Coriolanus by Shakespeare — Pride, the Crowd, and the General Who Couldn’t Bend (w/John Hill)

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Hello,

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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

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198. If you’re

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counting at home, that means we are 2 episodes away from

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our big 200th

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episode. And as I’ve been saying before,

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who does 200 of anything?

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Well, apparently me. Anyway, from our book

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today, Act 1,

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Scene 1. Actually, not our book, from our play today.

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Act 1, Scene 1. Enter a company of

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mutinous citizens with staves, clubs, and other

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weapons. Before we proceed any

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further, hear me speak. Speak, speak.

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You are all resolved rather to die than to famish?

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Resolved, resolved. First, you know Caius Martius is chief

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enemy to the people. We know it, we know it.

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Let us kill him, and we’ll have corn at our own price. Is it a

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verdict? No more talking on it. Let it be done. Away,

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away. One word, good

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citizens. We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians good.

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What authority sure fits on would relieve us if they would yield us but to

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the superfluity while it were wholesome? We might guess they relieved us

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humanely, but they think we are too clear and

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we are too dear. The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our

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misery, is as an inventory to particularize their abundance.

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Our sufferance is a gain to them. Let us revenge this with our

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spikes ere we become breaks. For the

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gods know I speak this in hunger for bread, not in

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thirst for revenge.

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Would you proceed especially against Caius Martius? All

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against him first. He’s a very dog to the commonality.

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Consider you what service he has done for this country?

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Very well, and could be content to give him good report for it, but

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Nay, but speak not maliciously. I say

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unto you, what he hath done famously, he did it to that end.

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Though soft-conscious men can be content to say it was for his country, he did

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it to please his mother and to be partly proud, which he is

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even to the altitude of his virtue.

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What he cannot help in his nature, you account a vice in him. You must

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in no way say he is covetous.

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If I must not, I need not be barren of

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accusations. He hath faults with surplus to tire in

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repetition. Shouts within. What shouts are these?

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The other side of the city is risen. Why stay we prating here? To the

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Capitol! Come, come, come, come, come!

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From our book— nah, nay, our play today.

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A story

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that weirdly enough is very timely, I think.

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I think it’s very timely to our time. And this

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that I’m going to open up with today is going to be a little bit

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of a deep cut, but follow the bouncing ball with me for just a second.

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Okay. So on this show, we have discussed that one of

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the more destabilizing facts of our postmodern age is that we

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tend to absorb the news of tragic circumstances as mere

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content in our social media feeds.

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Rather than constructing stories around such circumstances to derive meaning and

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significance from them, we absorb them in an endless loop that

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also includes everything from updates about Aunt Ida to marketing

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outreach from advertisers. We miss the implications

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of tragedies because our mental bandwidth is overloaded with

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banalities and propaganda.

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Nowhere is that more evident. Nowhere is that phenomenon more

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evident than in the reporting on the Ukrainian-Russian war.

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No matter what you may think about the politics surrounding this war or

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the ongoing missile strikes into— by the United States into the Strait of

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Hormuz and into Iran, The challenge of both of these

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wars, and they are wars that are going on in our

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world today, the challenge is that the meaning of these acts

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cannot merely be pushed away or pushed down in our

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social media feeds, safely

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inoculated, of course, from further action or further thinking on our part

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by being buried deep in the algorithmic embrace of the social

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media platform. of your choice.

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Stories about warfare, wounds, and even weapons have been a staple

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of Western and indeed global consciousness since a man first

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hit another man across the head for— with a rock and took his stuff.

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We as a species cannot absorb the nature of these violent events without a

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story or a narrative structure that goes beyond the mere

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reporting on facts on the ground. And

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instead chooses to delve into the heart of the people, the

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circumstances, and the consequences of our material

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actions. There are

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only about 16 stories, I’ve heard this once said, in all of

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humanity, and the author that we are covering today on the show

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wrote plays pretty much about all 16 of them.

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One of those 16 is a play About honor,

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sacrifice, pride, status,

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and place, all viewed through the emotional

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haze, dare I say emotional

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fog, of war and battle.

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Today on the show, we are going to try to extract some leadership lessons

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from a very tough play that both myself and my guests had a tough time

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getting through, but I think for probably different reasons.

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We’re going to be covering Coriolanus by

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William Shakespeare. Leaders,

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the true tragedy of the warrior, I think, today

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is that he, the warrior, constructs a narrative about the cost of war,

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even though all of those folks around him

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fail to buy into the narrative as well.

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And back from episode number 193, where we covered Ben-Hur by Lew

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Wallace. And he asked me a lot of questions on that episode. So here’s some

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deep inside baseball. I’ve asked him to— I’m going to ask him some better

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questions on this episode of the show because I really bloviated too much in that

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episode. So we’re going to correct that now.

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Where we, we, we, we have—

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we’re going to discuss the second to the

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last of the 3 Shakespeare plays we’re covering this month. We already talked about

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Macbeth with Katie Mestras, and we’re going to talk about Henry V coming up.

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That should be very interesting with, uh, with Zach Stuckey. Uh, that should be

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very interesting. Also, by the way, a person in marketing and sales, interestingly

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enough. Um, but we’re joined by my, uh, my friend, and

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I think he’s a regular co-host now, John Hill,

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AKA Small Mountain. I always say that at the end. All right, there we go.

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How you doing today, John? I’m good, man.

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It’s funny because you do have 200 coming up, which

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congratulations, by the way. And that’s a significant amount of

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bloviating, to use your term just a second ago. But

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honestly, I was looking back over the books that we’ve done together and

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I was kind of like, oh my gosh, I kind of felt like Tom

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Hanks in Saturday Night Live whenever they bring him on because he’s like, the

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5-timer club and they give him the jacket. I don’t know if you’ve ever even

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seen this skit, but it was like a big deal whenever I was a kid

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because there were only a handful of people that had hosted that many times, right?

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So like I was counting and I was like, oh my gosh, like I think

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I’m, I think I might be regular co-host status on this thing. So man,

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I’m excited to dive into this one because yeah, I think there’s some really cool

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stuff here. And yeah, it was, it was hard to,

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uh, work through, you know. Yeah. And then I got some really great advice from

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my wife on it. So excited to talk about the whole thing. There you

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go. So normally

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at this point, I’d go in and I’d dive back in and I’d read, you

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know, a different— a little bit of a piece, and then that’d be the setup

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for the next piece. But I’m gonna sort of break my own mold here because

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I can do that. It’s my show. And I’m gonna go right into

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sort of how I had to

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absorb this, this play. Let’s talk about that up front. So

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The Tragedy of Coriolanus was written,

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was probably composed in 1608 and was probably staged

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between 1609 and 1610. It is one of

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Shakespeare’s last plays, or one of his final plays that he, that he

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wrote. It’s towards the end of the First Folio.

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And so he writes it as a much older man. Yeah. having gone through

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and having seen and experienced the,

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the, the particular politics of the

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era of Queen Elizabeth I, which at that

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point in time in Europe were

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very religious. Like, we like to say we have wars about religion now.

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God bless us all. We actually don’t. Not at least not in the Western world.

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We don’t, we don’t have those kinds of wars. We, we We shout words at

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each other and we, we say nasty things on the internet, but

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nobody that I know is actually going to somebody else’s house and

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killing them because they’re a Roman Catholic.

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Most people are like, well, I’m going to shout nasty words at you and then

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I’m going to leave. Like, that’s, that’s, that’s where we’ve evolved to, quite frankly,

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because of the wars that happened in Europe where

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thousands of people did get killed because they were Roman Catholic.

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Shakespeare also had a lifetime where he came out of Queen

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Elizabeth I’s father,

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who was Henry VIII, I believe, if I remember correctly,

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who was the one that went around beheading people, like beheading wives looking for sons,

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right? And so he came out of all of that

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milieu. At the same

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time, North American colonialization was beginning to

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ramp up. And so the Europeans had

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traveled across the Atlantic and had

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shown up looking for, by the way, for a Northwest Passage around the Arabs and

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the Africans to get to the— to get to China.

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And instead, what they found was a bunch of people who had no concept of

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land ownership, at least not a European concept of land ownership.

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And by the way, that’s a deep inside joke from Futurama.

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When all the Indians go to Mars and open up casinos

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right off the bat. That’s a deep cut. It’s a very deep cut.

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It’s one of the best jokes in that show, actually.

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And so, you know, you have Roanoke that started the colony of

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Roanoke, the initial

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sort of navigating by the European powers

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at that point, which were England, Spain, France,

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and Russia. Well, no, not Russia. Sorry, not Russia. Belgium,

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who were just trying to— Germany, by the way, didn’t exist as a nation-state at

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that point— who were trying to colonialize.

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They were, they were trying to spread out all over the world, and North America

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was ripe for the taking from their perspective.

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So Shakespeare’s writing all of this, or writing

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and creating plays inside of this milieu. Oh, and by the way, the

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Ottoman Empire was knocking on the door of Southern Europe. So

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there was a lot of consternation in places like Italy

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and Greece and Hungary

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and Serbia. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was kind of a— it hadn’t

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come together yet. That would be another 300 years. But as a result

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of the Ottoman Empire’s sort of incursions in Southern Europe,

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This would be a thing later on. Anyway, so Shakespeare’s writing at this linchpin moment,

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right? And Coriolanus is a play

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where he comments on the riots that were

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going on at the time. That’s why I opened up with the riot around corn,

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because there were corn riots. There were, you know, people in

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England were hungry and they wanted to eat. They

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also were— there’s also civil strife around class and

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status. Not a little bit of civil strife, not,

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not the current politicians that we have running around saying eat the rich. This isn’t

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Ro Khan or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This is, or Bernie

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Sanders. This was like people saying, no, no, no, we’re actually gonna go get rich

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people in their castles and drag them out and we’re gonna kill them. And

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they meant it, by the way, that, that wasn’t a joke.

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And so of all these dynamics. And

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Shakespeare is looking for a way, I think, and we have to be careful to

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not to over-psychologize Shakespeare, which we tend to do in our own time

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with our writers, because we tend to come from a very

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interior-focused worldview in the last

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200 years that didn’t exist very much and at

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depth in the 17th century.

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But Shakespeare is writing Coriolanus At the end of his life as an older man,

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looking at all of this happening and seeing the backsweep of all of this

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and go and probably saying, I would imagine, what do I do with all

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this information? How do I put all this into a play? And so

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the setup here, and by the way, he wrote about

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3 plays on warfare. So there’s Coriolanus,

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actually 4 or 5 plays. So there’s Coriolanus, there’s

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Henry V. Henry VI, Part 3, which has elements of

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war and warfare in it, and Titus Andronicus, which I think was one of

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either the very last play that he wrote or one of his very last

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plays, along with Coriolanus. This is not a

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play that has a lot of popularity. I only found one movie

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about it. I know there’s

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2 out there, but I only found the one directed by Ralph

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Fiennes with Gerard Butler. And Vanessa Redgrave

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and the person who never mails it in, Brian Cox. And he was,

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he was freaking amazing. He never mails it in. And

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so I had to— I say all that to say this.

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I had to go watch the movie because I had a really hard time wrapping

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my head around this play. And it wasn’t the language, it was the

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social commentary that’s happening in that time. and

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figuring out how that resonates with, with us in our time.

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John, I don’t know if that was your experience, but I’ll let you ramble for

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5 minutes. So tell us about your experience about what sort of where

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you went with this and sort of, sort of what was going on here with

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you. Cause I know you had a similar challenge, not similar, but you had a

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challenge getting your arm around it as well. Yeah. So, um,

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my wife is a huge Shakespeare nut, right? Has always been a big

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fan of it. We’ve always had collections, right? And we’ve, you know,

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bought more and sold some off and everything. And so, uh,

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when I first told her that we were gonna do this book together, you know,

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she was excited and she’s like, oh, I think I have, you know, a play

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of that. And I was like, I’m gonna read it. And she goes, it’s meant

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to be watched, dummy. You know, it’s like, you know, because

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I’m like, I’m gonna go read the book, I’m gonna go do the hard thing

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and everything. And she’s like, you could just watch it, it’s probably better. And I

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was like, no. And she, she said this line and

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You know, sometimes I’m really rigid with everybody, including my wife, but she said this

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thing. She was like, he was punny, right? Like he was, he

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was meant to be light at times and stuff like that.

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And I think to where if you just go in and you try to just

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like ingest it all, you’re gonna miss so much of that. And I

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was like, okay, that’s a fair point. And so

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I did the same research, right? And I saw the Ray Fine one, but I

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was like, nope, nope, that’s, that’s too much cheating, right?

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Let’s go find a play of it, right? And I was doing some research and

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apparently Apparently there’s a Tom Hiddleston version that apparently gets like rave reviews, but

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I couldn’t find it anywhere. And so then doing more research, I

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find a version, um, that was, uh, on a

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streaming channel that I’m gonna blank on. I’ll find it here in a second. And,

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uh, watched it yesterday, like with her. And it was

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so helpful, right? Because— Mm-hmm. A, there were times to where

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it’s funny because she’s— she used this label that

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it’s like a history. Right. And so that to me, I

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kind of went in there almost like it was been her again, right? And I

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was trying to find like, okay, what’s the real version of the story versus like

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the fabricated play part of it and everything? And for the first 30 minutes,

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I was very much like in this very, uh, like audit kind of

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mode, right? I’m trying to find the connection points. I’m trying to make sure I

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can remember all this. And then I was like, hey, like just enjoy the show,

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dummy. Like just dial it back a little bit. And because

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The production on the one that we saw was phenomenal.

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Like the stage direction, there’s all this really cool stuff.

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For me, it’s always weird, and I’m curious as to your thoughts on this, whenever

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like no one’s dressed in Roman garb though, right? Yeah. Everyone’s in jeans

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and pants and like military uniforms and everything else like this.

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And to me, that’s a jarring impact, right?

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Like I think it would’ve been easier for me to drop into the pocket of

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just enjoying this if they were like in the togas and the garb and everything

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else like that at the time. Did you feel any of that

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in the movieized version that you watched? So like,

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00:18:42,494 –> 00:18:46,195
pardon me. So we actually discussed this. I

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brought this up with, when we were talking about Macbeth with

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our Shakespeare expert, and she’s a Shakespeare performer,

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Katie Mestris. Okay. So we had her on to discuss

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Macbeth, um, a play that she was not— she is not a magic— a massive

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fan of, by the way. Um, and I brought this up because I did

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watch a play version of Macbeth, um, that had David

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Tennant in it from, um, from, uh, uh, Doctor Who.

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Doctor Who, right. And so, um, but it was all

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modern stage direction with modern garb, you know, so it wasn’t

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17th century Scottish, you know, whatever. And then I went and

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watched the movie with, uh, Maria— Marion

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Cotillard and, oh, what’s

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his name? It’ll come to me in a minute. Um, as Macbeth.

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And, um, that was shot

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as a period piece. So I watched both of those kind of

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parallel together. Mm-hmm. And it was interesting because, to

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your point about the modern garb being sort of jarring.

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Um,

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the— I didn’t find it to be just as distracting as I thought it was

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00:20:00,573 –> 00:20:03,897
going to be. Um, I

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00:20:04,365 –> 00:20:07,827
thought Michael Fassbender— that’s who it was, I knew eventually it would come to me—

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00:20:08,247 –> 00:20:11,582
Michael Fassbender was Macbeth. Um, I thought it was going to be more

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00:20:11,630 –> 00:20:15,478
jarring in the stage version with the modern garb, and they were walking around

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00:20:15,478 –> 00:20:19,092
in modern dress and all of that. But they, they

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integrated everything so well that it didn’t take me out of

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it. Now, what weirdly— what took me

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00:20:27,039 –> 00:20:30,519
out of it was Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard

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stating the Shakespearean lines in Macbeth,

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while I know that they’re, you know, contemporary actors. So that was a

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little bit jarring. Interesting. Now on the other end, when I

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00:20:42,941 –> 00:20:46,643
watched Coriolanus— so Ralph Fiennes directs

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that, and it’s still the Shakespeare, because actors

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still want to do the Shakespeare thing. That’s what they like. They like

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delivering the lines and the blah blah blah. And Vanessa Redgrave, by the

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00:20:57,780 –> 00:21:01,562
way, this is just a— this is just a shout out— Vanessa Redgrave as Volumnia,

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the, the mother, um, of, um, of Coriolanus.

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she lays down a monster. She loved it. You could clearly

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tell she was like loving saying the lines. She was loving giving

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00:21:13,078 –> 00:21:16,834
Ralph Fiennes nonsense. Like when she goes in at the, the, the, in

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00:21:16,866 –> 00:21:19,835
the, the 5th act or 6th act or whatever it is, and she’s begging him

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to save Rome. Yeah. And then she like straightens herself up and she’s like doing

327
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the whole chewing scenery with

328
00:21:26,398 –> 00:21:29,945
Shakespearean lines, right? But it’s all

329
00:21:29,945 –> 00:21:33,458
modern dress, so it’s done as a modern And it was shot in Serbia.

330
00:21:34,051 –> 00:21:37,111
So, you know, it’s a modern Iraq War

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analogy, and it was made in 2011. So it was shot 2000— probably

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shot in 2010, 2009, 2010. So it’s, it’s all about the Iraq

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00:21:44,915 –> 00:21:48,601
War, actually. That’s what it’s a stand-in for, and everybody knows it. Mm-hmm. But it

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doesn’t jar you as much, weirdly enough. So maybe I’m just

335
00:21:52,623 –> 00:21:56,245
used to it by this point. But them running around, and they—

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00:21:56,533 –> 00:22:00,223
and, you know, Corey Elanit Ray Fiennes and Gerard Butler

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00:22:00,255 –> 00:22:03,049
still have a knife fight. They don’t have a sword fight, they have a knife

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00:22:03,049 –> 00:22:06,469
fight. And it’s a pretty brutal knife fight, you know, at the beginning.

339
00:22:07,047 –> 00:22:10,868
Um, and that’s what gives Coriolanus his wounds, and he’s got to go

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back. But you buy into the whole

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00:22:14,689 –> 00:22:18,125
intrigue that’s in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th act with the

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00:22:18,125 –> 00:22:21,947
senators and the, and the, the plebeians and the patricians and all

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00:22:22,139 –> 00:22:25,737
this. You buy into the intrigue of the manipulation, even though they’re all in modern

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dress with, with, you know, suits and ties on.

345
00:22:29,382 –> 00:22:32,546
Yeah, the, the, the part of the thing

346
00:22:33,317 –> 00:22:36,578
I think that bothered me the most was like, I like— she’d use this word

347
00:22:36,915 –> 00:22:40,304
history, and so then I’m thinking, okay, more historical than just like

348
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theatrical and everything. And so when it opens in the,

349
00:22:44,640 –> 00:22:48,109
the, the tribunes are already like against them and

350
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everything, like, like even in the first like instance Right? When he gets sent off

351
00:22:51,240 –> 00:22:54,418
to the war and everything, right? And they’re already like, ah. I was like,

352
00:22:55,770 –> 00:22:58,662
I was like, man, they never even gave the guy a fair shot, right? And

353
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then I was like, wait a minute, play. It’s a play. Like, stop trying to

354
00:23:01,972 –> 00:23:05,379
make it real, real life and everything. And so once I

355
00:23:05,379 –> 00:23:08,624
stopped like trying to figure out like, okay, like, because

356
00:23:09,379 –> 00:23:12,850
like for, for this stuff, I always go and I try to consume it

357
00:23:13,235 –> 00:23:17,067
with as little load as possible, right? Yeah. Right? So that way

358
00:23:17,147 –> 00:23:19,388
I can just kind of sit with it. And then I try to do research

359
00:23:19,549 –> 00:23:22,145
afterwards, right? So like, I’m like in my head and I’m like, okay, like who

360
00:23:22,145 –> 00:23:25,647
are these tributes? And then I was like, play,

361
00:23:26,136 –> 00:23:29,672
just enjoy the show, stuff like that. And then it got better,

362
00:23:30,680 –> 00:23:34,462
but yeah, it still took me a little bit to drop into

363
00:23:34,511 –> 00:23:37,599
it. But the stage direction on the one that we saw is called the—

364
00:23:39,021 –> 00:23:42,831
Gah. That thing is called the National Theater. is

365
00:23:42,928 –> 00:23:45,654
the one that we watched it of. And man, it was

366
00:23:46,590 –> 00:23:49,849
so cool. Like, things are moving up, they’re

367
00:23:49,882 –> 00:23:53,380
projecting video feeds onto the things to make it seem more

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00:23:53,509 –> 00:23:57,019
like— I mean, it was, it was incredibly well done,

369
00:23:57,196 –> 00:24:00,626
right? Um, and I’m excited to go watch the one that you watched now

370
00:24:00,819 –> 00:24:04,359
because the woman who plays the mom in the stage production

371
00:24:07,145 –> 00:24:08,472
crushes it. Like,

372
00:24:10,123 –> 00:24:13,672
Like, I— like, gravitas. Like, just,

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I was, I was floored, right? And to me, the, the, like,

374
00:24:18,416 –> 00:24:21,852
obviously that scene is a big scene, but the scene there, there’s a scene before

375
00:24:21,981 –> 00:24:25,499
that and everything that I was like, this— I mean,

376
00:24:25,838 –> 00:24:29,566
oh my— like, just the power of the woman who was putting on the performance

377
00:24:29,566 –> 00:24:33,154
was so stellar. So I’m, I’m now very excited to go watch this version

378
00:24:33,752 –> 00:24:36,905
that you watched just so I can have a comparison. Yeah. comparison point, honestly. Are

379
00:24:37,017 –> 00:24:40,082
you referring to when she goes and confronts the 2,

380
00:24:40,789 –> 00:24:44,319
the 2, um, patrician senators who like drogue?

381
00:24:44,480 –> 00:24:48,123
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ll love them. You’ll love what Vanessa Redgrave does with that.

382
00:24:48,251 –> 00:24:51,317
Oh my gosh, I thought she was gonna kick— pardon me, folks— I thought she

383
00:24:51,541 –> 00:24:54,414
was gonna kick their

384
00:24:54,510 –> 00:24:58,298
asses. I did. I thought she was gonna throw

385
00:24:58,298 –> 00:25:00,849
them down the stairs and tell the cops the car hit them, like, go come

386
00:25:00,849 –> 00:25:01,235
pick them up.

387
00:25:05,499 –> 00:25:09,173
I mean, disdain, like, oh, absolutely, in every

388
00:25:09,205 –> 00:25:12,912
fiber of the being. Like, I mean, and it is— I, like, I was blown

389
00:25:12,912 –> 00:25:16,632
away, right? And, um, afterwards my, my wife and I were

390
00:25:16,696 –> 00:25:20,529
both just like, like, she, she’s the, she’s

391
00:25:20,561 –> 00:25:23,949
the real star of this thing, right? Mm-hmm. The guy, the guy who played, uh,

392
00:25:24,110 –> 00:25:27,744
the lead was, was phenomenal. And I know he’s famous, but I just don’t— I’ve

393
00:25:27,744 –> 00:25:30,816
not seen anything else that he’s done. he’s in, and he did a phenomenal job.

394
00:25:31,217 –> 00:25:35,064
But she, I mean, she’s the bringer.

395
00:25:35,866 –> 00:25:38,607
It’s one of those, and we’re going to talk about sort of what Shakespeare’s saying

396
00:25:38,607 –> 00:25:41,942
about family here with the mother, because I think that that’s the linchpin of,

397
00:25:42,583 –> 00:25:46,078
just like in Macbeth, everybody sort of, not

398
00:25:46,126 –> 00:25:49,717
everybody, in an analysis of Macbeth, people struggle, I

399
00:25:49,717 –> 00:25:53,292
believe, with is Macbeth the main

400
00:25:53,404 –> 00:25:57,095
protagonist or is Lady Macbeth, the main protagonist, and like how does that how does

401
00:25:57,127 –> 00:26:00,904
that work right in that play? Because it’s kind of there’s a

402
00:26:00,904 –> 00:26:03,993
lot of different things going on, and Katie and I talked about that last episode.

403
00:26:05,281 –> 00:26:08,477
In Coriolanus, by comparison or by

404
00:26:08,477 –> 00:26:11,902
contrast, the

405
00:26:11,902 –> 00:26:14,562
mother Volumnia, like her character

406
00:26:15,917 –> 00:26:19,545
is like Shakespeare wrote her. He wrote her as a steel man. He he

407
00:26:19,840 –> 00:26:21,590
He, he steelmanned her

408
00:26:24,248 –> 00:26:27,683
maternal instincts because I think he was trying to get at something

409
00:26:28,380 –> 00:26:31,947
that we moderns find to

410
00:26:32,028 –> 00:26:35,650
be threatening. And I

411
00:26:35,650 –> 00:26:38,775
think the thing he was trying to get at is the

412
00:26:38,889 –> 00:26:42,548
power of the mother and just how

413
00:26:42,694 –> 00:26:46,526
strong that drive is, because he’s saw it in the royal court

414
00:26:46,526 –> 00:26:50,302
with King James I. I’m sure he heard about it

415
00:26:50,302 –> 00:26:54,014
on back end, background in the, in the, in the, um, the

416
00:26:54,415 –> 00:26:57,994
circles that he wrote, he, he went in when Queen Elizabeth,

417
00:26:58,332 –> 00:27:01,622
um, was, uh, was on the throne. Mm-hmm. And,

418
00:27:02,945 –> 00:27:05,312
you know, we live in a post-feminist, and I talked about this with Katie too,

419
00:27:05,328 –> 00:27:09,095
in Macbeth. We live in a post-feminist environment. So there’s just certain assumptions we

420
00:27:09,095 –> 00:27:12,634
have about women that just weren’t available in the

421
00:27:12,634 –> 00:27:16,361
17th century. They just weren’t. And so we struggle

422
00:27:16,553 –> 00:27:20,297
as moderns because in the case of Lady Macbeth,

423
00:27:21,036 –> 00:27:24,522
we want to see her standing on the battlements like,

424
00:27:24,666 –> 00:27:28,104
like, um, what’s-her-face at the end of Game of Thrones, you know, with the

425
00:27:28,104 –> 00:27:31,944
800-ton dragon, you know, yelling, we will conquer. Like, that’s what we

426
00:27:32,040 –> 00:27:35,799
want to see from Lady Macbeth, but we don’t get that. Mm-hmm.

427
00:27:36,394 –> 00:27:40,118
And then on the other end, in Coriolanus, You’ve got the— at the

428
00:27:40,230 –> 00:27:44,080
other end of a woman’s lifetime, you’ve got the older lady who’s

429
00:27:44,080 –> 00:27:47,433
the matriarch. And we struggle with

430
00:27:47,465 –> 00:27:50,898
matriarchal understanding in our culture.

431
00:27:51,635 –> 00:27:54,763
We used to have a place for old women, and we’re going to visit this

432
00:27:54,763 –> 00:27:58,164
again later on. We used to have a place for old women, not necessarily old

433
00:27:58,196 –> 00:28:01,725
men, because old men die. We die earlier. That’s just— we just die and

434
00:28:01,821 –> 00:28:05,559
that’s it. But older, older women, they’re the ones that hold together the community.

435
00:28:05,896 –> 00:28:09,027
They’re the ones that tell— used to tell younger women what the deal was.

436
00:28:09,769 –> 00:28:13,577
Uh, the term Karen that we have now really only works if

437
00:28:13,577 –> 00:28:17,264
the woman’s like over 50 or over 40. It’s not a term that we

438
00:28:17,344 –> 00:28:21,055
use for younger women. It’s just not. Um, there’s a certain image

439
00:28:21,055 –> 00:28:24,686
we have in our brain, and because we also

440
00:28:24,686 –> 00:28:28,388
live in a youth-obsessed culture, we don’t really know what to do with older

441
00:28:28,388 –> 00:28:31,706
women. And so a character like Volumnia

442
00:28:32,420 –> 00:28:35,913
She belies in our time, not in Shakespeare’s time. She

443
00:28:35,913 –> 00:28:39,745
belies all of that. Now in Shakespeare’s time, you had all of that

444
00:28:39,810 –> 00:28:42,183
set up where the older woman was like,

445
00:28:45,072 –> 00:28:48,833
she was keeping everybody in line. She was keeping people in line informally.

446
00:28:49,108 –> 00:28:52,933
She was using all of the informal tools that— Informal, I

447
00:28:52,982 –> 00:28:56,088
think is a big distinction here, right? But still there,

448
00:28:56,398 –> 00:28:59,978
not lacking power. just informal, right?

449
00:29:00,443 –> 00:29:04,039
She was using all of the informal tools that older women have had access

450
00:29:04,216 –> 00:29:07,764
to throughout the centuries at the

451
00:29:07,764 –> 00:29:11,521
point of the tip of the spear. And so Shakespeare looked at this and

452
00:29:11,537 –> 00:29:15,005
I think he probably said, what would this look like if this were in the

453
00:29:15,005 –> 00:29:18,039
state? And he didn’t have feminism as a, as a sort of

454
00:29:18,200 –> 00:29:21,539
construct there. So let’s just move this person into here.

455
00:29:21,892 –> 00:29:25,576
Plus, Coriolanus is built on To your

456
00:29:25,609 –> 00:29:27,981
point about history, it’s built on the,

457
00:29:32,719 –> 00:29:36,009
it’s built on the fact of Roman virtue, which is something that they were very

458
00:29:36,041 –> 00:29:39,524
familiar with, that English folks are very familiar with, and Europeans in general were very

459
00:29:39,524 –> 00:29:43,061
familiar with and were rediscovering in the, in the 17th century,

460
00:29:43,531 –> 00:29:46,994
which we don’t, we don’t put a whole lot of stock in that

461
00:29:47,253 –> 00:29:47,399
now.

462
00:29:51,530 –> 00:29:54,499
Oh, think about the last movie you saw that was about Roman virtue, which is

463
00:29:54,515 –> 00:29:58,218
probably Gladiator. Oh, okay. So,

464
00:29:58,476 –> 00:30:01,931
okay, sorry, I was, I was, I was hearing something else, right? So,

465
00:30:02,397 –> 00:30:05,980
um, so you don’t, uh, so you’re saying that we don’t

466
00:30:06,028 –> 00:30:09,269
hold up that example? Like, like we don’t make movies about it, we don’t talk

467
00:30:09,269 –> 00:30:11,689
about it in the way that we used to, it doesn’t get passed on, right?

468
00:30:11,754 –> 00:30:14,965
So, so really, I guess if you’re, if you’re

469
00:30:15,842 –> 00:30:19,583
Well, I guess that makes sense, right? If you’re, if you’re learning

470
00:30:19,599 –> 00:30:23,003
about things like virtue, right, it’s probably through like

471
00:30:23,244 –> 00:30:27,017
Stoicism or philosophy or something else like that, right?

472
00:30:27,162 –> 00:30:30,839
I, like, I would say that there’s pockets of leading with

473
00:30:30,839 –> 00:30:34,452
virtue and it done in a, in a reasonable way are, are

474
00:30:34,452 –> 00:30:37,920
not very frequent. I think of,

475
00:30:38,482 –> 00:30:41,389
and then we’ll go back to the play here. I think of the, um, There

476
00:30:41,389 –> 00:30:45,236
was a Japanese businessman a couple of years— no, maybe about 5 years

477
00:30:45,350 –> 00:30:49,162
ago, maybe— that I heard about. Um, might have been

478
00:30:49,519 –> 00:30:53,219
an executive at Nissan. It was some large

479
00:30:53,317 –> 00:30:56,383
company. I’d have to go back and look at it, and I’m not in a

480
00:30:56,383 –> 00:30:59,817
space with a computer right now. I’m gonna go look up the details. But I

481
00:30:59,817 –> 00:31:02,786
believe, if I remember correctly, he committed ritual suicide

482
00:31:04,667 –> 00:31:08,170
because something happened in the business that wasn’t supposed to happen. Yeah.

483
00:31:08,657 –> 00:31:12,225
It was dishonorable. And so, like, he committed

484
00:31:12,225 –> 00:31:16,017
seppuku. Like, his assistant cut his head off and he, like, opened himself

485
00:31:16,130 –> 00:31:19,496
up from, as they would say in Macbeth, the nape to the chops. Mm-hmm.

486
00:31:19,916 –> 00:31:23,610
And I remember this being

487
00:31:25,578 –> 00:31:29,289
like— this landed like an atomic bomb on LinkedIn. People were like, why would this

488
00:31:29,289 –> 00:31:33,097
person commit suicide? Well, that’s Japanese honor culture.

489
00:31:33,161 –> 00:31:36,463
That’s the code of Bushido. If you actually take that

490
00:31:36,463 –> 00:31:38,932
seriously. The thing is,

491
00:31:39,997 –> 00:31:42,175
very few of us take that seriously.

492
00:31:43,880 –> 00:31:46,921
Very few. And by the way, I think that’s why Coriolanus actually, as a play

493
00:31:47,794 –> 00:31:51,349
and as a story, works in our time. Hmm.

494
00:31:51,689 –> 00:31:55,134
But then there’s also some elements in it that actually put some— they put some

495
00:31:55,150 –> 00:31:58,773
frictions of sandpaper on that too, which we’ll talk about that too, um,

496
00:31:59,113 –> 00:32:02,774
which And that goes back to Caius Martius, the, the,

497
00:32:02,839 –> 00:32:05,825
the, you know, how his character is portrayed.

498
00:32:06,925 –> 00:32:10,390
And weirdly enough, this is my last point. When I was watching Ralph Fiennes

499
00:32:10,488 –> 00:32:14,298
portray him, all I could think of, all I

500
00:32:14,298 –> 00:32:15,922
could think of was Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank.

501
00:32:19,707 –> 00:32:23,539
Mr. Wonderful? I don’t know why. I don’t know why.

502
00:32:23,766 –> 00:32:27,441
My brain jumped right to Kevin O’Leary. I

503
00:32:27,441 –> 00:32:31,199
mean, here, uh, like, I don’t watch a lot of Shark Tank personally.

504
00:32:31,423 –> 00:32:35,100
I don’t either. I guess it’s a loaded ground. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Um,

505
00:32:35,293 –> 00:32:39,066
but you know, you know, some of the, some of the

506
00:32:39,066 –> 00:32:42,647
monologues of him talking to the people that are supposed to be on his

507
00:32:42,679 –> 00:32:46,436
side and get it, I would, I would wager sound very much like, like

508
00:32:46,436 –> 00:32:50,145
that guy’s conversations after someone comes on for a thing that he doesn’t

509
00:32:50,145 –> 00:32:53,340
see any value in. Look at these idiots. You know, and everything else like this.

510
00:32:53,854 –> 00:32:57,465
So yeah, I can see that. Yeah. Yeah. I

511
00:32:57,513 –> 00:33:01,284
wasn’t getting that. I was just, I mean, I can’t

512
00:33:01,284 –> 00:33:04,061
wait to dive into this because coming from my lane,

513
00:33:05,216 –> 00:33:08,892
there’s, there’s so much overlap. Like there’s so much of, of this

514
00:33:08,988 –> 00:33:12,759
that still goes on today, right? In sales and selling and— Oh yeah.

515
00:33:12,936 –> 00:33:16,627
Let’s just promote the biggest producer into being the leader

516
00:33:16,643 –> 00:33:20,078
and then like not give them any coaching or training or development and then we’re

517
00:33:20,078 –> 00:33:23,925
just expected to go well. Right. Why? Like, but everybody does it,

518
00:33:24,150 –> 00:33:27,274
you know, it’s, it’s like, oh yeah, you know, you don’t take Jordan off the

519
00:33:27,274 –> 00:33:31,088
court and make him the coach. That’s going to be a terrible idea. And, but

520
00:33:31,280 –> 00:33:33,860
sales side, everyone just thinks, well, this is the highest producer. They’re going to be

521
00:33:33,860 –> 00:33:36,888
a great leader, not without a bunch of training and development so that way they

522
00:33:36,888 –> 00:33:40,734
can like make the jump. Otherwise they’re just going to be, well, it’s just

523
00:33:40,734 –> 00:33:43,794
faster if I do it and look how slow these idiots are and everything else

524
00:33:43,794 –> 00:33:47,608
like that. And just, it just blows up more than it usually does

525
00:33:47,640 –> 00:33:51,051
anything worth talking about. So let me ask you a question.

526
00:33:51,409 –> 00:33:55,232
Sure. That’s not in the script at all because you just triggered

527
00:33:55,232 –> 00:33:58,561
something in my brain. Is LeBron going to be a terrible coach?

528
00:34:00,147 –> 00:34:03,113
Oh, are they going to make him a coach? I haven’t even heard this. I

529
00:34:03,145 –> 00:34:05,547
don’t know. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I— so, so here’s what I—

530
00:34:05,563 –> 00:34:09,188
here’s— let me set this up. He’s gonna do a year, maybe 2,

531
00:34:09,527 –> 00:34:13,082
with the Sixers, go back to Cleveland, retire in

532
00:34:13,082 –> 00:34:16,123
Cleveland. 5 years from now,

533
00:34:16,736 –> 00:34:20,572
good coach, bad coach, based on

534
00:34:20,669 –> 00:34:23,908
what you know of the man and what you’ve seen. I don’t even ask if

535
00:34:23,908 –> 00:34:27,179
you’re a basketball fan. Yeah, I merely— because the Jordan thing

536
00:34:28,037 –> 00:34:31,829
clicked over the thing in my head. So we’re past Jordan now. The Last Dance

537
00:34:31,829 –> 00:34:35,388
is over. Yep. Kobe’s dead. Kobe’s gone,

538
00:34:35,567 –> 00:34:39,152
right? We all live in the backwash of LeBron. We

539
00:34:39,152 –> 00:34:41,791
just do. Uh, whether we want to or not.

540
00:34:44,978 –> 00:34:48,293
Primary question, does he coach? Secondary question,

541
00:34:49,447 –> 00:34:53,087
is he good or bad? And by good or bad, I just mean above

542
00:34:53,151 –> 00:34:56,846
.500 or below .500. Let’s just use that as a metric. That’s fair. Um, so

543
00:34:56,943 –> 00:35:00,073
is he leaving the Lakers? Like, I’m like— Uh-huh. Oh yeah, he’s going to the

544
00:35:00,073 –> 00:35:03,470
76ers. Yeah, that was huge last week. Is his son going with him, or is

545
00:35:03,470 –> 00:35:06,779
his son staying on the Lakers? Shut up, leave Bronny alone. Hold on, we can’t,

546
00:35:07,020 –> 00:35:09,752
we can’t, because this, because this is going to play a major part in my,

547
00:35:10,009 –> 00:35:13,270
in my opinion here in a minute. I have no idea. I haven’t heard anything

548
00:35:13,286 –> 00:35:16,765
about Browning. I have not heard anything about the man. So here’s my, here’s my

549
00:35:16,765 –> 00:35:20,540
thinking, right? The guy who fights that hard to have

550
00:35:20,556 –> 00:35:23,894
his son on the same team as him is not ready to be a coach,

551
00:35:26,068 –> 00:35:29,410
right? Because he’s not, he’s not thinking about the organization or the

552
00:35:29,410 –> 00:35:33,091
franchise or the team or anything else like this. He wants to play ball

553
00:35:33,187 –> 00:35:36,096
with his kid, right? And like, as a parent, I can, I can see a

554
00:35:36,096 –> 00:35:39,759
lot of value in that. And like, hey, like, you’re a great player, so

555
00:35:40,097 –> 00:35:43,924
okay, cool. But those— that type of decision-making

556
00:35:44,134 –> 00:35:47,805
means that you’re not ready for, for the bigger thing, hands

557
00:35:47,821 –> 00:35:51,620
down, right? Like, Mm-hmm. if you need to get your needs met versus the

558
00:35:51,620 –> 00:35:55,344
team getting their needs met, you’re just categorically not at the level, right?

559
00:35:55,684 –> 00:35:58,954
And Phil Jackson talks about this in all of his books, right? Like, he He’s

560
00:35:58,954 –> 00:36:02,194
like, he’s like, everyone was so impressed, but like, do you know how much effort

561
00:36:02,194 –> 00:36:05,658
it took to get Jordan away from just chasing shooting titles and to be the

562
00:36:05,658 –> 00:36:08,945
team player and to trust other people and stuff? Do you think anybody would be

563
00:36:08,945 –> 00:36:12,730
talking about this if we, if we’d not made that jump? No, right?

564
00:36:12,794 –> 00:36:16,403
No. So I think, I think as long as he is the

565
00:36:16,403 –> 00:36:19,738
guy who’s going to go pull strings and use his platform to get his son

566
00:36:19,770 –> 00:36:23,507
on the team with him, then he’s not ready to be a coach

567
00:36:23,700 –> 00:36:27,520
and do anything. Now, here’s the other

568
00:36:27,520 –> 00:36:30,952
part. Nobody starts off good

569
00:36:31,774 –> 00:36:35,571
at these things. This is true. Right? Everybody needs

570
00:36:35,571 –> 00:36:38,961
development, right? And the longer you spend in the doer seat, the more

571
00:36:39,010 –> 00:36:42,802
development you need to be in the leader seat, is my personal opinion about

572
00:36:42,802 –> 00:36:46,288
it, right? So I

573
00:36:46,336 –> 00:36:50,079
think everybody starts out bad at it. Like, you know, at 20

574
00:36:50,175 –> 00:36:53,009
years old, I have not told the story on here. We could if you want

575
00:36:53,009 –> 00:36:56,709
to. It’s one of the most stupidest things I’ve ever done.

576
00:36:57,143 –> 00:37:00,984
But I answered classified ads, and in the classifieds it said management

577
00:37:01,065 –> 00:37:04,544
opportunities. I’m all of 20 years old. This is before the military, kung fu, all

578
00:37:04,544 –> 00:37:07,036
these things that have made me who I am. And I’m like, you know what,

579
00:37:07,052 –> 00:37:10,713
I’m ready to lead men. No, no,

580
00:37:11,312 –> 00:37:14,595
right? It was a designer imposter cologne and perfume Ponzi

581
00:37:14,644 –> 00:37:18,493
scheme MLM thing that they send you out of town. I lasted 3 days, and

582
00:37:18,493 –> 00:37:21,463
then after that, like, I came home and the military sounded like a really sweetheart

583
00:37:21,463 –> 00:37:24,413
of a deal after that whole thing. Yeah, I love them. Right? So it’s like,

584
00:37:24,910 –> 00:37:28,694
like, like I say this fully admitted as a guy who

585
00:37:29,239 –> 00:37:32,189
was like, oh, I can lead other people. No, I would have been good at

586
00:37:32,189 –> 00:37:35,988
telling people what I thought they should be doing without having enough experience to

587
00:37:35,988 –> 00:37:39,804
know whether or not those things actually lead to the improvements and advancements that

588
00:37:39,804 –> 00:37:43,315
everyone is working towards. But I would have very loud opinions

589
00:37:43,909 –> 00:37:47,580
and I could shout over people. And if that is what you think leadership

590
00:37:47,580 –> 00:37:50,562
is, then that’s why all these guys think that they’re really great at it. Right?

591
00:37:51,043 –> 00:37:54,744
But to me, it’s like the same— it’s the same shift that happens inside of

592
00:37:54,744 –> 00:37:57,260
martial arts schools, right? Everybody walks in

593
00:37:58,334 –> 00:38:01,875
thinking we’re here to be Billy Badass, right? Yeah.

594
00:38:02,244 –> 00:38:06,010
But the only people that get

595
00:38:06,010 –> 00:38:09,567
to the higher levels of any art are the people who stop

596
00:38:09,615 –> 00:38:13,413
chasing that thing and they make it about something else. They

597
00:38:13,413 –> 00:38:16,858
make it about an internal kind of situation. And I got to,

598
00:38:17,468 –> 00:38:19,760
sorry, and I’ll shut up after this. There was a guy I interviewed once, his

599
00:38:19,760 –> 00:38:23,414
name’s Jeff Risley. We’re talking about like sales and he

600
00:38:23,414 –> 00:38:26,107
runs a thing called the Mental Sales Health Alliance. And I think about this line

601
00:38:26,860 –> 00:38:30,466
weekly, man. Every, every week I think about this line. The

602
00:38:30,466 –> 00:38:33,304
longer a salesperson stays motivated by pure

603
00:38:33,672 –> 00:38:37,455
extrinsic dangles, right? Spiffs, commissions,

604
00:38:37,679 –> 00:38:41,350
President’s Club, the harder it is and the longer it takes for them to become

605
00:38:41,350 –> 00:38:45,183
intrinsically motivated to do just quality work because quality work is

606
00:38:45,280 –> 00:38:48,966
what’s called for. And there’s so many

607
00:38:48,999 –> 00:38:52,814
examples of bad leadership, the Bobby Knights, the throwing of chairs and all

608
00:38:52,879 –> 00:38:55,886
of this stuff. And people love to think that, well, it’s not okay when anyone

609
00:38:55,918 –> 00:38:57,862
does that to me, but it’s going to be okay because I’m going to be

610
00:38:57,991 –> 00:39:01,380
right. It’s like, you’re not ready, right?

611
00:39:01,927 –> 00:39:04,318
If getting angry is the only thing you know to do,

612
00:39:06,161 –> 00:39:07,323
you’re not ready yet. Yeah.

613
00:39:10,705 –> 00:39:13,707
Speaking of not being ready, back to the play.

614
00:39:14,746 –> 00:39:18,299
Back to Coriolanus. I’m gonna go Act

615
00:39:18,397 –> 00:39:21,292
2, Scene 2.

616
00:39:22,371 –> 00:39:26,026
I’m gonna pick up where, um, the Senate meets

617
00:39:26,219 –> 00:39:29,988
to hear Cominius praise Coriolanus in a formal

618
00:39:30,085 –> 00:39:33,120
oration, and then to choose Coriolanus

619
00:39:33,782 –> 00:39:37,513
as its nominee for consul. Speaking of

620
00:39:37,545 –> 00:39:41,254
getting a position of leadership when you’re not

621
00:39:41,302 –> 00:39:44,867
ready. By the way, this is right after Coriolanus has, uh, successfully

622
00:39:45,878 –> 00:39:49,170
cowed— not defeated, but successfully cowed— the, uh, the

623
00:39:49,170 –> 00:39:52,702
Volscics. And, um, and, uh, and had, uh, had

624
00:39:52,718 –> 00:39:56,042
hand-to-hand combat with, um, with Alphidius,

625
00:39:56,571 –> 00:40:00,296
his, uh, his sworn enemy, right? Can we talk about that for just a

626
00:40:00,345 –> 00:40:04,182
second? Because I thought that was— Sure, go ahead. Like, yeah. You’re the only

627
00:40:04,198 –> 00:40:08,036
guy inside the walls, right? So I’m glad it worked

628
00:40:08,036 –> 00:40:11,584
out well for you. Why are you the only guy

629
00:40:11,584 –> 00:40:15,165
inside the walls? Like, I mean, and maybe this is

630
00:40:15,582 –> 00:40:19,356
me being a product of a military time, very, very, very different and everything

631
00:40:19,436 –> 00:40:23,016
else like that, but like, I’m just thinking about what would

632
00:40:23,145 –> 00:40:26,677
really realistically happen if you’re the only guy who breaks

633
00:40:26,677 –> 00:40:30,335
lines and insides ends up inside the gate, even if it does

634
00:40:30,383 –> 00:40:34,184
go well. So why was in the Iliad— now the Odyssey is out,

635
00:40:34,200 –> 00:40:37,953
I’m going to bring this up— why in the Iliad did Achilles fight Hector

636
00:40:38,225 –> 00:40:41,914
one-on-one on the beach? Or why in the

637
00:40:41,914 –> 00:40:45,747
Bible was David not sent out? Why did he

638
00:40:45,827 –> 00:40:49,115
go out against Goliath? Why did Goliath come out every day and yell at the

639
00:40:49,115 –> 00:40:52,787
Israelites, right? So there’s

640
00:40:53,044 –> 00:40:56,518
ancient not modern, but ancient ideas about one-on-one

641
00:40:56,518 –> 00:41:00,059
combat. Actually, I didn’t have a problem with that, weirdly enough. I didn’t. I thought

642
00:41:00,059 –> 00:41:03,251
that was fine. And in the movie, just so that you know,

643
00:41:04,719 –> 00:41:08,123
they actually kind of gloss past that and just sort of let that go because

644
00:41:08,123 –> 00:41:11,768
it actually doesn’t work for our time. Yeah. So they just have him like coming

645
00:41:11,785 –> 00:41:15,594
out of the fog or whatever, claiming that he did a

646
00:41:15,610 –> 00:41:19,352
one-on-one thing. And there is a scene in there where

647
00:41:19,401 –> 00:41:22,876
he does have the combat and everybody sort of stands around and watches him. And

648
00:41:22,876 –> 00:41:26,163
then they just sort of let him, let him walk away. But that was the

649
00:41:26,179 –> 00:41:29,690
best gloss they could put on it because we don’t, we don’t run wars that

650
00:41:29,690 –> 00:41:33,474
way anymore. Yeah, we don’t have the, the one example or

651
00:41:33,474 –> 00:41:37,129
let, let’s spare all these lives and just have like your champion versus our champion,

652
00:41:37,386 –> 00:41:40,576
you know, and stuff like that. So yeah. Okay. I can see that. Which actually,

653
00:41:40,673 –> 00:41:44,472
I would love to go back to that, quite frankly. Um, that would actually be

654
00:41:45,114 –> 00:41:48,865
a lot more pleasant for me, honestly. Um, I think we should

655
00:41:48,865 –> 00:41:52,529
probably have, no, really, I think we should have Zelensky and Putin In a ring,

656
00:41:52,561 –> 00:41:55,320
and that’ll fix the problem.

657
00:41:57,592 –> 00:42:01,065
That would be an interesting matchup. And Putin’s an old judo guy.

658
00:42:01,645 –> 00:42:04,978
So, I mean, he’s, he’s got some skills. I mean,

659
00:42:05,477 –> 00:42:08,844
looking at his path up and stuff like that, you don’t get there without knowing

660
00:42:08,876 –> 00:42:12,671
how to handle yourself. Correct. And Zelensky’s just a comedian, but

661
00:42:12,671 –> 00:42:15,417
he’s, but he’s got long reach. I mean, he’s kind of short, but he’s got

662
00:42:15,417 –> 00:42:17,872
long arms. And I think he’s hungrier.

663
00:42:19,305 –> 00:42:22,582
He’s also like 30 years younger than the man. So like, there’s also that.

664
00:42:22,662 –> 00:42:25,987
There’s also that. Putin looks damn good on the back of a horse without a

665
00:42:25,987 –> 00:42:29,633
shirt on though. He does. He does.

666
00:42:29,890 –> 00:42:33,295
He does. So it’s like, you— I don’t— and this is why.

667
00:42:33,584 –> 00:42:35,656
And by the way, I would want to do best 2 out of 3 falls.

668
00:42:35,768 –> 00:42:38,724
Just best 2 out of

669
00:42:38,820 –> 00:42:40,025
3.

670
00:42:44,603 –> 00:42:48,315
So I, I personally, like I said, that

671
00:42:48,315 –> 00:42:51,542
would eliminate a whole lot of nonsense. We could eliminate resource— we could save

672
00:42:51,542 –> 00:42:55,150
resources, you know. And then, uh, you know, then our undercard

673
00:42:55,166 –> 00:42:58,269
match could be a Trump versus whoever the Iranians will spit up.

674
00:42:59,162 –> 00:43:02,700
Just pop up somebody. I don’t know, somebody can represent your country. It’s fine.

675
00:43:03,624 –> 00:43:07,382
Like, send some Persian over. It’s fine. Donald Trump will come

676
00:43:07,430 –> 00:43:11,243
because he’s crazy. Like, literally mentally crazy. crazy. He’s crazy enough to think

677
00:43:11,243 –> 00:43:15,020
he can do it. And yeah, there’s no one better than me. There’s no one

678
00:43:15,036 –> 00:43:18,151
better than me. And, and

679
00:43:19,148 –> 00:43:22,686
much like Bruce Wayne as Batman, he’s gonna cheat. So we’ve

680
00:43:22,686 –> 00:43:26,159
got that. So there’s gonna be that.

681
00:43:26,898 –> 00:43:29,725
Um, but the Iranians, I think, will struggle with actually like

682
00:43:30,336 –> 00:43:34,031
pushing a person forward somewhere because— and if you can’t put— and the

683
00:43:34,047 –> 00:43:35,531
rules would be if you can’t push forward a

684
00:43:35,531 –> 00:43:39,335
champion You gotta surrender. You gotta say, okay, that’s

685
00:43:39,335 –> 00:43:41,168
it, I’m done. You gotta come up with somebody.

686
00:43:43,850 –> 00:43:47,671
Interesting. If I were king

687
00:43:47,671 –> 00:43:48,885
of the universe, that’s what I would do.

688
00:43:52,172 –> 00:43:55,316
Okay. And then we just— and then we— look how many lives we save.

689
00:43:57,026 –> 00:44:00,571
Like, all of World War I could have been decided if Pétain and,

690
00:44:01,473 –> 00:44:04,931
you know, any of those other General, and all those old boys would have fought.

691
00:44:05,895 –> 00:44:09,062
Have you seen— have you ever seen like World War I, like Pershing and all

692
00:44:09,110 –> 00:44:12,231
those? They were— they were— they would go. They would

693
00:44:12,489 –> 00:44:16,046
absolutely have been like— they would have been all about it. The French,

694
00:44:16,594 –> 00:44:20,377
oh my God. Well, and like, not to cut away from

695
00:44:20,458 –> 00:44:24,037
the thing or whatever, like, that’s the thing I appreciated a lot about

696
00:44:24,344 –> 00:44:27,749
the book, right, is that, uh,

697
00:44:28,459 –> 00:44:32,180
every Everybody makes this assumption around like the military and stuff.

698
00:44:32,245 –> 00:44:34,734
Like, like people look at me weird because they see the long hair and the

699
00:44:34,734 –> 00:44:38,413
beard and they’re like, well, John, you don’t, you don’t actually, you don’t exactly talk

700
00:44:38,413 –> 00:44:41,721
like someone who was prior service. And I’m like, you know, isn’t it great that

701
00:44:41,721 –> 00:44:44,966
we’re all capable of growth? You know? And so

702
00:44:45,255 –> 00:44:49,094
it’s, it like one of the things that I think now is, um, a lot

703
00:44:49,094 –> 00:44:52,676
of people don’t have to make military a career. You don’t necessarily have to go

704
00:44:52,724 –> 00:44:56,169
down this lane. Right. Whereas like back in the day, Those guys, you know,

705
00:44:56,590 –> 00:45:00,125
uh, like it’s the Hamilton line, right? I wish there was a war so I

706
00:45:00,173 –> 00:45:03,868
could fly above my station, right? And when we’re looking at death and

707
00:45:04,370 –> 00:45:07,540
war and all of these things as just like a way to like level up

708
00:45:07,540 –> 00:45:11,163
and everything, of course all those hardcore guys are going to be really into it

709
00:45:11,163 –> 00:45:13,946
and stuff like that. So I was kind of taken by

710
00:45:15,548 –> 00:45:19,189
that during that time, like there, there really was only one way

711
00:45:20,887 –> 00:45:24,033
to really do it if you weren’t born to it, you know. Like,

712
00:45:25,140 –> 00:45:28,928
it was the easiest path to get some advancement during that time and

713
00:45:28,928 –> 00:45:32,651
stuff. And I think, I think now it’s, it’s actually like we’re less

714
00:45:32,844 –> 00:45:36,358
likely to put a war hero in charge of things because

715
00:45:36,936 –> 00:45:40,547
we know how faulty they can be, right? Or just humans in

716
00:45:40,643 –> 00:45:44,431
general, and that people don’t come locked and loaded for these roles, you

717
00:45:44,431 –> 00:45:47,770
know. Well, like General Petraeus like

718
00:45:48,493 –> 00:45:51,883
he got dunked on by Hillary Clinton and that was the end of his— like,

719
00:45:52,188 –> 00:45:55,883
like, there— I mean, people forget now in 2026, but

720
00:45:56,365 –> 00:46:00,205
in 2007, 2006, 2007,

721
00:46:00,317 –> 00:46:04,092
General Petraeus was thought to be a genius. Yep. And then Hillary Clinton

722
00:46:04,092 –> 00:46:07,691
dunked on him. I think she called him David Petraeus or

723
00:46:07,691 –> 00:46:11,450
David Petraeus or something like that. She like tagged him and then that was

724
00:46:11,546 –> 00:46:13,972
it. Like, his— he was going to run as a Democrat, I think, and Like,

725
00:46:14,357 –> 00:46:17,340
his entire career blew up on the— well, that and the, the,

726
00:46:18,447 –> 00:46:21,976
the, what do you call it, the— there was some issue with him, like,

727
00:46:22,233 –> 00:46:25,281
having an affair with his ghostwriter or something like that on some book that he

728
00:46:25,281 –> 00:46:28,344
was writing. Anyway, his entire

729
00:46:28,809 –> 00:46:32,050
political career blew up on the landing pad. And then,

730
00:46:32,659 –> 00:46:35,899
and now Mark Kelly, you’ve got Mark Kelly that people are talking about running for

731
00:46:36,493 –> 00:46:40,214
the president. He’s the astronaut guy? He’s the astronaut guy, but he’s also

732
00:46:40,262 –> 00:46:44,034
former military. Yep. And I just, I put a pin

733
00:46:44,034 –> 00:46:47,647
in that. I just, I wonder, I wonder, that’s a big

734
00:46:47,647 –> 00:46:50,779
giant question mark for me because to your point, I don’t know that people,

735
00:46:52,159 –> 00:46:55,644
I don’t know that it plays anymore. I don’t know that enough

736
00:46:55,676 –> 00:46:58,952
people have had enough. And you and I live in Texas, so it’s a little

737
00:46:58,984 –> 00:47:02,645
bit different for us geographically. Mm-hmm. But you go to other parts of the country,

738
00:47:03,143 –> 00:47:06,338
there are people who just, there’s no one in their neighborhood, much less their family.

739
00:47:06,450 –> 00:47:10,015
There’s no one in their neighborhood that’s even been in the military in like now

740
00:47:10,304 –> 00:47:14,123
almost 3 generations. So I don’t know that it plays,

741
00:47:14,621 –> 00:47:18,216
right, electorally to a much larger, a much larger group of people.

742
00:47:18,730 –> 00:47:21,667
And then when you talk about specific parties, where does it play more? Where does

743
00:47:21,699 –> 00:47:25,390
it play less? Yeah, you know, I think it’s helpful that J.D. Vance was in

744
00:47:25,390 –> 00:47:29,161
the Marines. Whether or not he was a good Marine is irrelevant. Like, that

745
00:47:29,161 –> 00:47:32,452
he was in the Marines, it doesn’t matter. That he was in the Marines and

746
00:47:32,452 –> 00:47:35,982
the Republican Party, that works a little bit better for him. I

747
00:47:35,982 –> 00:47:39,724
don’t know how well being in the military works for Mark Kelly

748
00:47:40,061 –> 00:47:43,192
among— in the Democratic Party. I just, I just don’t know. I don’t even know

749
00:47:43,192 –> 00:47:44,862
if it— I don’t even know if there’s enough people who remember him. That’s an

750
00:47:44,862 –> 00:47:48,314
interesting question, right? Does that work? You know. To me, I’m just,

751
00:47:48,667 –> 00:47:52,312
I’m glad that it’s no longer like assumed that if you have a stellar

752
00:47:52,440 –> 00:47:56,101
war career and God knows how you got that stellar reputation, that you just

753
00:47:56,198 –> 00:47:59,762
automatically have a path paved to be an elected

754
00:47:59,762 –> 00:48:03,596
official because Being good at that doesn’t mean that you’re good at

755
00:48:03,596 –> 00:48:07,331
this, right? Just, it doesn’t, you know. And

756
00:48:07,908 –> 00:48:11,434
I want to give everybody the full room to change. Okay, great. You

757
00:48:11,434 –> 00:48:14,720
know, work with a coach, work with a consultant, work with someone who can give

758
00:48:14,720 –> 00:48:17,830
you a toolkit. Don’t just show up assuming that the toolkit that you have is

759
00:48:17,846 –> 00:48:21,436
going to be what you need to get the job done, right? Right. And so

760
00:48:21,533 –> 00:48:24,931
I think like a guy like— I’ve not seen a lot of the Kelly stuff,

761
00:48:25,139 –> 00:48:27,480
right? I try very hard to not look at any of this stuff on social

762
00:48:27,480 –> 00:48:31,057
media and use my time to upskill myself and I suppose just making myself angry.

763
00:48:31,731 –> 00:48:35,068
But I think, I think, I think that, I think that if you’re really,

764
00:48:36,143 –> 00:48:39,160
I guess, practiced, maybe you can tell whenever someone,

765
00:48:40,460 –> 00:48:44,022
uh, is, is like open to the challenge of the next

766
00:48:44,086 –> 00:48:47,681
level versus, ah, this is gonna be easy because I led 7

767
00:48:47,761 –> 00:48:51,404
guys through battle. You’re not in battle anymore. Right. Like, like the,

768
00:48:51,548 –> 00:48:55,207
the rules of engagement aren’t anywhere close to, to what they were when you were

769
00:48:55,223 –> 00:48:58,545
exceeding and And I’m glad that you found success over here, but don’t think you

770
00:48:58,545 –> 00:49:01,648
can bring that playbook over here and it’s going to work out very well.

771
00:49:02,424 –> 00:49:05,075
Right, right. Yeah, it is a real challenge.

772
00:49:07,353 –> 00:49:10,858
And in our time, I don’t know, it remains to be seen,

773
00:49:11,069 –> 00:49:14,769
right? And I do think this is the last thing I’ll say. I

774
00:49:14,882 –> 00:49:18,597
think as, as we, we further, we go further into the century,

775
00:49:20,106 –> 00:49:23,697
I do think that at least in the United States, other countries,

776
00:49:24,040 –> 00:49:25,795
who knows? But in the United States,

777
00:49:32,040 –> 00:49:35,662
outside of certain geographic areas, military service will continue to not matter

778
00:49:36,241 –> 00:49:39,187
as a, as a chip on your resume. I agree.

779
00:49:41,328 –> 00:49:43,596
And we could discuss whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I think

780
00:49:43,596 –> 00:49:46,731
it’s just gonna be a fact of the matter on the ground. And then how

781
00:49:46,779 –> 00:49:50,300
you navigate that is, is a whole other kind of, a whole other kind of

782
00:49:50,620 –> 00:49:53,850
I mean, it’s kind of like college, I think, now

783
00:49:53,850 –> 00:49:57,390
at this point, right? Because I’m not even going to

784
00:49:57,390 –> 00:50:01,070
lie, right? I have been hired because I’m prior service. It’s absolutely happened,

785
00:50:01,070 –> 00:50:04,650
right? Sure. And sometimes it’s not like the deciding

786
00:50:04,650 –> 00:50:08,170
factor, but my first job when I got home, the guy was prior

787
00:50:08,170 –> 00:50:11,230
service. He’d been a tanker and he was like, what are you looking for a

788
00:50:11,230 –> 00:50:14,080
job for? Right? And I was like, well, I just got home from the reserves.

789
00:50:14,290 –> 00:50:17,260
I’m trying to find a job. I’m kind of limited because I’m in the reserve,

790
00:50:17,260 –> 00:50:19,760
blah, blah, blah. And he goes, oh, you’re prior service? I said, yeah. He’s like,

791
00:50:19,760 –> 00:50:23,000
what’s your MOS? And I told him what it was. And he was like, okay,

792
00:50:23,000 –> 00:50:25,640
cool. You’re not lying. And I was like, what do you mean? He’s like, cause

793
00:50:25,640 –> 00:50:29,040
no one would, no one would lie about that job. And I was like, okay,

794
00:50:29,040 –> 00:50:32,880
that’s weird. And he goes, yeah, absolutely. You come in tomorrow. You’re going to

795
00:50:32,880 –> 00:50:36,400
be fine. Now this is waiting tables, right? But like in sales roles,

796
00:50:36,400 –> 00:50:39,960
like, oh, John, military, right? You know,

797
00:50:39,960 –> 00:50:43,640
and, and, you know, it’s, it’s been helpful to me. I’m not going to lie

798
00:50:43,640 –> 00:50:45,840
or obfuscate about that. And some of my conversations and some of my growth.

799
00:50:47,203 –> 00:50:50,578
But still, it goes back to the idea that like

800
00:50:53,161 –> 00:50:56,579
anybody who brings that full persona into, into

801
00:50:56,643 –> 00:51:00,427
work ain’t gonna make it, right? Yeah. You’re gonna

802
00:51:00,427 –> 00:51:03,405
get ridden outta town on a rail. You become the problem child. You become the

803
00:51:03,405 –> 00:51:06,498
guy who’s way too rigid because I’ve just seen this time and time and time

804
00:51:06,546 –> 00:51:10,043
again on teams that I’ve worked with, you know? And it’s,

805
00:51:10,171 –> 00:51:13,949
you know, when you are that cog, it’s a very specific place that you

806
00:51:13,998 –> 00:51:17,177
fit into. And if you can, if you can make your way there,

807
00:51:17,867 –> 00:51:21,351
more power to you. But like, to me, it’s like the same thing as reading

808
00:51:21,480 –> 00:51:24,739
War, right? And doing some follow-up research and

809
00:51:25,093 –> 00:51:28,866
hearing those guys talk about like, yeah, it’s kind of hard to come home. You

810
00:51:28,866 –> 00:51:32,575
know, like the tightening of that screw kind of, it’ll break

811
00:51:32,575 –> 00:51:36,252
certain people, right? Yeah. So the idea that that just automatically equips you

812
00:51:36,252 –> 00:51:39,967
for a great job back here, Oh,

813
00:51:40,144 –> 00:51:43,815
you know, especially in the— and this is going to make me very unpopular potentially,

814
00:51:43,831 –> 00:51:47,534
especially these days, because most people are— would rather

815
00:51:47,695 –> 00:51:51,267
talk about and post about, you know, maybe joining, or they would have joined if

816
00:51:51,267 –> 00:51:54,726
they— if blah blah blah, if situations had been different and everything else like that.

817
00:51:55,337 –> 00:51:58,600
And I know some recruiters who, uh, are—

818
00:51:59,296 –> 00:52:02,926
they talk about it’s so hard to find people who actually qualify these days

819
00:52:03,347 –> 00:52:06,574
because of all like the— Yeah. Neurodiversity

820
00:52:06,768 –> 00:52:09,771
drugs and, you know, things like that that the people take when they’re trying to

821
00:52:09,819 –> 00:52:12,757
figure out who they are. And it kind of disqualifies you for this, right? So

822
00:52:12,757 –> 00:52:16,566
we’ve had, we have less people ever. It’s still used as a

823
00:52:16,566 –> 00:52:20,117
way to get away from, you know, problematic situations, right?

824
00:52:20,181 –> 00:52:23,732
Like, right. I had a drill sergeant ask us like, okay, who is here

825
00:52:23,780 –> 00:52:26,452
because a judge told you you could join the military or go to jail? And

826
00:52:26,452 –> 00:52:30,225
the amount of hands that rose astounded me.

827
00:52:30,951 –> 00:52:34,689
I’ll do you one better. Russia doesn’t

828
00:52:34,721 –> 00:52:38,335
report the numbers of dead soldiers in the Ukraine,

829
00:52:39,335 –> 00:52:43,061
but we do know that

830
00:52:43,368 –> 00:52:44,944
they have opened up the doors of the prisons

831
00:52:47,467 –> 00:52:51,292
and offered people the option to go. The Russians

832
00:52:51,324 –> 00:52:55,092
have opened up the doors of their prisons and have opened— have offered

833
00:52:55,124 –> 00:52:58,861
people, prisoners, the opportunity to go to the front and fight And you’ll

834
00:52:58,861 –> 00:53:01,349
be free, or you can stay here and rot in Russian jail.

835
00:53:04,320 –> 00:53:07,661
What’s the take? It’s not just happening here. I have no idea. They don’t report

836
00:53:07,661 –> 00:53:11,436
that. God, that would be a fascinating study. They do not

837
00:53:11,436 –> 00:53:14,590
report that. So. Well, I

838
00:53:14,590 –> 00:53:18,440
mean, the, the cynicism is like, it’s like it ain’t going

839
00:53:18,473 –> 00:53:22,163
that well or else they would be pumping those numbers across, right, every

840
00:53:22,179 –> 00:53:25,970
propaganda channel that they had access to. So. You would think, except I

841
00:53:25,986 –> 00:53:27,687
read something the other day. I don’t want to go too far further down this

842
00:53:27,703 –> 00:53:31,487
road, but I read something the other day where And it was interesting analysis. I

843
00:53:31,551 –> 00:53:35,149
would not have thought of it this way. The Russians are used to playing

844
00:53:35,325 –> 00:53:39,116
wars of attrition that are like chess, whereas the American

845
00:53:39,116 –> 00:53:42,649
conception of war is much more like poker. We’ve got to have big wins, got

846
00:53:42,649 –> 00:53:44,801
to have big wins, got to hit big pots, got to have big pots because

847
00:53:44,801 –> 00:53:48,158
we’re done in 4 years, got to get in, get out. Whereas the Russians—

848
00:53:48,656 –> 00:53:52,430
They can play the long game. Oh yeah, they’ll take grind after grind after grind

849
00:53:52,430 –> 00:53:55,883
after grind for decades, for years, right? Not decades, but for

850
00:53:55,899 –> 00:53:56,397
years.

851
00:53:59,892 –> 00:54:01,284
And then they declare a win.

852
00:54:05,012 –> 00:54:08,428
I like to say there is some historical, I mean, there’s historical precedent for that

853
00:54:08,509 –> 00:54:11,875
in Russia, you know, going back to, yeah, going back to, I mean,

854
00:54:12,232 –> 00:54:15,677
yes, the most notorious example is World War II. But even in Afghanistan,

855
00:54:16,239 –> 00:54:19,051
they just took hit after hit after hit after hit after hit after hit after

856
00:54:19,051 –> 00:54:22,664
hit. And they, the only reason they exited that was because

857
00:54:22,682 –> 00:54:25,725
Gorbachev came in. And I was like, the hell are we doing? We’re wasting money

858
00:54:25,725 –> 00:54:29,336
here. And that was the only reason they left. Otherwise they would’ve just stayed there

859
00:54:29,336 –> 00:54:32,953
another 10 years. Yeah. So it’s the Russian way of war

860
00:54:33,001 –> 00:54:36,745
versus the American way of war. And it’s 2 different ways

861
00:54:36,841 –> 00:54:40,087
of looking at warfare. And, and the person that, the analysis that I was reading

862
00:54:40,555 –> 00:54:44,058
was, you know, poker versus chess. And I, I had never thought of it that

863
00:54:44,107 –> 00:54:45,738
way, but that makes sense. Yeah.

864
00:54:50,094 –> 00:54:53,172
So anyway, I promised we’d go back to the play.

865
00:54:53,801 –> 00:54:56,653
Yeah. Let’s go back to the play here. We’ve got watered all

866
00:54:58,152 –> 00:55:01,949
over the countryside here, but it’s all right. Let’s pick up with,

867
00:55:02,354 –> 00:55:04,508
like I said, the Senate meeting to hear Comenius.

868
00:55:06,018 –> 00:55:09,681
Scene 2. Enter 2 officers to lay cushions, as it were, in the

869
00:55:09,681 –> 00:55:13,489
Capitol. By the way, I love that stage direction, as it were. First officer.

870
00:55:13,553 –> 00:55:16,070
Come, come, they’re almost here. How many stand for consulships?

871
00:55:17,590 –> 00:55:21,329
3, they say, but ’tis thought of everyone Coriolanus will

872
00:55:21,362 –> 00:55:24,972
carry it. That’s a brave fellow, but he’s

873
00:55:25,101 –> 00:55:27,741
vengeance proud and loves not the common

874
00:55:27,774 –> 00:55:31,553
people. Faith, there hath been many great men that have

875
00:55:31,569 –> 00:55:35,186
flattered the people who never loved them, and there be many that have loved they

876
00:55:35,396 –> 00:55:39,176
know not wherefore, so that if they love they know not why, they hate

877
00:55:39,176 –> 00:55:42,839
upon no better ground. Therefore, for Coriolanus,

878
00:55:43,177 –> 00:55:46,047
neither to care whether they love or hate him manifests the true knowledge he has

879
00:55:46,047 –> 00:55:49,688
in their disposition, And out of his noble

880
00:55:49,704 –> 00:55:53,487
carelessness lets them plainly see it.

881
00:55:54,529 –> 00:55:57,206
If he did not care whether he had their love or no, he waved indifferently

882
00:55:57,238 –> 00:56:00,701
twixt between them, neither good nor harm, but he seeks their hate with greater

883
00:56:00,701 –> 00:56:04,420
devotion than they can render it to him, than render it to him, and leaves

884
00:56:04,468 –> 00:56:07,546
nothing undone that may fully discover him their opposite.

885
00:56:08,379 –> 00:56:11,970
Now, to seem to affect the malice and displeasure of the people is as bad

886
00:56:11,970 –> 00:56:14,711
as that which he dislikes, to flatter them for their love.

887
00:56:17,185 –> 00:56:20,945
He hath to deserve worthily of his country, and his ascent is not by such

888
00:56:21,041 –> 00:56:24,737
easy degrees as those who, having been supple and courteous to the people,

889
00:56:25,058 –> 00:56:28,610
bonneted without any further deed to have them at all in their estimation and

890
00:56:28,610 –> 00:56:32,353
report. But he hath so planted his honors in their eyes and his actions in

891
00:56:32,434 –> 00:56:36,017
their hearts that for their tongues to be silent and not confess so much as

892
00:56:36,065 –> 00:56:39,857
were a kind of ungrateful injury, to report otherwise were a

893
00:56:39,857 –> 00:56:43,655
malice that Giving itself the lie would pluck reproof and rebuke

894
00:56:44,122 –> 00:56:47,825
from every ear that heard it. No

895
00:56:47,825 –> 00:56:50,930
more of him. He’s a worthy man. Make way, they are coming.

896
00:56:52,823 –> 00:56:56,608
Enter a Senate, enter the patricians, the tribunes of the people, lictors before them,

897
00:56:56,624 –> 00:57:00,473
Coriolanus, Menenius, Cominius the consul, the patricians,

898
00:57:00,506 –> 00:57:04,231
they all sit. Cinicus and Brutus, by the way, Cinicus and Brutus

899
00:57:04,345 –> 00:57:07,559
are your villains in this, in case you’re wondering. take their place by

900
00:57:07,559 –> 00:57:10,023
themselves, and Coriolanus stands.

901
00:57:11,327 –> 00:57:15,176
Menenius, by the way, who was played by, again, the never mailing it in Brian

902
00:57:15,289 –> 00:57:19,113
Cox in the film version that I watched. Having

903
00:57:19,113 –> 00:57:22,220
determined of the Volscics and to send for Titus

904
00:57:22,478 –> 00:57:26,261
Laericus, it remains as the main point of this our

905
00:57:26,342 –> 00:57:30,150
after-meeting to gratify his noble service that hath thus stood for his country.

906
00:57:30,781 –> 00:57:34,279
Therefore, please you, most reverend and grave elders, to desire the present

907
00:57:34,279 –> 00:57:38,110
consul and last general in our well-founded successes, to report a little

908
00:57:38,110 –> 00:57:41,488
of that worthy work performed by Marcius Caius Coriolanus,

909
00:57:42,700 –> 00:57:46,350
whom we met here both to thank and to remember with honors

910
00:57:46,463 –> 00:57:50,066
like himself. Speak good,

911
00:57:50,083 –> 00:57:53,471
Cominius. Leave nothing out for length and make us think rather our state’s

912
00:57:53,471 –> 00:57:57,246
defective for requital, that we to stretch it out. To the

913
00:57:57,246 –> 00:58:00,789
tribunes. Masters of the people, we do request your kindest ears,

914
00:58:00,967 –> 00:58:03,347
and after your loving motion toward the common body,

915
00:58:07,026 –> 00:58:10,728
We are convented upon a pleasing treaty, and have hearts inclinable to

916
00:58:10,793 –> 00:58:14,532
honour and advance the theme of our assembly. Which

917
00:58:14,725 –> 00:58:18,487
the rather we shall be blessed to do, if he remember a kinder value of

918
00:58:18,519 –> 00:58:21,279
the people than he hath heretofore prized them at.

919
00:58:22,705 –> 00:58:25,844
That’s off, that’s off! I would rather you had been silent.

920
00:58:26,410 –> 00:58:28,513
Please you to hear Cominius speak.

921
00:58:30,441 –> 00:58:33,862
Most willingly, but yet my caution was more pertinent than the

922
00:58:33,879 –> 00:58:37,588
rebuke you give it. He loves

923
00:58:37,943 –> 00:58:41,258
your people, but tie him not to be their

924
00:58:41,322 –> 00:58:43,720
bedfellow. Worthy Cominius, speak.

925
00:58:44,960 –> 00:58:48,610
Cominius rises and offers to go away. Nay, keep your place.

926
00:58:49,173 –> 00:58:52,598
Sit, Coriolanus. Never ashamed to hear what you have nobly done.

927
00:58:54,970 –> 00:58:58,738
Your honour’s pardon. I had rather have my wounds to heal

928
00:58:58,787 –> 00:59:01,293
again than hear say how I got them.

929
00:59:02,922 –> 00:59:05,332
Sir, I hope my words dispense you not.

930
00:59:06,697 –> 00:59:10,393
No, sir. Yet oft when blows have made me stay, I fled from words. You

931
00:59:10,393 –> 00:59:14,067
soothe not, therefore hurt not. But your people, I love them as

932
00:59:14,164 –> 00:59:16,946
they weigh. Pray now sit

933
00:59:17,577 –> 00:59:21,362
down. I had rather— I’d rather have one scratch on my head in

934
00:59:21,362 –> 00:59:24,824
the sun when the alarm was struck than idly sit to hear my nothings

935
00:59:24,920 –> 00:59:27,397
monstered. Coriolanus exits.

936
00:59:29,262 –> 00:59:32,968
Masters of the people, you multiplying spawn, how he can flatter!

937
00:59:33,306 –> 00:59:36,401
There’s thousand to good— there’s thousand to one good one.

938
00:59:37,267 –> 00:59:40,405
When you now see, he had rather venture all his limbs for honor

939
00:59:41,149 –> 00:59:44,173
than one on one’s ear to hear it. Proceed,

940
00:59:44,222 –> 00:59:48,067
Cominius. I shall lack voice The deeds of

941
00:59:48,067 –> 00:59:51,209
Coriolanus should not be uttered feebly. It is held that valor is the

942
00:59:51,209 –> 00:59:54,656
chiefest virtue and most dignifies the haver.

943
00:59:55,217 –> 00:59:58,247
If it be, the man I speak of cannot in the world be singly

944
00:59:58,247 –> 01:00:01,998
counterpoised. At 16 years, when Tarkin made head,

945
01:00:02,190 –> 01:00:05,958
made a head for Rome, he fought beyond the mark of others. Our then dictator,

946
01:00:06,022 –> 01:00:09,292
whom with all praise I point at, saw him fight with this

947
01:00:09,965 –> 01:00:13,540
Amazonian shin. He drove the bristled lips before him. He

948
01:00:13,572 –> 01:00:17,003
bestride an o’erpressed Rome, and in the consul’s view slew 3

949
01:00:17,003 –> 01:00:20,834
oppressors. Tarquin’s self he met, and struck him on his knees.

950
01:00:21,667 –> 01:00:25,274
In that day’s feats, when he might act the woman in the scene, he

951
01:00:25,274 –> 01:00:29,105
proved best man in the field, for his meed was brow-bead with the oak.

952
01:00:29,666 –> 01:00:33,369
His pupil age man entered thus, he waxed like a sea, and in the

953
01:00:33,369 –> 01:00:37,024
brunt of 17 battles since, he lurched all swords of the garland.

954
01:00:37,697 –> 01:00:41,498
For this last, before and in Coriolanus, Let me say, I

955
01:00:41,546 –> 01:00:45,255
cannot speak him home. He stopped the flyers and

956
01:00:45,255 –> 01:00:48,980
by his rare example made the coward turn terror into sport. As

957
01:00:49,093 –> 01:00:52,577
weeds before a vessel under sail, so men obeyed and fell below his stem.

958
01:00:52,946 –> 01:00:56,704
His sword, death’s stamp, where it did mark, it took from face to

959
01:00:56,704 –> 01:01:00,316
foot. He was a thing of blood whose every motion was timed with dying

960
01:01:00,316 –> 01:01:04,025
cries. Alone he entered the mortal gate of the city, which he painted with shunless

961
01:01:04,041 –> 01:01:07,301
destiny. Aidless came off and with a sudden reinforcement struck

962
01:01:07,381 –> 01:01:11,113
Coriolanus like a planet. Now all’s his. When by and by

963
01:01:11,356 –> 01:01:14,717
the din of war gained Pierce his ready sense, then straight his double

964
01:01:14,749 –> 01:01:18,384
spirit requickened what in flesh was fatigued, and to the battle came

965
01:01:18,384 –> 01:01:22,167
he, where he did run reeking o’er the lives of men as if ’twere a

966
01:01:22,167 –> 01:01:25,677
perpetual spoil. Until we called both field and

967
01:01:25,710 –> 01:01:29,477
city ours, he never stood to ease his breast with

968
01:01:29,574 –> 01:01:30,045
panting.

969
01:01:34,145 –> 01:01:37,965
You crushed that, dude. If I can pay you a compliment. Oh, well,

970
01:01:37,981 –> 01:01:41,690
thank you. I appreciate that. It was a long, it was a long, it’s

971
01:01:41,754 –> 01:01:45,463
tough. No, man. Like, I, I, I’m, I’m over here

972
01:01:45,527 –> 01:01:48,145
like listening and I’m like, man, like, this is really, I mean, if it was

973
01:01:48,177 –> 01:01:51,838
me, I’d be like, uh, the teacher at the beginning of Ferris

974
01:01:51,950 –> 01:01:55,547
Bueller’s Day Off. Right? Like, it’s hard for me to read

975
01:01:55,547 –> 01:01:59,063
things and emote them if I’m reading them out loud and everything.

976
01:01:59,175 –> 01:02:02,310
So good for you, dude. That was rad. Well, thank you. I

977
01:02:02,616 –> 01:02:06,335
appreciate that. That’s, that’s, thank you. So the

978
01:02:06,335 –> 01:02:09,973
entire plot of Coriolanus hinges on this, this, this piece right

979
01:02:10,022 –> 01:02:12,245
here, the entire plot. This is the linchpin piece.

980
01:02:16,346 –> 01:02:19,794
And, and Caius Martius Coriolanus,

981
01:02:21,180 –> 01:02:24,776
this entire play hinges on his inability to perform in a way that

982
01:02:24,809 –> 01:02:28,395
society, represented by the Plebeians, the patricians, his

983
01:02:28,508 –> 01:02:32,121
mother and his wife, even his son demand of him. He

984
01:02:32,121 –> 01:02:35,460
just can’t do the thing they want done. His

985
01:02:35,573 –> 01:02:39,234
inability to perform, notably in failing to display his

986
01:02:39,346 –> 01:02:42,959
war wounds, failing to address the citizens, the plebeians, without

987
01:02:42,959 –> 01:02:46,491
mocking them, and failing to even be slightly interested in the

988
01:02:46,491 –> 01:02:49,992
class upgrade he’s due to receive from the patricians, dooms

989
01:02:50,024 –> 01:02:51,870
Coriolanus to being an outsider.

990
01:02:53,888 –> 01:02:57,535
Um, there’s an idea here that I tied back,

991
01:02:57,552 –> 01:03:00,957
interestingly enough, to the story of Doubting Thomas in the Bible. It’s in John

992
01:03:00,957 –> 01:03:04,617
20:24-28, where John— or Thomas

993
01:03:04,617 –> 01:03:08,298
says, um, because all the other apostles— sorry, apostles— disciples had

994
01:03:08,298 –> 01:03:12,140
seen Jesus at the resurrection, or had seen him resurrected and walking around. And Thomas

995
01:03:12,140 –> 01:03:15,985
says, um, I, I would put my hands

996
01:03:15,985 –> 01:03:19,665
in his side, right? Um, because he didn’t believe. That’s where the doubting piece

997
01:03:19,665 –> 01:03:22,684
comes from. I would put my hands in his side and I would, I would

998
01:03:22,716 –> 01:03:25,718
see him and in his hands and feet. That’s what he says, hands and feet

999
01:03:25,927 –> 01:03:29,765
and side, to prove to myself that he’s alive. And of course, then

1000
01:03:29,765 –> 01:03:33,137
Jesus then shows up and he says, put your hands in my side, go ahead.

1001
01:03:34,020 –> 01:03:37,070
And Thomas falls to the ground and says, my Lord and my God. And then

1002
01:03:37,070 –> 01:03:39,977
that’s the end of that, right? You can go read that in the Book of

1003
01:03:39,977 –> 01:03:43,349
John. That idea of the wounds, right?

1004
01:03:44,456 –> 01:03:48,017
would have been something that a highly religious culture like

1005
01:03:48,547 –> 01:03:52,348
the, the Elizabethan age that Shakespeare was

1006
01:03:52,397 –> 01:03:56,134
writing to would have known. And so this idea of not

1007
01:03:56,262 –> 01:03:59,952
showing the wounds would have been really interesting to

1008
01:03:59,952 –> 01:04:03,802
people in 1609, 1610. That would have been a real shocker

1009
01:04:03,802 –> 01:04:07,636
to them. Oh, you’re not going to show them and we’re still expected to love

1010
01:04:07,636 –> 01:04:11,181
you? Thus, I suspect that most of the people that

1011
01:04:11,181 –> 01:04:14,741
Shakespeare audience would have been initially anyway, um,

1012
01:04:15,854 –> 01:04:19,625
on the side of the plebeians, because how dare you not show us? And

1013
01:04:19,690 –> 01:04:23,425
so Shakespeare writes Coriolanus as a

1014
01:04:23,425 –> 01:04:27,192
person who— you’re just gonna have to trust me.

1015
01:04:28,033 –> 01:04:31,673
And the audience he’s writing to is going, nope,

1016
01:04:31,995 –> 01:04:35,660
we don’t have to. Why would we? We haven’t seen any proof. This

1017
01:04:35,773 –> 01:04:39,390
is interesting because I have a very different take around, around this.

1018
01:04:39,502 –> 01:04:42,892
Like, like that line where he was like, I would rather go through the injuries

1019
01:04:42,892 –> 01:04:46,668
again than sit here and just talk about them. Like, yes, like, like,

1020
01:04:46,732 –> 01:04:50,331
first of all, that, that line just like hit me like really, really

1021
01:04:50,589 –> 01:04:54,429
like hard, right? And then, um, there’s also the, the town

1022
01:04:54,541 –> 01:04:56,726
or the time where he’s got to put on the robe and he’s got to

1023
01:04:56,726 –> 01:05:00,245
be on public display and he’s got to do all of these. And like, it’s

1024
01:05:00,245 –> 01:05:03,603
so, it’s so interesting to me because the, the thing that I was so struck

1025
01:05:03,619 –> 01:05:06,634
by is like he doesn’t even really want this station.

1026
01:05:07,564 –> 01:05:11,235
It seems like everyone else around him, his mother, uh,

1027
01:05:12,662 –> 01:05:16,429
uh, Manias? Manias? Menanias. Menanias. It

1028
01:05:16,429 –> 01:05:19,860
seems like they’re more fit on him being this

1029
01:05:19,972 –> 01:05:23,659
person than he has any real desire to be. Like,

1030
01:05:24,220 –> 01:05:27,330
it almost seems like he’s calling out, like,

1031
01:05:28,067 –> 01:05:31,514
like, let me just be this guy. Like, Like, like, keep me in the

1032
01:05:31,514 –> 01:05:35,075
field, keep me, like, keep me at what I’m good at, right? Like, to me,

1033
01:05:35,668 –> 01:05:38,683
I sense this, this big, like, I don’t really want to do this,

1034
01:05:39,212 –> 01:05:42,388
but it’s what, it’s what’s expected, right?

1035
01:05:43,045 –> 01:05:46,830
Right. It’s this, everybody wants it. And it’s so

1036
01:05:46,830 –> 01:05:50,455
funny because I see this all the time in sales, right?

1037
01:05:50,695 –> 01:05:54,432
Sales is in this very interesting age to where depending upon what lane of

1038
01:05:54,432 –> 01:05:58,236
selling you’re looking at, it’s very siloed. Right? And so the very, very popular one

1039
01:05:58,236 –> 01:06:01,801
in tech is you start off at either an SDR or BDR, and you’re essentially

1040
01:06:02,315 –> 01:06:06,009
telemarketing, trying to set appointments for people and stuff like this. And people will

1041
01:06:06,009 –> 01:06:09,623
go do this under the angle of like, hey, just do this for like

1042
01:06:09,623 –> 01:06:12,241
6, 7 months, and then you get to become a closer. Then you don’t have

1043
01:06:12,257 –> 01:06:15,807
to do this part anymore. You just get to do this other part. And so

1044
01:06:15,823 –> 01:06:19,051
then people get sold on this idea when

1045
01:06:19,581 –> 01:06:23,114
in actuality, the person who closes the business has a

1046
01:06:23,259 –> 01:06:26,503
lot of different things to be thinking about than just the person who sets the

1047
01:06:26,503 –> 01:06:30,197
appointment. Right. Mm-hmm. And so, you know, when you’re deep

1048
01:06:30,197 –> 01:06:33,617
into sales, people know, like, just because you’re a great SDR,

1049
01:06:33,633 –> 01:06:37,375
BDR, like becoming a closer, like someone who closes

1050
01:06:37,391 –> 01:06:40,973
business regularly on the right terms, on the right timeline and everything, skill set in

1051
01:06:41,021 –> 01:06:44,779
and of itself. Right. And I can’t tell you how many people I’ve

1052
01:06:44,779 –> 01:06:48,489
met who were chasing this, this ghost,

1053
01:06:48,633 –> 01:06:52,343
if you will, like, okay, I started out as a BDR, SDR. Because most

1054
01:06:52,343 –> 01:06:55,233
people are here on borrowed time because most people don’t want to be in sales

1055
01:06:55,233 –> 01:06:58,363
in the first place, right? I’m going to go be in marketing or product, or

1056
01:06:58,363 –> 01:07:01,414
I’m going to go start my own thing, or I’m going to be C-suite and

1057
01:07:01,414 –> 01:07:05,186
all this other stuff. And then, okay, great. Now you’re

1058
01:07:05,186 –> 01:07:08,975
a closer and it’s still hard, right? And, you know, in some of

1059
01:07:08,975 –> 01:07:12,732
these situations, these guys are set up to fail because they don’t actually want you

1060
01:07:12,732 –> 01:07:15,509
going out and getting your own leads. So now you’re having to be fed by

1061
01:07:15,541 –> 01:07:19,270
someone else. You’re probably not able to coach or train this person and what

1062
01:07:19,383 –> 01:07:23,087
you want in your deals, and that’s gonna lead to a bunch of frustration.

1063
01:07:23,750 –> 01:07:27,473
And then you start thinking of like, well, this is not as easy

1064
01:07:27,505 –> 01:07:31,057
as I thought it was, and the money’s better, but it’s not great. I guess

1065
01:07:31,057 –> 01:07:34,544
I got to go into leadership, right? And I know a

1066
01:07:34,608 –> 01:07:38,343
ton of salespeople that have made the jump to leadership only to

1067
01:07:38,391 –> 01:07:42,191
realize that it wasn’t for them, right? Mm-hmm. And my favorite people to

1068
01:07:42,191 –> 01:07:45,886
like interview for a sales role are people that have gone up and decided

1069
01:07:45,919 –> 01:07:49,649
that that version, that next rung, was not the right rung for them, and

1070
01:07:49,649 –> 01:07:53,380
they would rather be the person who’s really good at the thing that they’re good

1071
01:07:53,493 –> 01:07:56,865
at. Okay, but let me ask you a question, because this is— this goes directly

1072
01:07:56,865 –> 01:08:00,619
to integrity. This is something that Corey Alanis— one of the

1073
01:08:00,619 –> 01:08:04,343
first things that jumped out to me was, other than the Kevin

1074
01:08:04,343 –> 01:08:06,999
O’Leary thing, but, uh, was that

1075
01:08:09,201 –> 01:08:12,982
he was a person Regardless of which audience he was in front of,

1076
01:08:13,030 –> 01:08:16,813
who had ruthless integrity, even all the way to the end, even in the

1077
01:08:16,878 –> 01:08:20,677
way that he died, he had ruthless integrity, right? Got to be right. Got to

1078
01:08:20,677 –> 01:08:24,476
be right. Even if it means you lose. Right. Have

1079
01:08:24,492 –> 01:08:28,244
you ever met or ever coached a

1080
01:08:28,356 –> 01:08:31,947
BDR or even an SDR who

1081
01:08:32,588 –> 01:08:36,147
had that level of not loyalty? Because we, we confuse, I

1082
01:08:36,340 –> 01:08:40,161
think in our culture, loyalty and integrity. We think they’re both the same

1083
01:08:40,225 –> 01:08:43,581
thing. Oh, this is— yeah, yeah, they’re not the same thing. They’re

1084
01:08:43,597 –> 01:08:47,370
not the same thing. Like, and by the way, we see this in Coriolanus,

1085
01:08:47,434 –> 01:08:50,501
right? Because so he goes and he hangs out with the Volscics,

1086
01:08:51,223 –> 01:08:54,740
who are Rome’s enemies, and Alphidius and all that. He hooks up with them. And

1087
01:08:54,836 –> 01:08:57,421
then, you know, the mother comes in and is talking to him and trying to

1088
01:08:57,421 –> 01:09:01,226
get him out of that because they’re looking at it as a sign of

1089
01:09:01,259 –> 01:09:04,983
disloyalty. He’s, however,

1090
01:09:05,096 –> 01:09:08,742
looking at it from the position of, I’m just

1091
01:09:08,790 –> 01:09:12,243
having integrity all the way through. Yeah. To the

1092
01:09:12,243 –> 01:09:16,082
ruthless end. Have you ever run across a BDR or an SDR with

1093
01:09:16,274 –> 01:09:19,808
integrity? Have you ever coached one? Oh

1094
01:09:20,290 –> 01:09:24,096
man, this is a, this is a tough question, right? Because I

1095
01:09:24,144 –> 01:09:27,822
think, I think most people inside of sales and

1096
01:09:27,822 –> 01:09:31,582
revenue Until you decide to make it your craft, it’s almost the same thing as

1097
01:09:31,598 –> 01:09:35,373
the martial arts thing. Let me come in here, watch some Grant Cardone videos or

1098
01:09:35,373 –> 01:09:38,521
some Andy Elia videos, and then watch me close all these people,

1099
01:09:38,987 –> 01:09:42,585
right? And then there’s no connection. There’s no,

1100
01:09:42,922 –> 01:09:46,601
there’s no real business acumen. There’s no understanding. There’s none of these

1101
01:09:46,617 –> 01:09:50,456
things. And it’s just try hard, right? Mm-hmm. And part of this

1102
01:09:50,568 –> 01:09:53,861
is because sales is pushed by a lot of people of like, hey, you just

1103
01:09:53,861 –> 01:09:57,282
gotta want it enough to just keep doing the follow-up and like, now we’re putting

1104
01:09:57,395 –> 01:10:00,895
people onto pilgrimages that don’t have a high conversion

1105
01:10:00,992 –> 01:10:04,669
rate, right? And then this person is

1106
01:10:05,006 –> 01:10:08,636
sweating, but they’re also told, well, hey, just keep

1107
01:10:08,636 –> 01:10:11,687
sweating, just keep sweating. You’re so close, you’re so close. And then we’re going to

1108
01:10:11,687 –> 01:10:13,951
be able to promote you up, and then you don’t got to do this crap

1109
01:10:13,951 –> 01:10:17,597
anymore. And sometimes that’s on borrowed territory,

1110
01:10:17,773 –> 01:10:21,370
right? Because if you’re a closer and the person who is setting

1111
01:10:21,467 –> 01:10:25,273
appointments for you is only setting deals that cannot win, cannot close, are

1112
01:10:25,273 –> 01:10:28,501
not aligned, blah, blah, blah, all the numbers of reasons why deals don’t die.

1113
01:10:29,031 –> 01:10:31,970
Now you’re on borrowed territory on a new role, and you don’t even have any

1114
01:10:32,018 –> 01:10:35,664
of the things around you that were leading to everyone being

1115
01:10:35,696 –> 01:10:39,309
forced to take you seriously because the results aren’t there. Right.

1116
01:10:39,791 –> 01:10:43,292
Yeah. And, you know, that’s where it takes a long time

1117
01:10:43,645 –> 01:10:47,355
for people on the growth side total. Like,

1118
01:10:47,403 –> 01:10:50,230
this isn’t just salespeople, because I know a lot of marketing people that are just

1119
01:10:50,230 –> 01:10:53,871
chasing pure volume vanity metrics that kick up

1120
01:10:53,919 –> 01:10:57,414
more dust and waste more time than are actually leading to growth, conversion,

1121
01:10:58,168 –> 01:11:01,936
consistency, and stability. And so I think,

1122
01:11:02,017 –> 01:11:05,063
I think until you decide that this is your lane and you mean to do

1123
01:11:05,143 –> 01:11:08,222
it well and you, you find your version of

1124
01:11:08,575 –> 01:11:12,375
ethics, you know, because all these people that I kind of railed against,

1125
01:11:12,424 –> 01:11:15,903
they all think that they’re right as well, right? Which is a whole other part

1126
01:11:15,903 –> 01:11:18,694
of the conversation that we’re probably not going to be able to dive into today,

1127
01:11:19,160 –> 01:11:22,676
but it’s, you know, nobody thinks that they’re wrong,

1128
01:11:23,656 –> 01:11:26,787
right? Which is part of the problem with like sales and marketing and how it’s

1129
01:11:26,787 –> 01:11:30,560
talked about and coached. And I think we’re closer to being better at it than

1130
01:11:30,576 –> 01:11:32,985
we ever have been, but there’s still a whole lot of people that just want

1131
01:11:32,985 –> 01:11:36,405
to make it about effort and you don’t want it enough. And,

1132
01:11:37,160 –> 01:11:39,937
but they came up with a goal on the back of a napkin based upon

1133
01:11:40,034 –> 01:11:43,052
what should happen, right? And then it all gets pushed down from there.

1134
01:11:44,292 –> 01:11:48,065
So there’s a line in some analysis that I got

1135
01:11:48,065 –> 01:11:51,773
from the Folger Shakespeare— the Folger Library, um, which is a

1136
01:11:51,773 –> 01:11:55,564
great resource online. This is not an ad for them, but go check

1137
01:11:55,581 –> 01:11:59,185
them out. folgershakespearelibrary.com or .edu,

1138
01:11:59,265 –> 01:12:02,833
whatever it is, .org. Go check them out. Um, they

1139
01:12:02,897 –> 01:12:06,410
have, um, the full analysis of each one of

1140
01:12:06,410 –> 01:12:10,168
Shakespeare’s plays. They have each one of Shakespeare’s plays on there. Mm-hmm. They have a

1141
01:12:10,168 –> 01:12:13,821
ton of good information. I use them. I buy their editions. Folger Shakespeare

1142
01:12:13,885 –> 01:12:17,313
Library. If they sponsored the show, that would be the sponsorship thing.

1143
01:12:17,667 –> 01:12:21,214
Go check them out. Okay. One of the pieces of

1144
01:12:21,214 –> 01:12:24,854
analysis that I read quoted this from a guy named

1145
01:12:24,967 –> 01:12:27,068
Lee Bliss. He said,

1146
01:12:28,932 –> 01:12:32,273
Coriolanus never asks, who am I? Or what have I

1147
01:12:32,273 –> 01:12:36,018
become? He seems more likely to ask, have I done anything to

1148
01:12:40,622 –> 01:12:44,359
Oh, that’s interesting. So now

1149
01:12:44,423 –> 01:12:48,112
the reason I’m bringing this up is because you just said in

1150
01:12:48,241 –> 01:12:51,509
sales, no one wants to admit they’re wrong.

1151
01:12:53,640 –> 01:12:56,458
Yeah. Have I ever sold something

1152
01:12:57,624 –> 01:13:01,350
for which— not something— have I ever sold something in a way for

1153
01:13:01,431 –> 01:13:05,260
which I was ashamed? Ashamed.

1154
01:13:05,340 –> 01:13:09,148
And if you— I suspect that if people— like, I wrote a blog

1155
01:13:09,148 –> 01:13:12,536
post years ago— not years ago, feels like years ago— months ago on the

1156
01:13:12,536 –> 01:13:16,090
psychology of selling. Actually, you liked it on, um, on Facebook, where I

1157
01:13:16,090 –> 01:13:19,923
talked about, um, how we don’t actually want to

1158
01:13:20,295 –> 01:13:23,660
look at how selling actually works at a

1159
01:13:23,660 –> 01:13:26,900
psychological level. Like, we don’t want to write books like that.

1160
01:13:27,947 –> 01:13:31,785
Because we write books on persuasion, which is

1161
01:13:32,234 –> 01:13:35,606
an aspect of sales, influence, which is an aspect of sales.

1162
01:13:35,991 –> 01:13:39,684
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. I facilitated that

1163
01:13:39,684 –> 01:13:43,408
book. Great book, right? Phenomenal. Um, or even Robert Greene’s The 48

1164
01:13:43,457 –> 01:13:47,294
Laws of Power, which— very good, very good, right? Or any of

1165
01:13:47,294 –> 01:13:50,168
the other books that Greene has written about mastery and all those types of things,

1166
01:13:50,200 –> 01:13:53,603
right? Yeah, great books. But those are not books on the

1167
01:13:53,620 –> 01:13:57,400
psychology of— not even the psychology, sorry, the why of why selling

1168
01:13:57,513 –> 01:14:01,053
works. And it’s real— I think I wrote in my blog post, it’s real

1169
01:14:01,053 –> 01:14:04,839
thin on that end of the shelf. And it’s real thin on that end

1170
01:14:04,839 –> 01:14:07,901
of the shelf because I think we’re genuinely

1171
01:14:07,983 –> 01:14:11,580
afraid. We’re afraid that if we pull it

1172
01:14:11,580 –> 01:14:15,350
apart, it won’t work anymore. But then we’re also

1173
01:14:15,350 –> 01:14:18,311
genuinely afraid, and this goes to the shame question,

1174
01:14:19,088 –> 01:14:22,792
that we might have done something for which we should be

1175
01:14:22,792 –> 01:14:26,568
ashamed, and we just— it’s a little hole in the boat, and we

1176
01:14:26,568 –> 01:14:29,970
just plug it over and we don’t think about it because we closed the sale,

1177
01:14:30,276 –> 01:14:33,971
we got the revenue, everybody was happy, I got my bonus,

1178
01:14:34,293 –> 01:14:36,542
everybody shut up and move on. Yeah.

1179
01:14:38,294 –> 01:14:41,980
And if we had too much analysis there— this is the thing that’s tripped over

1180
01:14:42,012 –> 01:14:45,183
this in my head for me. Sure. Um, but if we had that analysis

1181
01:14:45,984 –> 01:14:49,664
in sales, whether it’s at the BDR level, the SDR

1182
01:14:49,664 –> 01:14:53,413
level, the leadership level, maybe we

1183
01:14:53,413 –> 01:14:56,471
might have to change somehow in there.

1184
01:14:57,421 –> 01:15:01,162
And God forbid we do that. Well, I

1185
01:15:01,340 –> 01:15:05,174
mean, if you’re on any sort of fundraised version of this, there’s

1186
01:15:05,190 –> 01:15:08,614
no real room to do it because, I mean, those guys want 1,400%

1187
01:15:08,663 –> 01:15:12,462
returns, right? And, you know, I saw a very interesting post that

1188
01:15:12,462 –> 01:15:15,857
was talking about how the whole VC startup environment

1189
01:15:16,420 –> 01:15:19,682
is based around getting people who have

1190
01:15:19,714 –> 01:15:23,540
workaholic tendencies so that way they, they just become

1191
01:15:23,540 –> 01:15:27,254
workaholics, right? And they get a bunch of, you know, growth

1192
01:15:27,367 –> 01:15:30,838
and improvements and ideas out the door and stuff like this. But at what cost,

1193
01:15:30,855 –> 01:15:34,122
right? They all become like a little bit of Looney Tunes, right? And

1194
01:15:34,640 –> 01:15:38,170
burned out or, you know, chasing other things that don’t really

1195
01:15:38,688 –> 01:15:40,599
need to be in the, in the lens of it. Yeah.

1196
01:15:42,159 –> 01:15:45,276
Um, I mean, this is honestly, uh, like,

1197
01:15:46,827 –> 01:15:50,331
I think, I think that, I think the— oh my gosh, the part of this,

1198
01:15:53,607 –> 01:15:56,966
how do I, how do I even say, if I had not been shown this

1199
01:15:57,079 –> 01:16:00,664
idea in the way that I was shown this, I don’t think I would still

1200
01:16:00,696 –> 01:16:04,338
be able to work in sales, honestly. Because my business partner,

1201
01:16:04,894 –> 01:16:08,562
we just started working together and I closed a couple of deals. We’re doing

1202
01:16:08,562 –> 01:16:12,238
affordable websites and we— there was a reason that we were

1203
01:16:12,254 –> 01:16:15,510
able to do these affordably. It was because we had a different process, right?

1204
01:16:16,057 –> 01:16:18,213
And so he pulls me to the side and he goes, hey man, we gotta

1205
01:16:18,213 –> 01:16:20,932
talk about these deals you closed. And I was like, yeah, pretty good, right? And

1206
01:16:20,932 –> 01:16:23,908
he goes, no dude, these are garbage. What are you doing?

1207
01:16:24,760 –> 01:16:27,401
And I said, you brought me here to close these deals. And he goes, no,

1208
01:16:28,438 –> 01:16:32,166
I brought you here to bring in easy projects. These people don’t

1209
01:16:32,166 –> 01:16:35,683
get it. Because you’re selling it on the basis of commodity.

1210
01:16:36,478 –> 01:16:40,220
You’re just going around talking about that we’re cheaper than other people. And, you

1211
01:16:40,220 –> 01:16:43,279
know, like, you know, he was such a, such an abundant guy. He was like,

1212
01:16:43,746 –> 01:16:47,530
he’s like, honestly, this is, this is a me thing, right? I thought

1213
01:16:47,530 –> 01:16:50,917
you already knew this and everything. But he goes, he goes, man, it’s not enough

1214
01:16:50,917 –> 01:16:53,730
for them to have a budget. It’s not enough for them to have a need

1215
01:16:53,730 –> 01:16:56,688
for in the form of a new website. They have to want it how we

1216
01:16:56,737 –> 01:16:59,880
do it, or it’s going to be a nightmare. Yeah. Right.

1217
01:17:00,586 –> 01:17:04,405
And thankfully, I’d had another interaction with a coach

1218
01:17:04,517 –> 01:17:07,470
like way back in the day whenever I was trying to play poker full-time. I

1219
01:17:07,470 –> 01:17:10,840
quit a sales job in 2006 and played poker for 9 months

1220
01:17:10,840 –> 01:17:14,547
professionally, right, before deciding that that wasn’t my lane of greatness and I

1221
01:17:14,547 –> 01:17:18,110
wanted to, you know, have a car and a mortgage eventually and stuff like that.

1222
01:17:19,024 –> 01:17:22,009
And so I decided to like move out of that, but I had a poker

1223
01:17:22,009 –> 01:17:24,817
coach because it was important to me and I’m trying to get better and I’m

1224
01:17:24,817 –> 01:17:28,405
losing a lot. I’m trying to figure this thing out. And he says this line,

1225
01:17:28,760 –> 01:17:31,709
right? You will improve based upon the quality of the questions you ask yourself.

1226
01:17:32,647 –> 01:17:35,526
I was like, what the hell does that mean? Because I was mad, right? I’m

1227
01:17:35,575 –> 01:17:39,116
very much like Corey Alanis, like, like at this time, like, what?

1228
01:17:39,278 –> 01:17:42,735
Because I’m paying this dude all of $40 an hour, which was

1229
01:17:43,009 –> 01:17:46,760
really incredible money to me at this time. And, and I was like, dude,

1230
01:17:47,018 –> 01:17:50,254
you’re here to help me win more pots. And he goes, no,

1231
01:17:51,317 –> 01:17:54,101
I’m here to— I’m here to help you become a winning poker player. These are

1232
01:17:54,101 –> 01:17:56,971
different levels. If you want the other thing, I can’t help you.

1233
01:17:58,520 –> 01:18:00,502
I was like, what the hell does that mean? He’s like, sometimes you’re gonna come

1234
01:18:00,648 –> 01:18:03,167
ask me, how do I win this pot? And my question to you is, why

1235
01:18:03,167 –> 01:18:06,982
are you in the pot at all? So then fast-forwarding, thankfully I’ve

1236
01:18:06,982 –> 01:18:10,565
had that conversation and then lived a

1237
01:18:10,870 –> 01:18:14,501
version as a poker player of folding a lot, right?

1238
01:18:14,629 –> 01:18:17,925
Not trying to let my ego just run wild and win every single pot whether

1239
01:18:17,925 –> 01:18:20,579
I have it or not, but let’s pick my spots, let’s pick my battles.

1240
01:18:21,945 –> 01:18:25,625
Right? And so whenever my business partner kind of shows me this idea, I,

1241
01:18:25,901 –> 01:18:29,500
I mean, I’m a rigid person, right? I, I think I’m right when I think

1242
01:18:29,500 –> 01:18:32,508
I’m right. And I was so mad about this thing, but

1243
01:18:33,107 –> 01:18:36,282
just enough of hearing that of like, man, they have to want it how we

1244
01:18:36,282 –> 01:18:38,500
do it, or can you see how bad it’s going to get?

1245
01:18:40,558 –> 01:18:44,395
And that to me was like the opening of the door. Like,

1246
01:18:45,982 –> 01:18:49,724
oh my gosh, like This was everything that had always

1247
01:18:49,836 –> 01:18:53,155
bothered me about like being in those other sales roles where it was just try

1248
01:18:53,267 –> 01:18:55,623
hard and push and try hard and push and try. Well, I mean, part of

1249
01:18:55,623 –> 01:18:59,054
that is corporate and in corporate, it’s a big enough organization that you can just

1250
01:18:59,054 –> 01:19:01,763
close it and pitch it over the wall. Like, are you still gonna end up

1251
01:19:01,763 –> 01:19:05,450
hated? Yeah, but no one’s really thinking about it, you know, stuff like that.

1252
01:19:05,867 –> 01:19:08,528
But in smaller business, and, and this is why I do the work that I

1253
01:19:08,576 –> 01:19:12,392
do now, if you’re doing work that is subjective or custom or

1254
01:19:12,440 –> 01:19:15,726
very specific, or if you need to be seen as a partner and not just

1255
01:19:15,726 –> 01:19:19,254
a set of hands that does a magic trick for someone else. You

1256
01:19:19,254 –> 01:19:22,886
can’t be a close them all type, right? And

1257
01:19:22,934 –> 01:19:26,775
trying to chase any of that idea or ideology

1258
01:19:26,951 –> 01:19:30,567
or thinking, Grant Cardone or Andy Elliott, of just like push real

1259
01:19:30,647 –> 01:19:34,455
hard and close them, it’s a ticking time bomb until you become

1260
01:19:34,471 –> 01:19:38,039
like, hey, agencies are hard. You should just become a consultant because that’s what I

1261
01:19:38,039 –> 01:19:40,931
had to do. No, you were bad at selecting who you wanted to work with

1262
01:19:40,947 –> 01:19:44,564
because you were thinking that no matter what they wanted, when you

1263
01:19:44,564 –> 01:19:47,427
showed it to them, they were going to get it and just roll over and

1264
01:19:47,476 –> 01:19:51,163
do whatever you wanted. It doesn’t work that way, especially not in

1265
01:19:51,196 –> 01:19:54,607
B2B. And so

1266
01:19:55,559 –> 01:19:58,240
it was so interesting because that

1267
01:19:58,240 –> 01:20:01,824
idea was

1268
01:20:02,180 –> 01:20:05,974
the whole reason that I’m still working in this job as a guy who’s very

1269
01:20:05,974 –> 01:20:09,639
unaligned for it personality-wise. Right. I’m an introverted, reserved guy

1270
01:20:09,704 –> 01:20:12,676
that wants to be right and wants to help you fix the problem. I don’t

1271
01:20:12,676 –> 01:20:16,479
want to be the guy who’s trying to woo you or win you over or

1272
01:20:16,512 –> 01:20:19,882
push something in your face if it doesn’t make any sense, you know? So this

1273
01:20:19,882 –> 01:20:23,188
idea, hyper-targeted, highly specific,

1274
01:20:23,653 –> 01:20:27,055
and let’s go do it differently and see if they

1275
01:20:27,055 –> 01:20:30,666
appreciate how we do it, not just that we have something for them and

1276
01:20:31,212 –> 01:20:33,956
just follow up until they block you and all this other stuff.

1277
01:20:35,160 –> 01:20:38,835
See, I, so I hear this and I think Corey Alanis would’ve benefited from your

1278
01:20:38,835 –> 01:20:42,501
coaching before he went and sat with the folks in the Senate.

1279
01:20:43,017 –> 01:20:45,904
Yeah. And the reason I say this is because I think

1280
01:20:46,711 –> 01:20:49,329
Coriolanus represents a certain strain in,

1281
01:20:53,350 –> 01:20:57,174
I would say among men as a, as a gender, but I would also

1282
01:20:57,174 –> 01:20:59,712
say it’s evident in women. It just shows up in different ways. We’re about to

1283
01:20:59,712 –> 01:21:02,829
talk about Volumnia in a minute. And that’s, I think, another way that it shows

1284
01:21:02,942 –> 01:21:05,350
up, but this strain

1285
01:21:08,820 –> 01:21:12,488
of, um, being uncompromising,

1286
01:21:12,842 –> 01:21:16,446
right? Having your ethics and your integrity,

1287
01:21:16,864 –> 01:21:20,362
right? Mm-hmm. But also failing to realize that

1288
01:21:21,106 –> 01:21:24,808
other groups around you, the patricians, the plebeians,

1289
01:21:25,633 –> 01:21:29,340
the senators, and I wrote this down, this is why I was like thinking

1290
01:21:29,372 –> 01:21:32,355
while you were talking, they don’t want to level up.

1291
01:21:33,458 –> 01:21:36,391
And I think this is something we struggle with in our time as well.

1292
01:21:37,793 –> 01:21:41,338
So the internet has brought us the long tail and

1293
01:21:41,757 –> 01:21:45,362
out on the long tail, we have all of these people. Yeah.

1294
01:21:45,522 –> 01:21:49,222
Chris Anderson’s long tail, Seth Godin, all those guys. Yeah, absolutely. Out here on the

1295
01:21:49,238 –> 01:21:49,673
long tail,

1296
01:21:52,516 –> 01:21:55,082
myself and John get to make a living.

1297
01:21:57,537 –> 01:22:01,266
The fat head of the pre-internet world, which we’re old enough to remember

1298
01:22:01,412 –> 01:22:02,655
that those of you who are listening who are under the age of 30, you

1299
01:22:04,446 –> 01:22:08,194
you don’t remember that world. We got the vague vestige

1300
01:22:08,276 –> 01:22:12,095
ends of it and it was still bad. And in that world, the

1301
01:22:12,095 –> 01:22:15,772
fathead world, if other people around you

1302
01:22:15,885 –> 01:22:19,596
didn’t want to level up, you were alone. You just were. That was the

1303
01:22:19,612 –> 01:22:22,495
whole, like, thank you for saying this, dude. Because

1304
01:22:23,558 –> 01:22:27,118
when I, when I got home from the military, right, I joined as a reservist

1305
01:22:27,118 –> 01:22:30,909
in May of 2001, right? 9/11 happens. I’m learning how to

1306
01:22:30,909 –> 01:22:34,538
do my job. And for the most part, I, I like, I

1307
01:22:34,651 –> 01:22:38,135
realize about 4 or 5 days, days in, I made a huge mistake.

1308
01:22:38,504 –> 01:22:42,069
This is not my space. I’m not supposed to be here, but I’m not, you

1309
01:22:42,069 –> 01:22:44,670
know, I’m not going to wet the bed so they’ll send me home or any

1310
01:22:44,718 –> 01:22:48,315
of this other stuff that other people will do. I sign the papers, right? So

1311
01:22:48,861 –> 01:22:52,634
I don’t, I don’t own my own butt cheeks for the next, you know, 8

1312
01:22:52,634 –> 01:22:55,283
years of this thing. I sign the paper. Yep. I’ve sworn the oath. We’re gonna

1313
01:22:55,283 –> 01:22:56,808
do the thing. And

1314
01:22:58,604 –> 01:23:02,164
when I came home as a

1315
01:23:02,164 –> 01:23:05,789
reservist, you kind of like almost live this like dual life, right? Because

1316
01:23:05,967 –> 01:23:09,123
I come back and I’m waiting tables. Like I didn’t go back into like a

1317
01:23:09,123 –> 01:23:12,895
super corporate environment or anything else. I’m waiting tables, right? Right. So

1318
01:23:13,187 –> 01:23:16,752
the incongruence between these 2 lanes, right? So one weekend a month,

1319
01:23:17,284 –> 01:23:21,084
I’m trying hard to like shift into this other

1320
01:23:21,245 –> 01:23:25,022
gear of like military because we’re on alert. I mean, we could be sent

1321
01:23:25,022 –> 01:23:28,871
off anytime and, you know, there’s always things to do. And

1322
01:23:29,773 –> 01:23:33,300
then I’m waiting tables and everyone is more focused on doing drugs

1323
01:23:33,412 –> 01:23:35,613
and like, hey, it’s okay if we blow all of our money because we’re just

1324
01:23:35,613 –> 01:23:39,196
going to come in and work a double tomorrow. And being the guy who’s

1325
01:23:39,196 –> 01:23:42,876
trying too hard in a situation where no one else is

1326
01:23:42,876 –> 01:23:46,642
trying at all is my, is my never-ending

1327
01:23:46,674 –> 01:23:49,602
nightmare. Mm-hmm. Right. My favorite thing now

1328
01:23:50,534 –> 01:23:53,873
being out on my own and being a founder and doing this for 8 years

1329
01:23:53,970 –> 01:23:56,667
is I call my shots, I make my goals, I do the things that I

1330
01:23:56,715 –> 01:23:59,381
think are important and meaningful and everything. And I don’t have to

1331
01:24:00,569 –> 01:24:04,310
invent something around these things. But man,

1332
01:24:05,209 –> 01:24:08,758
all I want to do is like try and perform at the

1333
01:24:08,758 –> 01:24:12,547
highest caliber that I possibly can. And whenever other people don’t want to

1334
01:24:12,611 –> 01:24:16,417
do that, it sucks my, my soul and my will to,

1335
01:24:17,189 –> 01:24:20,370
to, to show up and try and be that person. And so then I become

1336
01:24:20,466 –> 01:24:24,258
this weird apathy version that is like trying to mimic

1337
01:24:24,322 –> 01:24:27,375
apathy, even though like it never really rests very well

1338
01:24:28,034 –> 01:24:31,777
for me, right? It’s— I’ve always been kind of an improver and a guy who

1339
01:24:31,793 –> 01:24:35,007
wants to get better and stuff. And then like waiting tables, it was

1340
01:24:35,810 –> 01:24:39,554
weird. And then moving out of waiting tables back into

1341
01:24:39,602 –> 01:24:41,803
sales roles, I’m like, I’m like, okay, like maybe this will be

1342
01:24:41,803 –> 01:24:45,047
more like the military and there’s room to really try and to like, you know,

1343
01:24:45,063 –> 01:24:48,643
take up space meaningfully as opposed to just punching a clock. My

1344
01:24:48,659 –> 01:24:52,352
first handful of retail sales roles, it was more

1345
01:24:52,352 –> 01:24:56,126
about, okay, new commission structure is out. Let’s get it and let’s figure

1346
01:24:56,126 –> 01:24:58,791
out how we can make the most money with the least amount of effort. And

1347
01:24:58,791 –> 01:25:02,549
doesn’t this training suck? And training is something you get punished with because you’re

1348
01:25:02,549 –> 01:25:06,210
not hitting your numbers. And I’m like, where’s the high performance of this whole

1349
01:25:06,258 –> 01:25:09,951
thing? Right. And it just largely wasn’t there. It was who can talk the loudest.

1350
01:25:10,417 –> 01:25:13,060
Who’s got the most political capital? And

1351
01:25:13,978 –> 01:25:17,104
back in the early days of this, no one was really all that concerned with

1352
01:25:17,104 –> 01:25:20,803
like what happened after the sale. And

1353
01:25:20,819 –> 01:25:24,464
the internet has allowed you to go far enough out,

1354
01:25:24,578 –> 01:25:27,050
just like me, far enough out to where

1355
01:25:28,467 –> 01:25:31,574
we can be a mini version of Coriolanus

1356
01:25:32,958 –> 01:25:36,582
and, and have our integrity and our wounds We all

1357
01:25:36,582 –> 01:25:40,231
have cycle— these days, psychological wounds. We can have our integrity and

1358
01:25:40,231 –> 01:25:43,960
have our wounds, and we can pick and choose how

1359
01:25:44,331 –> 01:25:48,076
we decide we are going to level up in that, in that area.

1360
01:25:49,977 –> 01:25:53,159
Yep. But in the 16th century, in Shakespeare’s time,

1361
01:25:53,773 –> 01:25:57,473
pre-Industrial Revolution, right, it’s

1362
01:25:57,553 –> 01:26:01,237
very much town, sometimes city.

1363
01:26:01,737 –> 01:26:05,193
But town, like, you’re

1364
01:26:05,755 –> 01:26:09,308
generationally in your town. Yeah. Like,

1365
01:26:09,549 –> 01:26:13,185
you do what your father— like, Shakespeare’s father was a leather glove maker.

1366
01:26:14,236 –> 01:26:17,666
And there’s no evidence that we could find— I found this out from Katie when

1367
01:26:17,666 –> 01:26:20,885
we were talking about the Macbeth episode, I didn’t even know this— there’s no evidence

1368
01:26:20,949 –> 01:26:24,573
of, like, there being strife

1369
01:26:24,831 –> 01:26:28,455
between him and his father about him not being a leather glove maker.

1370
01:26:28,969 –> 01:26:32,387
Mm-hmm. And, you know, not following on in what his father, you know, did.

1371
01:26:33,370 –> 01:26:36,498
However, I think there’s probably no evidence of that

1372
01:26:36,852 –> 01:26:40,034
because the folks of the 17th century,

1373
01:26:41,657 –> 01:26:45,257
all the way up in human history, all the way up until

1374
01:26:45,611 –> 01:26:48,736
the mid-20th century, didn’t think any of that was interesting.

1375
01:26:50,776 –> 01:26:53,919
That strife was interesting. It wasn’t worth commenting on.

1376
01:26:54,627 –> 01:26:58,226
Because it was merely, you’re going to do—

1377
01:26:58,724 –> 01:27:02,035
You’re just being childish. You’re just being childish, right? And they don’t even use the

1378
01:27:02,035 –> 01:27:05,843
term childish. They use the term— they don’t use immature. That’s

1379
01:27:05,843 –> 01:27:09,105
not even the terms that they use, right? They use the term of, you’re just

1380
01:27:09,105 –> 01:27:12,833
not doing what— no, in Fiddler

1381
01:27:13,106 –> 01:27:16,577
on the Roof, Fiddler on the Roof, there’s a great scene in Fiddler on the

1382
01:27:16,577 –> 01:27:20,000
Roof. If you’ve never seen the movie, you should go watch it. But the father

1383
01:27:20,112 –> 01:27:23,901
talks about his daughters getting married, and there’s a whole scene at the

1384
01:27:23,901 –> 01:27:27,723
beginning. It’s even in the stage play of Fiddler on the Roof. And the— and

1385
01:27:27,739 –> 01:27:31,496
he’s— she’s a Jewish person, and he talks about tradition, and

1386
01:27:31,496 –> 01:27:34,627
that’s the whole— like, that’s what it was. That was the only word that people

1387
01:27:34,627 –> 01:27:38,352
heard. Yeah. And the, the interesting thing about

1388
01:27:38,352 –> 01:27:41,853
America in the last 8 years, in America specifically, in the

1389
01:27:41,853 –> 01:27:45,289
West overall, is we’ve broken all that down

1390
01:27:46,283 –> 01:27:49,795
Again, we could discuss whether or not that’s good or bad, but the

1391
01:27:49,876 –> 01:27:53,532
internet has been a force of disruption for a lot of that

1392
01:27:53,580 –> 01:27:57,429
tradition. Yeah, I agree with that. And has allowed people— yeah, has

1393
01:27:57,429 –> 01:28:00,973
allowed people to go way the hell out on the long tail. So like, I

1394
01:28:01,037 –> 01:28:03,764
think of my own life, right? Nobody in my family

1395
01:28:04,790 –> 01:28:07,372
even tried— well, I wouldn’t say even tried. There were a few people in my

1396
01:28:07,372 –> 01:28:09,569
family who tried. I got to give credit where credit is due. They did try,

1397
01:28:10,098 –> 01:28:12,658
and it was hard, and they didn’t get very far. Nobody in my family has

1398
01:28:12,692 –> 01:28:16,456
gotten as far as I’ve gotten with entrepreneurship. Same. Nobody else in

1399
01:28:16,456 –> 01:28:20,180
my family thinks of work in the way that I think of work.

1400
01:28:20,277 –> 01:28:23,079
So I’ll give you an example, right? So I’ll give you an example.

1401
01:28:24,123 –> 01:28:27,593
I once worked at a bookstore. It shall remain nameless.

1402
01:28:29,352 –> 01:28:32,758
When we stop recording, it will not remain nameless because I want to know what

1403
01:28:32,758 –> 01:28:35,436
bookstore you worked in. But we can— Major— We can save that.

1404
01:28:36,087 –> 01:28:39,313
Major bookstore. Who is not a sponsor of this show

1405
01:28:40,661 –> 01:28:44,353
for several good reasons. Okay. And I worked at the

1406
01:28:44,497 –> 01:28:47,819
local outfit of this major bookselling

1407
01:28:47,867 –> 01:28:50,868
brand, and my supervisor there,

1408
01:28:51,799 –> 01:28:55,506
when he hired me— and at the time I was doing entrepreneurship stuff, but it

1409
01:28:55,506 –> 01:28:58,860
was— it hadn’t grown. I had to go get money, whatever. Yeah,

1410
01:28:58,972 –> 01:29:02,728
it’s not always pretty. And he told me—

1411
01:29:02,728 –> 01:29:06,159
no, no, not that he told me. After he hired me, he’s like, oh well,

1412
01:29:06,175 –> 01:29:09,925
we’re really happy to have you here, blah blah blah blah. We have, um, we

1413
01:29:09,925 –> 01:29:13,418
have performance evaluations coming up in name your number of months here.

1414
01:29:14,187 –> 01:29:16,607
And I looked him dead in the face and I said— and I would have

1415
01:29:16,607 –> 01:29:20,180
never said this 20 years ago, you couldn’t even say this 20 years ago, but

1416
01:29:20,180 –> 01:29:22,840
if you take the internet seriously and the long tail seriously, this is what you

1417
01:29:22,840 –> 01:29:26,542
say to that— I looked at him and I said, no, actually, that’s about the

1418
01:29:26,542 –> 01:29:29,891
time I’ll be leaving. I’m not going to let you evaluate me.

1419
01:29:30,599 –> 01:29:33,167
I’m going to do this work because you and I are partners. You’re not my

1420
01:29:33,167 –> 01:29:36,542
supervisor, you’re my partner. I’m going to show up to work, I’m going to do

1421
01:29:36,542 –> 01:29:40,080
the work, you’re going to pay me, I’m going to learn some things, and

1422
01:29:40,080 –> 01:29:43,459
then at the end of this period of time that you’ve said, I’m going to

1423
01:29:43,459 –> 01:29:43,671
leave.

1424
01:29:47,685 –> 01:29:49,893
And he laughed and thought I was full of crap.

1425
01:29:51,684 –> 01:29:55,107
Do you want to know what the punchline is? Here’s the punchline.

1426
01:29:56,304 –> 01:29:59,628
At the end of the period, like a week before

1427
01:30:00,639 –> 01:30:03,883
the performance evaluations were due to come out, I handed him my

1428
01:30:03,915 –> 01:30:07,062
resignation letter. I said, you have a good day. It’s been great working here.

1429
01:30:08,507 –> 01:30:12,345
And walked right out the door. Okay. I heard later on—

1430
01:30:12,345 –> 01:30:14,657
now, I heard later on, I heard later on from other people who worked with

1431
01:30:14,673 –> 01:30:17,017
me. This is the other part of it. Heard later on from other people who

1432
01:30:17,017 –> 01:30:20,614
worked with me, the guy was like, oh, he’s full of crap. He’ll never do

1433
01:30:20,630 –> 01:30:23,888
it. Because he was going around telling everybody what I said. Said, oh, he’s full

1434
01:30:23,936 –> 01:30:26,018
of crap, he’ll never do it. By the way, never came and told me that

1435
01:30:26,018 –> 01:30:28,536
I was full of crap. Of course. Yeah, they never did. Of course I— right.

1436
01:30:29,166 –> 01:30:32,873
And other people around me, other employees

1437
01:30:33,067 –> 01:30:36,082
who had been there, by the way, some of them years had been there,

1438
01:30:38,901 –> 01:30:42,679
who had their dreams in them and they had died. I’m

1439
01:30:42,711 –> 01:30:46,231
thinking of one guy in specific who was working there for the health insurance, had

1440
01:30:46,247 –> 01:30:48,883
been there for 10 years. And he had bad feet.

1441
01:30:50,390 –> 01:30:54,055
Like he was having foot surgeries like all the time. It was just,

1442
01:30:54,927 –> 01:30:56,881
it was, it was, it was horrible. Right.

1443
01:30:58,900 –> 01:31:02,715
I showed up every day to work, behaved with integrity, did

1444
01:31:02,715 –> 01:31:06,534
the work that I, as I was told to do it, treated customers well, did

1445
01:31:06,599 –> 01:31:09,742
all the things I was supposed to do. But I’m not gonna, I have the

1446
01:31:09,758 –> 01:31:12,885
long tail. I’m not going to be evaluated by you.

1447
01:31:14,838 –> 01:31:18,584
I don’t give you that permission. Instead, I

1448
01:31:18,584 –> 01:31:21,578
evaluate my— this is a very Coriolanus way of looking at it— is that I

1449
01:31:21,578 –> 01:31:25,394
evaluate myself and I decide when I leave.

1450
01:31:27,283 –> 01:31:31,068
And this is where we get into the— this is where it’s in the Fathead.

1451
01:31:31,263 –> 01:31:35,015
For all you under 30, this is the Fathead levers that were used

1452
01:31:35,015 –> 01:31:37,617
against people. Our mortgage,

1453
01:31:40,238 –> 01:31:42,828
neighborhood, your wife, your kids,

1454
01:31:43,848 –> 01:31:47,409
school district, status. What are

1455
01:31:47,409 –> 01:31:51,060
people going to put your black— put whatever is in the block there

1456
01:31:51,060 –> 01:31:54,763
behind that? And all of those levers, if you actually— and

1457
01:31:54,763 –> 01:31:57,226
this is the thing I’ve bet my entire career on— if you take the internet

1458
01:31:57,259 –> 01:32:00,879
seriously, none of those levers— don’t say they don’t matter, but those levers

1459
01:32:00,879 –> 01:32:04,452
become levers now that you choose to be leveraged by. Mm-hmm.

1460
01:32:05,498 –> 01:32:07,930
rather than allowing them to leverage you.

1461
01:32:09,605 –> 01:32:12,858
And that is a fundamental thing that the long tail has brought, has opened up.

1462
01:32:13,486 –> 01:32:17,045
And I think we, we don’t understand that. We’re groping through that right now.

1463
01:32:17,270 –> 01:32:20,249
Yeah. And I think we will fully get it at the end of this century,

1464
01:32:20,571 –> 01:32:24,256
but it’s gonna be a long groping because a lot of the Industrial Revolution, a

1465
01:32:24,256 –> 01:32:27,844
lot of the Henry Ford Industrial Revolution assumptions are all still

1466
01:32:27,892 –> 01:32:31,143
hanging around. And it’s hard to get rid of them because they

1467
01:32:33,960 –> 01:32:37,620
Well, okay, I have— this is such an interesting situation

1468
01:32:38,370 –> 01:32:42,030
for me because like hearing the story, that doesn’t sound

1469
01:32:42,030 –> 01:32:44,820
like the guy that I know you,

1470
01:32:45,110 –> 01:32:48,950
right? Um, I’ve become this— I’ve become the guy over time. It took a lot

1471
01:32:48,950 –> 01:32:52,630
of going through like experiences like that to become that guy. So, okay, so,

1472
01:32:52,630 –> 01:32:55,110
okay, so let me, let me make sure that I’m hearing this the right way.

1473
01:32:55,250 –> 01:32:56,930
You’re not saying that that’s the right way to be, you’re saying that that’s the

1474
01:32:56,930 –> 01:33:00,433
way that you No, I’m really saying that’s a step along the

1475
01:33:00,433 –> 01:33:03,756
path to getting to this spot where I’m at now.

1476
01:33:04,177 –> 01:33:07,633
Mm-hmm. But I had to go through that. I had to

1477
01:33:07,633 –> 01:33:11,345
test that. I had to test the theory. Can I actually

1478
01:33:12,920 –> 01:33:16,183
engage with the industrial system that this

1479
01:33:16,408 –> 01:33:19,579
institution, this employer represents,

1480
01:33:20,905 –> 01:33:24,484
in a way where I will not be

1481
01:33:24,501 –> 01:33:27,916
leveraged. Instead, I will tell the system what I’m going to do.

1482
01:33:30,450 –> 01:33:34,061
Can this happen? Can

1483
01:33:34,176 –> 01:33:37,389
this work? And so I tested it. That was a test.

1484
01:33:39,159 –> 01:33:42,646
Mm-hmm. And I ran a different variation of it years

1485
01:33:42,678 –> 01:33:45,377
before that, but I had forgotten the lesson

1486
01:33:46,614 –> 01:33:50,252
because I’m hardheaded. I had forgotten the lesson. Um,

1487
01:33:50,608 –> 01:33:54,395
in a different sort of situation underneath different circumstances. Again, where I looked at

1488
01:33:54,395 –> 01:33:58,043
the system and I said, no, you’re not going to do this thing. Yeah.

1489
01:33:58,107 –> 01:34:00,366
I’m instead going to do this thing. Mm-hmm.

1490
01:34:02,785 –> 01:34:05,770
And at that time underneath those situations, and that’s a, that was a much more

1491
01:34:05,770 –> 01:34:08,346
delicate one. You and I could talk about that one off the air. Much more

1492
01:34:08,346 –> 01:34:11,784
delicate one. Um, there’s still people around who like know me who were involved in

1493
01:34:11,784 –> 01:34:14,933
that, that situation. And it was not pleasant for a whole bunch of people, but

1494
01:34:14,933 –> 01:34:18,710
I hoisted an entire system by its own it’s hard. And

1495
01:34:18,790 –> 01:34:22,320
the system doesn’t like it when you do that. Oh, yeah. And again, the

1496
01:34:22,400 –> 01:34:25,560
internet allows you— if you actually take the internet seriously,

1497
01:34:26,363 –> 01:34:30,085
it allows you to understand that, okay, I blew this thing

1498
01:34:30,117 –> 01:34:33,374
up here on the launchpad. And

1499
01:34:33,951 –> 01:34:37,561
there’s so many more things out there, I just have to go get them.

1500
01:34:37,802 –> 01:34:40,754
And the internet opens up the door to the courage to do that. This is

1501
01:34:40,786 –> 01:34:43,469
why I look at— this is why I look at people under 30. I’ll use

1502
01:34:43,469 –> 01:34:47,213
this as a perfect example. People under 30 who have 30,000 followers on Instagram

1503
01:34:47,294 –> 01:34:49,286
and still think that it’s about posting nonsense

1504
01:34:53,022 –> 01:34:56,480
and can’t figure out how to make money. Oh, well, you know,

1505
01:34:57,043 –> 01:35:00,433
yeah, that’s a, that’s, you know,

1506
01:35:00,658 –> 01:35:04,450
that’s the whole thing. Right. And then, you know, but like, here’s the

1507
01:35:04,450 –> 01:35:07,724
other part of it. They don’t have to want for long.

1508
01:35:08,466 –> 01:35:12,238
Right. Because, because these companies are going, you know, like Like,

1509
01:35:12,318 –> 01:35:15,686
I’m not on TikTok. I don’t think we even have any content going to

1510
01:35:16,135 –> 01:35:19,054
TikTok because like, I don’t want to— I don’t want it on my phone, right?

1511
01:35:19,358 –> 01:35:22,967
Right. And so I have this— I like, like hills I will die on, if

1512
01:35:22,967 –> 01:35:26,415
you will. If you’re using AI in your social media, like, like for like

1513
01:35:26,415 –> 01:35:30,087
commenting or DMs, it ain’t gonna go very well,

1514
01:35:30,408 –> 01:35:34,257
you know? Yeah. Um, and so for me, I’m like,

1515
01:35:34,273 –> 01:35:36,919
great, if I don’t want to be present on a social media platform, I’m not

1516
01:35:36,919 –> 01:35:40,114
even going to try to push content on that platform. Because to me, to get

1517
01:35:40,114 –> 01:35:43,457
success from a social media platform, you must be social on it.

1518
01:35:44,148 –> 01:35:47,702
Right. Right. It’s ridiculous to think that we can just treat these things like

1519
01:35:48,415 –> 01:35:52,237
broadcast networks and just be able to flip the money line and

1520
01:35:52,285 –> 01:35:54,731
just pull the bandit arm.

1521
01:36:01,430 –> 01:36:04,018
Let me— while you’re thinking, let me pause here for just a moment.

1522
01:36:05,250 –> 01:36:07,750
Okay, go ahead. And, um,

1523
01:36:08,750 –> 01:36:12,530
I think the internet helps with this stuff. I, I, one of the things that

1524
01:36:12,530 –> 01:36:16,270
I try to get and impress upon people, because if you don’t

1525
01:36:16,270 –> 01:36:19,040
come from sales, if you don’t come from conversational selling,

1526
01:36:20,110 –> 01:36:22,610
you really have a probably limited,

1527
01:36:22,610 –> 01:36:25,830
uh, view on

1528
01:36:25,830 –> 01:36:29,630
how you can run a conversation.

1529
01:36:30,418 –> 01:36:33,838
Right. So one of my favorite things to do with people is to give them

1530
01:36:33,966 –> 01:36:37,402
weird words and weird questions to go

1531
01:36:37,563 –> 01:36:40,678
ask. Right. And well, John, this doesn’t seem like it’s going to help me sell.

1532
01:36:41,336 –> 01:36:43,680
I’m like, it’s not going to help you sell, but it’s going to help you

1533
01:36:43,680 –> 01:36:47,341
take up space in your conversations and fight for what’s important and ask questions.

1534
01:36:47,389 –> 01:36:51,082
So like, I’ll do things like I one time told this

1535
01:36:51,131 –> 01:36:54,422
founder that he had to go ask people like what their favorite book was, what

1536
01:36:54,422 –> 01:36:57,790
their favorite movie was, and what their favorite color was. And he,

1537
01:36:58,431 –> 01:37:00,579
he was supposed to do this in a way so that way the other person

1538
01:37:00,595 –> 01:37:02,984
did not get knocked out of the bubble and be like, well, why are you

1539
01:37:03,000 –> 01:37:06,286
asking me that question? Right? So we, so they respond with that.

1540
01:37:06,767 –> 01:37:10,582
We’re not doing a good enough job of contextualizing and looking for

1541
01:37:10,855 –> 01:37:13,676
bridges and all these other things. Right. But it’s one of my favorite things to

1542
01:37:13,676 –> 01:37:16,129
do with people that don’t come from sales because they’re like, I want to come

1543
01:37:16,177 –> 01:37:19,591
in. I want to have a brass tacks kind of conversation. I don’t want to

1544
01:37:19,591 –> 01:37:22,735
change anything at all. And then I want them to buy. And it’s like, okay,

1545
01:37:22,751 –> 01:37:26,075
great. How do you function in that kind of sales process?

1546
01:37:26,749 –> 01:37:29,206
Well, John, this is different because this is what I want to do to other

1547
01:37:29,302 –> 01:37:32,626
people, not what I want being done to me. And I’m like, do you see

1548
01:37:33,236 –> 01:37:36,078
how well that’s going to go? Can we just talk about that for a minute?

1549
01:37:36,142 –> 01:37:39,916
You know, like, and people just get so floored with it. And I’m like,

1550
01:37:40,943 –> 01:37:44,733
don’t overshoot the mark. Go have great conversations. Right. Because like, especially if you’re

1551
01:37:44,733 –> 01:37:48,583
founding a company, if you don’t have connections, connection with the people that

1552
01:37:48,583 –> 01:37:52,253
you’re trying to serve, you’re so far out of touch, you’re the only

1553
01:37:52,269 –> 01:37:55,714
person who doesn’t know, period, right?

1554
01:37:56,114 –> 01:37:59,896
So like, I love how

1555
01:38:00,906 –> 01:38:03,886
deliciously crazy a conversation can be,

1556
01:38:04,591 –> 01:38:07,555
right? Yeah. Because we’ve all been in conversations with people that have like just led

1557
01:38:07,555 –> 01:38:11,032
us around by our nose. And, you know, it might be that, that it was

1558
01:38:11,080 –> 01:38:13,580
like a manager and you didn’t know that you could push back or be like,

1559
01:38:13,628 –> 01:38:17,113
hey, can we get back on Topic, right? Like, hey, this sounds like something we

1560
01:38:17,113 –> 01:38:20,230
could talk about for two to three days, but we’d probably be upset with and

1561
01:38:20,246 –> 01:38:24,006
spend the time well, right? You know, like these little bitty turns of phrase

1562
01:38:24,006 –> 01:38:27,541
that salespeople get really good at, and it’s just about pushing for what you need.

1563
01:38:27,717 –> 01:38:30,754
But most people don’t know that you’re allowed to push for what you want, right?

1564
01:38:31,236 –> 01:38:34,948
And so instead, what they do—oh man, what a great tieback—is they

1565
01:38:34,948 –> 01:38:38,290
kind of act like the mother, right? And you go around and they’re and they’re

1566
01:38:38,322 –> 01:38:42,037
pushing manipulative levers, right? My least favorite

1567
01:38:42,037 –> 01:38:44,760
thing is whenever people are like, man, I’m not trying to sell you, I’m trying

1568
01:38:44,792 –> 01:38:48,193
to help you. You have sold yourself on the idea

1569
01:38:48,982 –> 01:38:52,092
that you know what they need so well that you’re allowed to bulldoze people

1570
01:38:52,775 –> 01:38:56,463
into lanes that they have told you and asked you not to go into.

1571
01:38:57,224 –> 01:39:00,080
Right. A friend of mine is a very spiritual person. She knows where I sit

1572
01:39:00,080 –> 01:39:03,307
on it. We’ve had multiple conversations about it, and we can have a conversation about

1573
01:39:03,307 –> 01:39:06,776
it. But about once a year, she has to sit down

1574
01:39:07,069 –> 01:39:10,007
and be like, hey. Right. I just got it. And I’m like, hey, you think

1575
01:39:10,007 –> 01:39:13,815
I don’t know where you are? I know where you

1576
01:39:13,865 –> 01:39:17,447
are. Like, why? Like,

1577
01:39:17,773 –> 01:39:21,055
why? Right? All right. Well, John, I just really want to see you there.

1578
01:39:21,892 –> 01:39:25,435
Yeah. Okay, great. So my preferences of like, I

1579
01:39:25,435 –> 01:39:28,591
like, I like spending time with you, but I’m tired of having this conversation because

1580
01:39:28,591 –> 01:39:31,023
I just keep having to tell you no because this is a waste of your

1581
01:39:31,120 –> 01:39:33,693
time, right? Just aren’t heard.

1582
01:39:35,243 –> 01:39:38,232
Yeah. You know, and it’s like that stuff like that, to me, that’s the worst

1583
01:39:38,232 –> 01:39:41,140
version of selling, is that you have drank so much of your own Kool-Aid,

1584
01:39:42,270 –> 01:39:42,866
you’re Lex Luthor.

1585
01:39:46,561 –> 01:39:50,288
Happens all the time. Happens with founders. It

1586
01:39:50,288 –> 01:39:53,922
happens with all these coaches that are hitting the scene, and they’re, they’re not, they’re

1587
01:39:53,922 –> 01:39:57,753
not coaching on anything other than vibes, right? But they’re, oh, well,

1588
01:39:57,947 –> 01:40:01,412
I’m not trying to sell you, I’m trying to help you. Okay, cool. Who asked

1589
01:40:01,412 –> 01:40:04,384
you? So

1590
01:40:06,637 –> 01:40:10,404
I want to get to Volumnia. Yeah, here, I want to get to the mom.

1591
01:40:10,887 –> 01:40:14,450
Um, so okay, before we do this, who do you think is the bigger

1592
01:40:14,450 –> 01:40:17,321
culprit for pushing

1593
01:40:17,321 –> 01:40:21,117
Coriolanus into a lane that

1594
01:40:21,149 –> 01:40:24,970
doesn’t actually fit him or behoove him? Do you think it’s mother, or

1595
01:40:24,970 –> 01:40:27,745
do you think it’s Uh, Manai—

1596
01:40:28,749 –> 01:40:30,710
what? Manaias. Yeah, yeah.

1597
01:40:35,962 –> 01:40:39,241
So there’s a— I’ll answer the question this way. There’s a great thing we, we

1598
01:40:39,241 –> 01:40:42,940
tell the— we tell actually in the— both the adult jiu-jitsu class.

1599
01:40:43,053 –> 01:40:46,252
Now I’ve mentioned— look at that, we’re an hour, almost 2 hours in. Stop talking

1600
01:40:46,268 –> 01:40:50,000
jiu-jitsu. Look at that. Um, so, um, in the adult

1601
01:40:50,000 –> 01:40:53,575
class and in the kids class And it particularly

1602
01:40:53,607 –> 01:40:57,103
sucks in the summer when it’s like 100 degrees outside and the air conditioning is

1603
01:40:57,295 –> 01:41:01,064
barely working inside. It’s ridiculous, right? Um, but

1604
01:41:01,064 –> 01:41:04,672
we tell the kids, and it’s true, some days you’re the hammer, some days you’re

1605
01:41:04,672 –> 01:41:08,377
the nail. Yep. And

1606
01:41:09,644 –> 01:41:13,413
you’re asking which one has the most— sort of not responsibility, but

1607
01:41:13,413 –> 01:41:17,085
the most, uh, not even culpability, the most— which one’s the most of the hammer?

1608
01:41:17,423 –> 01:41:20,658
Right? That’s hammering— With good intentions. With good intentions, right?

1609
01:41:21,592 –> 01:41:23,185
Um, always good intentions.

1610
01:41:25,412 –> 01:41:28,693
Um, so I think Menelaus, from my analysis,

1611
01:41:28,871 –> 01:41:31,274
Menelaus is self-serving

1612
01:41:32,977 –> 01:41:33,925
and

1613
01:41:37,074 –> 01:41:40,846
fundamentally— and, and he commits suicide, actually.

1614
01:41:41,382 –> 01:41:43,511
So, you know, he, he removes himself

1615
01:41:43,511 –> 01:41:47,034
from the scene before, um, Volumnia goes to, um,

1616
01:41:47,276 –> 01:41:50,949
goes to Alphidius to— because he can’t, he can’t— he originally

1617
01:41:50,981 –> 01:41:54,777
goes to, um, he originally goes to, to, um, the Volscics

1618
01:41:55,019 –> 01:41:58,725
to bring back, um— He’s the first messenger. Yeah, he’s the first messenger,

1619
01:41:58,984 –> 01:42:02,172
and he can’t do it. He can’t, he can’t complete his mission. And so he,

1620
01:42:03,273 –> 01:42:06,639
you know, he cuts him. He’s done, right? He takes himself out. And

1621
01:42:12,472 –> 01:42:15,610
He does this because he’s self-serving and he doesn’t realize—

1622
01:42:18,134 –> 01:42:21,419
well, he doesn’t realize who he’s talking to

1623
01:42:21,712 –> 01:42:25,059
until the end there. He doesn’t realize the game he’s in.

1624
01:42:26,342 –> 01:42:29,796
Menenius does it. Hmm.

1625
01:42:29,877 –> 01:42:33,604
Volumnia— and this is not me laying everything at her feet, however—

1626
01:42:34,857 –> 01:42:38,639
Volumnia knows exactly what game she’s in, and

1627
01:42:38,639 –> 01:42:42,033
she knows from the beginning. She knows who her kid is.

1628
01:42:44,000 –> 01:42:47,091
She repeatedly states that she knows who her kid is.

1629
01:42:49,077 –> 01:42:52,814
She behaves with him as if she knows who

1630
01:42:52,879 –> 01:42:56,438
he is, and she even manipulates, or

1631
01:42:56,519 –> 01:42:59,488
attempts to manipulate, at the end with Alphidius. Yeah.

1632
01:43:00,547 –> 01:43:04,336
Who he is. So who has more— who’s more of

1633
01:43:04,336 –> 01:43:08,022
the hammer there? I think they’re both hammers. I think it’s a big, big blind,

1634
01:43:08,070 –> 01:43:11,836
small blind, big blind, small blind. Who’s the big blind? Who’s the

1635
01:43:11,836 –> 01:43:15,199
small blind, right? And I think

1636
01:43:15,215 –> 01:43:19,016
Volumnia is the big blind. I think she is, you know.

1637
01:43:21,792 –> 01:43:25,439
Now, there’s another aspect to this, which,

1638
01:43:25,587 –> 01:43:28,665
which kind of gets glossed over, and it’s the plebeians.

1639
01:43:29,651 –> 01:43:32,190
It’s the people, um,

1640
01:43:33,128 –> 01:43:36,050
and the mob.

1641
01:43:37,018 –> 01:43:39,808
And we don’t talk about this very much, but in our time—

1642
01:43:41,131 –> 01:43:43,600
oh my God. And I think it’s, again, this is, this is the downside of

1643
01:43:43,600 –> 01:43:47,274
the internet, specifically social media, but let’s

1644
01:43:47,307 –> 01:43:51,124
just blame the entire internet for this. It can carry the weight of it. Um,

1645
01:43:51,770 –> 01:43:55,513
I was watching a clip in my Facebook feed of like Trevor Noah talking

1646
01:43:55,513 –> 01:43:59,015
about him not believing in bullying online. I saw this. I don’t know if you’ve

1647
01:43:59,015 –> 01:44:01,152
seen this clip. You’ve seen this clip? Yeah, I did see this clip. Yeah. And

1648
01:44:01,152 –> 01:44:04,414
I watched it all the way through, not because I particularly care about Trevor Noah,

1649
01:44:04,896 –> 01:44:08,575
although now I’m gonna be flooded with it, but because I

1650
01:44:09,073 –> 01:44:11,820
was like, okay, what is he— this is a compelling enough

1651
01:44:12,688 –> 01:44:15,435
idea. Let’s just see what he has to say all the way to the end.

1652
01:44:15,483 –> 01:44:18,375
Right. And I got to the end of the clip.

1653
01:44:19,575 –> 01:44:23,180
And the distinction that he makes between bullying happening in a

1654
01:44:23,180 –> 01:44:27,025
physical space because you have no escape, that’s bullying, versus

1655
01:44:27,605 –> 01:44:31,004
in an internet space where you have the option to participate or not.

1656
01:44:31,181 –> 01:44:34,805
Mm-hmm. I think that’s an important distinction with a difference. I

1657
01:44:34,870 –> 01:44:38,534
think that that’s, that’s, that’s truly critical. I think he has— he does understand something

1658
01:44:38,567 –> 01:44:42,376
there that I think a lot of us have forgotten. What

1659
01:44:42,424 –> 01:44:46,273
the internet has done, however, is it has opened up the

1660
01:44:46,273 –> 01:44:49,813
psychological, not the psychological, the social norming power of the

1661
01:44:49,813 –> 01:44:53,538
mob. And the social

1662
01:44:53,538 –> 01:44:57,332
norming power of the mob is what we also see here in

1663
01:44:57,332 –> 01:45:00,170
Coriolanus. This is what he’s pushing back against.

1664
01:45:01,067 –> 01:45:04,782
He’s pushing back against the social norming power of the mob. And we miss

1665
01:45:05,058 –> 01:45:08,108
that because, quite frankly, in our time,

1666
01:45:09,070 –> 01:45:12,204
when the social norming power of the mob, and this is the appropriate response, by

1667
01:45:12,204 –> 01:45:15,650
the way, to Trevor Noah. Yeah. When the social norming power of the mob is

1668
01:45:15,763 –> 01:45:19,603
working for you, you love it. You’re fine with it.

1669
01:45:20,422 –> 01:45:23,413
When the social norming power of the mob is working against you, all of a

1670
01:45:23,413 –> 01:45:27,246
sudden you’re DMing individuals, DMing individuals asking, hey, what’s up, bro? And then

1671
01:45:27,327 –> 01:45:31,137
they go, oh, well, you know, I just wanted to pile on. Sorry, I think

1672
01:45:31,137 –> 01:45:34,848
you’re fine. Because he did, he like DM’d, like the

1673
01:45:34,929 –> 01:45:38,477
ultimate comedian’s revenge, like showing up to somebody’s work and booing them.

1674
01:45:39,810 –> 01:45:43,224
He, he DM’d somebody. And the guy was like, I

1675
01:45:43,417 –> 01:45:46,076
actually think you’re fine. I don’t know. I was just piling on, man. I don’t—

1676
01:45:46,334 –> 01:45:49,524
I mean, I mean, I think you’ll fail because you’re not as good as Jon

1677
01:45:49,540 –> 01:45:53,164
Stewart, which, okay, whatever. But

1678
01:45:53,164 –> 01:45:56,949
like, I don’t have a personal problem with you. And that’s the thing where Trevor

1679
01:45:56,965 –> 01:45:59,359
Noah goes to is that personal connection.

1680
01:46:01,343 –> 01:46:04,648
And again, I think there can be multiple perspectives on this. And I think that

1681
01:46:04,648 –> 01:46:07,008
that is a perspective that’s useful and decent. And I think

1682
01:46:07,008 –> 01:46:10,621
it’s Particularly useful and decent if you are, if you have a teenager who’s

1683
01:46:10,621 –> 01:46:14,451
very online all the time. But there’s a whole other cascade of

1684
01:46:14,467 –> 01:46:17,784
challenges there that you probably should have solved before even getting to that point.

1685
01:46:18,409 –> 01:46:21,790
But oh yeah, like with the devices and the

1686
01:46:21,790 –> 01:46:25,267
monitoring, all of that, even before you showed up with the internet. But there, or

1687
01:46:25,363 –> 01:46:28,985
put the, as I told my 16-year-old daughter, who we finally, she finally got a

1688
01:46:28,985 –> 01:46:32,751
smartphone this year because she’s going to be driving at the end of the next

1689
01:46:32,751 –> 01:46:36,586
6 months. Um, because I’m sort of guiding her through that process.

1690
01:46:37,067 –> 01:46:40,373
Uh, here’s your portal to hell. Like, be careful. Like, this is it,

1691
01:46:41,080 –> 01:46:44,771
you know? Oh my God. Yeah. Oh my God. Um, and we’ve prepped her. And,

1692
01:46:44,963 –> 01:46:48,751
and so again, it’s one of those things where we prepped you, you

1693
01:46:48,944 –> 01:46:52,105
let us know. Like, you got to be on— got to be on guard, right?

1694
01:46:53,469 –> 01:46:57,289
So we don’t talk enough about the prepping part. We don’t talk

1695
01:46:57,289 –> 01:47:01,075
enough about the individual versus the mob part. And then for

1696
01:47:01,140 –> 01:47:04,611
Coriolanus, we don’t talk about the pushback against the mob.

1697
01:47:05,881 –> 01:47:09,209
And this is what Coriolanus is about. It’s the pushback against the mob.

1698
01:47:09,824 –> 01:47:13,613
And in our time, it’s

1699
01:47:13,711 –> 01:47:17,030
really hard. Like, I have people yelling, yell at me on the internet too for

1700
01:47:17,030 –> 01:47:20,813
like things I say, like, or things I’ve put out there. Like, YouTube is

1701
01:47:20,829 –> 01:47:24,434
rife with this. The number of uncommented-on

1702
01:47:24,547 –> 01:47:28,135
YouTube comments that I have on this podcast is unbelievable.

1703
01:47:28,636 –> 01:47:31,593
And some of the things that people have said in DMs to me on Instagram,

1704
01:47:32,559 –> 01:47:35,786
on Facebook, on YouTube about things I’ve said on the show.

1705
01:47:37,610 –> 01:47:41,067
Hmm. And my attitude has always been, and it’s not a Corey Alanis

1706
01:47:41,164 –> 01:47:44,735
attitude, it’s about halfway there. But, but the, the, the

1707
01:47:44,961 –> 01:47:48,153
attitude for me has always been, if your handle is, you know,

1708
01:47:48,816 –> 01:47:49,313
gemini65@yahoo.com,

1709
01:47:56,710 –> 01:48:00,483
I mean, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t care. Go

1710
01:48:00,547 –> 01:48:03,967
listen to something else. It’s harder for me to not care.

1711
01:48:04,191 –> 01:48:07,547
I’m gonna be honest. Right. Oh, absolutely. And I understand how it’s harder for some

1712
01:48:07,547 –> 01:48:09,859
people. But I don’t attach a real person to

1713
01:48:09,859 –> 01:48:13,584
gemini65@yahoo.com. I don’t think of there being a real mind

1714
01:48:13,648 –> 01:48:17,405
back there versus, versus, and this is a variation of the Trevor Noah thing,

1715
01:48:17,501 –> 01:48:20,026
but just take it to the— to a little bit more of a logical end.

1716
01:48:20,414 –> 01:48:22,228
Versus if my sister,

1717
01:48:24,670 –> 01:48:28,231
who I know, is like, hey bro, you missed

1718
01:48:28,344 –> 01:48:32,140
this, that I’m gonna listen to because I have a personal

1719
01:48:32,140 –> 01:48:35,577
relationship with that person. Or if my wife is like, uh,

1720
01:48:36,012 –> 01:48:39,788
you probably shouldn’t have said that, okay, then I’m gonna have

1721
01:48:39,999 –> 01:48:43,617
more of a personal relationship with that. Now I will say this,

1722
01:48:44,007 –> 01:48:47,829
My cover, my cover, my, my discipline for all of that has always been

1723
01:48:48,343 –> 01:48:50,993
I don’t say anything on the podcast that I wouldn’t say to anybody in real

1724
01:48:50,993 –> 01:48:53,804
life. 100%. Whether you’re, whether you’re

1725
01:48:53,804 –> 01:48:57,305
Gemini65@yahoo.com or you’re, you know, my daughter or my,

1726
01:48:57,514 –> 01:49:00,999
my sister or my best friend, the way I show up here

1727
01:49:01,770 –> 01:49:05,255
is the way I show up. This is me. This is the thing you’re getting.

1728
01:49:05,303 –> 01:49:08,370
And I’ve never said anything that’s indefensible here.

1729
01:49:08,595 –> 01:49:11,839
Like I’ve always said, I’ve always said, about Twitter back when I was way more

1730
01:49:11,904 –> 01:49:15,294
on Twitter than I am now. Way more. I have about 26,000 tweets

1731
01:49:15,716 –> 01:49:19,503
and probably about a third of them are offensive to somebody. And I don’t care.

1732
01:49:19,714 –> 01:49:22,483
I would still back up all that stuff that I tweeted, even if it was

1733
01:49:22,531 –> 01:49:26,337
like 10 years ago. Yeah. Fine. Yeah. Come on. Try to,

1734
01:49:26,418 –> 01:49:28,820
try to have a problem. Try to make a problem. It’s fine.

1735
01:49:31,922 –> 01:49:34,960
But where people get into, where people get into a problem is

1736
01:49:36,119 –> 01:49:39,951
They start, and this is where Coriolanus is interesting. They start moving and Menenius

1737
01:49:39,951 –> 01:49:43,685
is actually, Menenius is interesting for this. And the senators Brutus and, um,

1738
01:49:44,073 –> 01:49:47,918
Cinnaeus, they try to manipulate the mob by moving this way and that

1739
01:49:47,918 –> 01:49:51,730
way. Yeah, they do. They try to flow with the mob. And the internet has

1740
01:49:51,730 –> 01:49:54,284
shown us that the mob is fickle. It is fickle and dangerous.

1741
01:49:55,989 –> 01:49:59,559
Yeah, I saw a very interesting, um, guy talking

1742
01:49:59,559 –> 01:50:03,157
about how a lot of the The big

1743
01:50:03,157 –> 01:50:06,940
people with big audiences aren’t moving away because they really have

1744
01:50:06,940 –> 01:50:10,483
a problem with how things are. They’re just seeing data that indicates that their rhetoric

1745
01:50:10,483 –> 01:50:13,758
is no longer the popular version of it and stuff like that. There you go.

1746
01:50:13,936 –> 01:50:17,379
That’s right. And like, like, this is a weird thing because like my,

1747
01:50:17,670 –> 01:50:21,323
my wife, uh, and I will talk about this thing because like

1748
01:50:21,452 –> 01:50:23,504
the, the question I’ll ask her is like, do you want a fake apology?

1749
01:50:26,060 –> 01:50:29,667
Right? I don’t, I don’t want a fake apology. Right. I know that

1750
01:50:29,667 –> 01:50:33,307
people are going to believe whatever they believe, and because of my path, and,

1751
01:50:34,318 –> 01:50:38,070
you know, like, I know a range of, I guess,

1752
01:50:38,263 –> 01:50:41,711
belief that I think most people would kind of like shudder at, right? If you’ve

1753
01:50:41,711 –> 01:50:44,389
never been in the military, if you’ve never trained martial arts, if you’ve never been

1754
01:50:44,437 –> 01:50:47,933
in sales, if you’ve never been in growth— like, I mean, my whole

1755
01:50:48,046 –> 01:50:50,868
path is flooded with like a lot of tryhards and a lot of people that

1756
01:50:50,868 –> 01:50:54,477
are selling themselves on whatever, on whatever they think that they

1757
01:50:54,477 –> 01:50:58,104
need to do is totally okay because it’s outcomes only, bro,

1758
01:50:58,637 –> 01:51:02,331
right? Right. Gotta hit these goals, bro, and all this other stuff. And so

1759
01:51:04,627 –> 01:51:08,233
it’s, uh, just such an interesting

1760
01:51:08,281 –> 01:51:11,418
situation because like on the other side of it is like I try to make

1761
01:51:11,418 –> 01:51:15,083
sure that I’m speaking with discernment and distinction because

1762
01:51:16,304 –> 01:51:19,822
I don’t want to argue with anybody online, honestly, right? Like, like

1763
01:51:19,951 –> 01:51:22,110
my— I mean, I have this one shirt, it’s like I’m not gonna argue with

1764
01:51:22,242 –> 01:51:25,949
with idiots on the internet. And it’s more about a reminder for

1765
01:51:25,949 –> 01:51:29,625
myself that, like, you’re not close enough to any of these people to change their

1766
01:51:29,625 –> 01:51:33,076
hearts and their minds on anything big. And so I like, you know, we were

1767
01:51:33,076 –> 01:51:36,366
talking about Spider-Man before we turned on the recording. I like the Tom Holland

1768
01:51:36,671 –> 01:51:40,266
version of this, right? Mm-hmm. If, if you have a problem with something

1769
01:51:40,764 –> 01:51:43,364
you heard me say, text me.

1770
01:51:44,567 –> 01:51:47,489
If you don’t have my cell phone number, you’re not close enough to have an

1771
01:51:47,537 –> 01:51:51,037
opinion. Hmm. And I like that line a lot.

1772
01:51:51,519 –> 01:51:55,147
Now, where it sometimes goes a little sideways is whenever I talk

1773
01:51:55,147 –> 01:51:58,873
about like, hey, sometimes it makes sense to like not

1774
01:51:58,985 –> 01:52:02,822
chase that deal, to not chase that opportunity, to not just keep following them

1775
01:52:02,855 –> 01:52:06,178
around. And then inevitably I’m going to have 4 or 5 people and like, well,

1776
01:52:06,291 –> 01:52:10,032
I followed up with someone 715 times. And it’s like, I’m

1777
01:52:10,032 –> 01:52:12,810
not trying to argue with your lived experience. I’m saying that this is not the

1778
01:52:12,826 –> 01:52:15,095
way that anyone should do it. should be trying to do it as a regular

1779
01:52:15,143 –> 01:52:18,896
function of business, you know. So

1780
01:52:19,073 –> 01:52:22,359
you said 2 words there, and we’ll get to Volumnia here shortly.

1781
01:52:23,480 –> 01:52:27,323
Um, lived experience. Oh my

1782
01:52:27,323 –> 01:52:27,942
God. Okay,

1783
01:52:33,238 –> 01:52:37,075
so— oh man, this is— this might— this might

1784
01:52:37,075 –> 01:52:40,346
be— this might be unchristian. This might be a probably One of the more unchristian

1785
01:52:40,346 –> 01:52:42,279
things I’m about to say on the show. Do I need to go make some

1786
01:52:42,279 –> 01:52:44,808
popcorn? You might, you might. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know how

1787
01:52:44,808 –> 01:52:45,597
people are going to take this.

1788
01:52:51,348 –> 01:52:53,746
Lived experience is interesting,

1789
01:52:58,430 –> 01:52:59,332
ellipsis, comma.

1790
01:53:05,658 –> 01:53:08,885
Paragraph break. Paragraph break. Yeah, yeah, yeah, paragraph break.

1791
01:53:10,792 –> 01:53:14,295
And cannot be scaled up to

1792
01:53:14,311 –> 01:53:17,556
everybody else from you. Oh

1793
01:53:18,296 –> 01:53:21,993
man, it just

1794
01:53:21,993 –> 01:53:25,820
can’t. Like, and the delusion of

1795
01:53:25,820 –> 01:53:28,552
our time

1796
01:53:29,740 –> 01:53:33,552
is that my lived experience and your lived

1797
01:53:33,552 –> 01:53:37,020
experience, the first illusion is that your lived experience and my lived

1798
01:53:37,020 –> 01:53:40,857
experience are just lived experience, bro. Mm-hmm.

1799
01:53:41,644 –> 01:53:45,449
And can’t be judged, bro. Well, okay, we’re all walking around judging

1800
01:53:45,449 –> 01:53:49,255
and discriminating. Let’s dump that first. Okay, but this is

1801
01:53:49,271 –> 01:53:52,771
also what happens when you’re, when you’re sweeping in a sea of philosophical moral

1802
01:53:52,964 –> 01:53:56,095
relativism, which is a whole other kind of issue. And

1803
01:53:57,863 –> 01:54:01,110
There’s, we may not like the standard, but if there’s no standard to fight against,

1804
01:54:01,175 –> 01:54:04,891
or if there’s a floating standard, then you got a real— Then it’s

1805
01:54:04,891 –> 01:54:08,537
just whoever’s loudest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s whoever shouts the loudest. Okay. So we got

1806
01:54:08,537 –> 01:54:11,968
a real problem even there from the jump, from jump street, as a

1807
01:54:12,225 –> 01:54:15,961
friend of mine would say. And now your second order problem there,

1808
01:54:16,059 –> 01:54:19,640
which is what I’m talking about, is now you want to take your lived

1809
01:54:19,640 –> 01:54:21,698
experience and scale it out to the rest of us.

1810
01:54:23,500 –> 01:54:26,371
And this is in a lot of things. I’m not even talking about the cultural

1811
01:54:26,403 –> 01:54:29,612
stuff, which is a hot point. I’m not talking about political stuff, which is a

1812
01:54:29,612 –> 01:54:32,355
hot point. I’m not even talking about social stuff, which is a hot point.

1813
01:54:33,526 –> 01:54:36,911
Just in business, just in sales. Oh

1814
01:54:37,552 –> 01:54:41,049
dude, your lived experience can’t be scaled up to everybody.

1815
01:54:41,787 –> 01:54:45,509
It doesn’t work. And here’s the other thing, right? Like, since we, since

1816
01:54:45,509 –> 01:54:48,749
we pulled this band-aid, okay, here’s the thing that tilts me to no in

1817
01:54:49,102 –> 01:54:52,876
Whenever I’m talking with— oh, okay.

1818
01:54:53,598 –> 01:54:57,002
John, why are my salespeople so lazy? Okay,

1819
01:54:57,372 –> 01:55:00,471
let’s talk about it. What are you looking at that makes them seem lazy?

1820
01:55:01,209 –> 01:55:04,693
Well, you know how hard I worked? And it’s like,

1821
01:55:04,742 –> 01:55:08,579
okay, tell me more, tell me more, tell me more, right? Let’s get into

1822
01:55:08,595 –> 01:55:12,304
this whole thing because it’s almost like a white privilege conversation

1823
01:55:12,304 –> 01:55:15,968
with, like, an older white guy who Who doesn’t want

1824
01:55:16,000 –> 01:55:19,489
anyone to tell him that his life wasn’t difficult, right? Okay, right.

1825
01:55:19,538 –> 01:55:22,497
But when you’re the founder of a company

1826
01:55:24,675 –> 01:55:27,967
and you don’t come from sales, you’re not treating this like a sales motion.

1827
01:55:28,680 –> 01:55:32,295
You’re treating this, let’s be honest, in the best way you possibly can,

1828
01:55:32,344 –> 01:55:36,121
because this is not your lane. You don’t come from this space. That’s like

1829
01:55:36,121 –> 01:55:39,681
showing up and never actually being a developer and thinking that you can

1830
01:55:39,698 –> 01:55:43,533
just like put stuff into the right folders and this thing is

1831
01:55:43,565 –> 01:55:47,387
going to work. Like, the idea that you’re calling the shots on the folder hierarchy

1832
01:55:47,419 –> 01:55:51,210
when you don’t come from development is absurd, right? But people do

1833
01:55:51,274 –> 01:55:54,389
this all the time. And founders who were like, well, I did this thing, like,

1834
01:55:54,502 –> 01:55:58,003
like, and half of my job is trying to figure out, okay, when I tap

1835
01:55:58,019 –> 01:56:01,552
this glass and I tell you that I

1836
01:56:01,649 –> 01:56:05,390
appreciate what you have done, it’s a— it’s hard, but it

1837
01:56:05,390 –> 01:56:08,748
can’t continue this way. And you’re crazy

1838
01:56:09,423 –> 01:56:13,263
spending 17 plates in the air, and you’re doing this so badly because you

1839
01:56:13,263 –> 01:56:16,590
don’t know any better, right? You don’t come from sales, you don’t come from growth.

1840
01:56:17,072 –> 01:56:20,751
So you’re going around chasing everybody, making

1841
01:56:20,751 –> 01:56:24,447
terrible referral asks, you’re inconsistent as hell, you’re all over the

1842
01:56:24,447 –> 01:56:28,143
place. And there’s— let’s look at your CRM

1843
01:56:28,207 –> 01:56:31,935
data before you want to haul up a sales rep and put them in front

1844
01:56:31,935 –> 01:56:35,703
of a firing Squad around. There’s— let me see yours first, buddy,

1845
01:56:35,831 –> 01:56:39,500
before you are going to make it about, well, I know this person

1846
01:56:39,549 –> 01:56:43,186
doesn’t want it enough because they’re not putting CRM data in it. Where’s yours?

1847
01:56:43,859 –> 01:56:47,321
Well, John, it’s different because I— It is not. It’s

1848
01:56:47,401 –> 01:56:51,150
not, right? If you want that, let’s go build it. But the

1849
01:56:51,150 –> 01:56:54,948
idea that you just think that, that people are just going to give you this

1850
01:56:55,077 –> 01:56:58,667
thing because you worked hard on it when it was mostly a Scramble

1851
01:56:58,908 –> 01:57:02,601
of just like scattered effort that got some— like,

1852
01:57:03,163 –> 01:57:06,872
you learn by failure, which is totally fine and totally valid. But why would we

1853
01:57:06,872 –> 01:57:10,613
try to do this in the first sales hire? Because

1854
01:57:10,645 –> 01:57:14,306
integrity requires discipline. Genuine integrity

1855
01:57:14,402 –> 01:57:18,063
requires discipline. So the, the line in The Last

1856
01:57:18,063 –> 01:57:20,761
Dance— we just talked about LeBron, we just mentioned LeBron— the line in The Last

1857
01:57:20,761 –> 01:57:22,977
Dance, right, that Michael Jordan says

1858
01:57:27,378 –> 01:57:31,030
Um, was I a tyrant as a leader? Because they ask him, like, what did

1859
01:57:31,030 –> 01:57:33,628
you say to people who were— you say you were a tyrant? Oh, I was

1860
01:57:33,693 –> 01:57:37,367
a tyrant? I mean, I wanted other people to win. I’m paraphrasing

1861
01:57:37,464 –> 01:57:41,166
here. I wanted other people to win. I wanted it as bad. I wanted it

1862
01:57:41,182 –> 01:57:44,350
more. Basically, he’s saying he wanted it more than they wanted it, and he wanted

1863
01:57:44,350 –> 01:57:47,702
to bring them along on the journey. So, and I love this piece of it.

1864
01:57:47,767 –> 01:57:51,143
So did I get up in them? And he uses a different term, but did

1865
01:57:51,143 –> 01:57:54,879
I get up in them when like they didn’t want to be motivated? And did

1866
01:57:54,879 –> 01:57:58,485
I push them to do things that they didn’t want to do? Yeah, sure. Does

1867
01:57:58,518 –> 01:58:02,074
that make me a tyrant? Maybe. But guess what?

1868
01:58:02,317 –> 01:58:05,841
You’re saying that because— and now this is where the ego and the thin skin

1869
01:58:06,342 –> 01:58:09,670
pops up on Michael Jordan— you’re saying that because you never won anything.

1870
01:58:13,787 –> 01:58:17,626
Well, that’s about— and that’s about as direct as a transfer to Coriolanus

1871
01:58:17,626 –> 01:58:20,811
as possible, right? Because Because he’s going around and he’s like, you want to compare

1872
01:58:20,859 –> 01:58:23,743
yourselves to me? Like, look at the greatness that I have done. You haven’t done

1873
01:58:23,743 –> 01:58:27,445
anything, right? And man, it was so funny because during that part I

1874
01:58:27,509 –> 01:58:30,778
was like, I was like, yeah, that’s everybody in their lane,

1875
01:58:30,842 –> 01:58:34,175
right? Because like, I don’t care what it is, right? Like, I mean, I see

1876
01:58:34,175 –> 01:58:37,716
so much of this because sales is very egoic, right? But like,

1877
01:58:38,277 –> 01:58:42,107
it’s like this with everything. Let’s just be honest about it, you know? Yeah.

1878
01:58:42,812 –> 01:58:46,530
And yeah, I You

1879
01:58:46,530 –> 01:58:50,073
know, uh, this is where, I mean, honestly, books and reading

1880
01:58:50,425 –> 01:58:54,160
are so helpful because like 15 years ago I would have drank that

1881
01:58:54,273 –> 01:58:58,056
like very tasty Kool-Aid, right? And I would have become a belligerent idiot and I’d

1882
01:58:58,056 –> 01:59:01,101
have gone around and I’d been like, well, Michael Jordan says so. Yeah. It’s like

1883
01:59:01,101 –> 01:59:04,163
all these guys that go around and they’re like, well, I got Mamba mentality, so

1884
01:59:04,163 –> 01:59:07,658
like screw you, you’re an idiot. And I’m like, you didn’t even read this book.

1885
01:59:08,299 –> 01:59:12,068
You saw a 30-second clip, you took what you wanted to from it. And

1886
01:59:12,101 –> 01:59:15,418
now you’re going around trying to be like some hard-ass version of a

1887
01:59:15,418 –> 01:59:18,961
low-rent person who’s taking, taking a philosophy you don’t even

1888
01:59:18,961 –> 01:59:22,290
believe in. And like,

1889
01:59:22,839 –> 01:59:25,973
like, it’s like, it’s like people who watch Wolf of Wall Street and they— oh

1890
01:59:25,989 –> 01:59:29,817
yeah, I think it’s like, like a developmental tale. And I’m like— It’s a

1891
01:59:29,850 –> 01:59:33,526
documentary. Are you like— no one, like,

1892
01:59:33,913 –> 01:59:37,137
no one— like, if you finish that movie and you’re like, yeah, that’s who I

1893
01:59:37,137 –> 01:59:40,806
want to be like, I don’t know what movie you watched, but it

1894
01:59:40,823 –> 01:59:43,826
happens. Come on, John, go with me.

1895
01:59:44,714 –> 01:59:48,281
No, no, sir. No, sir.

1896
01:59:48,845 –> 01:59:52,588
Right. Because to your point, right, like being,

1897
01:59:53,185 –> 01:59:55,847
you know, like one of the things that I have to be super careful about,

1898
01:59:55,863 –> 01:59:59,571
right, I get meetings around the idea that I’m an ethical salesperson. We’re not going

1899
01:59:59,571 –> 02:00:03,298
to lie. We’re not going to go chase the roadmap or make promises we can’t

1900
02:00:03,298 –> 02:00:06,149
deliver on. I want to sell the real thing so that way people stay and

1901
02:00:06,149 –> 02:00:09,908
blah, blah, blah. And people will be like, whoa, John, I love this thing. And

1902
02:00:09,908 –> 02:00:13,218
half of my process is like trying to figure out,

1903
02:00:13,844 –> 02:00:17,395
do you only believe it when times are good? Good.

1904
02:00:17,540 –> 02:00:21,331
Yeah. Because I’m gonna believe it even when it’s bad. I’m going to kill a

1905
02:00:21,331 –> 02:00:24,721
deal if it’s not aligned. I’m going to kill a deal because they’re not treating

1906
02:00:24,785 –> 02:00:28,625
us with the, like, the level of partnership necessary to get any work

1907
02:00:28,625 –> 02:00:32,062
done. And it’s, it’s been one of the most probably

1908
02:00:32,079 –> 02:00:35,497
frustrating things of my career is how people are like, yeah, John, I want to

1909
02:00:35,497 –> 02:00:38,595
do it the right way. I want to be, you know,

1910
02:00:38,611 –> 02:00:41,339
solution-focused. I don’t want to be chasing bad fits. I don’t want to be trying

1911
02:00:41,339 –> 02:00:44,790
to run people over. And then you can almost set your clock by it, right?

1912
02:00:44,854 –> 02:00:48,273
We get to the end of a quarter, right? This reporting period we just

1913
02:00:48,626 –> 02:00:52,398
decided on, right? Mm-hmm. And there’s a goal that we have decided

1914
02:00:52,398 –> 02:00:56,057
on, right? And where do these work? Like, do these things even

1915
02:00:56,089 –> 02:00:59,920
actually matter? Half the time, no, right? And then all of a sudden, what can

1916
02:00:59,920 –> 02:01:03,044
we do to close this person, John? What can we do to just like force

1917
02:01:03,044 –> 02:01:06,746
them across the line? Like, you know, how do we get more leads in? How

1918
02:01:06,746 –> 02:01:09,694
do we make, you know, and I’m like, what happened to the integrity, guys? Like,

1919
02:01:09,710 –> 02:01:12,178
what happened to doing this thing the right way? The cards fall where they may.

1920
02:01:12,274 –> 02:01:15,334
We look for the meaningful improvements. We do this thing the whole, the whole right

1921
02:01:15,382 –> 02:01:19,180
way. ‘Cause like, this is what you wanted. Mm-hmm. When you

1922
02:01:19,180 –> 02:01:22,849
thought it was gonna work out okay. But there’s still a way

1923
02:01:22,929 –> 02:01:26,714
that it works out okay, but just deciding to compromise yourself

1924
02:01:26,714 –> 02:01:30,197
is not going to be it. And this is arguably the thing that

1925
02:01:30,454 –> 02:01:34,162
I struggle the most trying to teach founders, right? If you get them all the

1926
02:01:34,162 –> 02:01:37,517
way through the process and like the last sticking point is the last sticking point

1927
02:01:37,517 –> 02:01:40,936
and you decide to capitulate versus standing your ground, especially on something meaningful,

1928
02:01:41,626 –> 02:01:45,398
you deserve all the frustration you get trying to serve that client. Yeah.

1929
02:01:45,559 –> 02:01:49,090
You knew where the line was. You just also decided to chase the money. And

1930
02:01:49,090 –> 02:01:52,076
this is especially apparent in all the people who were like, well, this one seems

1931
02:01:52,076 –> 02:01:54,606
like he’s going to be a A little bit of a— there’s actually a word

1932
02:01:54,622 –> 02:01:56,574
for this. I don’t even know if you know this or not. It’s called the

1933
02:01:56,574 –> 02:01:59,607
PITA tax, the pain in the ass tax, right? So we’re not gonna tell ’em

1934
02:01:59,640 –> 02:02:03,025
no, we’re just gonna charge ’em more because we can see that they’re gonna be

1935
02:02:03,330 –> 02:02:06,704
a nightmare to deal with. Or you could just put it down and go find

1936
02:02:06,704 –> 02:02:09,451
someone else to work with who’s not gonna be a nightmare and doesn’t put you

1937
02:02:09,451 –> 02:02:12,185
on short term. And then you’re still gonna be anxious the whole time because you

1938
02:02:12,185 –> 02:02:14,937
know that they’re gonna be on borrowed time. Right.

1939
02:02:16,944 –> 02:02:20,436
Oh. Sorry, man, that, that really got me

1940
02:02:20,565 –> 02:02:22,787
riled up. Yeah. Well,

1941
02:02:24,735 –> 02:02:28,345
I’m, um, I gotta go pick up groceries

1942
02:02:29,043 –> 02:02:32,662
in like 15 minutes, so that’s, that’s my

1943
02:02:32,662 –> 02:02:35,112
mark of integrity. I said I was gonna go pick up groceries and I gotta

1944
02:02:35,112 –> 02:02:38,956
go pick up groceries in 15 minutes. So, um, we didn’t even get into the

1945
02:02:38,956 –> 02:02:42,520
family matters, but I would like to talk a little bit about Volumnia.

1946
02:02:42,844 –> 02:02:46,216
Yeah. Um, If you read Coriolanus,

1947
02:02:46,570 –> 02:02:50,290
and she swings a big stick, right?

1948
02:02:50,371 –> 02:02:53,536
She saves Rome from Coriolanus’s wrath

1949
02:02:55,770 –> 02:02:58,792
in Act 5 and Act 6 in the end. And

1950
02:02:59,580 –> 02:03:03,424
she operates out of a very specific hierarchy, right?

1951
02:03:03,858 –> 02:03:07,525
There are hierarchical claims that she makes upon Coriolanus in

1952
02:03:07,621 –> 02:03:11,460
her speech to him when he’s with Alphidius with the Volsics,

1953
02:03:11,621 –> 02:03:15,351
that I think we as a postmodern society, and this kind of goes

1954
02:03:15,351 –> 02:03:19,143
along with that whole, like, lived experience thing.

1955
02:03:20,398 –> 02:03:23,860
If I can appeal to my lived experience, then I don’t have to pay attention

1956
02:03:23,860 –> 02:03:27,530
to the hierarchy, right? I don’t have to honor it, right? I

1957
02:03:27,579 –> 02:03:31,018
can just kind of play outside of it. Yeah. Now, there are some who will,

1958
02:03:31,115 –> 02:03:34,814
after listening to this whole episode, say, well, hey, son, that story you just told

1959
02:03:34,862 –> 02:03:38,629
about working at the, working at the bookstore. Didn’t you just— didn’t you just say

1960
02:03:39,226 –> 02:03:42,936
that? Didn’t you just ignore the hierarchy? No, no, I didn’t ignore the

1961
02:03:42,936 –> 02:03:46,598
hierarchy. I looked at what the hierarchy was saying. And I

1962
02:03:46,598 –> 02:03:49,578
said, I will play with you in this way. I didn’t appeal to my lived

1963
02:03:49,578 –> 02:03:53,384
experience. I just said, I will— this is what I will do with integrity. Yeah.

1964
02:03:53,529 –> 02:03:55,505
And I followed through on it at the end.

1965
02:03:57,590 –> 02:04:01,391
That’s a different thing than appealing to the hierarchy of

1966
02:04:01,391 –> 02:04:04,435
my lived experience. And then demanding that the hierarchy

1967
02:04:05,061 –> 02:04:08,452
change in a lot. In fact, this is happening a lot in our culture.

1968
02:04:08,838 –> 02:04:12,295
Change for me to accommodate my thing so that I can scale up,

1969
02:04:12,683 –> 02:04:16,278
right? Versus just

1970
02:04:16,278 –> 02:04:19,921
saying I don’t want to play in that. I don’t need the rewards that are

1971
02:04:19,921 –> 02:04:23,478
in there, and going off out on the long tail and finding other rewards.

1972
02:04:26,033 –> 02:04:29,824
The question I had here: leaders rarely talk honestly publicly about their mothers

1973
02:04:30,019 –> 02:04:33,638
or their fathers for that matter. matter. And they do.

1974
02:04:33,735 –> 02:04:37,475
Like, you very rarely— I was thinking about it— you very rarely hear

1975
02:04:37,523 –> 02:04:41,296
a founder, you very rarely hear a business

1976
02:04:41,296 –> 02:04:44,925
person other than the hagiography of like, like the old Steve

1977
02:04:44,973 –> 02:04:48,553
Martin joke, I was a small Black child from Alabama. Like, you hear that,

1978
02:04:48,826 –> 02:04:51,892
right? Once upon a time, you know? Yeah.

1979
02:04:53,257 –> 02:04:56,837
It’s stated in that sort of way, in that sort of frame. But you very

1980
02:04:57,030 –> 02:05:00,484
rarely hear a leader or a

1981
02:05:00,484 –> 02:05:03,023
founder or a person in sales,

1982
02:05:04,501 –> 02:05:08,020
and we all kind of act as if, oh, well, they just sprouted up from

1983
02:05:08,020 –> 02:05:10,880
the ground in situ, right? They just—

1984
02:05:11,796 –> 02:05:15,637
Alex Hormozi was always Alex Hormozi. Except, no.

1985
02:05:15,894 –> 02:05:19,590
What an example. I know, terrible example. Oh, well, you said Grant

1986
02:05:19,590 –> 02:05:22,514
Cardone twice. I got to throw somebody else in there. That’s fair. Oh, that’s fair.

1987
02:05:22,579 –> 02:05:24,635
So, you know, Um,

1988
02:05:26,763 –> 02:05:30,551
we were all children. We were all incubated inside of a family. We

1989
02:05:30,551 –> 02:05:34,249
were all incubated inside of a structure. And I

1990
02:05:34,249 –> 02:05:37,756
have said on this show, and I’ve said it in trainings before, that

1991
02:05:37,756 –> 02:05:41,300
family is the world’s first organization. It’s the first one.

1992
02:05:41,576 –> 02:05:44,990
It’s the very first business that you’re born into, where you learn concepts of

1993
02:05:45,038 –> 02:05:48,226
leadership. You learn concepts of structure and hierarchy.

1994
02:05:49,270 –> 02:05:52,605
Yes, you learn lessons about function and dysfunction. You learn it all

1995
02:05:53,278 –> 02:05:57,013
and you don’t actually know what the lessons are that you’ve learned. And then you

1996
02:05:57,062 –> 02:06:00,877
go to kindergarten and you meet all of these other people from these other organizations

1997
02:06:01,213 –> 02:06:04,868
who are coming around with their own structures. And now you’ve got to

1998
02:06:04,916 –> 02:06:08,763
figure out how to not make war with these folks, how

1999
02:06:08,763 –> 02:06:12,499
to make peace, how to get along, how to play, as

2000
02:06:12,771 –> 02:06:16,346
maybe Jordan Peterson and others would say, you know, how to play with

2001
02:06:16,378 –> 02:06:20,110
them. Well, you do. He’s right about that. And you have

2002
02:06:20,159 –> 02:06:22,646
to learn how to— That’s what I think. Yeah, there you go. You have to

2003
02:06:22,646 –> 02:06:25,408
learn how to get along. Well, you know, hey, we gotta give the clock its

2004
02:06:25,408 –> 02:06:25,505
due.

2005
02:06:28,662 –> 02:06:30,376
So we

2006
02:06:32,624 –> 02:06:36,281
both hold up the structure of family and we seek to erode it

2007
02:06:36,751 –> 02:06:39,820
because it does represent all of those things. And we’re doing both things at the

2008
02:06:39,820 –> 02:06:42,904
same time, which makes us weirdly schizophrenic in our culture.

2009
02:06:44,634 –> 02:06:48,375
Not so in the 17th century. Not so in

2010
02:06:48,407 –> 02:06:51,940
Shakespeare’s time. And by the way, in the time that he’s referring to, the

2011
02:06:51,940 –> 02:06:55,777
time of Rome, even more not so. Yeah. Yeah,

2012
02:06:55,794 –> 02:06:59,069
yeah. So families had structure. The

2013
02:06:59,069 –> 02:07:02,874
hierarchy meant something. Um, where

2014
02:07:03,003 –> 02:07:06,343
you were in the hierarchy meant something. Um,

2015
02:07:07,547 –> 02:07:10,966
not a lot of people know this, but, um, In a lot of ancient

2016
02:07:10,966 –> 02:07:13,852
cultures, the oldest son gets everything,

2017
02:07:15,012 –> 02:07:18,314
or at least gets a lot. And like, if you have 8 sons, that 8th

2018
02:07:18,331 –> 02:07:22,153
kid, good luck to them. Like, they’re gonna have to go make their

2019
02:07:22,218 –> 02:07:25,393
way, you know, in the world. And if it’s girls, oh, forget it, it’s a

2020
02:07:25,393 –> 02:07:27,815
whole different kind of thing. Yep. Right? So

2021
02:07:29,089 –> 02:07:32,732
there are structural things that Shakespeare’s audience just would have

2022
02:07:32,878 –> 02:07:36,686
known, some of which, many, much of which we have abandoned,

2023
02:07:36,817 –> 02:07:40,564
or we just don’t talk about out loud in a meaningful way. Mm-hmm.

2024
02:07:41,527 –> 02:07:45,266
My question, of course, is should leaders talk honestly about their mothers and

2025
02:07:45,298 –> 02:07:48,557
fathers? Should they honestly talk about that incubator that they first came out of

2026
02:07:48,829 –> 02:07:52,489
more often? Not would that make them be more human, that’s not what I’m looking

2027
02:07:52,585 –> 02:07:56,309
for, but would it actually give us understanding of who

2028
02:07:56,357 –> 02:07:59,872
they are? Well, it’s, it’s interesting because you were talking

2029
02:08:00,129 –> 02:08:03,643
earlier about something else, and I’m drawing this like interesting

2030
02:08:03,676 –> 02:08:07,176
parallel, right? you don’t really know if your parents are

2031
02:08:07,208 –> 02:08:10,968
good at being parents or not, right?

2032
02:08:11,064 –> 02:08:14,631
Like, like, they’re, they’re the only parent you have until, until you run across

2033
02:08:14,920 –> 02:08:18,704
teachers or maybe a coach, right? And someone who can show you that there’s another

2034
02:08:18,704 –> 02:08:22,086
version of parenting, right? One of the things I think about are like all the

2035
02:08:22,086 –> 02:08:25,644
parents that like essentially kind of put

2036
02:08:26,433 –> 02:08:29,734
all of their failures onto their kids, right? Mm-hmm.

2037
02:08:30,523 –> 02:08:34,130
I wasn’t, Like, I petered out after high school football, but not you,

2038
02:08:34,339 –> 02:08:37,392
kiddo. Like, we’re gonna put you in peewee. You’re gonna do the college thing and

2039
02:08:37,392 –> 02:08:39,577
then you’re gonna go be a pro. You get to go do all these things

2040
02:08:39,577 –> 02:08:43,289
that I didn’t get to do. And it’s not always just sports, right? Like, I

2041
02:08:43,321 –> 02:08:46,198
was talking with someone the other day and they were talking about how their—

2042
02:08:47,596 –> 02:08:50,922
when they went and told their dad that they wanted to be an entrepreneur and

2043
02:08:51,388 –> 02:08:54,859
not an engineer, the dad got sad, right?

2044
02:08:55,341 –> 02:08:58,953
Of just like, ugh, you know? And I think, I

2045
02:08:59,017 –> 02:09:02,450
think good intentions is what, is what all this is. Good

2046
02:09:02,450 –> 02:09:06,221
intentions from people who were not developed enough to realize that they are deficient in

2047
02:09:06,221 –> 02:09:09,846
a leadership capacity. Like, my, my

2048
02:09:09,846 –> 02:09:13,424
parents were too young to have kids,

2049
02:09:13,921 –> 02:09:17,627
right? Mm-hmm. Especially not the 3 that they had, right? I’ve got an older

2050
02:09:17,627 –> 02:09:21,413
brother, he’s 5 years older, he’s from a different father. And like, there’s all this

2051
02:09:21,542 –> 02:09:24,687
weird generational stuff, like My grandmother told my mom, like,

2052
02:09:25,410 –> 02:09:28,781
because she divorced the first guy because it just wasn’t working out. Like, good for

2053
02:09:28,781 –> 02:09:32,537
her divorcing a guy because the relationship isn’t working out. And then my grandmother

2054
02:09:32,537 –> 02:09:35,684
shows up and tells her like, hey, you got a kid, you better find some

2055
02:09:35,684 –> 02:09:38,493
man who’s gonna take care of you and the kid. Like, pushing her just out

2056
02:09:38,493 –> 02:09:41,864
there into almost any relationship that she can get, as opposed to like,

2057
02:09:42,346 –> 02:09:46,182
what are some other options here, right? Mm-hmm. And so, you know, this

2058
02:09:46,198 –> 02:09:49,682
was obviously a long time ago, right? And things were just kind of different, right?

2059
02:09:49,730 –> 02:09:53,033
But like, The coolest thing that I try to do

2060
02:09:53,802 –> 02:09:57,505
is to like be the person that I am, but let my

2061
02:09:57,505 –> 02:10:01,079
kid see the example of that without drowning in

2062
02:10:01,977 –> 02:10:05,311
the things that I want for her, right? You know, so like whenever she was

2063
02:10:05,423 –> 02:10:09,126
a toddler and I was doing kung fu like 25 to

2064
02:10:09,126 –> 02:10:12,908
30 hours a week, of course I wanted her to go do kung fu,

2065
02:10:12,972 –> 02:10:16,146
but I was like, don’t ruin it, don’t ruin it. Right. Right, she’ll come to

2066
02:10:16,178 –> 02:10:18,839
it if she wants to and everything else like that. And so

2067
02:10:20,115 –> 02:10:22,257
that to me is like, you know, I think about,

2068
02:10:24,214 –> 02:10:28,059
I think about like old school stuff, right? Like, uh, like being a kid of

2069
02:10:28,059 –> 02:10:31,872
like the ’50s, ’60s, or ’70s, right? The only examples you have are your

2070
02:10:31,872 –> 02:10:35,563
parents, good, bad, or otherwise, right? Mm-hmm. You might not have the internet

2071
02:10:35,659 –> 02:10:39,330
to where you can go find a pocket of community to where your nerdy thing

2072
02:10:39,668 –> 02:10:42,657
isn’t nerdy. It’s the popular thing in that thing. And maybe you’re not such a

2073
02:10:42,657 –> 02:10:46,468
weirdo for liking liking the things that you like, you know. I,

2074
02:10:47,782 –> 02:10:50,538
I shudder to think what kind of person I would be in that kind of

2075
02:10:50,538 –> 02:10:54,320
environment because I’d probably be drinking some Kool-Aid that I had

2076
02:10:54,368 –> 02:10:57,845
become accustomed to and become a person that was not

2077
02:10:57,957 –> 02:11:01,690
really aligned with the things that I think are important, you know. Now,

2078
02:11:02,379 –> 02:11:06,209
being this person now doesn’t always win me favors. I’m the, you know, like,

2079
02:11:07,267 –> 02:11:11,017
like, uh, like my mom will be like, hey, Why

2080
02:11:11,049 –> 02:11:14,611
don’t you call when I answer? Well, how about you don’t call it Tuesday at

2081
02:11:14,964 –> 02:11:18,671
11:30 in the morning when I’m in the middle of work, right? Like, just because

2082
02:11:18,671 –> 02:11:21,367
I work for myself and I’m in sales doesn’t mean I’ve got all this like

2083
02:11:21,447 –> 02:11:25,138
crazy time to just like take phone calls with other people. That’s how people end

2084
02:11:25,218 –> 02:11:27,881
up not being able to stay in sales, you know. So

2085
02:11:28,042 –> 02:11:31,861
it’s, it’s so interesting because like the whole thing

2086
02:11:32,037 –> 02:11:35,760
of the, the mom specifically, like, because I go

2087
02:11:35,760 –> 02:11:38,873
the other way, I think that the other guy is the, is the bigger because

2088
02:11:38,873 –> 02:11:42,566
I think most parents are Lex Luthoring themselves,

2089
02:11:42,582 –> 02:11:46,274
right? I’m really great at this, right? They’re shouting at their kids, they’re ramrodding them

2090
02:11:46,274 –> 02:11:50,111
into stuff that they want, they’re just ignoring their, their preferences and bulldozing them and

2091
02:11:50,111 –> 02:11:53,321
doing, doing all the bad sales stuff that has just been for a while the

2092
02:11:53,321 –> 02:11:56,757
thing that everyone thought everyone needed to do around this idea of, I know what’s

2093
02:11:56,757 –> 02:12:00,465
best for you. Mm-hmm. Not all parents actually know what’s,

2094
02:12:00,690 –> 02:12:04,238
what’s best for their kids. They’re not, they’re not aware enough, they’re not developed

2095
02:12:04,238 –> 02:12:07,902
enough, they’re not They’re not that thing. But,

2096
02:12:08,796 –> 02:12:10,177
you know, good luck telling them that.

2097
02:12:12,840 –> 02:12:16,516
Okay, so I think we’re

2098
02:12:16,597 –> 02:12:19,757
at— I might just have— I might disagree with you on this. I think we’re

2099
02:12:19,757 –> 02:12:21,788
at a crossroads here because I do think

2100
02:12:23,642 –> 02:12:26,939
that— or maybe it’s just the examples I’ve seen, right? So

2101
02:12:28,467 –> 02:12:31,913
maybe this is one of those your mileage will vary kind of Kind of

2102
02:12:32,251 –> 02:12:35,971
places, kind of spots in the conversation. Well, because I— hold on real quick,

2103
02:12:36,294 –> 02:12:39,257
if I could. I have this conversation a lot. It’s one of John’s

2104
02:12:40,240 –> 02:12:43,972
lesser popular ideas. Okay. Yeah. What is the output of being

2105
02:12:44,087 –> 02:12:47,866
a good parent? Is it a super successful

2106
02:12:47,898 –> 02:12:51,051
kid? Is it a well-adjusted kid? Is it a happy kid? Is it like, how

2107
02:12:51,051 –> 02:12:54,819
do you know what does

2108
02:12:54,932 –> 02:12:57,451
successful parenting look like? What’s the output?

2109
02:12:58,831 –> 02:13:02,493
So I think that as a society and culture, I would say

2110
02:13:02,558 –> 02:13:06,269
pre-World War II, we probably

2111
02:13:06,366 –> 02:13:10,188
had a better idea or a more coherent idea of what that actually meant.

2112
02:13:11,058 –> 02:13:14,456
But I can only go on what I read from the past.

2113
02:13:15,493 –> 02:13:18,401
And the people who wrote it down were probably people who thought they were coherent

2114
02:13:18,401 –> 02:13:21,632
anyway. So, you know, there’s all these kind of, kind of places, right,

2115
02:13:22,036 –> 02:13:25,677
that where there’s fractures, right? Mm-hmm. And we already pointed out

2116
02:13:25,677 –> 02:13:28,452
Shakespeare didn’t go into the thing that his father was in.

2117
02:13:29,607 –> 02:13:32,767
Did his father think that he was a success? Yeah. We will never know. That

2118
02:13:32,815 –> 02:13:36,505
wasn’t written down because people at that time didn’t, they didn’t think that it was

2119
02:13:36,505 –> 02:13:39,457
interesting enough to write that down, that observation down. Okay.

2120
02:13:40,195 –> 02:13:44,013
We think it’s interesting though, because, and this is also follow along

2121
02:13:44,045 –> 02:13:47,703
from the rise of the novel. So with the rise of the novel in

2122
02:13:47,735 –> 02:13:51,330
book form, we get more interiority. into human beings

2123
02:13:51,330 –> 02:13:54,520
and more of an interest in what’s going on in the interior of human beings.

2124
02:13:54,830 –> 02:13:57,450
And so that opens up the door to the question that you just asked of

2125
02:13:57,450 –> 02:14:00,830
what is a successful— what is the successful output for parenting,

2126
02:14:00,830 –> 02:14:04,570
right? And I think that

2127
02:14:04,570 –> 02:14:08,290
answer, the answer to that question, is going to be one of those other

2128
02:14:08,290 –> 02:14:12,050
things that you can’t, at least at this point in society, scale

2129
02:14:12,050 –> 02:14:15,370
up to all of society. So I’ll give you my answer for what I think

2130
02:14:15,370 –> 02:14:19,199
success is. That’s all I’m That’s all I’m really chasing. I know, that’s what

2131
02:14:19,311 –> 02:14:22,984
you’re chasing. So for me, success as a parent is an

2132
02:14:23,481 –> 02:14:27,314
adult who can work whatever work they

2133
02:14:27,410 –> 02:14:31,131
want to do, whatever that may happen to be, whether it’s ditch digger

2134
02:14:31,195 –> 02:14:34,515
or entrepreneur, or if they want to be married and stay at

2135
02:14:34,547 –> 02:14:38,108
home, whatever. I don’t care. There’s so much work

2136
02:14:38,108 –> 02:14:41,764
everywhere. It’s not even funny. I care more about you being able to have the

2137
02:14:41,764 –> 02:14:44,956
discipline and the integrity to do the work and to recognize where the work is

2138
02:14:44,988 –> 02:14:48,676
and the creativity and the innovation be able to work around that. So being able

2139
02:14:48,676 –> 02:14:52,122
to do work, that’s at the lowest level, honestly.

2140
02:14:52,683 –> 02:14:56,370
But then the second level up, the second highest level is to be a person

2141
02:14:56,370 –> 02:15:00,218
of character, which is a word we don’t actually talk about very much. Yeah. But

2142
02:15:00,218 –> 02:15:03,408
character is creative thinking, it’s

2143
02:15:03,408 –> 02:15:06,966
innovation, it’s all of the sort of psychological, secular

2144
02:15:06,966 –> 02:15:10,718
psychological things. And because I am a person of God, I

2145
02:15:10,718 –> 02:15:14,180
believe also you have to have a belief system. that influences your character.

2146
02:15:14,564 –> 02:15:17,513
Because one day I will be gone, and I cannot be at the top of

2147
02:15:17,513 –> 02:15:21,327
the hierarchy. That can’t, that can’t be. I’m failed

2148
02:15:21,359 –> 02:15:24,355
and flawed. I can’t be at the top of the hierarchy.

2149
02:15:25,221 –> 02:15:28,923
Okay. Now, at the highest level, I want them to be a person who

2150
02:15:29,852 –> 02:15:33,698
follows a belief in Jesus. I do want that, right? And I

2151
02:15:33,698 –> 02:15:37,368
want that to be the cornerstone thing. However they choose to walk that out is

2152
02:15:37,400 –> 02:15:41,117
between them and Jesus. I don’t want to be involved in that. You know, that’s,

2153
02:15:41,246 –> 02:15:45,092
that’s a— you, at a certain point, not when they’re 9, but when

2154
02:15:45,092 –> 02:15:48,232
they’re like 20, 21, 22, 16 to 20, you,

2155
02:15:48,521 –> 02:15:52,367
you’ve— I’ve poured enough into you. You have to make some decisions. And

2156
02:15:52,383 –> 02:15:56,117
by the way, if you choose not to follow that, I want you to

2157
02:15:56,133 –> 02:15:59,867
have enough information, because I do have one child who has chosen

2158
02:15:59,867 –> 02:16:03,632
not to do that. I want you to have enough information so you know what

2159
02:16:03,680 –> 02:16:07,356
you are moving away from. I want you to be fully informed.

2160
02:16:08,014 –> 02:16:11,675
That’s fair. Because— and then, and then after you’re fully informed,

2161
02:16:12,253 –> 02:16:15,801
I don’t need to inform you anymore. I need to do other things for you

2162
02:16:15,801 –> 02:16:19,639
but not inform you because you’ve been informed. It’s like the person you were

2163
02:16:19,639 –> 02:16:23,107
talking about who’s very Christian and in sales. I don’t need to inform you about

2164
02:16:23,107 –> 02:16:26,912
Jesus. You’ve already heard the thing. I have to do other things now.

2165
02:16:27,378 –> 02:16:31,054
So now it becomes incumbent on me as an adult with fellow adult, a

2166
02:16:31,054 –> 02:16:34,826
child who’s now moved into being an adult, it becomes incumbent upon me to

2167
02:16:34,826 –> 02:16:38,389
show the correct example of walking out the actual thing,

2168
02:16:39,224 –> 02:16:42,498
even if you decide not to go along, because that goes back to that integrity

2169
02:16:42,610 –> 02:16:46,382
thing. Mm-hmm. So I’m going to have integrity in my conversation with you.

2170
02:16:46,783 –> 02:16:50,378
I’m going to have it at all levels. So you should not be surprised when

2171
02:16:50,378 –> 02:16:54,085
I have integrity with you at all levels in that conversation. You should not be

2172
02:16:54,085 –> 02:16:57,917
shocked because I’ve been doing it for a while now. So work,

2173
02:16:58,174 –> 02:17:01,635
character, belief, right? That’s, that’s sort of, for me,

2174
02:17:02,164 –> 02:17:05,754
what I look at as a successful, quote unquote,

2175
02:17:06,346 –> 02:17:09,968
you know, adult, a successful child who’s moved

2176
02:17:09,968 –> 02:17:13,798
into, into that adult space. Now, with all that being said, there’s also

2177
02:17:13,798 –> 02:17:17,612
a whole bunch of other things in there that people will throw in,

2178
02:17:17,724 –> 02:17:20,817
right? Yeah. So people will throw in hobbies, they’ll throw in

2179
02:17:20,865 –> 02:17:24,714
skills, did, you know, health, body,

2180
02:17:25,179 –> 02:17:28,146
you know, all these other kinds of things, right? But if you get— I think,

2181
02:17:28,226 –> 02:17:31,915
I think personally, if you get those things correct, a

2182
02:17:31,915 –> 02:17:35,620
lot of those other things will work out because they’ll influence all of that

2183
02:17:35,620 –> 02:17:39,276
other stuff. Hmm. And they’ll even influence how that

2184
02:17:39,276 –> 02:17:42,820
person interacts with other people and the

2185
02:17:42,901 –> 02:17:46,685
ways in which they choose to interact with other people. So I’ve got 4 kids

2186
02:17:47,150 –> 02:17:50,185
and I can see it and how they choose to interact. So my

2187
02:17:50,666 –> 02:17:54,102
youngest daughter, who just turned 16

2188
02:17:54,777 –> 02:17:58,550
and is getting her driver’s license, and I gave her the phone and it’s

2189
02:17:58,550 –> 02:18:02,372
like, give her the warning, right? Mm-hmm. The way she interacts with her peers,

2190
02:18:02,885 –> 02:18:06,562
and she’s very much— she has a large

2191
02:18:06,578 –> 02:18:09,806
nurturing heart. She wants to save everybody. She’s

2192
02:18:09,950 –> 02:18:11,925
that kid. And

2193
02:18:13,545 –> 02:18:17,209
She’s learned the hard way in our house

2194
02:18:17,402 –> 02:18:20,921
that everybody can’t be saved. But she’s done that not

2195
02:18:21,114 –> 02:18:24,749
floating around outside by herself with her friends. She’s learned that

2196
02:18:24,749 –> 02:18:28,597
inside of the structure of the household that we’ve built with the

2197
02:18:28,597 –> 02:18:32,171
guidance from us. And then we let her make the decision. I’m thinking of one

2198
02:18:32,220 –> 02:18:35,225
friend in particular. And we didn’t tell her, no, you can’t go be friends. We

2199
02:18:35,225 –> 02:18:37,549
didn’t do the 1950s thing of, no, you can’t go be friends with that person

2200
02:18:37,549 –> 02:18:40,555
because they don’t believe what we believe. Well, No, we were like, yeah, go ahead,

2201
02:18:41,374 –> 02:18:45,164
see how it works. You want to go try? Sure, go ahead. Come, come

2202
02:18:45,244 –> 02:18:48,616
back to me with how that works. Now we’re going to have boundaries around that

2203
02:18:48,616 –> 02:18:52,405
because there’s certain behaviors I don’t want in my household, and I get to make

2204
02:18:52,453 –> 02:18:55,520
that decision. I get, I get to decide that. Yeah. But at the end of

2205
02:18:55,520 –> 02:18:59,117
the day, you’re going to make a decision about that. And guess what? It took

2206
02:18:59,117 –> 02:19:02,922
her 2 years and she was like, oh, that’s what mom

2207
02:19:02,922 –> 02:19:06,707
and dad were talking about. Yeah. Now I see it. Okay, I

2208
02:19:06,707 –> 02:19:09,159
don’t want to be— I don’t want to be associated with that person anymore. She

2209
02:19:09,159 –> 02:19:12,380
gradually moved away from that person, but it took her a while because she’s a

2210
02:19:12,380 –> 02:19:15,953
nurturing person. Whereas my, my younger

2211
02:19:15,953 –> 02:19:18,805
son, who’s 9, he’s very black and white.

2212
02:19:19,831 –> 02:19:23,500
So like, you know, when he sees something, he’s

2213
02:19:23,500 –> 02:19:26,208
yelling. My wife is telling me a story about him the other day. I didn’t

2214
02:19:26,224 –> 02:19:29,638
know about this. He like fussed at some kid in a bounce house and got

2215
02:19:29,638 –> 02:19:32,540
him to like leave the bounce house. because he was like making trouble for all

2216
02:19:32,540 –> 02:19:34,900
the other kids. He was like, no, you don’t do that in the bounce house.

2217
02:19:34,900 –> 02:19:38,600
Get the hell out. And apparently the kid was like, blah, blah,

2218
02:19:38,600 –> 02:19:42,380
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And Jeremiah— sorry, the boy was like, no,

2219
02:19:42,380 –> 02:19:44,360
just go. Take your shoes and go.

2220
02:19:47,910 –> 02:19:51,200
Hmm. But he’s 9. Is he going to carry that all the way through to

2221
02:19:51,200 –> 02:19:54,200
18? No, because there’s going to be a lot of different things that are going

2222
02:19:54,200 –> 02:19:57,909
to happen in there. Testosterone still has to hit. girls are

2223
02:19:57,909 –> 02:20:01,120
coming up. There’s all these other kinds of things. These are the kinds of inputs

2224
02:20:01,120 –> 02:20:04,330
that are going to come in. Yeah, running into someone who’s more rigid than he

2225
02:20:04,330 –> 02:20:07,797
is. And eventually he’s going to run into somebody like that,

2226
02:20:07,862 –> 02:20:11,457
correct? And then— and we’ll work through that in the context of

2227
02:20:11,650 –> 02:20:15,053
that triangle. But it took me a long

2228
02:20:15,165 –> 02:20:17,910
time to— to answer your— fully answer your question. It took me a long time

2229
02:20:17,910 –> 02:20:21,008
to get to that triangle. That’s fair. That wasn’t something that I got to easily.

2230
02:20:22,164 –> 02:20:25,756
And I’m not asking to scale it to other So my

2231
02:20:25,890 –> 02:20:29,695
neighbor? Okay, pick something else.

2232
02:20:30,695 –> 02:20:34,486
Yeah, that’s fair. I, I— it’s funny because like the way

2233
02:20:34,502 –> 02:20:37,696
that I think about it, I, I saw, I saw a joke around this thing

2234
02:20:37,792 –> 02:20:41,178
of like, you know, you only really know how well or bad you did, um,

2235
02:20:41,390 –> 02:20:43,428
based upon how much therapy they need in their 20s,

2236
02:20:45,175 –> 02:20:48,920
right? And it’s something— I have known to joke with my kid. I

2237
02:20:48,968 –> 02:20:52,570
would I have known to joke with my children, all of them. They all

2238
02:20:52,570 –> 02:20:56,310
know, like, listen, while you’re crying here, cry

2239
02:20:56,310 –> 02:20:58,770
and mow, and I’ll save the money and I’ll pay you when you’re 30 to

2240
02:20:58,770 –> 02:21:02,430
go to therapy. I’ll pay for your therapy when you’re

2241
02:21:02,430 –> 02:21:05,450
30. You’ll have something to talk with your therapist about. It’ll be interesting. It won’t

2242
02:21:05,450 –> 02:21:09,190
be boring. So go ahead and mow and cry. It’s so funny

2243
02:21:09,190 –> 02:21:12,020
because, like, I saw that and I kind of, like, chuckled and I was like,

2244
02:21:12,090 –> 02:21:15,808
hahaha, you know, and everything. But, like, You

2245
02:21:15,808 –> 02:21:19,423
know, I largely think that there’s a lot of validity in that, right?

2246
02:21:19,568 –> 02:21:21,994
Because there’s a whole lot of people putting a whole lot of pressure on their

2247
02:21:22,043 –> 02:21:25,852
kids to be some version that they think is the right version of themselves,

2248
02:21:25,981 –> 02:21:29,523
right? They’re overshooting the mark, you know, and they’re too zeroed in and stuff like

2249
02:21:29,523 –> 02:21:32,486
that. And like, those kids are going to have a whole lot of therapy sessions

2250
02:21:32,518 –> 02:21:36,157
to like, you know, like, I’m a failure if I didn’t go to like med

2251
02:21:36,189 –> 02:21:39,584
school. Okay, what are you? I’m an incredibly profitable like

2252
02:21:39,584 –> 02:21:43,126
entrepreneur, right? Yeah. But, you know, my parents, you know, so

2253
02:21:43,725 –> 02:21:47,062
it’s, it’s interesting because that’s where I, I

2254
02:21:47,305 –> 02:21:50,448
purposefully talk about it as good intentions, right? Everybody means well,

2255
02:21:50,870 –> 02:21:54,392
but right, it’s, you know, shouting, shouting louder

2256
02:21:55,560 –> 02:21:58,946
doesn’t actually mean you’re doing better. No. And

2257
02:22:01,387 –> 02:22:04,621
I will say this, and this is why we all know, we all,

2258
02:22:05,186 –> 02:22:07,714
the most, one of the more fascinating things to me when my daughter was younger,

2259
02:22:08,515 –> 02:22:12,001
was taking her to kindergarten, right?

2260
02:22:13,055 –> 02:22:16,870
And watching the other parents drop off the kids and being part of the parent

2261
02:22:16,870 –> 02:22:20,467
drop-off. Because during the time when I was working on my first business,

2262
02:22:22,038 –> 02:22:25,155
I just— I had the capability to do that, and so I did it, right?

2263
02:22:29,952 –> 02:22:33,307
And we all as parents look at what other parents are doing.

2264
02:22:34,897 –> 02:22:37,256
And I know you’ve done this with your wife. I know you have. I’ve done

2265
02:22:37,256 –> 02:22:40,833
this with my wife. And we all side-eye

2266
02:22:41,059 –> 02:22:44,167
what they’re doing. And then later on in the car, when the kid can’t hear—

2267
02:22:44,442 –> 02:22:48,165
put the headphones on the kid— they were like, what

2268
02:22:48,165 –> 02:22:51,977
the hell? That guy’s gonna screw up that kid. Mm-hmm. We

2269
02:22:52,139 –> 02:22:54,818
all have this conversation. Or,

2270
02:22:56,087 –> 02:22:59,404
wow, those 2 people together, like, why don’t they get divorced?

2271
02:23:00,148 –> 02:23:03,958
they’d be better separate. Or, as I

2272
02:23:03,958 –> 02:23:07,708
will sometimes say with my wife, um, those 2 people should have found

2273
02:23:07,708 –> 02:23:10,956
mutual dislikes that weren’t the kid. It would have been better.

2274
02:23:11,671 –> 02:23:15,362
It would have been better for them. Mm-hmm. Or even

2275
02:23:15,426 –> 02:23:19,162
worse, I go— and I have said, I will admit publicly, I have

2276
02:23:19,162 –> 02:23:21,652
said this many times when I show up to events with my wife

2277
02:23:23,039 –> 02:23:26,203
and it’s all the wives are there and all the kids are there, but there’s

2278
02:23:26,220 –> 02:23:28,844
no other husbands. Like, where are the men?

2279
02:23:30,253 –> 02:23:33,137
I, I ask this, and I don’t ask it rhetorically.

2280
02:23:34,795 –> 02:23:38,518
There’s a reason for you being there as a husband. Show up

2281
02:23:38,518 –> 02:23:41,871
at the 5-year-old’s birthday party. Oh, well, I gotta work. Yeah, I gotta work too,

2282
02:23:41,888 –> 02:23:45,720
bud. Everybody gotta work. Show up. Oh, you

2283
02:23:45,720 –> 02:23:48,844
don’t understand. You’re right, I don’t understand. You’re exactly right. Yeah, I, I don’t

2284
02:23:48,860 –> 02:23:52,692
understand. I was out of PTO and I really needed this bone,

2285
02:23:52,885 –> 02:23:56,598
and it’s like Sure. Yeah. Okay. But we all do

2286
02:23:56,598 –> 02:24:00,039
this as parents. We all critique other parents privately.

2287
02:24:01,040 –> 02:24:03,781
But we all say the correct public things publicly.

2288
02:24:05,973 –> 02:24:09,752
And the correct things to say publicly are, well, you know, and actually,

2289
02:24:09,849 –> 02:24:12,768
I just said a variation of it. Well, you know, I mean, you’re in your

2290
02:24:12,768 –> 02:24:16,481
house. So like, I don’t know. And that I

2291
02:24:16,481 –> 02:24:19,854
don’t know, that statement right

2292
02:24:19,770 –> 02:24:23,414
there leads us in weird— leads us down

2293
02:24:23,511 –> 02:24:27,139
weird— and has for the last, I would say, 60 or 70-some-odd

2294
02:24:27,171 –> 02:24:30,798
years. And it didn’t start immediately. We kind of wound up here gradually.

2295
02:24:33,072 –> 02:24:35,369
And part of it is a function of the changing of the economy, the changing

2296
02:24:35,401 –> 02:24:39,225
of society, the changing of culture, like all this shifting around. But we don’t feel

2297
02:24:39,241 –> 02:24:43,041
comfortable as adults critiquing other adults. Like one of the points you

2298
02:24:43,041 –> 02:24:46,871
made earlier, this is the last thing we’ll wrap up. Mm-hmm. You were talking about

2299
02:24:46,871 –> 02:24:50,634
something, oh, with Coriolanus and sort of where he gets his, where he gets his

2300
02:24:50,666 –> 02:24:53,557
power from. And then I came back with the plebs and talked about that. And

2301
02:24:53,573 –> 02:24:56,582
the question that I thought of was this: by whose authority does

2302
02:24:56,646 –> 02:25:00,451
Coriolanus act? And that’s never very clear in

2303
02:25:00,451 –> 02:25:02,960
the play other than he’s acting by his own authority.

2304
02:25:05,330 –> 02:25:08,717
Volumnia comes in and appeals to the authority of the Roman

2305
02:25:08,717 –> 02:25:12,242
state, the Roman Senate specifically. to pull him

2306
02:25:12,355 –> 02:25:15,692
back. But that’s a question I think for us to end on, is

2307
02:25:16,430 –> 02:25:20,071
by whose authority do leaders do these things? By whose authority do they act with

2308
02:25:20,071 –> 02:25:23,761
integrity? Is it just their own, or is it the

2309
02:25:23,761 –> 02:25:26,761
state, or is it the organization, or is it the team?

2310
02:25:27,900 –> 02:25:31,686
And where does that finally crack up? Where does that

2311
02:25:31,686 –> 02:25:35,167
finally— where does the weight of that be too much and then the whole thing

2312
02:25:35,215 –> 02:25:37,804
starts to splinter? And I don’t think we have a good answer to that. that

2313
02:25:37,804 –> 02:25:39,546
question in our time anyway?

2314
02:25:46,630 –> 02:25:49,831
I mean, maybe this is a product of being in sales and the whole hammer

2315
02:25:49,831 –> 02:25:53,517
nail thing, right? But one of the great things about sales is— I mean,

2316
02:25:53,533 –> 02:25:56,362
there’s a bunch of bad stuff, let’s be honest about it. But the great thing

2317
02:25:56,362 –> 02:25:59,719
is that if we’re doing it right, I have a quant-driven number

2318
02:26:01,349 –> 02:26:05,078
that tells me if I’m having the impact that I need to have on this

2319
02:26:05,078 –> 02:26:08,272
team or not. Right? And there’s lots of people and you don’t actually define the

2320
02:26:08,272 –> 02:26:10,893
number. And so then it becomes very much, what have you sold for me lately?

2321
02:26:11,022 –> 02:26:14,403
All these other things that happen, right? But ultimately,

2322
02:26:16,061 –> 02:26:19,719
like, and this can become a little, I

2323
02:26:19,783 –> 02:26:22,778
mean, I’m sure there’s problems with this that I just haven’t thought about yet, but

2324
02:26:22,827 –> 02:26:25,757
define the outcome that you want, right? Mm-hmm. And then work

2325
02:26:27,013 –> 02:26:30,135
in relation to that whole thing and then check your progress,

2326
02:26:31,063 –> 02:26:34,886
right? One of the things that, uh, that I heard very early on was

2327
02:26:34,983 –> 02:26:38,098
this guy, and I think it was on the Tim Ferriss Show, right? And so,

2328
02:26:38,615 –> 02:26:41,587
uh, this guy said that the most uncomfortable thing that he’d ever did was

2329
02:26:42,818 –> 02:26:46,593
he allowed his kids and his spouse to give him a report

2330
02:26:46,642 –> 02:26:50,466
card because that, because that, that was something that he was

2331
02:26:50,498 –> 02:26:54,071
doing at work, right? So like 360 feedback, right? You tell me how I’m doing,

2332
02:26:54,104 –> 02:26:56,930
I’m going to tell you how you’re doing and everything. And so then someone was

2333
02:26:56,930 –> 02:26:59,501
like, hey, you should do this with like your family and everything because you’re going

2334
02:26:59,501 –> 02:27:03,258
to be so like data-oriented and everything. And it’s funny because I

2335
02:27:03,323 –> 02:27:07,096
think about this all the time, right? Like, it’s great

2336
02:27:07,240 –> 02:27:10,660
that you think you’re doing everything right and you’re righteous. And this is some of

2337
02:27:10,660 –> 02:27:13,679
my pushback on the Jordan Peterson stuff, right? Yeah. All those guys think that they’re

2338
02:27:13,679 –> 02:27:16,489
right, right? But based upon what?

2339
02:27:17,757 –> 02:27:21,563
You know, like, I mean, because we can sell ourselves on literally anything.

2340
02:27:21,691 –> 02:27:24,885
Like, I mean, it’s one of the best and worst things about being human,

2341
02:27:25,302 –> 02:27:28,816
right? So for me, it’s like, what is the outcome? Like in

2342
02:27:28,848 –> 02:27:32,618
sales, give me a number, tell me how much time I have, I’ll

2343
02:27:32,618 –> 02:27:34,383
tell you if I can do it or not, and then please like leave me

2344
02:27:34,383 –> 02:27:38,153
alone, right? Right. Some people will hire like salespeople based upon the

2345
02:27:38,153 –> 02:27:41,458
close rate. In certain situations, that makes a lot of sense, but in other situations,

2346
02:27:41,506 –> 02:27:45,020
it’s just a weird limitation, right? And here’s this

2347
02:27:45,197 –> 02:27:48,277
other thing, right? Like I saw this last week and just talking about how

2348
02:27:49,063 –> 02:27:52,381
people’s, you know, version of what is right. Okay.

2349
02:27:53,086 –> 02:27:56,853
A salesperson said that he got declined from a job because he asked like

2350
02:27:56,901 –> 02:28:00,284
what the OTE looks like, on-track earnings. Mm-hmm.

2351
02:28:00,765 –> 02:28:03,506
And they were like, well, we don’t talk about money beforehand because if it’s just

2352
02:28:03,506 –> 02:28:06,776
about money, we don’t really want people like you here. And it’s like,

2353
02:28:07,321 –> 02:28:10,431
no, like, I promise that that

2354
02:28:11,008 –> 02:28:14,423
job post talks about wanting massive action takers and

2355
02:28:14,872 –> 02:28:18,224
You know, all people that are outcome only and blah, blah, blah, and everything else

2356
02:28:18,224 –> 02:28:21,736
like this. Because like, here’s where the rub is. That person is actually

2357
02:28:21,769 –> 02:28:25,506
showing you that they’re capable of doing the job because sales is about

2358
02:28:25,682 –> 02:28:29,451
uncomfortable actions, uncomfortable questions, and pushing for what you

2359
02:28:29,467 –> 02:28:33,157
need to determine if this is worth more of your time. So you want

2360
02:28:33,157 –> 02:28:36,685
people that are going to ask you about the budget for the commissions because that

2361
02:28:36,685 –> 02:28:40,438
means they’re going to ask your customers about the budgets for their

2362
02:28:40,438 –> 02:28:43,085
dreams and goals and aspirations and all these things that you’re supposed to be selling

2363
02:28:43,085 –> 02:28:46,775
them. But because you got indignant because salespeople aren’t allowed to ask

2364
02:28:46,775 –> 02:28:49,502
about the money and the rate and the performance when they’re coming in at a

2365
02:28:49,502 –> 02:28:52,695
fraction of their value compared to any other role inside of an organization,

2366
02:28:53,289 –> 02:28:56,000
and they’re showing you that they can do this job and you’re going to choose

2367
02:28:56,000 –> 02:28:59,033
to get affronted about it because no one’s allowed to ask you about money.

2368
02:28:59,626 –> 02:29:03,220
Like that stuff. Oh my gosh, man. Like,

2369
02:29:04,279 –> 02:29:08,129
like instead, this person is going to hire someone who’s got a glint

2370
02:29:08,129 –> 02:29:11,660
in the eye who doesn’t ask about money. And then when they flame

2371
02:29:11,660 –> 02:29:15,372
out in 4 or 5 months because they’re more focused on people

2372
02:29:15,372 –> 02:29:18,379
pleasing than they are on taking uncomfortable action and figuring it out,

2373
02:29:19,203 –> 02:29:21,113
you know, then you’re going to come back and be like, well, I think we

2374
02:29:21,113 –> 02:29:24,940
need to pay them less. Hmm. Right. It’s such a, like,

2375
02:29:24,956 –> 02:29:28,219
a very interesting, like, recipe. But it comes, it comes just back down to the

2376
02:29:28,219 –> 02:29:32,001
idea that, like, some people are more focused on their,

2377
02:29:32,017 –> 02:29:35,740
like, preferences and what’s allowed versus, like, what’s not

2378
02:29:36,239 –> 02:29:39,954
versus giving like people in their lives the

2379
02:29:39,954 –> 02:29:43,669
space to be themselves, to go do these things. Right. And so if you have

2380
02:29:43,669 –> 02:29:47,265
a super willful kid and they’re pushing back on you and everything, my opinion,

2381
02:29:47,604 –> 02:29:51,290
that’s actually a good thing. Mm-hmm. You want someone who’s gonna be self-contained and not

2382
02:29:51,290 –> 02:29:55,105
just following a group and stuff like that. Like one time my daughter came in

2383
02:29:55,105 –> 02:29:57,124
and asked me for something. I was on the phone with like one of my

2384
02:29:57,124 –> 02:30:00,952
kung fu buddies and it, it was like a cookie or a snack.

2385
02:30:01,000 –> 02:30:03,132
And I said no. And she said, why? And I was like, well, because we’re

2386
02:30:03,132 –> 02:30:06,951
too close to dinner. And my, my buddy who’s not in this lane at all,

2387
02:30:07,146 –> 02:30:10,901
right? He was like, you let your kid talk back to you? I said, yeah,

2388
02:30:10,917 –> 02:30:13,959
I actually encourage it. We have an agreement that if I just tell her no

2389
02:30:13,975 –> 02:30:16,629
and I don’t give her a reason, she’s allowed to ask me for that reason.

2390
02:30:17,216 –> 02:30:19,840
Oh man, I can’t believe it. You’re like, you’re everything that’s wrong with it. And

2391
02:30:19,840 –> 02:30:23,591
I’m like, my kid is going to be able to stand up and ask

2392
02:30:23,672 –> 02:30:27,053
why when she gets shouted down no. That’s way more

2393
02:30:27,053 –> 02:30:30,850
important than like me getting my ’50s dad needs met

2394
02:30:30,850 –> 02:30:33,348
of like, well, I worked hard and I brought home the bacon, sir. What? Everyone

2395
02:30:33,348 –> 02:30:36,963
just has to do what I want them to do, you know? Right. So

2396
02:30:37,011 –> 02:30:40,529
it’s, it’s weird because like sometimes people are shutting down, I would say,

2397
02:30:42,007 –> 02:30:45,034
uh, motivation, motion, progress

2398
02:30:45,565 –> 02:30:48,978
towards really great elements of character

2399
02:30:49,831 –> 02:30:53,213
because I want that, but it’s not done on me. Right.

2400
02:30:53,519 –> 02:30:56,419
Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah.

2401
02:30:59,856 –> 02:31:03,084
Yeah, I mean, that, that’s— that, that leads to my close. So

2402
02:31:03,084 –> 02:31:06,152
like one of the points I was going to make, we didn’t get to this.

2403
02:31:06,345 –> 02:31:10,151
We didn’t talk about millionaires and billionaires and trillionaires, um, because

2404
02:31:10,199 –> 02:31:13,877
I think there’s a parallel to them and Coraline Coriolanus in

2405
02:31:13,893 –> 02:31:17,684
this. So I went and looked actually at the Forbes

2406
02:31:17,684 –> 02:31:21,329
list of, uh, billionaires, quote unquote. Um,

2407
02:31:21,522 –> 02:31:25,040
73%, apparently according to them, of U.S. billionaires

2408
02:31:25,392 –> 02:31:28,167
are self-made rather than having inherited their fortunes.

2409
02:31:29,241 –> 02:31:32,625
Now, I want to see the list. Yeah, I know. We could discuss what

2410
02:31:32,625 –> 02:31:36,377
self-made is and what that actually means. Oh yeah, we can. Um, and it’s

2411
02:31:36,377 –> 02:31:39,135
interesting, I read an article, I read an essay by Paul Graham,

2412
02:31:39,889 –> 02:31:43,289
um, on who— the founder of Y Combinator, um,

2413
02:31:43,818 –> 02:31:47,041
who also was there with Sam Altman back in the day. And Paul Graham’s an

2414
02:31:47,041 –> 02:31:50,328
interesting VC. I don’t know if you ever read any of his stuff, but he

2415
02:31:50,392 –> 02:31:53,935
went and did a speech he republished as a blog post. And he

2416
02:31:53,935 –> 02:31:57,733
talked about basically how to be a startup entrepreneur with a bunch of people who

2417
02:31:57,733 –> 02:32:01,274
are going to be prime ministers in like England somewhere. And, um,

2418
02:32:01,851 –> 02:32:04,992
he talked about the, the potential for a startup

2419
02:32:05,393 –> 02:32:08,886
making something like 15x its money. And

2420
02:32:09,223 –> 02:32:12,908
that moves a person from being a $100,000 to being a millionaire. Mm-hmm. He’s like,

2421
02:32:12,988 –> 02:32:16,578
being a millionaire, becoming a millionaire, if you, if you have your startup positioned

2422
02:32:16,610 –> 02:32:19,980
correctly, which he would know after 6,500 startups and Y

2423
02:32:19,980 –> 02:32:23,657
Combinator and all that, if you have it positioned correctly, you,

2424
02:32:23,994 –> 02:32:27,832
you can become wealthy. It’s like, how do you create wealthy people? This is

2425
02:32:27,832 –> 02:32:31,252
how you do it right now. Paul Graham being an investor

2426
02:32:32,649 –> 02:32:36,342
and Forbes, they don’t talk about the morality of any of

2427
02:32:36,342 –> 02:32:39,874
this. They just talk about the numbers. Of course. And to

2428
02:32:39,874 –> 02:32:43,350
John’s point, the quants, right? The numbers, the The

2429
02:32:43,581 –> 02:32:45,877
thing that gives me the authority is the numbers.

2430
02:32:49,793 –> 02:32:53,588
And because 2 things can be true at once, I think we live in

2431
02:32:53,588 –> 02:32:56,980
a time where we

2432
02:32:57,288 –> 02:33:00,917
confuse, like, Coriolanus’s stiff-necked pride

2433
02:33:01,824 –> 02:33:05,016
with integrity. And I think we have to be careful to not do that.

2434
02:33:06,765 –> 02:33:09,894
And on the other side of that, I think we have to be careful to

2435
02:33:09,943 –> 02:33:13,632
not confuse, um, venal greed or

2436
02:33:13,632 –> 02:33:17,406
public panic or social envy with principles.

2437
02:33:18,750 –> 02:33:22,512
Just because I’m envious of the startup founder because I

2438
02:33:22,512 –> 02:33:26,274
see all their stuff on Instagram and

2439
02:33:26,355 –> 02:33:29,377
I feel that spirit of, I want that for me—

2440
02:33:30,476 –> 02:33:34,259
not I want to go get my own Ferrari, I want Sam Altman’s Ferrari.

2441
02:33:34,874 –> 02:33:38,014
Mm-hmm. Right. That’s a distinction with a difference. That’s envy,

2442
02:33:39,416 –> 02:33:42,866
which drives a lot of our social media interactions. Or

2443
02:33:43,077 –> 02:33:46,828
that should not be confused with principles. Yeah, because, like, I

2444
02:33:46,828 –> 02:33:50,531
don’t even— because I saw a thing talking about that and I’ve done some

2445
02:33:50,531 –> 02:33:54,270
research on it. Like, it’s not

2446
02:33:54,270 –> 02:33:58,070
even— it’s not even as light as you put it. It’s, well,

2447
02:33:58,344 –> 02:33:59,938
why don’t I have that Ferrari?

2448
02:34:03,078 –> 02:34:06,392
Right. And not— I mean,

2449
02:34:07,476 –> 02:34:10,807
I have zero problem with people working jobs that are super low

2450
02:34:10,952 –> 02:34:14,364
lift because they want to save their greatness for everything else.

2451
02:34:14,672 –> 02:34:18,505
I’m on that train. I love that. But don’t ask

2452
02:34:19,217 –> 02:34:23,025
for more money. Don’t expect more money because there are other roles, other jobs, other

2453
02:34:23,025 –> 02:34:26,293
things you could be doing, pouring yourself into upskilling so that way you had a

2454
02:34:26,293 –> 02:34:30,046
shot. have more money, but you’re not wanting to do any of those

2455
02:34:30,078 –> 02:34:33,837
things right now. At the same token, before anyone comes and flames me, like,

2456
02:34:33,853 –> 02:34:37,462
I don’t think anyone needs or should have to work 3 jobs either, right?

2457
02:34:37,511 –> 02:34:40,985
Right, right. There’s a bunch of different things can be true at once. Yes, exactly

2458
02:34:41,165 –> 02:34:43,316
right. But I like— I

2459
02:34:44,896 –> 02:34:48,234
like— you can’t just want it. You have to

2460
02:34:48,766 –> 02:34:52,438
get in gear and go do it. Otherwise you

2461
02:34:52,504 –> 02:34:55,640
are just on a one-way path of like Feeling entitled.

2462
02:34:56,289 –> 02:34:58,952
Right. And Corey Alanis,

2463
02:35:02,550 –> 02:35:05,426
my Act 3 subheading was Eat the Rich, Sure, But You’re Going to Choke on

2464
02:35:05,426 –> 02:35:09,048
the Meal. I think Rome choked on

2465
02:35:09,064 –> 02:35:12,552
Corey Alanis. And that was actually the larger point from Shakespeare. You’re going to choke

2466
02:35:12,552 –> 02:35:16,048
on this man with integrity. If he’s actually behaving,

2467
02:35:16,323 –> 02:35:18,717
or she is actually behaving with integrity,

2468
02:35:20,190 –> 02:35:23,988
they’re going to be a problem. Oh, absolutely. And you’re never going to know. And

2469
02:35:23,988 –> 02:35:27,548
here’s the other piece, and I want us to be very clear. In our psychologized,

2470
02:35:27,564 –> 02:35:31,108
our over-psychologized culture, our overly therapeutic

2471
02:35:31,108 –> 02:35:34,197
language culture, which even we’ve used some of that language even in our show here

2472
02:35:34,246 –> 02:35:38,047
today, because it just naturally comes. We’re never going to

2473
02:35:38,063 –> 02:35:41,825
know the full interior of another human being. You’re just never going to get to

2474
02:35:41,841 –> 02:35:45,484
the bottom of it. It’s too deep an abyss. And you don’t have the

2475
02:35:45,484 –> 02:35:48,656
time. The culture doesn’t have the time. Yeah. And to

2476
02:35:48,721 –> 02:35:52,186
presume that you can from just a few snippets

2477
02:35:53,520 –> 02:35:54,383
of what you may see—

2478
02:35:57,283 –> 02:36:00,979
not wise. That is not wisdom. So

2479
02:36:01,593 –> 02:36:05,308
let’s take what we can from Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Coriolanus,

2480
02:36:05,405 –> 02:36:06,827
which is also a history,

2481
02:36:09,282 –> 02:36:10,009
and move forward.

2482
02:36:13,436 –> 02:36:16,845
I want to thank John for coming on the show today. This was a good

2483
02:36:16,845 –> 02:36:20,141
conversation. Thank you. I enjoyed it as well. Yeah.

2484
02:36:20,868 –> 02:36:24,452
And well, with that, well, we’re out.