we’re having a fight. He didn’t say any of the things that, like, you would

570
00:36:00,710 –> 00:36:03,230
hear out of a modern. If this is in a modern film, you didn’t hear

571
00:36:03,230 –> 00:36:05,830
say any of that. He just goes, oh, no, we’re fine. We’re just rearranging the

572
00:36:05,830 –> 00:36:09,350
furniture in the room. Yeah, that’s awesome.

573
00:36:09,910 –> 00:36:12,710
That’s a John Wayne line, man. Classic, classic line.

574
00:36:14,470 –> 00:36:18,270
And that is the core. And it struck me when I was watching

575
00:36:18,270 –> 00:36:21,230
the movie, and it’s in black and white, of course, and it struck me when

576
00:36:21,230 –> 00:36:24,930
I was watching this movie that to her point about

577
00:36:24,930 –> 00:36:28,770
John Ford, directors were understanding. John

578
00:36:28,770 –> 00:36:32,490
Ford understood this more so than most directors. Stagecoach, all the way

579
00:36:32,490 –> 00:36:36,330
through his career, that. The Searchers, man. The best Searchers.

580
00:36:36,330 –> 00:36:40,130
Oh, my top five movie of all time, in my opinion. The last scene of

581
00:36:40,130 –> 00:36:43,450
the Searchers with the door closing and he just walks away. Ridiculous.

582
00:36:43,450 –> 00:36:47,250
Genius. Genius. The only. Probably, the only last scene better is

583
00:36:47,250 –> 00:36:50,980
at the end of Godfather. Like, probably. Like, that’s,

584
00:36:50,980 –> 00:36:54,420
you know, and I’m a huge cinephile guy. Everybody knows who listens to the show.

585
00:36:54,420 –> 00:36:58,220
I’m a huge movie guy, huge movie guy. But

586
00:36:59,820 –> 00:37:03,620
Ford understood that America needed myths. And he

587
00:37:03,620 –> 00:37:07,380
saw in John Wayne a container he could pour the myth

588
00:37:07,380 –> 00:37:11,020
in. But he also saw a person who could carry that Myth.

589
00:37:11,900 –> 00:37:14,780
And in our time coming up,

590
00:37:15,800 –> 00:37:18,600
we’re going to need people that can have myths poured into them that they can

591
00:37:18,600 –> 00:37:22,360
carry. And I don’t know if we’ve made enough strong men

592
00:37:22,520 –> 00:37:25,400
to be able to carry those myths. Well,

593
00:37:26,440 –> 00:37:30,120
interesting you should say that. I believe that today’s John

594
00:37:30,360 –> 00:37:33,560
Ford is a man by the name of Dana

595
00:37:33,880 –> 00:37:37,560
White. And I believe that

596
00:37:37,560 –> 00:37:41,000
Dana White is in the myth making business as well,

597
00:37:41,660 –> 00:37:44,780
through his properties, the ufc.

598
00:37:45,980 –> 00:37:49,660
The, the, the slap. I forget the name of the slap company

599
00:37:49,660 –> 00:37:53,260
and the boxing thing that he’s done, but in particular,

600
00:37:53,900 –> 00:37:57,659
the UFC and these fighters

601
00:37:58,060 –> 00:38:01,740
and the way that he builds these myths are

602
00:38:02,060 –> 00:38:05,780
less relevant and important as an individual

603
00:38:05,780 –> 00:38:09,420
than the whole concept of the Ultimate Fighting Championship of strongmen

604
00:38:09,420 –> 00:38:13,220
slapping each other in boxing. But he’s saying that there

605
00:38:13,220 –> 00:38:16,540
is still a powerful place

606
00:38:16,780 –> 00:38:20,500
in our world for men who live by a

607
00:38:20,500 –> 00:38:23,940
code and are willing to go out there and use their

608
00:38:23,940 –> 00:38:26,940
wits and their fists to get it.

609
00:38:27,500 –> 00:38:30,220
And if you look at, if you look at

610
00:38:31,500 –> 00:38:35,060
a week and a half ago, there was a

611
00:38:35,060 –> 00:38:38,700
fight, UFC fight. And

612
00:38:38,940 –> 00:38:42,660
this UFC fight was between a guy named

613
00:38:42,660 –> 00:38:46,060
Hamza Chamayev, who’s a Dagistani based fighter,

614
00:38:46,860 –> 00:38:50,620
undefeated, and an American fighter by the name of Sha

615
00:38:50,620 –> 00:38:53,860
Strickland, who was not undefeated and was a massive

616
00:38:53,860 –> 00:38:57,340
underdog. And in that fight,

617
00:38:57,500 –> 00:39:01,220
Mr. Strickland not only didn’t lose,

618
00:39:01,220 –> 00:39:04,910
he won. He beat this guy. He beat him to the point where I saw

619
00:39:04,910 –> 00:39:08,750
his face afterward and I watched the fight. I’m going, those punches don’t look hard.

620
00:39:08,910 –> 00:39:12,750
Oh, they’re hard. I saw the guy’s face. He’s.

621
00:39:13,470 –> 00:39:17,190
That his face is messed up for at least three months based on how

622
00:39:17,190 –> 00:39:20,350
he got hit. And I saw Strickland got hit, and, you know, he had a

623
00:39:20,350 –> 00:39:23,870
broken nose, but he wasn’t nearly as badly disfigured as his opponent,

624
00:39:23,950 –> 00:39:27,790
which is, I guess, why he won the fight. But if you look at it,

625
00:39:28,030 –> 00:39:31,420
the whole UFC narrative is a myth making narrative.

626
00:39:31,580 –> 00:39:35,420
And Dana White has made himself a gazillion dollars

627
00:39:36,220 –> 00:39:40,060
by creating the myth of the strong man through the UFC fight.

628
00:39:40,220 –> 00:39:43,980
And when it’s an American man beating a foreigner, and in this case,

629
00:39:43,980 –> 00:39:47,580
a Christian beating a Muslim, which is part of, you know, a subtle,

630
00:39:47,660 –> 00:39:51,500
a subtle subtext of the narrative, it’s something that

631
00:39:51,580 –> 00:39:55,060
really, really resonates with a lot of people. Well, those

632
00:39:55,060 –> 00:39:58,820
Dagestani guys, I could tell you as a, as a jiu jitsu guy, those

633
00:39:58,820 –> 00:40:02,580
Dagestani guys train like nobody’s business. They aren’t no slouches.

634
00:40:02,820 –> 00:40:06,500
They’re not. They, they ain’t no slouches. And Sean

635
00:40:06,500 –> 00:40:10,020
Strickland, he’s a

636
00:40:10,020 –> 00:40:13,140
unicorn, man. He’s a unit. Yeah, exactly. He’s.

637
00:40:13,620 –> 00:40:16,740
He’s that classic sort of Boston

638
00:40:17,220 –> 00:40:20,820
Southie, working class, blue collar.

639
00:40:21,540 –> 00:40:25,380
I’m gonna run my mouth, you know, and you’re. Does he ever. Eh.

640
00:40:25,780 –> 00:40:28,700
Oh, my God. And you’re going to take it or leave it, you know, however

641
00:40:28,700 –> 00:40:32,260
it is. And the thing is, he can back up running his

642
00:40:32,260 –> 00:40:36,020
mouth by just walloping you or grounding and pounding you. Right.

643
00:40:37,540 –> 00:40:40,460
And it’s interesting that you mentioned Dana White. I would not have thought. I would

644
00:40:40,460 –> 00:40:43,940
have not have poured Dana White into that. Or not poured. I would not have.

645
00:40:44,100 –> 00:40:47,780
I would not have made that analysis or that align between Dana White

646
00:40:47,780 –> 00:40:50,020
and John Ford. I think that’s very interesting because

647
00:40:52,290 –> 00:40:56,090
I’m very interested in the decline of boxing in the United States and

648
00:40:56,090 –> 00:40:58,850
the rise of ufc. Like, how that has sort of, like,

649
00:40:59,730 –> 00:41:03,410
things have sort of flipped kind of in the similar way where baseball is

650
00:41:03,410 –> 00:41:07,250
no longer as popular a sport in the United States as football currently

651
00:41:07,569 –> 00:41:11,330
is. And it’s one

652
00:41:11,330 –> 00:41:14,570
of those cultural things that just never gets commented on. It just sort of happens.

653
00:41:14,570 –> 00:41:17,170
And the flow of it is just hap. Not just happening. But, I mean, it’s

654
00:41:17,170 –> 00:41:20,970
being guided by Dana White and others. But I remember UFC 1.

655
00:41:20,970 –> 00:41:24,130
I mean, I remember the Gracies, when they came out and just killed everybody.

656
00:41:24,610 –> 00:41:27,170
They were amazing. Yeah. And everybody was like, I have no idea what to do

657
00:41:27,170 –> 00:41:29,330
with this jiu jitsu thing. We all better figure this out.

658
00:41:30,770 –> 00:41:33,890
We better go figure this out. And of course, over the last 30 years, they’ve

659
00:41:33,890 –> 00:41:37,530
been able to figure it out, both the men and the

660
00:41:37,530 –> 00:41:41,370
women. But ufc, I remember back

661
00:41:41,370 –> 00:41:45,160
in the early days was associated with gladiatorial combat. It

662
00:41:45,160 –> 00:41:48,600
was associated with cage fighting. And of course, over time, it has become

663
00:41:48,600 –> 00:41:52,280
professionalized. And so it’s interesting that you would say that. That Dana

664
00:41:52,280 –> 00:41:55,680
is sort of, sort of molding that myth because he’s had time to do it,

665
00:41:55,680 –> 00:41:59,320
you know? Yes, definitely in a. Definitely in

666
00:41:59,320 –> 00:42:02,080
a. In a. In a masculine, coded

667
00:42:02,960 –> 00:42:06,080
kind of way. So. Yep. Yeah, I.

668
00:42:06,640 –> 00:42:10,480
I not remembered the Sean Strickland fight until. Until you just mentioned it. Yeah.

669
00:42:10,860 –> 00:42:14,060
It was a hell of a fight. I really enjoyed that fight. It was fun

670
00:42:14,060 –> 00:42:17,740
to watch. And when. When Hamza

671
00:42:19,020 –> 00:42:22,740
came out like a bat out of hell in the first round, that’s. That’s been

672
00:42:22,740 –> 00:42:26,020
his strategy. That’s how he’s won all those 15 fights. He comes out like a

673
00:42:26,020 –> 00:42:29,180
bat out of hell, and most people are just overwhelmed by him.

674
00:42:29,660 –> 00:42:33,300
But Joe Rogan said before the fight that this is what

675
00:42:33,300 –> 00:42:35,460
Hamza’s going to do. He’s going to come out like a bat out of how

676
00:42:35,460 –> 00:42:37,870
he’s going to come at Sean, he said, and he’s not going to be able

677
00:42:37,870 –> 00:42:41,630
to keep him down. Can’t keep Sean down. So. And he’s. And he’s

678
00:42:41,630 –> 00:42:45,430
going to get tired. And. And he also said Sean’s going to get tired,

679
00:42:45,430 –> 00:42:48,550
but Sean’s cardio is 30 times as strong as

680
00:42:48,550 –> 00:42:51,510
Hamzat’s. So when Hamza’s tired,

681
00:42:52,070 –> 00:42:55,550
Sean’s like, that’s my second win. Now I’m going to. Now I’m going to hammer

682
00:42:55,550 –> 00:42:58,590
you. And he said, because it was everybody who said, oh, Hamzat’s going to kill

683
00:42:58,590 –> 00:43:01,430
him. And he said, I don’t know about that, guys. You know, this isn’t as

684
00:43:01,430 –> 00:43:05,250
much of a slam dunk as you think it is. And Sean, he

685
00:43:05,250 –> 00:43:09,090
also said, Sean Strickland’s lost some fights, but he also beat the greatest

686
00:43:09,090 –> 00:43:12,730
middleweight of all time, Israel Adesanya. Right again with this

687
00:43:12,730 –> 00:43:16,490
unorthodox thing that Izzy couldn’t figure out is he couldn’t figure

688
00:43:16,490 –> 00:43:20,010
out how to do it. So. But the beauty of Sean Strickland

689
00:43:20,250 –> 00:43:23,970
is Dana White has understood making

690
00:43:23,970 –> 00:43:27,050
a myth out of this man. And how did he do it? First of all,

691
00:43:27,050 –> 00:43:30,820
he encouraged him to run his mouth. He encouraged him to run his

692
00:43:30,820 –> 00:43:34,300
mouth. In fact, he told him, the more you run your mouth, the better. And

693
00:43:34,300 –> 00:43:37,860
when Sean was in Toronto, I saw him fight Dracus du

694
00:43:37,860 –> 00:43:41,060
Plessis. We, we got tickets. We went to see that fight. It was a lot

695
00:43:41,060 –> 00:43:42,580
of fun with my two sons.

696
00:43:45,220 –> 00:43:48,860
At the end of that fight, you know, before the fight, Sean just

697
00:43:48,860 –> 00:43:52,700
hammered some of Toronto’s leftist media. He just hammered him. He said, people like

698
00:43:52,700 –> 00:43:56,470
you are a disease. And, and he looked around in the room, he

699
00:43:56,470 –> 00:44:00,270
said, look at this guy that’s the enemy. Because that. The guy was

700
00:44:00,270 –> 00:44:03,950
making some pro trans comments or something like that. And then

701
00:44:03,950 –> 00:44:07,390
they came back to J. How could you allow him to do that? You have

702
00:44:07,390 –> 00:44:11,070
an obligation. And he said, I have an obligation

703
00:44:11,550 –> 00:44:15,390
to tell a grown man how to think. Haven’t you ever heard of free

704
00:44:15,630 –> 00:44:19,230
speech? I’m not going to tell him how to think. Sean. Sean.

705
00:44:20,120 –> 00:44:23,840
And there’s myth making in all

706
00:44:23,840 –> 00:44:27,440
of this. Dana White does those press conferences and says what he

707
00:44:27,440 –> 00:44:31,200
says because he wants a certain narrative out there, and that narrative is

708
00:44:31,200 –> 00:44:34,920
about building certain fighters and certain fights up to get more excitement.

709
00:44:35,000 –> 00:44:37,800
He realizes that young men in particular

710
00:44:38,520 –> 00:44:42,240
are hungry for masculine avatars that

711
00:44:42,240 –> 00:44:46,010
they can Latch onto and say, I want to be like that guy. I want

712
00:44:46,010 –> 00:44:49,730
to be like that guy. He got it. And that’s what helped

713
00:44:49,730 –> 00:44:53,250
him turn UFC into a multi, multi, multi billion dollar brand.

714
00:44:53,570 –> 00:44:57,410
UFC is going to take over boxing. You watch this

715
00:44:57,410 –> 00:45:01,130
new boxing outfit he’s brought. He’s putting in the same type

716
00:45:01,130 –> 00:45:04,570
of UFC myth making strategies into building these

717
00:45:04,570 –> 00:45:08,330
boxers up. Boxing is going to be a thing again. And this slap thing.

718
00:45:08,330 –> 00:45:12,040
Who the hell thought slapping people would be a spectator sport? Dude, it

719
00:45:12,040 –> 00:45:15,440
is a huge spectator sport. Huge. It’s

720
00:45:15,440 –> 00:45:18,560
masculinity for fat people, buddy. Oh, it’s masculine,

721
00:45:21,600 –> 00:45:25,080
I tell you. I saw a couple of clips of that on YouTube and I

722
00:45:25,080 –> 00:45:28,560
thought, are you kidding me? And then I went on to. I went on to

723
00:45:28,560 –> 00:45:31,880
something else. I was like, I gotta. I can’t, I can’t. The things. At least

724
00:45:31,880 –> 00:45:34,560
once a day, the Internet asks me to look at something and I’m like, I

725
00:45:34,560 –> 00:45:36,880
can’t. I can’t even with you people. And then I gotta walk away.

726
00:45:40,590 –> 00:45:44,150
But have you seen those guys get hit? I mean. Oh, yeah, slaps are

727
00:45:44,150 –> 00:45:47,630
nutty, man. They are no joke. That’s like standing

728
00:45:47,950 –> 00:45:51,550
for a. For a right hook. That’s like standing in place to take a right

729
00:45:51,550 –> 00:45:55,030
hook. I mean, it’s crazy, man. I’ve zero interest in any of that, thank you

730
00:45:55,030 –> 00:45:58,510
very much. I’d rather slip the right hook and. Yeah, no, we’re done with that.

731
00:45:59,230 –> 00:46:02,990
But, but you understand what this man is doing? He is a

732
00:46:02,990 –> 00:46:06,570
myth maker. He is a myth maker. And, and

733
00:46:06,570 –> 00:46:10,330
he just like John Ford, understood the American public was looking for this.

734
00:46:10,330 –> 00:46:14,010
He understood that a massive global audience of young men

735
00:46:14,250 –> 00:46:17,290
was looking for heroes and he was going to supply them.

736
00:46:17,610 –> 00:46:21,410
Yep. Yep. Let’s go back to the book.

737
00:46:21,410 –> 00:46:25,250
Back. Let’s go. Let’s go back to the book. Let’s go back to the

738
00:46:25,250 –> 00:46:28,730
book. Back to Slouching towards Bethlehem. I want to pick up with.

739
00:46:30,090 –> 00:46:33,050
With another idea that, that runs through here

740
00:46:34,150 –> 00:46:37,750
in her essay on keeping a notebook. I think this was also very, very

741
00:46:37,750 –> 00:46:41,310
relevant. I think there’s some relevance here for, for leaders as

742
00:46:41,310 –> 00:46:44,950
well. I’m going to pick up a couple of different pieces here.

743
00:46:47,190 –> 00:46:50,790
And I quote, my first notebook was a big five tablet

744
00:46:50,950 –> 00:46:54,790
given to me by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining

745
00:46:54,790 –> 00:46:57,910
and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts.

746
00:46:58,790 –> 00:47:02,510
She returned the tablet to me a few years ago. The first entry is an

747
00:47:02,510 –> 00:47:06,130
account of a woman who believed herself to be freezing in the Arctic night,

748
00:47:06,290 –> 00:47:10,010
only to find when day broke, that she had stumbled onto the

749
00:47:10,010 –> 00:47:12,850
Sahara desert where she would die of heat before lunch.

750
00:47:14,290 –> 00:47:17,730
I have no idea what turn of a five year old’s mind could have prompted

751
00:47:18,130 –> 00:47:21,970
so insistently ironic and exotic a story, but it

752
00:47:21,970 –> 00:47:25,730
does reveal a certain predilection for the extreme which has dogged me into adult

753
00:47:25,730 –> 00:47:29,530
life. Perhaps if I were analytically inclined, I

754
00:47:29,530 –> 00:47:32,850
would find it a truer story than any I might have told about Donald Johnson’s

755
00:47:32,850 –> 00:47:36,460
birthday party or the day my cousin Brenda put kitty litter in the

756
00:47:36,460 –> 00:47:39,620
aquarium. That’s funny.

757
00:47:40,180 –> 00:47:44,020
That’s funny. It’s funny. So the point of my keeping a notebook

758
00:47:44,020 –> 00:47:47,300
has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what

759
00:47:47,300 –> 00:47:51,100
I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an

760
00:47:51,100 –> 00:47:54,740
instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.

761
00:47:56,180 –> 00:47:59,660
At no point have I ever been able to successfully keep a diary. My approach

762
00:47:59,660 –> 00:48:03,350
to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent. And. And on

763
00:48:03,350 –> 00:48:06,950
those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has

764
00:48:06,950 –> 00:48:10,350
so overcome me that the results were are mysterious at best.

765
00:48:10,910 –> 00:48:14,510
What is this business about shopping? Typing. Peace. Dinner with E. Depressed.

766
00:48:14,750 –> 00:48:18,470
Shopping for what? Typing What? Peace. Who is E? Was this

767
00:48:18,470 –> 00:48:22,310
E depressed or was I depressed? Who cares? In fact, I have

768
00:48:22,310 –> 00:48:25,950
abandoned altogether that kind of pointless entry. Instead I tell what some would

769
00:48:25,950 –> 00:48:29,720
call lies. That’s simply not true. The members

770
00:48:29,720 –> 00:48:32,520
of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a

771
00:48:32,520 –> 00:48:36,120
shared event. The party was not for you. The spider was not a black

772
00:48:36,120 –> 00:48:39,840
widow. It wasn’t that way at all. Very likely they are right.

773
00:48:39,840 –> 00:48:43,640
For not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely

774
00:48:43,640 –> 00:48:47,400
might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction for

775
00:48:47,400 –> 00:48:50,360
my purpose, for my purposes matters.

776
00:48:51,480 –> 00:48:53,680
And then I’m going to skip down a little bit. She’s going to talk about

777
00:48:53,680 –> 00:48:56,870
cracked crab and come her father coming home from Detroit in

778
00:48:56,870 –> 00:49:00,550
1945. And I’m going to go to this piece here, how it felt to

779
00:49:00,550 –> 00:49:04,390
me. That is getting closer to the truth. About a notebook. I

780
00:49:04,390 –> 00:49:08,110
sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook. Imagine that some thrifty

781
00:49:08,110 –> 00:49:11,830
virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down,

782
00:49:11,830 –> 00:49:15,230
I tell myself. And then some morning, when the world seems drained of wonder,

783
00:49:15,310 –> 00:49:18,310
someday when I’m only going through the motions of doing what I’m supposed to do,

784
00:49:18,310 –> 00:49:22,110
which is right on that bankrupt morning, I was simply open my notebook in

785
00:49:22,110 –> 00:49:25,850
there and there will be always all be a forgotten account with accumulated

786
00:49:25,850 –> 00:49:28,890
interest paid passage back to the world out there.

787
00:49:29,370 –> 00:49:33,090
Dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat check counter

788
00:49:33,090 –> 00:49:36,730
in pavilion. One middle aged man shows his hat check to another and says

789
00:49:36,730 –> 00:49:40,090
that’s my old football number. Impressions of Bettina

790
00:49:40,250 –> 00:49:43,930
Aptheker and Benjamin sonnenberg and Teddy Mr. Alcapuco

791
00:49:43,930 –> 00:49:47,650
Stauffer, careful apricus about tennis bums and

792
00:49:47,650 –> 00:49:51,370
failed fashion models and Greek shipping heiresses, one of whom taught me significant

793
00:49:51,530 –> 00:49:55,160
lesson, a lesson I could have learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald. But perhaps we almost

794
00:49:55,160 –> 00:49:58,880
meet the very rich for ourselves by asking when I arrived

795
00:49:58,880 –> 00:50:02,680
to interview her in her orchid filled sitting room on the second day

796
00:50:02,680 –> 00:50:06,400
of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether it was snowing

797
00:50:06,800 –> 00:50:07,200
outside

798
00:50:10,800 –> 00:50:13,880
and then I’m going to skip ahead this last piece. It is a difficult point

799
00:50:13,880 –> 00:50:17,520
to admit. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all

800
00:50:17,520 –> 00:50:21,340
others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves, taught to be diffident

801
00:50:21,420 –> 00:50:25,180
just this side of self effacing, only the very young and

802
00:50:25,180 –> 00:50:28,820
the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self interrupt with

803
00:50:28,820 –> 00:50:32,620
memories of beach picnics and favorite liberty laundresses and the rainbow trout in

804
00:50:32,620 –> 00:50:36,140
a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected,

805
00:50:36,379 –> 00:50:39,740
rightly to affect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other

806
00:50:39,740 –> 00:50:43,460
people’s trout. And so we do. But

807
00:50:43,460 –> 00:50:47,180
our notebooks give us away. For however dutifully we record what we see around us,

808
00:50:47,180 –> 00:50:50,130
the common denominator of all all we see is always

809
00:50:50,210 –> 00:50:53,410
transparently, shamelessly, the implacable

810
00:50:54,130 –> 00:50:57,730
eye. Close Quote.

811
00:51:06,530 –> 00:51:10,250
One of the knocks I have on Didian and I’ve been I sort of

812
00:51:10,250 –> 00:51:13,130
took me a little while to understand it and to sort of really get where

813
00:51:13,130 –> 00:51:16,530
my my disjunction is with her. And Nikki already mentioned that

814
00:51:17,300 –> 00:51:20,860
she was part of and writing during a time of feminism

815
00:51:20,860 –> 00:51:24,540
becoming the dominant driver of communication, or not

816
00:51:24,540 –> 00:51:28,180
even communication, ideological and cultural thought in America, particularly for American

817
00:51:28,260 –> 00:51:31,820
women and women in the west and women fundamentally

818
00:51:31,820 –> 00:51:33,700
globally later on in the 80s and 90s.

819
00:51:35,460 –> 00:51:38,740
But that’s not my biggest problem with Didion.

820
00:51:39,940 –> 00:51:43,670
That’s a side trek for me or a

821
00:51:43,670 –> 00:51:47,230
side side adventure. The biggest thing for me and it took

822
00:51:47,870 –> 00:51:51,710
it was revisiting this after a couple of years and really looking at her again.

823
00:51:52,190 –> 00:51:56,030
The biggest problem for me was her

824
00:51:56,030 –> 00:51:59,550
her level of solipsism, her

825
00:51:59,630 –> 00:52:01,470
level of inability to

826
00:52:03,230 –> 00:52:06,670
fundamentally and it’s not care but

827
00:52:06,750 –> 00:52:10,360
to fundamentally determine determine something

828
00:52:10,360 –> 00:52:13,640
about her own actions from some form of self

829
00:52:13,640 –> 00:52:17,480
awareness. And in that piece on keeping a notebook, she’s not keeping a

830
00:52:17,480 –> 00:52:21,040
notebook to become more self aware. She’s keeping a notebook because

831
00:52:21,840 –> 00:52:25,160
she actually doesn’t understand what’s going on with

832
00:52:25,160 –> 00:52:29,000
herself. And

833
00:52:29,000 –> 00:52:31,920
I think a lot of people are like that. I think a lot of people

834
00:52:31,920 –> 00:52:35,310
don’t have any idea what’s going on with themselves, men and women alike.

835
00:52:36,030 –> 00:52:39,230
I agree with you. I think a lot of people struggle with that. Like,

836
00:52:39,870 –> 00:52:43,550
it’s really, really hard to turn the lens

837
00:52:43,550 –> 00:52:47,150
on yourself, but then

838
00:52:47,390 –> 00:52:51,070
it’s harder even to turn the lens on yourself, see

839
00:52:51,070 –> 00:52:54,510
the thing, acknowledge the thing, and make the change. And

840
00:52:54,670 –> 00:52:58,430
Didian’s classic move was she was an observer, right? She. She was.

841
00:52:58,590 –> 00:53:01,630
And that’s. We’re going to talk about in the essay that that grounds this book

842
00:53:01,630 –> 00:53:05,350
Slouching Towards Bethlehem. In a moment, she would go, she would observe, she would write

843
00:53:05,350 –> 00:53:09,150
down. And she opens the book, of course, like we. We mentioned

844
00:53:09,150 –> 00:53:12,910
in the preface or in the introduction, by saying that she believed that writing

845
00:53:12,910 –> 00:53:16,670
was no longer a fundamental act that would change society.

846
00:53:16,909 –> 00:53:20,710
Right? And that’s why she wrote Slouching Towards Bethlehem because she didn’t believe

847
00:53:20,710 –> 00:53:22,030
her writing had any meaning.

848
00:53:24,750 –> 00:53:28,560
That’s. That’s funny that that’s a sign of solipsism,

849
00:53:28,560 –> 00:53:31,720
that that’s what that is. And that’s the thing that’s been bugging me about her

850
00:53:31,720 –> 00:53:34,760
writing. That’s my biggest knock against her. And she.

851
00:53:35,240 –> 00:53:39,080
Now, look, let me be very clear. She was able to make a career off

852
00:53:39,080 –> 00:53:42,840
selling that, because she was that. And she was able to write in a

853
00:53:42,840 –> 00:53:44,200
literary way around it.

854
00:53:46,600 –> 00:53:50,280
But I guess my question is, if you’re a leader

855
00:53:50,280 –> 00:53:54,130
and you don’t understand her leader, if you’re anybody and you don’t

856
00:53:54,130 –> 00:53:57,930
understand yourself, should you bother keeping a notebook? It’s

857
00:53:57,930 –> 00:54:00,530
like I’m questioning even that advice that I’ve been giving people. Like, I give. I

858
00:54:00,530 –> 00:54:02,690
give people that advice all the time who are leaders. Like, no, go keep a

859
00:54:02,690 –> 00:54:05,410
notebook. It’ll help you out. But maybe that’s bad advice.

860
00:54:07,330 –> 00:54:10,770
I don’t think it’s bad advice. I think

861
00:54:12,610 –> 00:54:16,410
that in Joan’s case, she didn’t use her notebook

862
00:54:16,410 –> 00:54:19,170
in a way that would have benefited her in a maximal way

863
00:54:20,950 –> 00:54:24,630
if she took the time to actually read what she’d written.

864
00:54:25,350 –> 00:54:28,830
From the point of view of what is this telling me about

865
00:54:28,830 –> 00:54:32,230
myself? I think she’d have got a lot of value out of it because

866
00:54:33,190 –> 00:54:36,830
whatever motivated her to write what she wrote said

867
00:54:36,830 –> 00:54:40,390
something about her state of mind and the state of her soul at that time.

868
00:54:41,190 –> 00:54:44,630
And if she cared enough to examine that, she’d get value from that.

869
00:54:46,640 –> 00:54:50,440
I think people that are in leadership

870
00:54:50,440 –> 00:54:54,160
positions need to ask themselves if they’re really

871
00:54:54,160 –> 00:54:56,880
leaders or if they just have the title.

872
00:54:59,200 –> 00:55:02,640
Because if you’re really a leader, it’s not all about you.

873
00:55:04,240 –> 00:55:06,240
It’s about the people that you lead.

874
00:55:07,760 –> 00:55:11,280
It’s about making a difference for others above self.

875
00:55:12,080 –> 00:55:15,760
You know, a person who is very self focused,

876
00:55:16,080 –> 00:55:18,400
in my opinion, is circling the drain of life,

877
00:55:19,680 –> 00:55:21,680
while a person who’s a true leader

878
00:55:23,360 –> 00:55:26,480
is looking at how their life

879
00:55:27,439 –> 00:55:31,120
can enhance the lives of others,

880
00:55:31,440 –> 00:55:35,120
be it in the family, be it in their community,

881
00:55:35,920 –> 00:55:39,680
in their workplace, be it in society as a whole, and be it

882
00:55:39,680 –> 00:55:43,280
for all mankind. So you talk about Joan Didion.

883
00:55:43,280 –> 00:55:45,520
Yeah, she’s very solipsistic. I agree with you.

884
00:55:47,760 –> 00:55:50,400
I found what she had to say fascinating because

885
00:55:51,360 –> 00:55:55,040
I think she is an erudite observer of the human condition.

886
00:55:56,560 –> 00:56:00,200
I think her biggest problem is, along with a lot of the

887
00:56:00,200 –> 00:56:03,200
gals and guys back in the 60s, she

888
00:56:03,200 –> 00:56:06,770
rejected religion. It’s obvious

889
00:56:06,770 –> 00:56:10,610
she’s rejected religion from how she speaks, how she thinks and how she writes.

890
00:56:10,930 –> 00:56:14,610
If she had not done that, if she

891
00:56:14,610 –> 00:56:18,290
had grounded herself in the religious tradition, I think

892
00:56:18,290 –> 00:56:22,050
she’d have become more introspective and I think her writing

893
00:56:22,050 –> 00:56:25,490
would have been more powerful and more impactful

894
00:56:25,570 –> 00:56:29,210
on more people. And I think what people in the last

895
00:56:29,210 –> 00:56:32,820
25 years, in this time of chaos that you talk about in the current term

896
00:56:32,890 –> 00:56:36,570
returning Hasan, are looking for,

897
00:56:37,050 –> 00:56:40,730
is they’re looking for meaning. Have you read and

898
00:56:40,970 –> 00:56:44,810
discussed on your show Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning?

899
00:56:44,810 –> 00:56:48,290
Has that been one of the books you guys have gone through? Yes, went back.

900
00:56:48,290 –> 00:56:52,130
We went through that in the second season, I believe. Second or

901
00:56:52,130 –> 00:56:55,530
third season of the show. Yes. Well, that book to me

902
00:56:56,010 –> 00:56:59,840
is a primer for every human being who’s looking to

903
00:56:59,840 –> 00:57:03,400
understand why the heck they’re here and what’s going to make their life have

904
00:57:03,400 –> 00:57:07,080
mattered. And if, if you read

905
00:57:07,080 –> 00:57:10,800
that book, a big part of the subtext

906
00:57:10,800 –> 00:57:14,440
of that book is that you need a relationship with your higher

907
00:57:14,440 –> 00:57:17,840
power, with God. I don’t think Viktor

908
00:57:17,840 –> 00:57:21,000
Frankl would have survived the

909
00:57:21,000 –> 00:57:24,720
Holocaust and his brutal

910
00:57:24,720 –> 00:57:28,540
stay in the Nazi concentration camps if he

911
00:57:28,540 –> 00:57:32,340
didn’t have that. If Viktor Frankl had

912
00:57:32,340 –> 00:57:36,060
been a contemporary

913
00:57:37,180 –> 00:57:39,820
secular, anti religious

914
00:57:40,300 –> 00:57:43,740
psychiatrist and he was transported back

915
00:57:44,380 –> 00:57:47,420
to Nazi times and went into that

916
00:57:47,660 –> 00:57:50,700
concentration camp. I believe he’d have been dead in six months.

917
00:57:52,610 –> 00:57:56,410
Well, I mean, Alexander Solzhenitsyn points out something in the Gulag archipelago.

918
00:57:56,410 –> 00:58:00,090
He makes an interesting point. He says that and I mean, and

919
00:58:00,090 –> 00:58:03,530
he went into, he went into the Gulag during

920
00:58:03,530 –> 00:58:05,730
Stalin’s purges right after World War II.

921
00:58:07,570 –> 00:58:11,250
And while the Gulag was not a Nazi concentration camp, it was still no joke,

922
00:58:11,410 –> 00:58:15,090
you know, in Siberia breaking rocks. And one of the things,

923
00:58:16,130 –> 00:58:19,490
one of the, one of the things that Solzhenitsyn pointed out was that

924
00:58:20,770 –> 00:58:24,050
people who came into the

925
00:58:25,170 –> 00:58:28,770
Gulag and were the loudest purveyors

926
00:58:28,770 –> 00:58:30,210
of Marxist ideology,

927
00:58:32,770 –> 00:58:36,610
when they saw what was actually going on in the Gulag,

928
00:58:37,730 –> 00:58:40,730
either would do one of two things. They would either crumble or they would double

929
00:58:40,730 –> 00:58:44,450
down. And they would double down all the way to the,

930
00:58:44,450 –> 00:58:47,680
to the hanging or all the way to the execution or all the way to

931
00:58:47,680 –> 00:58:51,400
just being worked to death, whatever the clearing was at the end of the path.

932
00:58:52,040 –> 00:58:55,800
And he said the people who came in with religion would either

933
00:58:56,280 –> 00:59:00,000
do their time and they would come out one of two ways. Either reaffirmed

934
00:59:00,000 –> 00:59:03,640
in their religion, they would double down or they would abandon it

935
00:59:04,440 –> 00:59:06,280
because of what they saw. Right?

936
00:59:08,600 –> 00:59:11,970
Now, both Frankl and, and

937
00:59:11,970 –> 00:59:15,530
Solzhenitsyn both had those sort of

938
00:59:15,530 –> 00:59:19,210
life bending experiences that, to your

939
00:59:19,210 –> 00:59:22,930
point, Didion, raised in, not only raised

940
00:59:22,930 –> 00:59:26,650
in, but also had her career in mid century America where she didn’t suffer that

941
00:59:26,650 –> 00:59:30,050
much of anything. I mean, I’m not going to say, I’m not going to compare

942
00:59:30,050 –> 00:59:33,450
suffering. I don’t think you win anything by playing a suffering

943
00:59:33,450 –> 00:59:37,090
Olympics. She had her challenges during her time,

944
00:59:37,500 –> 00:59:41,300
right? Including her husband, you know, Gregory Dunn dying. And

945
00:59:41,300 –> 00:59:44,900
I read the Year of Magical Thinking and then her daughter dying as well. That

946
00:59:44,900 –> 00:59:47,500
was a, one terrible. That was just terrible. Right?

947
00:59:49,500 –> 00:59:53,100
So again, I’m not going to play the suffering Olympics. But she’s a product of

948
00:59:53,100 –> 00:59:56,780
her historical time and in her historical era. We talked about this and we

949
00:59:56,780 –> 01:00:00,500
covered a book of Common Prayer. She had to go and visit San Salvador and

950
01:00:00,500 –> 01:00:03,540
see the Civil War up close and then come back and figure out how to

951
01:00:03,540 –> 01:00:07,190
like put all that trauma that she experienced in some

952
01:00:07,190 –> 01:00:10,990
sort of boxes so readers of the New Yorker in the New York Times

953
01:00:10,990 –> 01:00:14,070
could understand it. We’re never going to go there,

954
01:00:14,550 –> 01:00:18,070
but Frankel and Solzhenitsyn are on a different

955
01:00:18,230 –> 01:00:21,590
par, they’re on a different level. And

956
01:00:23,670 –> 01:00:27,030
the challenge, I’m glad you brought up grounding. The

957
01:00:27,030 –> 01:00:30,790
challenge of that grounding, right, is we don’t know how firm it

958
01:00:30,790 –> 01:00:34,500
is until it’s actually tested. And I

959
01:00:34,500 –> 01:00:37,140
think that’s one of the things we’re concerned about in our culture now. We talked

960
01:00:37,140 –> 01:00:40,300
about, we talked a lot about John Wayne, but the,

961
01:00:40,780 –> 01:00:44,420
the idea of testing you talked about in the ufc, right? That’s

962
01:00:44,420 –> 01:00:47,860
testing. I know many

963
01:00:47,860 –> 01:00:51,420
religious people, many Christian people who I love

964
01:00:51,580 –> 01:00:55,420
Desperately and dearly. They have not been

965
01:00:55,420 –> 01:00:55,980
tested.

966
01:01:00,150 –> 01:01:03,430
And that’s a real challenge for us. You know,

967
01:01:04,310 –> 01:01:08,150
have we made life too comfortable? Perhaps. Perhaps

968
01:01:08,150 –> 01:01:11,870
life is too comfortable in America. And I know you’re. I know you’re in

969
01:01:11,870 –> 01:01:15,710
Canada, so, you know, I’m gonna say in the West. In the west it

970
01:01:15,710 –> 01:01:19,350
is. And that leads to

971
01:01:20,070 –> 01:01:23,870
sort of one of my thoughts that I have every time I read Slouching Towards

972
01:01:23,870 –> 01:01:27,270
Bethlehem, just in general. I read this collection of essays. It always sort of puts

973
01:01:27,270 –> 01:01:30,550
me in mind of the Book of Judges, that. That book at the end of

974
01:01:30,550 –> 01:01:32,870
the. Not at the end. And in the Bible

975
01:01:34,710 –> 01:01:38,430
where Israel sort of unravels, right? I mean, they start off with

976
01:01:38,430 –> 01:01:42,110
Joshua and everything’s fine, and then they just unravel throughout the

977
01:01:42,110 –> 01:01:45,950
entire book. And the last line of the Book of Judges is probably the

978
01:01:45,950 –> 01:01:49,470
coldest line in the Bible. And there’s a lot of cold lines in the Bible,

979
01:01:49,470 –> 01:01:52,840
but that is one of the coldest. And it’s. It says, in those days, there

980
01:01:52,840 –> 01:01:56,400
was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

981
01:01:58,160 –> 01:02:01,600
And that’s where the book closes. And it’s just insanity.

982
01:02:02,080 –> 01:02:05,840
Like, just wild things happen in the Book of Judges. People getting

983
01:02:05,840 –> 01:02:09,560
cut up, people getting. It’s. It’s a whole thing. Go, go read it. It’s

984
01:02:09,560 –> 01:02:12,880
wild. And this is what you get without

985
01:02:12,960 –> 01:02:16,560
grounding. But this is also what you get when you had grounding

986
01:02:16,720 –> 01:02:20,140
and then you floated away from it. So

987
01:02:23,260 –> 01:02:27,020
I guess I say all that to ask this question. How do we

988
01:02:27,500 –> 01:02:31,140
know? One of the challenges on this show is how do I make. How do

989
01:02:31,140 –> 01:02:33,660
we make this relevant for our lives? Right? How do we make this book. How

990
01:02:33,660 –> 01:02:37,260
do we make this content relevant for what we’re doing right now? And of course,

991
01:02:37,260 –> 01:02:40,980
the first organizational, the first organization that people are

992
01:02:40,980 –> 01:02:44,540
ever involved in is family. So we have to start in the home,

993
01:02:44,540 –> 01:02:48,350
right? How can. How can listeners,

994
01:02:48,350 –> 01:02:52,030
men or women, ground. Ground

995
01:02:53,150 –> 01:02:56,550
that religious tradition in their home? How do they do it if they’re not

996
01:02:56,550 –> 01:02:59,790
particularly religiously motivated? We’ve never really talked about this on the show before. I mean,

997
01:02:59,790 –> 01:03:03,590
it’s been actually. No, we talked about it in City of God. We’re

998
01:03:03,590 –> 01:03:07,430
talking about Augustine. So it’s been a minute, but how do you ground

999
01:03:07,430 –> 01:03:10,750
that religious tradition in your home? How do you do that in a practical way?

1000
01:03:15,380 –> 01:03:18,580
I think you can start by reading your religious text. I mean, if you’re a

1001
01:03:18,580 –> 01:03:21,060
Christian, I’m a Christian. You can start by reading a Bible.

1002
01:03:22,740 –> 01:03:26,420
If you got kids who read the Bible to your kids, get a

1003
01:03:27,380 –> 01:03:30,980
children’s version of a Bible for your kids that they can read on their own.

1004
01:03:32,580 –> 01:03:35,700
Go to church, find a good Bible based church.

1005
01:03:37,710 –> 01:03:40,270
I think that’s a start then.

1006
01:03:41,150 –> 01:03:44,910
Additionally, you are who you hang around and

1007
01:03:44,910 –> 01:03:48,550
ask yourself, who are the people that you spend the most time with

1008
01:03:48,550 –> 01:03:52,390
on a day to day basis? Are you spending time with

1009
01:03:52,390 –> 01:03:56,150
a bunch of secular types who have a sense of

1010
01:03:56,150 –> 01:03:59,710
moral relativism about the world? Are you spending time

1011
01:03:59,710 –> 01:04:03,010
with devout and religious people that

1012
01:04:03,810 –> 01:04:07,490
seek to live life as godly good humans?

1013
01:04:08,450 –> 01:04:11,970
These are questions to ask yourself. These are ways in

1014
01:04:11,970 –> 01:04:15,810
which to live and to love. And the other thing I would

1015
01:04:15,810 –> 01:04:19,570
tell you is you should read, you should read a lot

1016
01:04:19,570 –> 01:04:23,250
of books because reading will open

1017
01:04:23,650 –> 01:04:27,490
your heart, your mind and your soul to truth.

1018
01:04:30,300 –> 01:04:33,100
And I believe Christianity in particular

1019
01:04:34,060 –> 01:04:37,020
is grounded in eternal truth.

1020
01:04:38,140 –> 01:04:41,180
And if someone takes the time to read

1021
01:04:41,580 –> 01:04:42,300
widely,

1022
01:04:45,740 –> 01:04:48,060
you’ll develop a good meter.

1023
01:04:49,660 –> 01:04:53,500
You know, the most widely read people I know have the best

1024
01:04:53,900 –> 01:04:57,400
meters of anyone I know. Hey son, you got a really good

1025
01:04:57,400 –> 01:05:01,240
bullshit meter. In the time that I’ve known you, I’ve noticed that

1026
01:05:01,240 –> 01:05:04,800
about you. And I attribute that to the fact that

1027
01:05:04,800 –> 01:05:08,440
you take the time to be curious, to

1028
01:05:08,440 –> 01:05:12,160
read, to absorb ideas, to discuss them with other people

1029
01:05:12,240 –> 01:05:16,000
like me on a regular basis. That just makes it very

1030
01:05:16,000 –> 01:05:18,480
difficult for someone to con you or fool you.

1031
01:05:20,170 –> 01:05:22,650
Well, you also said something to me like the first time that we talked on,

1032
01:05:23,530 –> 01:05:27,290
on your podcast, actually a little bit before that, right? You said that I

1033
01:05:27,290 –> 01:05:29,770
was the first person, not first person, but you said I was one of a

1034
01:05:29,770 –> 01:05:32,890
handful of people that you knew who think.

1035
01:05:34,170 –> 01:05:36,730
And that. And that struck me because.

1036
01:05:45,780 –> 01:05:48,260
Much like reading, thinking is fundamental.

1037
01:05:50,500 –> 01:05:54,340
And the question of our time, one of

1038
01:05:54,340 –> 01:05:57,980
the questions I would sometimes ask leaders when I was doing more workshops and

1039
01:05:57,980 –> 01:06:00,900
trainings than I do now is.

1040
01:06:01,940 –> 01:06:05,180
And it is the penultimate question I think of our moment. How

1041
01:06:05,180 –> 01:06:06,660
clearly do you think.

1042
01:06:10,340 –> 01:06:14,080
And in, in our attempt to move our grounding from

1043
01:06:14,080 –> 01:06:17,640
religion to therapy, we’ve got a lot of muddled

1044
01:06:17,640 –> 01:06:21,240
thinking. Like therapeutic grounding is always going to give you muddled

1045
01:06:21,240 –> 01:06:24,920
thinking. And we live in a therapy culture. People

1046
01:06:24,920 –> 01:06:28,720
would rather go talk to a psychotherapist and

1047
01:06:28,720 –> 01:06:32,320
confess their sins, then go talk to a pastor

1048
01:06:32,320 –> 01:06:35,880
and confess their sins. People would rather be in a group

1049
01:06:35,880 –> 01:06:39,310
therapy session with other folks than go and be at church

1050
01:06:39,310 –> 01:06:43,030
praying. And we could talk about why that is.

1051
01:06:43,350 –> 01:06:46,590
But the fact of the matter is that these are the decisions that people have

1052
01:06:46,590 –> 01:06:49,350
made and we’re seeing the outcomes of those at a, at a

1053
01:06:49,510 –> 01:06:53,229
sociocultural, but also all the way down to an individual And a

1054
01:06:53,229 –> 01:06:56,990
family level. Right. And that’s going to be real hard to

1055
01:06:56,990 –> 01:07:00,470
pull back. But thinking clearly

1056
01:07:01,510 –> 01:07:05,270
is. Is the real. Is the real challenge, right? I mean, I think about the

1057
01:07:05,270 –> 01:07:09,070
level of, like, SSRI use that is in.

1058
01:07:09,710 –> 01:07:12,950
In the. In American culture alone. I don’t know about Canadian culture, but is it

1059
01:07:12,950 –> 01:07:16,430
an American culture alone to

1060
01:07:16,430 –> 01:07:20,230
block, you know, taking drugs designed to block or to redirect or

1061
01:07:20,230 –> 01:07:23,309
to. To ameliorate anxiety, to ameliorate

1062
01:07:24,110 –> 01:07:27,910
that sense of. Of anxiousness, Right. Where is

1063
01:07:27,910 –> 01:07:31,550
this anxiousness coming from? Because that’s what you’re grounding in, right? So

1064
01:07:31,550 –> 01:07:34,630
there’s an idea in church. You’ll appreciate this as a Christian. There’s an idea in

1065
01:07:34,630 –> 01:07:38,340
church and in the. In Christian theology that. That what you worship is

1066
01:07:38,340 –> 01:07:42,020
your idol, right? Well, if you’re. If you’re constant and what you focus

1067
01:07:42,020 –> 01:07:45,780
on is what you worship. So if you’re constantly focused on anxiety, if

1068
01:07:45,780 –> 01:07:49,540
you’re constantly focused on the things that are making you anxious, well,

1069
01:07:49,540 –> 01:07:53,219
that’s an idol. And by the way, idols always judge you brutally,

1070
01:07:53,219 –> 01:07:57,060
and you are never forgiven. When you’re judged by an idol, you’re never

1071
01:07:57,060 –> 01:07:59,260
forgiven. So we have a rampant idolatry,

1072
01:08:01,020 –> 01:08:04,810
rampant therapeutic culture. This is one

1073
01:08:04,810 –> 01:08:08,330
of those things that, like, flummoxes me on this show. How do we get people

1074
01:08:08,330 –> 01:08:12,090
to thinking clearly enough? Forget to go to church.

1075
01:08:12,090 –> 01:08:14,770
I mean, that may be a step too far. People. How do we get them

1076
01:08:14,770 –> 01:08:17,530
thinking clearly enough just to write down in a notebook,

1077
01:08:19,210 –> 01:08:23,010
even if it’s solipsistic thinking, but just write down in a notebook? How

1078
01:08:23,010 –> 01:08:26,770
do we get them to cross that? Read smart people’s

1079
01:08:26,770 –> 01:08:30,250
writing. Read smart people’s writing. I mean, look,

1080
01:08:31,610 –> 01:08:34,890
there’s a Canadian professor at

1081
01:08:35,530 –> 01:08:38,410
Concordia University. His name is Gad Said.

1082
01:08:39,130 –> 01:08:42,890
He’s quite popular on the Internet. He’s written a bunch of books. This is

1083
01:08:43,370 –> 01:08:46,570
not his first book, but it’s the first book that became quite famous.

1084
01:08:47,130 –> 01:08:50,890
It’s called the Parasitic Mind. How Infectious Ideas

1085
01:08:50,890 –> 01:08:54,490
Are Killing Common Sense. I read this book, and

1086
01:08:54,790 –> 01:08:58,550
I’ve got my notebook over here, and I take notes on

1087
01:08:58,550 –> 01:09:02,310
interesting things that I’ve read in the book. Do the same

1088
01:09:02,310 –> 01:09:05,910
with the Bible. You know, I’m also

1089
01:09:05,910 –> 01:09:06,470
reading

1090
01:09:09,430 –> 01:09:12,150
Ted Soren’s biography of Kennedy.

1091
01:09:13,670 –> 01:09:17,350
This is a hagiography. There’s no question, man. The. The man worships

1092
01:09:17,350 –> 01:09:20,070
Kennedy. But there’s a lot of good things in this book

1093
01:09:21,200 –> 01:09:24,880
that I’ve learned from, and when

1094
01:09:24,880 –> 01:09:28,640
I read it forces me to

1095
01:09:28,640 –> 01:09:32,280
think. Reading physical paper

1096
01:09:32,280 –> 01:09:35,840
books forces you to think. Listening to

1097
01:09:35,840 –> 01:09:39,200
smart podcasts like this one forces you to think.

1098
01:09:40,560 –> 01:09:44,320
You want your thinking to become clearer? Engage

1099
01:09:44,320 –> 01:09:48,160
in it. The reason why people aren’t able to think

1100
01:09:48,160 –> 01:09:51,920
properly today is because too many people doom scroll for much of the

1101
01:09:51,920 –> 01:09:55,640
day. I got a. I got a challenge for you.

1102
01:09:56,840 –> 01:09:59,720
Lock your phone away on a Saturday morning.

1103
01:10:00,920 –> 01:10:04,720
Turn it off. Get an old fashioned watch and wear it. Lock it

1104
01:10:04,720 –> 01:10:08,040
away for 10 hours once a week

1105
01:10:09,800 –> 01:10:13,620
and read and be present with people instead. Give that

1106
01:10:13,620 –> 01:10:14,060
a try.

1107
01:10:19,100 –> 01:10:22,620
In our house, we call that a Sabbath. There you go.

1108
01:10:24,060 –> 01:10:27,540
But we use old school words. You know, we’re, we’re sort of traditional that way

1109
01:10:27,540 –> 01:10:30,540
a little bit. No, you’re right. Like it’s

1110
01:10:33,660 –> 01:10:37,500
the. I wrote a blog post about this some months ago,

1111
01:10:37,660 –> 01:10:41,510
right? Um, it’s easy to say stop doom

1112
01:10:41,510 –> 01:10:44,550
scrolling. It’s easy to say read a book. It’s easy to say these things.

1113
01:10:45,190 –> 01:10:49,030
The, the practical hard part is doing it right is, is

1114
01:10:49,030 –> 01:10:52,590
being encouraged to do it, being encouraged to engage with it, being

1115
01:10:52,590 –> 01:10:55,670
encouraged to go down the road of it and

1116
01:10:56,230 –> 01:11:00,070
look, long form podcasts like this can, can get you there. We can show

1117
01:11:00,070 –> 01:11:03,710
you the way, right? We can show you the way down the path. But to

1118
01:11:03,710 –> 01:11:07,490
paraphrase from the Matrix, you know, you gotta, you gotta walk the path,

1119
01:11:07,570 –> 01:11:11,330
right? You do, you know, you have to walk it. And the ones who

1120
01:11:11,330 –> 01:11:14,930
walk the path, the, the delta between.

1121
01:11:15,650 –> 01:11:19,370
Between them and those who don’t just, just gets bigger and bigger and

1122
01:11:19,370 –> 01:11:23,130
bigger. With every, with every book that, that Nikki reads, every book

1123
01:11:23,130 –> 01:11:26,690
that I cover on this show, it just gets to be larger and larger.

1124
01:11:27,730 –> 01:11:31,530
You know, I’m currently working my way through Les Miserables, right? And every

1125
01:11:31,530 –> 01:11:35,010
time I run across something in that book by Victor Hugo, man, like

1126
01:11:36,050 –> 01:11:39,650
there’s so many amazing lines in there. So much

1127
01:11:39,650 –> 01:11:43,210
amazing like, like thinking, not like, but so much amazing

1128
01:11:43,210 –> 01:11:46,530
thinking that’s involved in that. You could see how Victor Hugo

1129
01:11:47,090 –> 01:11:50,930
conceptualizes. And this is a preview. So listen to the

1130
01:11:50,930 –> 01:11:53,410
episode of Labor’s Raw. We’re going to talk about that with Libby Younger. You’re going

1131
01:11:53,410 –> 01:11:57,250
to love that episode. But how he conceptualizes French culture

1132
01:11:57,670 –> 01:12:01,430
in, in the, in the early 19th century, how he conceptualizes

1133
01:12:01,430 –> 01:12:05,070
life, and you begin to see parallels between how

1134
01:12:05,070 –> 01:12:08,150
he’s conceptualizing life in a post

1135
01:12:08,150 –> 01:12:11,910
Napoleonic, you know, pre1848 revolution

1136
01:12:11,910 –> 01:12:14,870
sort of moment, a snapshot moment in France

1137
01:12:16,310 –> 01:12:20,070
and the levels of class and distinctions about wealth, the

1138
01:12:20,070 –> 01:12:23,190
distinctions about status and distinctions about geography.

1139
01:12:23,950 –> 01:12:27,550
He spends a huge chunk of that book just going over

1140
01:12:27,950 –> 01:12:31,390
the battle of Waterloo. The battle of

1141
01:12:31,390 –> 01:12:34,910
Waterloo, for God’s sakes. And

1142
01:12:34,990 –> 01:12:38,830
you read it and you Go. Not only this guy have

1143
01:12:38,830 –> 01:12:42,510
clear thinking, but this guy was able to articulate to other folks

1144
01:12:42,510 –> 01:12:46,270
what that clear thinking was. And that’s why they’ll be reading this book

1145
01:12:46,750 –> 01:12:50,500
for another 500 years. Like it’ll just last. It just will. It’ll smuggle

1146
01:12:50,500 –> 01:12:54,220
those. It’ll smuggle those ideas across time, across

1147
01:12:54,220 –> 01:12:57,940
the generations, across generations to other people who,

1148
01:12:58,580 –> 01:13:02,100
who just will never experience the French

1149
01:13:02,100 –> 01:13:05,900
Revolution, they’ll never experience Waterloo, but they’ll get to experience the way Victor

1150
01:13:05,900 –> 01:13:09,660
Hugo thought about. Thought about those things. Well, I’ll tell you,

1151
01:13:09,660 –> 01:13:13,460
I’d love to come on your show and talk about Victor Hugo. I’d

1152
01:13:13,460 –> 01:13:16,770
love to come on your show and talk about Ayn Rand, because iron. Ayn Rand.

1153
01:13:16,850 –> 01:13:20,570
Loved Victor Hugo. Loved Victor Hugo. She thought

1154
01:13:20,570 –> 01:13:24,170
he was the greatest writer of all time, even

1155
01:13:24,170 –> 01:13:27,650
though he was a socialist. Professed

1156
01:13:27,730 –> 01:13:31,570
socialist. She said he lived as a free thinker

1157
01:13:32,209 –> 01:13:35,330
and she thought

1158
01:13:36,450 –> 01:13:40,090
his work was absolutely marvelous. And I happen

1159
01:13:40,090 –> 01:13:42,980
to agree with her. I think

1160
01:13:43,860 –> 01:13:47,220
Les Miserables is a beautiful book

1161
01:13:47,860 –> 01:13:51,300
to come and talk about on the great book series. And so is Ayn

1162
01:13:51,300 –> 01:13:55,140
Rand’s Atlas Shrugged or the Fountainhead

1163
01:13:55,140 –> 01:13:58,740
or Anthem or we the Living, I mean, spectacular books.

1164
01:13:59,540 –> 01:14:02,420
We’re going to cover all those. We’re actually. So

1165
01:14:03,380 –> 01:14:07,180
we’re sort of beginning to think about again, this is some inside baseball on

1166
01:14:07,180 –> 01:14:09,500
the show, but we’re beginning to think about sort of what are our books for

1167
01:14:09,500 –> 01:14:13,220
next year? Where are you sort of started having that. I’m having that discussion

1168
01:14:13,220 –> 01:14:17,060
with folks and trying to figure out from guests what they are interested in coming

1169
01:14:17,060 –> 01:14:20,620
on and talking about and what we’re going to put together and of

1170
01:14:20,620 –> 01:14:24,260
course, figuring out where do I want to position, you

1171
01:14:24,260 –> 01:14:26,940
know, season six of the show and what do we want to. What do we

1172
01:14:26,940 –> 01:14:30,620
want to focus on for, for that season? Not

1173
01:14:30,620 –> 01:14:34,020
just, not just to. To get more listeners and to grow the show,

1174
01:14:34,020 –> 01:14:37,670
obviously, and expand the reach, but also to do more of the work that we’re

1175
01:14:37,670 –> 01:14:41,470
doing right now, challenging people to think, challenging people to engage.

1176
01:14:42,670 –> 01:14:46,470
And we have not covered, interestingly enough, we have not covered any of

1177
01:14:46,470 –> 01:14:50,310
Ayn Rand’s books yet. We have not. We’ve not. I’ve not wandered into

1178
01:14:50,310 –> 01:14:54,110
that Objectivist, you know, thing over there

1179
01:14:54,110 –> 01:14:57,790
yet. Quite just yet. Not.

1180
01:14:57,790 –> 01:15:01,230
Not because I’m afraid of Ayn Rand. I’ve actually read Atlas Shrugged. It was years

1181
01:15:01,230 –> 01:15:04,640
ago, but I read Atlas Shrugged and I read the

1182
01:15:04,640 –> 01:15:08,280
Fountainhead again years ago. It’s just there’s so many good

1183
01:15:08,280 –> 01:15:12,000
books. I gotta curate it. I gotta figure out and I gotta. I gotta

1184
01:15:12,000 –> 01:15:15,680
Move around. But we’ll definitely, we’ll definitely be covering both of

1185
01:15:15,680 –> 01:15:19,160
those potentially next year. So, yeah,

1186
01:15:19,400 –> 01:15:23,080
stay tuned. I’m interested, I’m interested in chatting about them

1187
01:15:23,080 –> 01:15:26,720
both. Ayn Rand’s two favorite authors were Mickey

1188
01:15:26,720 –> 01:15:29,870
Spillane and Victor Hugo. There you go. There you go.

1189
01:15:31,470 –> 01:15:35,310
So let me do this. I want to be

1190
01:15:36,510 –> 01:15:39,590
aware of our time. We’ve been talking for a while. I want to get us

1191
01:15:39,590 –> 01:15:43,070
to some conclusions. I want to round the corner a little bit on

1192
01:15:43,070 –> 01:15:46,870
Didion. I do want to bring up a

1193
01:15:46,870 –> 01:15:49,870
couple of points from her titular essay,

1194
01:15:50,430 –> 01:15:54,070
Slouching Towards Bethlehem. By the way, this book is divided

1195
01:15:54,070 –> 01:15:57,890
up into, into several parts, parts. So part one

1196
01:15:57,890 –> 01:16:01,290
is called Lifestyles in the Golden Land, then part two is called

1197
01:16:01,290 –> 01:16:04,970
Personals, and then part three is Seven Places of the Mind.

1198
01:16:05,690 –> 01:16:09,530
And so she, she, she’s done something that actually I,

1199
01:16:09,530 –> 01:16:13,170
I borrowed when I wrote my book of essays that I still haven’t

1200
01:16:13,170 –> 01:16:16,850
published, but then when I wrote my book of essays. And so she, she’s divided

1201
01:16:16,850 –> 01:16:20,450
up her content and her thinking, such as it

1202
01:16:20,450 –> 01:16:24,200
were, into all these little different piles, right. To show you little, little

1203
01:16:24,200 –> 01:16:26,920
pieces of herself. And so I want to,

1204
01:16:28,120 –> 01:16:30,920
I want to grab Slouching Towards Bethlehem and I want to make a couple of

1205
01:16:30,920 –> 01:16:34,120
points around that as we begin to round the corner and

1206
01:16:34,600 –> 01:16:38,200
close. So Slouching Towards Bethlehem was

1207
01:16:38,200 –> 01:16:42,040
written in, I believe it’s 1961,

1208
01:16:42,200 –> 01:16:45,880
is when this essay was originally written. Originally published. Let me go back and

1209
01:16:45,880 –> 01:16:49,490
look. Yes, 1961. And

1210
01:16:50,610 –> 01:16:51,970
it was written because.

1211
01:16:55,170 –> 01:16:58,930
And this is where regionalism then comes into the United States. So

1212
01:17:00,450 –> 01:17:04,290
regionalism in the mid century in the United States, we talked

1213
01:17:04,290 –> 01:17:08,130
about this on the show before, was a very powerful driver

1214
01:17:09,010 –> 01:17:12,610
for creativity and for literature. So Eudora Welthy,

1215
01:17:12,930 –> 01:17:16,510
who we covered on the show, she wrote a lot from a Southern perspective.

1216
01:17:16,670 –> 01:17:20,110
Charles Portis wrote a lot from a Western perspective.

1217
01:17:21,070 –> 01:17:24,750
And Didion, interestingly enough, wrote a lot from

1218
01:17:24,750 –> 01:17:28,390
the perspective of the Californian who has the

1219
01:17:28,390 –> 01:17:32,230
dream of going out east, sees the reality, and then runs right

1220
01:17:32,230 –> 01:17:35,790
back to California. Didion had zero interest in the middle of the country

1221
01:17:36,030 –> 01:17:38,270
she knows going on there. And she wasn’t curious.

1222
01:17:39,630 –> 01:17:43,270
And that was her sort of blind spot.

1223
01:17:43,510 –> 01:17:47,150
But again, she was a regional writer, right? She could afford to be

1224
01:17:47,150 –> 01:17:50,790
regional at a time when regionalism really worked. And so in

1225
01:17:50,870 –> 01:17:54,470
looking at Slashing Towards Bethlehem, this is an essay written

1226
01:17:54,470 –> 01:17:57,510
by a person who has been hired

1227
01:17:58,790 –> 01:18:02,070
to do what used to be called reportage, to go out,

1228
01:18:02,470 –> 01:18:06,250
to go see what the people are doing in a particular area, and

1229
01:18:06,250 –> 01:18:09,010
then they report back to The. The hoi polloi.

1230
01:18:09,890 –> 01:18:13,690
And you get that sense when you read, when

1231
01:18:13,690 –> 01:18:16,850
you get to the opening of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. And so I’m going to read

1232
01:18:16,850 –> 01:18:20,370
a little bit from that. The center was not holding.

1233
01:18:20,850 –> 01:18:24,650
It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public auction announcements and commonplace

1234
01:18:24,650 –> 01:18:28,450
reports of casual killings and misplaced children in abandoned homes and

1235
01:18:28,450 –> 01:18:31,330
vandals who misspelled even the four letter words they scrawled.

1236
01:18:32,620 –> 01:18:36,260
It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad

1237
01:18:36,260 –> 01:18:39,940
checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to

1238
01:18:39,940 –> 01:18:43,500
torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes

1239
01:18:43,500 –> 01:18:47,220
shed their skins. Children who were never taught and

1240
01:18:47,220 –> 01:18:50,900
would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People

1241
01:18:50,900 –> 01:18:54,700
were missing. Children were missing, parents were missing. Those left

1242
01:18:54,700 –> 01:18:58,410
behind filed desultory missing persons reports, then moved

1243
01:18:58,410 –> 01:19:01,970
on themselves. It was not a country in open

1244
01:19:02,050 –> 01:19:05,730
revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United

1245
01:19:05,730 –> 01:19:09,530
States of America in the cold late spring of 1967. And

1246
01:19:09,530 –> 01:19:13,290
the market was steady and the GNP high. And a great many articulate

1247
01:19:13,290 –> 01:19:16,890
people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose. And it might have been

1248
01:19:16,890 –> 01:19:20,690
a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not. And

1249
01:19:20,690 –> 01:19:23,730
more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.

1250
01:19:25,280 –> 01:19:28,840
All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and

1251
01:19:28,840 –> 01:19:32,600
butchered the job. And because nothing else seemed so relevant, I

1252
01:19:32,600 –> 01:19:36,120
decided to go to San Francisco. San

1253
01:19:36,120 –> 01:19:39,920
Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing

1254
01:19:39,920 –> 01:19:42,640
children were gathering and calling themselves hippies.

1255
01:19:43,840 –> 01:19:47,240
When I first went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of

1256
01:19:47,240 –> 01:19:51,070
1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out. And so I

1257
01:19:51,070 –> 01:19:54,710
just stayed around a while and made a few friends.

1258
01:19:56,390 –> 01:19:59,350
And then what follows from that is a

1259
01:20:00,550 –> 01:20:03,750
almost anthropological pulling apart

1260
01:20:04,230 –> 01:20:08,070
of what exactly was going on in San Francisco in.

1261
01:20:08,550 –> 01:20:12,390
And I. I said early 60s. I apologize. In 1967, in the late

1262
01:20:12,390 –> 01:20:15,590
60s, Haight Ashbury and

1263
01:20:16,320 –> 01:20:19,840
people getting high on acid. And the year before, the

1264
01:20:19,840 –> 01:20:20,720
Summer of Love.

1265
01:20:23,840 –> 01:20:27,640
It’s a story, it’s an essay of the

1266
01:20:27,640 –> 01:20:31,200
relationships between people and the ways in which people

1267
01:20:31,200 –> 01:20:34,160
are not honoring those relationships.

1268
01:20:35,040 –> 01:20:38,400
Every single seed that

1269
01:20:38,800 –> 01:20:42,560
produced the fruits of the last 25 years of chaos

1270
01:20:43,640 –> 01:20:46,840
and social unraveling, those seeds were planted,

1271
01:20:47,320 –> 01:20:51,160
and Didion saw them being planted, but didn’t know what to do

1272
01:20:51,160 –> 01:20:54,440
about them. In the essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem,

1273
01:20:54,920 –> 01:20:58,280
she was just a documenter and an observer. It was like watching Johnny

1274
01:20:58,280 –> 01:21:02,120
Appleseed throw the seeds out and just see what would Develop.

1275
01:21:05,800 –> 01:21:09,320
I am fascinated by this because Didion said she wrote this

1276
01:21:09,320 –> 01:21:13,030
essay in order to come to terms with

1277
01:21:13,030 –> 01:21:16,630
the disorder, in order to make sense of what she

1278
01:21:16,630 –> 01:21:18,710
perceived as chaos coming.

1279
01:21:20,870 –> 01:21:24,150
She didn’t provide any solutions because she didn’t have any.

1280
01:21:25,590 –> 01:21:28,630
And as a creative, I think she was more

1281
01:21:28,630 –> 01:21:32,470
fascinated with the destruction of the

1282
01:21:32,470 –> 01:21:36,190
center and the erosion of the center than she was fascinated

1283
01:21:36,190 –> 01:21:39,220
by the shoring up of the center. By the way, the politically,

1284
01:21:40,980 –> 01:21:44,580
you know, 1968 would then produce

1285
01:21:44,900 –> 01:21:48,660
the backlash of Nixon. Okay. And then Nixon, of

1286
01:21:48,660 –> 01:21:52,220
course, eventually would go away. There would be the seventies, not go away. He would

1287
01:21:52,220 –> 01:21:55,620
eventually resign office because of Watergate.

1288
01:21:55,860 –> 01:21:59,580
But then the, the, the echo of Nixon would come

1289
01:21:59,580 –> 01:22:03,020
about from a president who was formerly the

1290
01:22:03,020 –> 01:22:06,530
governor of California and who also really liked John

1291
01:22:06,530 –> 01:22:09,610
Wayne. Ronald Reagan.

1292
01:22:10,090 –> 01:22:10,650
Yep.

1293
01:22:15,050 –> 01:22:18,210
What did you make of Slouching towards Bethlehem as we close? What did you make

1294
01:22:18,210 –> 01:22:21,530
of that essay? What did you make of reading that being. Being a Gen Xer,

1295
01:22:21,530 –> 01:22:24,650
living in the backwash of all of this. Like, I looked at this and I,

1296
01:22:24,810 –> 01:22:28,450
I didn’t think of my parents because my parents, I mean, my parents in

1297
01:22:28,450 –> 01:22:32,130
1968 were 20 and my father had gone to Vietnam by that

1298
01:22:32,130 –> 01:22:35,800
point. My mother was 19 and

1299
01:22:35,800 –> 01:22:38,720
they weren’t even, like they hadn’t even met each other yet. They wouldn’t meet each

1300
01:22:38,720 –> 01:22:42,520
other for another few years. So, you know,

1301
01:22:42,520 –> 01:22:46,160
and my father, my mother marched for civil rights and did those kinds of

1302
01:22:46,160 –> 01:22:49,800
things. I will tell you, the African American experience was

1303
01:22:49,800 –> 01:22:53,640
different than this experience that Didian documented here at Hate Ash.

1304
01:22:53,640 –> 01:22:57,000
Yeah, no kidding. Very different. Very different. You know,

1305
01:22:57,960 –> 01:23:01,670
but it was. So for me, it’s anthropological.

1306
01:23:01,670 –> 01:23:04,990
Reading this as a African American Gen

1307
01:23:04,990 –> 01:23:06,990
Xer, it’s, this is, this is,

1308
01:23:09,150 –> 01:23:12,470
this wasn’t your life, man. This was not anything

1309
01:23:12,470 –> 01:23:15,870
culturally that. But, but, but it’s fascinating because

1310
01:23:16,350 –> 01:23:20,070
we have a country that’s big enough to contain all that. Yeah, yeah,

1311
01:23:20,070 –> 01:23:23,630
you do. While at the same time,

1312
01:23:24,190 –> 01:23:27,830
the seas, as I already said, that would produce

1313
01:23:27,830 –> 01:23:31,550
fruit later on in my life, were planted here at Haight

1314
01:23:31,550 –> 01:23:35,270
Ashbury. The, the, the grandsons,

1315
01:23:35,270 –> 01:23:38,830
the grand, the grandsons and granddaughters of those folks

1316
01:23:39,150 –> 01:23:42,270
who were high on LSD and couldn’t figure out how to feed their children.

1317
01:23:42,830 –> 01:23:46,670
They’re now dying in la, homeless, doing, having open air,

1318
01:23:47,150 –> 01:23:50,950
open air needle exchanges in front of kids, like it’s

1319
01:23:50,950 –> 01:23:54,790
the same thing. And we haven’t solved the problem. As a matter of

1320
01:23:54,790 –> 01:23:58,470
fact, if anything, in the United States, particularly in LA and in San

1321
01:23:58,470 –> 01:24:01,990
Francisco, we’ve scaled it up to a level where the

1322
01:24:01,990 –> 01:24:05,790
state now approves of it, rather than locking these people

1323
01:24:05,790 –> 01:24:09,430
up, rather than engaging in any sort of law and order, Matter of fact, Nixon

1324
01:24:09,430 –> 01:24:12,190
got in trouble. Well, not Nixon got in trouble. One of the reasons why Nixon

1325
01:24:12,190 –> 01:24:15,190
got elected was because the middle of the country wanted somebody to do something about

1326
01:24:15,190 –> 01:24:18,280
the hippies. Yeah, yeah.

1327
01:24:20,200 –> 01:24:20,600
So

1328
01:24:23,720 –> 01:24:27,360
I didn’t grow up in this. I mean, my family came

1329
01:24:27,360 –> 01:24:29,560
to Canada in 1982.

1330
01:24:31,720 –> 01:24:35,440
I would have been. Had I been in the

1331
01:24:35,440 –> 01:24:39,080
United States, this wouldn’t have been my experience. I would have been

1332
01:24:39,160 –> 01:24:42,760
a. An immigrant, probably living somewhere in

1333
01:24:42,760 –> 01:24:45,800
SoCal, Southern California. A lot of Iranians would have gone there,

1334
01:24:46,450 –> 01:24:49,730
working hard. And I’d be thinking, these hippies are nuts.

1335
01:24:50,370 –> 01:24:54,010
And I’d probably have voted for Richard Nixon and

1336
01:24:54,010 –> 01:24:56,850
later Ronald Reagan to do something about the hippies as well.

1337
01:24:59,250 –> 01:25:02,690
I think she’s a brilliant observer of what was going on there. It was fascinating

1338
01:25:02,690 –> 01:25:05,810
to see that there were so many people that went into that life,

1339
01:25:08,050 –> 01:25:11,570
that dissolute life, where rather than trying

1340
01:25:11,650 –> 01:25:15,340
to discover who the hell they are and build

1341
01:25:15,340 –> 01:25:18,940
a life of meaning for themselves, they throw it away

1342
01:25:19,180 –> 01:25:22,860
on getting high. You know, it’s like

1343
01:25:22,860 –> 01:25:26,460
they’re escaping reality. And

1344
01:25:26,460 –> 01:25:30,260
Joan kind of observed it and probably escaped reality

1345
01:25:30,260 –> 01:25:34,060
a few times along with him. She doesn’t talk very much in this particular

1346
01:25:34,220 –> 01:25:37,900
essay about her own partaking in things like wheat

1347
01:25:37,900 –> 01:25:41,430
and cocaine and so forth, but it’s pretty

1348
01:25:41,430 –> 01:25:45,030
obvious that she hung around a lot of people that did this. And it would

1349
01:25:45,030 –> 01:25:48,790
have been astonishing to me if she

1350
01:25:48,790 –> 01:25:52,190
didn’t partake herself, you know,

1351
01:25:52,190 –> 01:25:55,870
astonishing. I’m the middle American.

1352
01:25:55,950 –> 01:25:59,390
She looked upon, across, upon with such disdain

1353
01:26:00,430 –> 01:26:04,110
in how she decided to go about chronicling

1354
01:26:04,190 –> 01:26:07,910
America. So I was fascinated

1355
01:26:07,910 –> 01:26:11,710
by what she had to say, but I also looked at it and went,

1356
01:26:11,710 –> 01:26:14,990
yeah, that’s not me. That’s never going to be me. And

1357
01:26:15,390 –> 01:26:18,750
I’m glad that I came from a family that

1358
01:26:18,750 –> 01:26:22,510
valued hard work, that valued

1359
01:26:22,510 –> 01:26:26,150
God, that valued country, and wanted to build a

1360
01:26:26,150 –> 01:26:29,790
better future for myself and the people that I love. Well,

1361
01:26:29,790 –> 01:26:33,440
that’s what I have to say about Joan. And I’ll also say

1362
01:26:33,440 –> 01:26:36,600
this. The election of Ronald Reagan took place in

1363
01:26:36,600 –> 01:26:40,240
1980 because the American people really wanted to elect John Wayne

1364
01:26:40,240 –> 01:26:43,720
president. That’d been true for probably about three and a half

1365
01:26:43,720 –> 01:26:47,440
decades, but he went ahead and died and had no interest

1366
01:26:47,440 –> 01:26:51,080
in becoming a politician ever. He said that multiple times in his life.

1367
01:26:51,720 –> 01:26:55,320
And, you know, Ronald Reagan was a stand in for John

1368
01:26:55,320 –> 01:26:58,710
Wayne. That’s how, that’s why he got elected president, honestly.

1369
01:26:59,270 –> 01:27:02,550
Well, and, and, and Didion starts, you know, she, she

1370
01:27:03,270 –> 01:27:07,030
frames her observations through William Butler Yates

1371
01:27:07,030 –> 01:27:10,470
poem the Second Coming. Right? And

1372
01:27:13,190 –> 01:27:16,950
the. The things that she saw the center starting

1373
01:27:16,950 –> 01:27:20,510
to unravel were correct. The

1374
01:27:20,510 –> 01:27:24,190
center was beginning to unravel. The. The signs of it were

1375
01:27:24,190 –> 01:27:27,930
around the edges. But there was still enough in her

1376
01:27:27,930 –> 01:27:31,010
time, there was still enough of the core left

1377
01:27:31,730 –> 01:27:35,490
where the. The folks who were in charge of

1378
01:27:35,490 –> 01:27:39,330
preserving the core never thought that

1379
01:27:41,250 –> 01:27:45,090
it would unravel or it would come apart. And this is, this is,

1380
01:27:45,170 –> 01:27:48,770
this is the thing that I take from. From slouching towards Bethlehem. This is the

1381
01:27:48,770 –> 01:27:50,130
big lesson I take from it.

1382
01:27:52,630 –> 01:27:56,430
Never think that it can’t happen here. Allow yourself to

1383
01:27:56,430 –> 01:28:00,150
go into that space, whether it’s in your

1384
01:28:00,150 –> 01:28:02,870
family, in your. In your neighborhood, in your community.

1385
01:28:03,670 –> 01:28:07,429
Never think that an illness

1386
01:28:07,429 –> 01:28:11,110
can’t come along and unravel the core of your family. Or financial

1387
01:28:11,350 –> 01:28:14,230
exploit exploitation, but financial strife or financial

1388
01:28:15,030 –> 01:28:18,790
something disaster can’t come along and unravel your family. We saw a little bit of

1389
01:28:18,790 –> 01:28:21,700
this with COVID Never think that

1390
01:28:22,980 –> 01:28:26,780
a natural disaster can’t occur, like a flood or an earthquake or a fire or

1391
01:28:26,780 –> 01:28:30,340
something like that, and unravel the core. Never think that it can’t

1392
01:28:30,340 –> 01:28:34,180
happen. Because when you think it can’t happen, you don’t plan. And when you don’t

1393
01:28:34,180 –> 01:28:37,700
plan, then you are surprised when the unraveling

1394
01:28:38,180 –> 01:28:41,300
begins. Like the very good people who

1395
01:28:42,900 –> 01:28:46,660
read Didion’s essay initially in 1967, 68,

1396
01:28:48,180 –> 01:28:52,020
when they read that, I’m sure they thought, those crazy hippies, that’s

1397
01:28:52,020 –> 01:28:55,300
just weirdness. That’s just on tv, that’s over there. That’s not in my town,

1398
01:28:55,620 –> 01:28:59,220
that’s not in the place that I live. It can’t happen here.

1399
01:29:01,380 –> 01:29:05,100
Well, yeah, it can. And

1400
01:29:05,100 –> 01:29:08,660
it did. And it did. You know,

1401
01:29:08,820 –> 01:29:12,360
and the unraveling is always a gradual thing.

1402
01:29:12,590 –> 01:29:16,430
Thing. That’s where. Where one. One thread gets pulled here

1403
01:29:16,430 –> 01:29:20,190
and another thread gets pulled there, and everything seems to be disconnected. And that’s the

1404
01:29:20,190 –> 01:29:23,670
other thing you said to Didian. Like, she couldn’t connect the threads. She couldn’t figure

1405
01:29:23,670 –> 01:29:27,310
out how it all came together. She could

1406
01:29:27,310 –> 01:29:31,070
describe the threads unraveling, but she couldn’t figure out how all the threads came together.

1407
01:29:31,710 –> 01:29:35,150
And to your point about tradition and grounding, I think if she had a grounding

1408
01:29:35,150 –> 01:29:37,980
in religion, she would have had a better idea of how those threads came together

1409
01:29:38,130 –> 01:29:41,810
together. But even just grounding in a,

1410
01:29:41,810 –> 01:29:45,010
in a secular culture that continued to give nods to religion

1411
01:29:47,090 –> 01:29:50,770
would have been enough. It was more than enough for many people.

1412
01:29:51,330 –> 01:29:55,090
And yet. And yet. And yet

1413
01:29:56,050 –> 01:29:59,410
now we live on the other side of this. Right. And so I want to

1414
01:29:59,410 –> 01:30:02,730
sort of bring us home with this. We live on the other side of unraveling,

1415
01:30:02,730 –> 01:30:03,780
live on the other side of chaos.

1416
01:30:06,810 –> 01:30:09,930
I think the question for our time, and this is why the, the. This year

1417
01:30:09,930 –> 01:30:13,610
on the show we’ve really been focused on what I call a restoration project.

1418
01:30:14,410 –> 01:30:17,610
How do we restore, how do we rebuild a center?

1419
01:30:18,250 –> 01:30:21,970
Now I have an idea that centers, multiple centers actually are

1420
01:30:21,970 –> 01:30:25,690
being rebuilt in a lot of different places, some

1421
01:30:25,690 –> 01:30:29,410
online, some in real life. Very little overlap because

1422
01:30:29,410 –> 01:30:32,670
we’ve got a fragmented communication and media culture now

1423
01:30:32,990 –> 01:30:36,350
and there’s no mass culture anymore that just doesn’t exist.

1424
01:30:36,750 –> 01:30:40,590
And so, but people are all seeing the

1425
01:30:40,590 –> 01:30:44,310
same thing and they’re all saying, how do we rebuild? How do we rebuild,

1426
01:30:44,310 –> 01:30:46,430
how to rebuild? And I’ll use two examples.

1427
01:30:48,110 –> 01:30:50,510
I pay attention quite a bit to

1428
01:30:51,870 –> 01:30:55,590
ministries that are being run by 30 and

1429
01:30:55,590 –> 01:30:59,350
40 year olds. And what I’m seeing is a strong

1430
01:30:59,510 –> 01:31:03,350
online element to all these ministries that is then combined with

1431
01:31:03,350 –> 01:31:06,830
an in person element and they’re doing both of the same thing. And they’re building

1432
01:31:06,830 –> 01:31:09,990
out a new model that’s not the mass

1433
01:31:10,070 –> 01:31:13,870
evangelical model that Billy Graham piloted. And then that was taken to

1434
01:31:13,870 –> 01:31:17,510
a logical conclusion by, by other folks in the late

1435
01:31:17,510 –> 01:31:20,790
90s and is now dying, the big evangelical model.

1436
01:31:22,490 –> 01:31:26,090
So I’m seeing that in churches. I’m also seeing in homesteading. I just went to

1437
01:31:26,090 –> 01:31:29,930
a homestead conference where like 50,000 people showed up. People

1438
01:31:30,170 –> 01:31:33,370
raising their own food and, and

1439
01:31:33,690 –> 01:31:37,290
figuring out how to get water out of the ground and recapturing

1440
01:31:37,610 –> 01:31:41,450
knowledge that has been lost from the time when,

1441
01:31:41,610 –> 01:31:45,130
you know, the vast majority of people in the United States either lived on

1442
01:31:45,130 –> 01:31:48,450
farms, worked on farms, or knew somebody who did live or work on a farm.

1443
01:31:48,600 –> 01:31:52,360
Farm. Right in their own generational time, they could remember that. And now we’re

1444
01:31:52,360 –> 01:31:55,400
pulling that back. And again, that’s another center that’s being built out.

1445
01:31:56,760 –> 01:32:00,360
We’re having another center being built out in the technology

1446
01:32:00,600 –> 01:32:04,399
space that is both anti AI and pro AI.

1447
01:32:04,399 –> 01:32:08,000
And that that whole tussle is going on right now and the centers are being

1448
01:32:08,000 –> 01:32:10,840
built out there. But the thing is,

1449
01:32:12,120 –> 01:32:15,880
because it’s not happening at mass, everybody can’t see it. And so when I

1450
01:32:15,880 –> 01:32:19,360
tell people, people about, I say I see centers being

1451
01:32:19,360 –> 01:32:23,160
rebuilt, people stare at me like I’m crazy because they’re not seeing that in their

1452
01:32:23,160 –> 01:32:27,000
algorithm. They’re not seeing that when they do scroll, they’re not seeing that

1453
01:32:27,000 –> 01:32:30,320
when they go out to look at or deal with folks in real life.

1454
01:32:31,120 –> 01:32:33,600
So I guess the question is we round the corner is

1455
01:32:35,920 –> 01:32:39,400
how do we, how do we rebuild the center? How do we do that in

1456
01:32:39,400 –> 01:32:43,160
our own communities and our neighborhoods and move that out in concentric circles. I think

1457
01:32:43,160 –> 01:32:45,600
you’re part of that. That’s why I’m asking you this question. I think you’re building

1458
01:32:45,600 –> 01:32:49,250
a center as well. I think you’re building a center for masculinity and for

1459
01:32:49,250 –> 01:32:52,730
masculine men and for sovereign men. I think you’re building out this

1460
01:32:52,730 –> 01:32:56,370
center and I think you’re doing it with a combination of, in real life

1461
01:32:56,370 –> 01:33:00,170
and online and you’re putting it together and you’re letting it grow and grow

1462
01:33:00,170 –> 01:33:03,730
and grow and grow and grow. But it’s one center among many centers

1463
01:33:04,210 –> 01:33:07,770
that are being built out versus just a common center that

1464
01:33:07,770 –> 01:33:10,850
everybody can agree on because that’s now dead and gone. And we’re not going to

1465
01:33:10,850 –> 01:33:14,700
get back to that. No, no, I,

1466
01:33:16,860 –> 01:33:20,620
I want to see a hundred thousand men like me build

1467
01:33:22,780 –> 01:33:26,460
strongly traditional masculine centers

1468
01:33:26,700 –> 01:33:30,300
and communities. Because of a hundred thousand men,

1469
01:33:31,820 –> 01:33:35,660
build 10,000

1470
01:33:37,100 –> 01:33:40,660
man strong communities. We’ll have

1471
01:33:40,660 –> 01:33:43,700
a billion men that are part of something like this.

1472
01:33:45,140 –> 01:33:48,020
I also think that

1473
01:33:48,980 –> 01:33:52,700
we need to very strongly stand up against the

1474
01:33:52,700 –> 01:33:54,260
so called progressive

1475
01:33:56,340 –> 01:34:00,020
movement globally because there’s nothing

1476
01:34:00,020 –> 01:34:03,780
progressive about it. It’s designed to destroy the traditional

1477
01:34:03,780 –> 01:34:07,430
order and they don’t care if they burn it all to the

1478
01:34:07,430 –> 01:34:11,270
ground as long as they get to rule over the ashes. It’s

1479
01:34:11,270 –> 01:34:13,870
my opinion that

1480
01:34:15,630 –> 01:34:19,270
one person at a time, my

1481
01:34:19,270 –> 01:34:23,110
job on a day to day basis is to persuade people and

1482
01:34:23,110 –> 01:34:26,830
convince them that socialism and progressivism

1483
01:34:27,310 –> 01:34:29,950
are an unadulterated evil

1484
01:34:31,640 –> 01:34:35,360
that we all need to stand against. And honestly, if I

1485
01:34:35,360 –> 01:34:38,920
were to, if I were to rewrite the

1486
01:34:38,920 –> 01:34:42,680
American Constitution, I would keep it virtually the

1487
01:34:42,680 –> 01:34:46,199
same. But there’d be one thing that I’d add in there, that if there is

1488
01:34:46,199 –> 01:34:49,720
an ideology whose prime focus is to

1489
01:34:49,720 –> 01:34:53,200
overthrow this system, there’s no place for that

1490
01:34:53,200 –> 01:34:56,910
ideology in this country and it has to go. There’s no place

1491
01:34:56,910 –> 01:34:58,350
for people who speak of that

1492
01:35:00,510 –> 01:35:02,350
and the

1493
01:35:03,950 –> 01:35:06,030
educational system, the

1494
01:35:09,950 –> 01:35:13,790
media and storytelling need

1495
01:35:13,790 –> 01:35:17,510
to be in the hands of people that love America and believe in

1496
01:35:17,510 –> 01:35:21,230
freedom. The fact that we allowed over

1497
01:35:21,230 –> 01:35:25,040
a course, course of decades, an ideology

1498
01:35:25,040 –> 01:35:28,520
that is hostile to the very idea of Americanism to overtake these

1499
01:35:28,520 –> 01:35:31,560
institutions and march through them is a big reason

1500
01:35:32,760 –> 01:35:35,480
that traditional America

1501
01:35:36,120 –> 01:35:39,320
collapsed. And I think Donald

1502
01:35:39,320 –> 01:35:42,760
Trump’s election and all these

1503
01:35:42,840 –> 01:35:46,400
factors, all these centers that you’re talking about, Hassan, that are coming

1504
01:35:46,400 –> 01:35:49,570
up in masculinity, in, in

1505
01:35:50,930 –> 01:35:54,210
ministry, in online

1506
01:35:55,410 –> 01:35:59,250
folks that are speaking about what matters, people

1507
01:35:59,250 –> 01:36:02,210
like Charlie Kirk and Benny Johnson and so forth

1508
01:36:03,009 –> 01:36:05,650
are as a result of

1509
01:36:06,930 –> 01:36:10,770
one person standing up and saying, enough.

1510
01:36:11,010 –> 01:36:14,730
I don’t like what America’s become, so I’m going to give up

1511
01:36:14,730 –> 01:36:16,650
my very cushy, comfortable life

1512
01:36:18,410 –> 01:36:21,970
to step forward as America’s leader and turn this around. And that’s.

1513
01:36:21,970 –> 01:36:24,410
That’s Donald Trump. Because if you think about Donald Trump,

1514
01:36:26,250 –> 01:36:29,890
there was really no reason this man needed to become President of the United

1515
01:36:29,890 –> 01:36:33,410
States. He had a brilliant life and a brilliant

1516
01:36:33,410 –> 01:36:37,250
career. If Donald Trump never got into

1517
01:36:37,250 –> 01:36:41,020
politics and just rode off into the

1518
01:36:41,020 –> 01:36:44,740
sunset as one of the world’s great marketers

1519
01:36:44,820 –> 01:36:48,420
and real estate tycoons, he would have still

1520
01:36:48,420 –> 01:36:52,140
lived an incredibly consequential life. But what

1521
01:36:52,140 –> 01:36:55,860
he saw bothered him, and he decided to give all that up to

1522
01:36:55,860 –> 01:36:58,820
step forward and do something about it. And I don’t know

1523
01:36:59,540 –> 01:37:02,980
if the American people

1524
01:37:03,380 –> 01:37:07,130
really understand what a massive act of love this

1525
01:37:07,130 –> 01:37:10,450
was on his part.

1526
01:37:11,970 –> 01:37:15,170
And it. It’s my belief that Donald Trump

1527
01:37:15,970 –> 01:37:19,610
winning his second term is given the

1528
01:37:19,610 –> 01:37:22,130
world a chance to overthrow all this evil.

1529
01:37:24,770 –> 01:37:28,610
And people like you who have your podcast and talk about the great

1530
01:37:28,610 –> 01:37:32,420
books, you’re part of the center too, man. You’re part

1531
01:37:32,420 –> 01:37:35,260
of having real discussions and forcing people to think.

1532
01:37:37,900 –> 01:37:41,380
Look, I would have never picked up a Joan Didion book if you hadn’t said,

1533
01:37:41,380 –> 01:37:45,020
I want to talk about this on the show. She’s nobody I would remotely consider

1534
01:37:45,020 –> 01:37:48,140
reading because her politics are anathema to me.

1535
01:37:49,260 –> 01:37:52,740
But I said, okay, let’s go for it. And I’m glad I read it. I

1536
01:37:52,740 –> 01:37:56,460
learned a lot. I actually have some sympathy for this woman after reading this book.

1537
01:37:57,680 –> 01:38:01,360
I still don’t agree with her political philosophy, but I

1538
01:38:01,360 –> 01:38:04,560
learned a lot from her about

1539
01:38:05,760 –> 01:38:08,240
what led that generation

1540
01:38:10,560 –> 01:38:14,360
to go over the cliff and leave behind the

1541
01:38:14,360 –> 01:38:17,680
beautiful life that they had for

1542
01:38:18,240 –> 01:38:21,920
a fake narrative that’s basically

1543
01:38:23,680 –> 01:38:27,200
caused chaos not just for America, but

1544
01:38:27,280 –> 01:38:31,120
across the entire globe. And this book

1545
01:38:31,200 –> 01:38:33,920
helped me see that a little more clearly. And for that, I’m grateful and for

1546
01:38:33,920 –> 01:38:37,680
the opportunity to have a conversation with a brilliant man like Jason. So else.

1547
01:38:38,640 –> 01:38:40,160
And that’s my mic drop, brother.

1548
01:38:42,880 –> 01:38:46,520
Thank you, Nikki, for coming on the show today. What are all the

1549
01:38:46,520 –> 01:38:50,250
places where we can connect with you? Of course, we’ll have links to

1550
01:38:50,250 –> 01:38:53,250
everywhere where you are in the show notes, but where could folks get a hold

1551
01:38:53,250 –> 01:38:56,490
of you? Where are all the places where. Where we can connect with. With Nikki

1552
01:38:56,490 –> 01:39:00,330
Ballou. I’m the only Nikki Ballou on planet Earth. So if you go on

1553
01:39:00,330 –> 01:39:03,170
social media and you type in N I, C, K, Y, B, I L L

1554
01:39:03,170 –> 01:39:06,570
O U. You’ll find me and nobody else. So try that

1555
01:39:07,690 –> 01:39:11,530
if you enjoy reading. I’ve got a

1556
01:39:11,530 –> 01:39:15,370
few books that I’ve published on Amazon. Again, go to Amazon and type in Nikki

1557
01:39:15,370 –> 01:39:18,770
Ballou. I’ve been, in addition to this show on about a thousand other

1558
01:39:18,770 –> 01:39:22,170
shows, and I have two shows of my own, the Thought Leader

1559
01:39:22,170 –> 01:39:25,930
Revolution and the Sovereign Man Podcast. You’ve been on

1560
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one show, you’re about to come on the second. And if you’re a business

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owner and one of the things right now in your

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world is that you’re really trying to figure out

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how to make the difference you were born to make,

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I’ll tell you what one of my clients said that I should be saying

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about me and the work that I do. I look for good humans

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that at some level are getting in their own way. They

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may not even understand why, and they’re trying to figure

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it out up here, but the mission they have is

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in their heart. And what I do for good people

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like that who are up here is I get them out of here, I get

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them into their hearts and I point them and move them forward like

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a missile toward their mission. So if that’s you, go to my

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website, ercleacademy.com forward/appointment, jump on my calendar.

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I’ll give you 45 minutes of my time free of charge.

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We can talk about anything you like. And that’s it.

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Beautiful. We will have links to all of

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those places where you can get a hold of Iggy Blue

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and you can get a hold of Circle Academy and become a part of everything

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that. That he is, that he is building between his

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podcasts, his books, and the center

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that he is, he is rebuilding. Just in time

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for the next historical spring.

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I’d like to thank Nikki for coming on the podcast today. And with that, well,

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ladies and gentlemen, we’re.