Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

My name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership

Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode

number 152.

The 20th century was an era, at least the middle part of it, of

some of the most literate readers in the history of the

world. The readers of the mid 20th century were reading,

absorbing and thinking about ideas that sat at the high,

the high watermark of print culture.

Many books, essays, magazine articles and news reports are written during the 20th century

designed to prove many different points and advance many, many different

ideas. The mid 20th century was also the start

of the Western world's obsession with an

endlessly expanding visual culture, a culture that

included and began to shift in

the direction of the power of screens, both television and movie

screens, and really began to examine their power to shape and

deliver messages and even to deliver culture.

The mid 20th century was also the end result,

the logical high water mark of all of those utopian

Enlightenment ideas about man as an individual

and man in relation to institutions and

governments. At the same time, the mid 20th century marked the beginning of

the decline and ultimate fall of the Enlightenment project that had begun

400 years earlier. In the 17th century, these

two seemingly paradoxical and disparate events collided

and were reported on through the writing and the

reportage of various journalists, poets, prose and narrative

writers, and of course political writers like the

author we are going to be talking about here today.

Talented writers and hack writers alike both penned their letter

and shaped the culture of the west at this dynamic mid century mark,

while increasingly pessimistic and cynical views of human nature

dominated the very zeitgeist alongside the ever growing lust for

institutional power, institutional control and institutional

dominance. Now the main way for an

increasingly intellectual and literate reading public to understand, contemplate and even access

these views and opinions about human nature, of about government and

even the future was of course the novel, the technology

of the novel. And today we will work through

the dominant themes of one of the seminal

dystopian novels of the mid 20th

century. A novel whose author's

last name has become an adjective for almost every

form of totalitarianism under the Sun,

George Orwell's 1984

and I'm going to hold up the book for those of you who are watching

on the video. The copy that I have is a Signet Classics version with the

white cover and the blue eyeball

leaders. Some books, even not well written

ones, can lodge their ideas so deeply into the public's imagination

that it requires a metaphorical crowbar and even sometimes

metaphorical dynamite to extract them. And that

is some of what we are going to be doing today on the podcast with

a fine panel of folks. You're going to hear three voices today if you're

listening to the audio version, and of course, if you're watching on video, you're going

to see three faces joining me today.

So we're going to start by introducing our folks. So

Claire Chandler is the author of Growth On Purpose and the

founder of Talent Boost. She also joined us on episode number

63 to discuss the Myth of Sisyphus and the most

difficult podcast episode I've done so far to date.

This is her. This is her. This is the, the crowning achievement of Claire

Chandler on the show. Episode number 121, where we covered

Lolita. Again, I want to be very clear, a book I

did not pick, but I read it anyway

and we had a vibrant discussion. I recommend going back and listening to,

listening to us talk about that. We're also going to be joined

today by David Baumrucker. He's a licensed professional clinical counselor and founder

of Momentum Life Counseling. He joined us for episode

number six because he's been supporting the show for quite some time now where

we talked about Milan Kundera's the Unbearable Lightness of Being and episode

number 15 where Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and

Punishment, part one. David, we have to go back and do part two of

that book and like cycle back around to that maybe in this new format

we'll be be able to, we'll be able to do that. And of course,

today we joined in our conversation by our usual

partner in crime on this show, the,

the aforementioned, well, not aforementioned, but the now mentioned

Tom Libby, who just came on and talked with

us about Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Hello, everyone. How are we doing today? Hey there. Doing great,

doing good. Fantastic as always.

It's always love and life. Isan love and life.

I complain about much. I try. I tried. People don't listen, so I stop.

I would tell a whole story about something that happened to me this morning, but

Tom's very tired of hearing about it and Claire heard about it before we came

on. And David, you and I will have a session and we'll, we'll work through,

we'll work, we'll work through the various things. We'll do it off the air.

Avian Challenge. We're going to write into a novel called Hasan's Avian

Challenge. Book One.

Book one. Book one. It is, it is the

second time in my life clear that. That has happened to me. I

don't know what that means. Anyway,

David has no idea what we're talking about right now and neither does anybody else.

So it's just. It's just gonna be. It's just gonna be one of these things

that just sort of pops up in the episode. I have no idea what any

of that means. I just, I just, I just nod and.

And then he gets. And he gets paid like 200 for like a 15 minute

hour. And it's fine. It's just. I mean. There you go. Yeah, the bill will

be in the mail. Wait, you're getting paid for this?

Oh, man. Secret is out.

He just made it awkward. This is group therapy.

Welcome. Welcome

to our session. Today we're going to be discussing totalitarianism. Journey

should be good. It should be good for everybody. Oh my. All

right, well, we are reading, like I said, we are looking at the

themes and the larger. The larger ideas in

George Orwell's 1984. And as I mentioned in my

intro, my longer intro episode, which you should go back and listen to

before this episode number one, 151,

where we talked about the literary life of George Orwell, which we're not going to

talk too deeply about that today. We did talk about a little bit of the

content of the book and some of the challenges that I had reading it.

One of the dynamics that I will mention on this episode as well is because

this is copyrighted material, we will be referencing pieces in the book rather

than reading directly from it. Because George

Orwell's estate viciously

protects George Orwell's copyright,

which I find to be very, very fascinating and

also very ironic anyway.

And which align. It also aligns with everything else that you know about or

that we learned about George Orwell. And I wonder how much

he would actually be in favor of that if he were. Even. If you

were even still alive. It would be.

Yeah, I don't think Tom. I don't think he. I don't think he would be.

I think he would probably have a problem with, with some, some of the things

that his heirs have done in his name,

including that the, the. The. Was it the second wife that he married

who was the one who was most. The most vicious

protector of his estate up until her death in the 1970s.

Sonia Brownwell Orwell. She was the one who

sort of set up what we now know as

sort of the. For lack of a better term, although we're going to use it

a lot today, the Orwellian myth structure that

exists around both this book and Animal Farm,

which we're also going to cover later on. Later on this month.

So the book itself is structured in

a three book form. And so in the first book, we are introduced to the

character of Winston. Winston lives in

a totalizing one Party state,

Oceania, which is at war with East Asia or

Eurasia, depending upon which day of the week, is working for whatever

propaganda goal it is that Oceania wants to. Wants to put

forth. And Winston has a job as a

member of the Outer Party. So there's the Inner Party, there's the Outer Party, and

then there are the proles or the proletariat. The proletariat are what

we would call in the United States probably the working class or the poor.

The Outer Party are folks who would be probably like a lot of us on

this recording today. Probably a lot of us listening would be considered middle class, for

lack of a better term. And then the Inner Party folks

are the upper class, right? The folks who know

the game is all a game and yet also are the

loudest proponents of the game. They are

the folks that later on, Alexander Solzhenitsyn would write in the

Gulag Archipelago. They're the same people who,

when they were sent to the Gulag, shouted the loudest in

favor of Communism. Solzhenitsyn documents this

in his book. And that is what is documented here in the first part

of 1984. We also get the beginnings

of Newspeak, the removal of. And the

changing of the language in the first part here of

1984. And some of the philosophies that the Party

has around history. There is no past because the past can be

erased and manipulated and changed. There is no future,

because if there were a future, folks would actually be working towards something that would

be outside the Party. There is merely always the ever expanding

now, the ever expanding present. And

that sets up some of the things that we

see and can think about as dominant

themes that Orwell was trying to push throughout his entire life as an author,

particularly as a political writer and quite frankly, a polemicist,

we cover. Tom and I covered his essay on the

English language a few episodes back. I would recommend going

listening to that. And while Orwell did have a lot of good things to say

about the nature of language and the understanding of

language when he was putting together 1984, I want to read you a direct quote

from him. And he said this. What it is really meant to do is

to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into, quote, unquote, zones of

influence. I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the

Tehran conference and in addition to indicate by

parodying them the intellectual implications of

totalitarianism, and that's really the point of 1984 at a

large level is what are the intellectual implications of totalitarianism

and how do we think about that? If you go and look at

Orwell's Wikipedia page

and you know just a little bit about human nature and a little bit about

personality, Orwell, like any good artist, was a

persnickety, difficult and probably deeply, personally unpleasant.

Ma' am. He did not impress me after reading his Wikipedia page, did

not impress me as a guy. And I did some other research. It wasn't just

Wikipedia. When I did some other digging around on the, on this great sampling tool

we have called the Internet, which again I think Orwell would have been blown away

by that, but went into some digging around and found out

that yes indeed he was a deeply difficult individual. People did not like

him. His, his classmates at Eton

did not like him. He suffered, well, not suffered, but

he, he had the, he had the

psychological, the psychology of being

uncomfortable with being middle class in,

in England and also having to serve in

the military in, in, in India and tried to, and we'll talk

a little bit about this later on, try to make, trying

to make hay with the Spanish Civil War. And that didn't really work out. As

a matter of fact, the writer Henry James told him that all the things you're

going to go to fight for in Spain are all just a bunch of clap

trap. You don't actually really believe that. Which as an upper crust, you

know, British gentleman, I'm sure in that, in a very Doug Murray

lilt, he rejected that feedback

from Mr. Henry James, as the British often do.

But he was fascinated by systems, he was fascinated by institutions and he was

fascinated by how things all click together. And that is

one of the. You gotta sometimes give the author,

not sometimes you have to give the author's due. That is what has I think

driven this book directly into the zeitgeist of

particularly the progressive left imagination in the United

States, but increasingly a globalized imagination

of what totalitarianism actually is. And I have some thoughts on that today which we

can discuss. But I've rambled on long enough and I've introduced the book.

So I'm going to go around the horn. We're going to start with,

with Tom and then we'll go to David and we'll go to Claire.

What are your thoughts or impressions of

1984 I know it's been a little while, Tom, but go

ahead. I, I mean, I remember

again as we were kind of joking about this a few minutes ago, but

yeah, I read it almost 30 years ago, so it's been a while. But

I do remember it being kind of impactful at the time.

And if you think about like, you know, back in the 80s,

I mean, I read it probably 88,

89. So it was like. So we were like,

we were confused, like, oh, is this the book written a couple of years ago?

Or. And then like, of course, your teacher standing in front of the class going,

no, this book was written in 1940, whatever it was. And I was like, then

how do they know what's happening in 1984? Like, we were very confused why we're

reading this book in the first place. But I do remember it was, it was

kind of impactful. It was impactful to the point where people are,

you know, the idea or concept.

If we had a such a strong

political party that could actually do this, like, what would

be the pros and cons of it? And we had a lot of classroom discussion

around the what ifs. Right. Like, we're a

pretty strong two political party country. We've tried several times to have

a third party. It doesn't usually last long. It doesn't usually. And it doesn't usually

make a lot of impact. So we've been a strong two political

party almost from the beginning of our country. So

when we think of one of them falling off and just one of them taking

power and it becoming. What's the difference between a political party

holding all the cards versus a dictator holding all the cards or

a monarchy holding. It's essentially the same thing.

It's government by committee, sure, but it's still one ideology. It's

one direction, one unilateral thought process that

kind of dictates who you are, what you do, what you think and how you

act. So it was, it was pretty impactful to me when I was three.

So I've been, I've been a huge, huge, huge

advocate for trying for us to get a third party that actually sticks

it. Obviously I'm not successful at it, so I'm not

suggesting that it's going to happen. But I've always felt like we've

needed, you know, you always have, like when people tell you there's always three sides

to every story, right? His, hers and the truth. So I figured if we had

three political parties, we could kind of figure out like,

right, wrong and indifferent, like, and then be able to kind of select between the,

the three, you know, the three things that you want to do that you, that

you feel you should be focused towards. So

I feel like this book kind of talks your, you

into some of that stuff, I guess, is what my point was. Like you start

thinking about that stuff as you're reading it, essentially. Right, right. Well. And

you read it at a depressionable age, which a lot of people do read 1984

in high school. That's the first time they're, they touch on these ideas and

just like Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, it's one of those

books that, and Catcher in the Rye and the Great

Gatsby, you know, is. Yeah,

Brave New World. Right. Huxley. Right. The Big Five. Right. That sort of just

embed on you at a very. Or imprint on you at a very impressionable age

and then sort of set the tone for your thinking

in the, in the future. Dave, what were your thoughts on this

book? I, I think the book's, it's unique and

I think that it's honest. My opinion is a better book than Brave New World.

But I, I, why I like this book is because it is very linear.

Like, you walk through this book and I think Orwell's

perspective was that he cared less about characters and more about, like,

this activism through his art. And it seems like he is very dedicated

to world building and shaping a perspective and shaping

a message. And I like this book in that term because I think the

ambiguity. Again, we can make the argument that Winston isn't

developed enough. Right. We come into the book like, was Winston always like

this? What happened to Winston? How do we, we, we meet him somewhere in this

weird middle ground. And I remember when I first read

it, I was kind of frustrated with that. And I, as time goes on, I

went back and I looked at things with this and I was like, well, but

that offers us a very unique perspective, though,

because there is less character development. I think it makes it

easier for us as a reader to almost insert ourselves in that. And I think,

I don't know, but that was a feeling I kept on getting when I went

back to this is going. Maybe that's what his intention was, that I'm not going

to put a lot of focus on the nuanced character pieces, but I'm going to

let the characters be almost like the, the pong

paddles, right? Like bouncing this idea or this interaction between, like, power

and totality and propaganda. It's like the characters seem

to be these interplacing people like pieces that we

would just kind of walk with them along this and go, oh, this is the

introduction to that theme in the book. And then we'd seen somebody else. And this

is our introduction to that theme in the book. And for that, I really liked

it. Going back, Tom, what you said, I think that it.

When I first read it, too, it was impactful. I had no idea why it

was impactful. Like, I just knew that when I was reading something in high school

going, there's something to this. And you have to. Obviously, I had to get a

little bit older and to spend some time actually reflecting. And I think the last

15, 20 years have been really, really interesting because we think about the word

Orwellian, right? And the beautiful thing is both the right and the left can use

it because double speak. And isn't that a fun thing we have to bear witness

to now? So, again, it's a very.

I would agree it's impactful. And I think that only

getting ready for this episode and going back and looking at it again, just, I

guess, with a new set of eyes for myself, I was like, oh, there are

some things of this I didn't really realize the first time I watched. I was

trying to. I was focusing on the characters. I was focusing on

Winston. I was focusing on just the interaction, especially at the end with

the romance and the lack thereof. And then there was

some interesting pieces I focused on in the beginning. And then I went back. I'm

like, I don't think that this is the whole. I don't think this is what

the perspective of this is about characters at all. I think that the characters

are secondary to the storyline.

Okay. I might be. I might

be. I'm out to push back on you a little bit, Dave, because I was

not. Maybe. And maybe I'm reading too many literary novels. That might be

it. I might be. I might be, too. I'll grant you that. I might be

too down that road. Right. Things.

And I. I am. More. Well, we'll get to James Baldwin and

everyone's protest novel in a minute. Claire, you are.

You were very excited to read 1984. This is one of the books that I

initially sent out. My request of, like, hey, who wants to join me on this

podcast episode? Like, I do at the end of every year. You're like, yeah,

that one. And I did not, by the way. Normally I try to, like, pick

people, like, who I think is going to do what. And I did not

anticipate this one coming from you, so. So why are you excited about

1984. First and foremost, because I had to rehabil my

reputation with your audience after selecting Lolita.

I. I did pick Lolita for its controversy

because I had never read it, and I wanted to see one.

What all the fuss was about because I knew that we would have a. An

exceptionally interesting conversation, which we did, you know,

so. So this was in part to sort of counteract that, but it was

also an opportunity to not revisit

high school, but to reread

something that I first read as an idealistic

high school student who was naive, who had not

experienced much grit in

the world. Right. So it's interesting when I.

When I remember and Tom and David, you. You touched upon

it already, sort of your memories of your first introduction

to the book was far different from revisiting it now.

And now having gone through some grit, some

decades of realism,

some decades of true polarization. And I know we will get into,

you know, is it. Is it still dystopian when it's really mirroring

kind of current political life? I don't know. I think we might need

to come up with a different description of it. But I also chuckle,

Hasan, when you. When you described Mr. Orwell as

persnickety, because it's one of my favorite

English vocab words, I used it the other day in

reference to. I think zoom was being persnickety at the. At the time,

you know, so if even fiction is in some

way autobiographical, you know, I. I

think you do see a little bit of the persnicketiness of Mr. Orwell

and David. It's interesting your observation about the fact that these characters were not

terribly well developed, and maybe you didn't notice that the first go around.

I didn't really either, and I couldn't put my finger on what was different

this time until you said that. And I think it also,

for you, it made it easier to insert yourself into the

novel. For me, it made it easier to care less about the fate

of the characters, because it wasn't really about the characters

themselves. It was about the what if? And it was about

the, you know, a particular character named

Winston that we don't care that much about, because to your. To your point, we

don't really know his backstory. We don't know how he got to where he is,

but at the end, when he made the decision to choose

conformity over love because that was the easier path,

you know, do we really care that he never really figured it out? I don't.

I don't know. I'm kind of undecided about that. So a lot, a lot to

unpack, certainly. But reading it again as an adult,

at least in the, in the guise of an adult versus my

idealistic high school years, very different

book indeed. The first time I read this

book was when I was about 15, 16 maybe. And

interestingly enough, I did read it, along with Brave New World and

Brave New World, which you'll also cover on the podcast coming up here in a

little bit. Brave New World stuck with me more than

1984, even at like the age of like 15,

partially because to the point that

David has already brought up. Aldous Huxley is just a more

literary writer, right? He's, he's just, he's writing into more of

a developed space. The characters are more developed, their

motivations are more clear, I

guess at a, at a, at an authorial level, or

maybe not an authority level. Maybe that's what I want to say. They're clearer at

a character development level. Right. And I was also reading this book

during a period of time when I was beginning to explore and really get into

movies. So I was being very much influenced by. This is why I brought up

screens in the introduction. I was very much being influenced by screens and

visual culture. You know, it was a summer. I mean, my. The summer of the

year I turned 16. I watched probably a hundred movies

in that summer. So I had my first interaction. Well, this was

the heady days of the end of the collapse of Blockbuster Video, the heady

days of the collapse of Blockbuster Video when you could walk into Blockbuster and

you could walk out with like packs of videos. They were bundling DVDs together because

they couldn't figure out how to compete with anything. And they would just give them

to you walking out the door. They walk out with like $20 worth of movies.

It was insane. And

so, you know, I would go from watching, you know, Shawshank Redemption to,

you know, Braveheart to Goodfellas to

Apocalypse now to, you know, she Wore a Yellow

Ribbon. And also at the same time, I'm reading, you know, I'm reading these,

reading these books. So all those, all these things were kind of merging together in

my head, which made for a heady stew. Yeah, Tom?

Oh, I was just gonna. I was just kind of chuckling inside that

watching Apocalypse. I can only imagine a 16 year old watching Apocalypse now

route while reading A Brave new world in

1984. What I could only imagine the

turmoil inside. That's my grandma told me when she. So

my grandma, who was, Who Is fan of Oprah. Oprah came on at 4 o'

clock where I lived when I was in high school. She, she, she, this was

the deal. She said you could watch any movies that you want between like noon

and 4. But when 4 o' clock comes, you're done. Oprah's

coming on, you're done. And like, you're done. That's it. Like, I don't care if

you're in the middle of the movie. I don't care if the guy's screaming. I

don't care what's happening. Like, you're out. Go outside. Like, do something else.

And so I knew I had that little, that little spot

where I would be able to, to consume. And I did. I did. It was

a, it was a big summer. Okay? So several. I've taken

notes while everybody's been talking. Several things that jump out to me. The keyword that

everybody uses is. And even I've used is impactful. Right? So follow

up question.

Oh, actually, before I even do the follow up question, reading it again,

right In. In light of me be their 30 years have now passed. I

got to admit, I was gonna save this for later, but what the hell, I'll

go with it now. I kind of.

This is gonna be terrible, but I'm gonna be the terrible person. I

laughed at the book. I laughed at it. I did.

I chuckled and I, I thought, oh, you sweet summer child.

Right? Like the last 30 years that we've lived through. Not

in the Soviet Russia, which is dead and gone as of, as of the

1980s. Pachay, Vladimir Putin. The

greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century, according to him. Not my

words, his. But we don't need like the

Stasi and like children reporting on their parents.

We've got cell phones for that and everybody has them in their pocket by the

way. We're feeding all of our data into them. We don't need

screens on this that are on all the time that watch us and that we

watch. We already have those. They're brought to us by Apple. We don't need them.

We have them. We have them. They're brought to us by Apple and by Android.

Right. They're brought to us by Goog Google. We have the greatest behavioral

tracking system ever created in the history of

the world. It's called the Internet. And so

I read these things and then we just all

went through Covid together and we're all gonna have different opinions about what happened with

COVID But we did all go through Covid together and we can all sort of

see with our eyes exactly what happened. Whatever the reasons are or

justifications don't matter. Like, these are the things that happen, right?

And I need an explanation. And I put

this, I did put this in my, in my book or in my script. We

could talk about this today. I need an explanation. If that's not Orwellian, if those

things aren't Orwellian, then I need an explanation for what happened in the last 30

years. I need a better explanation other than maybe just governmental

incompetency or just foolish people who are pursuing power.

Now. Keep that in the back of your head. Because that was sort of the,

the framework that I came to and I. Did I crack? I sort of cracked

up laughing. I did. Like, I was like, okay,

like, this is definitely written from a mid 20th century

perspective when the horrors of this

seemed to be more horrible. And now we've wound up in, we've

wound up in a different spot. So follow up question, which I was

originally going to go back to. How young a person do you think should read

this book? Who would

you throw, what's the minimum age? You would throw this at somebody?

So my, my first reaction to that is it sort of, it, it sort of

triggers for me and I, and I, I laugh at

myself when I look at the high school students of today, my

nephew being one of them, and the thought of him reading what I

read at his age, I, I feel. Not specific to

1984, but a lot of the books that we've already mentioned, I think

he's not ready for those. First of all, he's not, he's not a big reader.

I always had a book in my hand. My last day of school,

I made a beeline to the library. I was that kid, right?

So he's, he's, he's got different interests, but I also feel

I'm laughing at myself because I'm finally at the point where I go, kids today,

but kids today don't read, you know, to the level that,

that we did. Or at least that's my, my accusation of that.

How early should someone read this book? Among the others that we

mentioned, today's kids of, of today's

era. I, because kids, to me, the, my, my,

my initial reaction to that is it depends on the era. If we're talking about

today's kids, I think they could read it, but I think they're going to

read it, discard it and go, oh, yeah, Big Brother, isn't that a reality TV

show on cbs? And then

they'll move On. So, you know, this is the TV and

tablet generation.

I think, I think the same age group, I

think that, you know, middle, high school. Middle, high school, meaning like

sophomore, junior would probably make sense.

I'm kind of with Claire here in a, in a sense,

not exactly, but in a sense, but because I do think today's

kids, I, I definitely don't think they read as much as, as we were.

And I don't, I also don't think the curriculum is forcing them to read as

much as we had to as well. But I do think that

they're, I think they're, they are more advanced than we were.

I think they think differently. I think they think through problems differently. I

think they, they see things differently than we did because they've had so much

exposure to it such, in such early way earlier than we did.

Our only exposure was the evening news. They're exposed to it 24 7.

They can see whatever they want. So I don't, I don't think the age

much matters. I think, I think that that middle high school age would be great

for them to read it. But I think their reaction to it might be a

little bit different than what you were thinking, Claire. I think their reaction to it

is going to be not so much is like, you know,

oh, isn't Big, Big Brother a show? But kind of what

Hasan was alluding to a few minutes ago. They're going to read the book and

it's not going to be as impactful because they're already seeing some of it,

right? Like so, so they're already seeing that the government can see everything that

they do. The government, Big data is the, the government

at this point. Like I think they're already seeing all that. So it's not

gonna shock them. It's not gonna, it's not gonna be as in like when we

looked at that, we were like, oh, wait, what, oh my God, what if a

government actually did that? And my kids, my kids are looking

at it going, what are you talking about, dad? The government is already doing that.

We're just falling into their trap, so to speak. And it doesn't matter if they're

a Democrat or Republican, they're both doing it. So to, to

my kids, that single source of Big Brother

that was, is, is represented in 1984 as one political

party in my kids views. It's just the government

is the government. They, they think that, that regardless of the

parties that, that they represent, they would represent that whole thing. And

I, I think that, I think they would read that book and go

and yeah, like I think, I don't think, I don't think it would be like,

like I said, we've all said it was impactful to us. I don't think it

would be impactful to them the same way because I think that they, they would

feel like they're already living it. What, what might surprise them and what

I, what I think what I would love to hear or see is if

any one of them could, could wrap a bow around the fact

that this book was written 80 years ago like that. That

I think I would like to see what that association would be. But I don't

think the content of the book would, would surprise them as much as it did

us. Yeah,

I, I think I, I think probably 10th grade

is what I think just development stage

wise. That's when we're trying to find where we're trying to find our tribe. Right.

We really want to isolate. I think political activism has started in 9th

grade now. So I think we have to start recognizing the fact that children are

more political today than they ever were. I just

think the big difference is that at least. So I read this

in I think 2000.

For me it was we, we the students were the

ones asking the questions. I think we're a post question

asking educational system. I think we're in a prompt

delivery education system. So I think that we have to get.

It'd be fascinating to listen to see them do it.

Tom, to your point, I think, I do think that

there are some radical advantages that kids today have

that we don't have just in terms of awareness.

I think that they're hyper aware and maybe that's what all the mental health stuff

is about. But I think it'd be interesting because when I'm,

when I have my experience working with people under the age of 23, I'm very

prompt driven. I have to present a series of secular

prompts in sequence and out of that

just a wonderful array of different ideas come out of it. But they're not

self driving those questions. They're not self invoking. Like

I'm thinking about this because I would love what I would the prompt again to

what I would love to ask them is going is if this was

the vision 80 years ago. Use your minds guys. What is your

vision? Right? What is the multiplier

effect that you kids can see going 80 years into the

future? Because I think that that would also be a fascinating thing to watch them

because yeah, I think that's a really good question. I don't know the

answer. I just think that 9th and 10th grade and maybe you

have to put the book on audio and maybe you have to kind of watch,

kind of prompt them through listening to pieces by pieces of it.

But I don't think the material is above their head. I think that they're definitely

ready for it. I think I, I think I

read it my junior year, so 11th grade, but I'm fine. Like I said, I'm

fine. 10 or 11 is fine with me. Either one of those I think would

be fine. I'm fascinated by the idea of

prompt of prompt, a prompt delivery based

system versus a post question asking

system or maybe not possible pre question

asking system. I'm going to get back to that because there's a fundamental difference.

I'm doing a lot of work, interestingly enough, in some other work that I'm doing

with other clients out of my leadership consultancy.

I'm currently doing a lot of work with the four major LLMs.

So I'm working with Perplexity, I'm working with Copilot, I'm working with Claude,

and I'm working with ChatGPT. And the way,

David, to your point, the way that you think in

relation to those systems is a fundamentally different way of

thinking than search based thinking which

comes out of Google and which is what we're all all sort of very

familiar with. So it is a different way of thinking. It's interesting that you, that

you brought that up. Okay, let's turn the corner here

and talk a little bit about some of my personal problems with this book

and then I'll use this to jump off to other folks with this.

So yes, I did kind of chuckle at it. I tried to take the

book seriously, I did on its own merits and I failed miserably at

probably at doing that. And the biggest reason, I think I failed miserably at it.

And by the way, this really began to happen to me when we, when we,

as we got more into the book and as Orwell began to develop more of

the ideas that Winston was beginning to

articulate. Right. So right around the middle of

book one and going into book two, Winston

begins to. And it's almost as if

weirdly enough, from a literary perspective, it's almost as if Orwell

didn't have enough for two more sections in this book.

And so he had to come up with the woman foil because

anyway, he had to come up with the woman foil. And so he creates the

character Julia and she is a about as one

dimensional character as I've ever seen. In literature.

And, and. And there is one line in here when. When

she first, you know, sort of engages with him

and Winston is. Is growing and is thinking and

is. And is moving, but he

thinks about her in a particular way. And one of the things. A

couple things he says. He says, number one, that her. Her.

Her sexuality and her. Yeah, here we go. With

Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. The sex impulse

was dangerous to the party. And because the sex impulse was dangerous to the party,

every act of sexual engagement that they had in the book

was a act of protest and an act of

rejection of the party. Which, by the way, I will

say this as a person who's been married a long, long time.

I've never. Even when I was single, I never met a person. And then immediately,

like, boom. Like, just went to the thing. I don't know how it works now,

apparently I hear that that happens a lot now. It did not happen for me

that way. There was some sort of seduction there. And I presumed that even more

in the 1940s there would be some form of seduction. But then I went back

and read, read, read and looked a little bit at Orwell, and I think Orwell

struggled with women. So there you go. I don't think he knew

how to write that. So Winston literally meets Julia. She drops a note in

his hand, and then, like, they're off to the races. It's.

It's weird. It's the 1940s version of, like,

OnlyFans or

Tinder. Yeah, it's the 1940s version of

Tinder. Hand to hand Tinder.

So. So. So he's got these ideas, right, wrapped around this

one dimensional character of Julia, and

it becomes more and more clear as he, you

know, starts to set up. Try to set up a relationship with her, and he's

trying to find a place to meet her that's away from the telescreens. And then

he meets this guy, Mr. Charrington, who eventually turns out to be something else. But

we'll leave that aside for just a moment. It becomes more and more clear to

me, or became more and more clear to me as I was reading the book,

that what Orwell was writing was protest

literature. It was protest literature against the Stalinist

regiment. It was also protest literature against capitalism. Because some of the

things he says in the book about capitalism, I'm like, that's not. That's. I don't

think that that is what you think it means. But he's coming. Well, he's

coming at it, and I have to give forgiveness so one of the principles that

I have, whenever I read something that's from the mid century of the United States

or of the west, going all the way back into like the

1890s or 1880s, I give those people grace

because they didn't know about gulag

there in. The idea of a concentration camp where you would put your political enemies

was not a reality for them.

When. When Communism was first pitched by Lenin

and the Marxist ideals were first pitched by Lenin,

and Stalin wasn't running anything yet and Trotsky was still

alive, everybody thought this could work. Everybody thought

this was absolutely a new way of creating a new man. They weren't saying it

in an ironical, cynical, nihilistic way. That all came after World War

II. We actually talked a little bit about this with Tinder Is the Night, because

this kind of popped up with Tender Is the Night. You also had the. The

old ending of the Victorian colonialism, right?

And so historically, you have this brew. And then the shock of World War I

came, and then people finally were like, oh, my God, like, wait, the institutions

failed. Holy crap, what are we going to do? And so there's this holy

crap moment that happens between the end of World War I and the beginning of

World War II, where all the idealism and everything else is just sort of up

in the air. And this is what Orwell came out of. So Orwell's writing a

protest novel with all of that underneath him. And I did find myself agreeing

with James Baldwin's idea, which he writes in his

book Notes of a Native Son, where he wrote a critique called

Everyone's Protest Novel about Uncle Tom's Cabin. And one of the

points that he made is that in that novel or in that

essay is that protest literature

is not actually literature. It's just pamphleteering.

And pamphleteering is fine, but we shouldn't treat it as literature. We

shouldn't treat it as a novel. We shouldn't treat it as if it's some erudite

intellectual thing. And James Baldwin, of course, is writing

in the context of, again, Uncle Tom's Cabin. He's writing the context of

civil rights. He's writing in the context of slavery. But

the critique applies here because Orwell was writing protest

literature. He was protesting against Stalinism. He was protesting against

gulags. He was protesting against what he saw as

the.

The. The lack of purity. It's interesting,

in political parties in America, we talk about politics, we talk about purity tests, the

lack of purity in Marxism and the lack of purity in

democratic socialism. He was protesting against that, and

I thought you always get the impression when someone's writing

a protest literature, like, Alice Walker did this with the Color Purple. That was also

protest literature. You always get the impression that they want you to do something

with, with their protests. They want you to take action. It's interesting that David

said that political activism is now replaced, you

know, reading and as a form of identity format, not reading, but as a

method of identity formation. Now, in the ninth grade, that's

insane to me. Like, that's absolutely insane. You don't know anything about anything. When you're

in ninth grade, you're gonna tell me you have some political opinion about

capital gains taxes or something. Like, you don't, you don't

work, you have no money. What

are you getting active about? What are we doing? Active about

what? So that's, I would love to explore that later. Maybe not on the

show. We'll talk about that later. But my point is,

when you're writing, when a writer writes a polemic like this,

he wants you to do something. And so I guess the question is,

what did Orwell want us to do? Totally different question

to what I wrote down, but we're going a totally different direction, which is fine.

So I'm going to start with David, and then we'll move to Claire and then

Tom. David, what does Orwell want us to do with his.

What I think is his protest literature? And you can disagree with that, that framing,

that's fine. But what does he want us to do? What action does he want

us to take? Because I can't tell. Great

question. I, I, My takeaway from all this is I think that Orwell wants us

to choose living naturally. Meaning that I think that Julia is

not a person, but she's the personification of the wild,

untamed nature. That's why he can be a grotesque man

and she still falls for him. Because it's more of a,

it's more of an encounter with this representation.

And at the end, when he get, when he, when he betrays her, he

betrays what? He betrays his own nature, he betrays his own humanity.

I take away from this book that Orwell is asking us

to choose us to always, like, define

maybe a higher order, meaning that there's no reference to a spiritual

north in this book anywhere. And I think that there's an undertone

that if we had a high, like a higher order or a guiding principle within

us, we would, we wouldn't sabotage ourselves. We wouldn't. We

wouldn't for lack of better. I mean, we wouldn't, we wouldn't just

undercut ourselves in these pieces because he. It

feels like all of these encounters. And I think the whole idea of doublespeak

is that because we are not standing for us, we are

not making a declaration that we need to stand for something or we stand for

nothing. It felt like this whole entire book was just

this projection of this lost soul in society

that you don't, you know, you're not, you're not, you don't have allegiance with anything.

Right? So you. And so he is attracted to,

like, the women he finds on the screen, even though he's disgusted

by her. It's like it's because you're rejecting your own nature. At least that was

my takeaway, that every single person in the book is more

of a placeholder of some form, of a deeper thing that

we need to connect with within ourself. Whether it's friendship,

companionship, whether it's sex, whether it's love,

whether it's just loyalty, it seems like all these people are

parts of it. And I think that that's why when he's going back and he's

changing words, he's like, the new speak. He's having this

crazy introspective moment where he's like, what am I doing? Like, what.

What in the world am I? And yet he continues to do it. And it

feels like all of this, this entire book is just herself reflection for me.

So I think that that's what he's asking us to do is just be, Be

introspective.

Claire, what is Orwell asking us to do?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a little bit trite by now, right? But

to say, because we hear it every day, you know, the, the one party that's

not in power tells the other party, think for yourself. Right?

Don't just, don't just take what they tell you on the news because it's not

really news anymore. It's really just an entertainment channel and it's spunning your

own narrative. So I think it's that. But I,

but I think at its core it is also. And David, I think this

is, is in alignment with what you're saying as well.

It's be, be the first one who

does not sort of revert

back to, I'm going to go the path of least resistance. I

peaked my head up out of, you know, out of the foxhole. I got

threatened with rats, didn't like that so much. And therefore I, you know, I, I

gave up the one woman who finally might have loved me because

did I mention the rats? And. Right. And then he just sort

of at the end of it goes, yeah, I just, I, I love Big

Brother and I, and I. So I think if there, if there is

a call to action and we could even debate. Is that really true?

But if there is a call to action, I think it is something around that

it's to say there has to be a first

person character, what have you, that goes into the breach who

doesn't say, well, I tried a little bit. It got uncomfortable.

Yes. So much about love. But you know, do you know the divorce rate? That

wasn't going to work out anyway with Julia. And so. Right. So I think,

I think if there is a call to action, it's that be, be the first

one, because there has to be a first one who is going to

rise above. And you could probably make the same argument about the

Color Purple, about a lot of the other protest type

narratives that they're saying. We, we can't. There, there

always has to be one who breaks the barrier.

Look, I think he's not, not to jump on

the bandwagon here, but I mean, it seems like a pretty easy question to

answer. Right. Like, I just. The way you put it, Clara, I think the two

of you guys are kind of saying the same thing, just different ways. And I'm

going to say a third way. I think he's giving us a

roadmap on how to lose our individualities. Right. Like, I think that's what

one of the things that he. That's like an underlying tone of the book. Like

you are not an individual anymore. You're just going to conform. And you know, Claire

used the, the term conform and you know, David, you used.

Used it a little differently, but it's, it's essentially he's giving us the roadmap and

I think it's a warning to your point. It's like, it's like a warning sign.

Like, hey, don't. Don't allow this to happen. Like, you have to, you have

to fight the power. We've been talking about fighting the man. I don't even

forever. Right. He's just adding. He's just, he's just giving it to you in a

kind of, in a way that he thinks is going to, to like really hit

and resonate with you is like two plus two equals five.

Right. Like, that's the whole, the whole thing. Like, because they said so.

And you just can't fight that. You're just gonna. To your point, you're going to

conform to that. And I, I think

that there's more to it than, than just someone has

to fight back. I think the whole point of it is that he's showing you

that we all have to, all of us have to fight back. He can't be

an individual like you. You can't just say, like,

listen, I, I've seen enough post apocalyptic movies and read

enough of these books. If you get that one person that just raised the hand

and goes, hey, this is wrong, boom. They shoot that person and nobody else wants

to say anything. So, you know, like, it's, it can't be. The problem

solves itself. Yeah. See, it, it

can't be. It's basically like, you know, one of those things where,

you know, the sum of the parts have to

be greater than the, than the, the parts themselves. Right. Like, I forget, I,

I always forget how to, how that phrase goes. I always mess it up. But,

but the reality of it is it can't just be one person

sitting in a, in a room rewriting history. As, as you may mentioned,

David, you can't just be that one person. Go, hey, this is wrong.

I shouldn't be doing this. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go start a riot. I'm

gonna go start a revolt. I'm gonna start a revolution.

Has to like you, There has to be something to fight the machine.

You have to, you need a machine to fight the machine. You can't, like, you

know, that's like, it's like going into a, you know, into a. What was

that the movie Real Steel with the robot fighters.

That's like going in the ring with the robot fighter. I'm not, I'm gonna lose

that fight. Well, I think

that's, but I think that's a common. Claire, you use the term trite.

Yeah, we use the term trope. That's a common trope, right?

Of these, of science fiction novels. I mean, heck, even Isaac Asimov,

the link that I sent out to everybody, Isaac Asimov's critique of 1984,

which was a really well written critique by a guy who wrote a lot of

science fiction. And even he, he was like,

really like, what are we, what are we doing here? Like, I'm a professional

writer. This is not, this is not the thing.

So I, I, I look at the trope and

I look at, I was

born in the late 70s. I came of age after all this was over. Like,

it's, it's sort of like I came of age after the rebel, after Big Brother

was Already installed. The rev. Already over. Like, what am I revolting against?

Right? Like sometimes the black community,

depending upon, like, what the ages of the black folks have to be sitting around

the room together, eventually somebody will bring up Malcolm and Martin,

and eventually then somebody else will bring up crack cocaine, and then that ends the

conversation. Like, this is because, like, it's over. Like, the revolution's over.

And, you know, I take from that, as an. As a person in the African.

As an African American person, the person who lives in that community

are. And engages with that community sometimes I take from that. That

weirdly enough, kind of like Glenn Lowry and John McWhorter,

I take from that you've won the freedom

to go off and to Tom's point, be an individual. You've run. You've won

the freedom to go off and do that. You don't need a revolution anymore. Now.

What you need is. I've been saying this word a lot more often lately. You

need a reformation of systems, a reformation of

institutions, because the. The unique things that

created the environment for a revolution are over.

Like those.

Like, you know, those. Those dynamics are done.

And by the way, if you don't believe me. If you don't believe me,

say what you want about blm, they tried to start a revolution.

And where are we at today? Where's the revolution?

If I think. Or even going back. Or even going back one second, David. Even

going back further. Occupy Wall Street. I remember. I'm old enough

to remember when Occupy Wall street of the Bernie Bros. Were out there, I walked

past some of those in campus because I was living and working in New York.

Well, not living, but working in New York City. I talked to some of those

people. Revolution is over. Broke the Tea Party people. The

revolution is over, bro. You lost. To paraphrase

for the Big Lebowski, do what your parents did, sir. Go get a job.

So, like, what are we? What. I get it. That Orwell

is passionate. This is Baldwin's critique, also with African American novelists

specifically. This is his. Was his specific critique even in the

50s, particularly with Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.

We are at a point where the mode for

revolution has shifted,

and we need a different word, I think. But the only words that were

offered in 1984, to everybody's point here, are words that would

inspire revolution. So what are we? I'm. You know, I. I don't know what to

do with that. Go ahead, David. Sorry, I didn't mean. I did not mean to

cut you off. No, no, it's fine.

So my My job is very unique because when people come and they're talking to

me about meaning making, I don't ask people what they're living for. I

ask what they're willing to die for. And I think that that's a fundamental

piece that is missing. And I think that that's almost like the comparison between

1984 and like the Matrix idea is that

Neo was willing to die for something. He's no longer standing. I want

to live for this. And I think that when we think about blm, my only

criticism about that is no one was willing to die for. For blm. I

think everyone was living for a world that BLM could create. But I

don't think that people were willing to die for that. And I think that's a

massive, just shift. And there's a. Almost like this invisible

wall there, because if you go to like the World War II generation,

right, there's a very staunch difference in attitude

and. Or how they look at America, right,

Versus every generation that's come because there was an existential threat like, I'm

willing to die for this. And I think that a lot of the generations have

compoundingly been focusing on what am I living for? It seems

nuanced, but I think it's everything. And I think when we think about

meaning making and we think about the book, and I think that maybe that's. I

was. Claire, when you were talking, it kind of struck me like

maybe that's an underlying message here. Is that.

Is Orwell Is. Is. Was Winston even willing to die

for change? Or was he just trying to find a reason to live?

Right, because finding a reason to live is different than something findings like, I'm willing

to die for this cause. And so, I don't know. There's an idea that was

coming to my head when you were talking because, I mean, no one gets to

the answers in psychotherapy going, what are you living

for? Nobody answers the question.

But if I ask people, what are you willing to die for?

Amazingly, three or four themes come out of everybody, and all of a sudden you

start having a very different conversation. Well, and

you. So I. I love that. And I don't think that's a. That's a small

distinction. I think it's huge. I think one of, one of the.

So first of all, the short answer to your question, no, I don't think Winston

was. Was willing to die because again, did we mention the rats?

Right? So he's willing to forego the idea of maybe some.

Some torture light for, you know, to, to

in the balance of true love. I think what makes for me

1984 deeply unsatisfying is there's no,

there's no triumph at the end. Winston, you know,

the hero didn't win. Well, the hero didn't win because

Winston didn't win and Winston wasn't a hero. I mean, coming back to

your, you know, your earlier observation about this isn't really deeply

developed characters. Hasan, you

had mentioned my all time favorite movie earlier when you said the

Shawshank Redemption. One of the things that makes that

movie so powerful is it's deeply unfair throughout the

entire movie treatment of our protagonist, the

hero, etc. But there's a, in the title of the

movie, there's a redemption. You know, it started out as a Stephen King short story

and it became this massively just powerful movie to

me because there was a, there was a triumph at the end. There was a,

there was a hero and he got his redemption. We don't see that in 1984.

So for me, the ending is deeply unsatisfying because it's like he

did think he was going to be part of a revolt and a, and a

rebellion, but he wasn't willing to lead it from the front. He was

just willing to follow somebody different from who he was told to follow.

And at the end it didn't matter and he just went back to conforming

more completely. Tom,

you had a thought when David was talking. I saw across your face.

Well, I, my, I, I, it's,

it's hard. It's right. I, I think, I think to say

that, you know, movements that die because. No, that people aren't willing

to die for that. I, I think that I, I'm not sure how I feel

about that because specifically about the BLM movement, which is really where I, where I

kind of hit me. I was like, people did die for that. They just died

prior to the movement starting. But they were the catalyst, right? Like, so they, they,

people were dying for BLM before they knew it was blm,

right? Like, so there have been people to stand on the side of

principle for the black community and die over it. We just didn't label

it as BLM until somebody put a label on it after the fact. Now, I

do agree, once you started the BLM movement, it kind of died off for probably

that reason. I'm not, I'm not going to argue that. But to say

nobody died for BLM is probably a slight

miscalculation of words. Back, back to the book part of

it though, you know, it's Weird. And I don't know how this relates to the

book at all. It just sparked into my brain because my daughter and I had

a conversation a couple of weeks ago that I think kind of to your point,

David, about like the generations of. And what they're fighting for or what they

would die for and so on and so forth. And my daughter and I got

into a conversation about the difference, the differences in the

generations themselves and where there was a, a

really, a big drop off in, in her brain. In her

brain, in the, the mannerisms and the ways in

which we interact with each other from Gen X to the

millennials. Like so there's, there's this huge gap of, of the

way that, and quite honestly, I don't think

the, the, the views of Gen X to the, to

the Greatest generation are as far away as people think

they are as compared to the Gen X and the Millennials. I think that is

leaps and bounds away from the idealisms and the way that we think.

And then the millennials to the Gen Zs are even

more. I think the, I think that the, it's like, it's like

compounding the problem, right? Like we're, and when we were talking about

this, I had said, yeah, because there's nothing that has happened in the generations,

lives that have mattered. If you think about it, every generation before

them had some impactful event that happened to them. World

War II, Vietnam, etc. Etc. Ours was 9

11. When 911 hit, there was a dramatic

change in what you would die for in this country. People were becoming, they went

back to patriotism. They wanted to go join the military and die for the country

because they, they just couldn't fathom what just happened on US soil.

That was only 22 years ago. 24, 24 years ago. That

was, that was not that long ago. But the two generations that I've mentioned

were way too young to live through it and have it impact them. Right? So

I think, I think there's, I think there's a lot of,

a lot of unknowns when you ask that question to a Gen

Xer or older. They probably can answer that question a lot

easier and faster than millennials and younger. So

spinning this back to the book at least a little bit, I think is I,

I think that's part of the problem, right, that people, when they read this book

and you're. I think you're right, David. Where there's nothing in this book

that says that I would die to protect that or die to, to

eradicate that. There's no, either way, there's nothing

clear that says, this is so bad, somebody should do something about

it, or it's so positive that we should all fight for it.

There's no impactful thing that happens in 1984 that

clearly defines who the protagonist really is. Because to your point, Claire, I

think it's dead on. You can't get behind Winston as a

protagonist. He's just not that right. He's not. He's not a

hero. But that's. I think that's the underlying problem with the

book. In that critique that you were talking about, Islam was like,

that's what it is. There's no. There's no impact. There's no

singular impactful event that makes you think yay or nay

on whether this book is right or wrong or. There's no moral compass. There's no.

Like, there's no. Although us reading it, we have

moral compasses. So when we read the book, we feel a certain way and

we read it and know that we wish or don't. Like, we want it to

go this way or that way. And the fact is, it just doesn't. It just

kind of ends. Right. Like. It does. Yeah, it just sort of

stops. Right. Like, just sort of in the. But

anyway. Anyway. Right. It sort of stops, like, in the middle of a sentence or.

Like, it's very clear. It's very French. It's a very French

book. Wait, didn't we use that same phrase for

Tenders? We did. We did use it, actually. We did.

Well, there's something. So there's something interestingly inherent in

writers who write in a British. More British

mode than writers who write in a more American mode. So if you're

writing more in an American mode, like, even a writer, like.

What's his name? Cormac McCarthy, right. In blood

Meridian or the Road or no country for Old Men or

whatever. Like, even the most sort of. For lack of a better

term. And I like Clint Eastwood, too, as a director. I put Clint Eastwood of

Cormac McCarthy in the same box in my head, because they're just saddle bastards. Like,

I watched Gran Torino a few. Few weeks ago. They just write. They just write

saddle bastard books and they write sad. They reduce saddle bastard movies. Like, they're just

sad at the end. And. But, But. But there's a. There's a

redemption arc that's built into that because they're still Americans, fundamentally.

Right. But people writing

in a British mode, even if they're Americans, they adopt that British mode. Please. The

British are very much influenced by the French. They don't want to admit it, but

the French are okay with an open ending sort of, ah,

let me go over here and have some wine and baguettes, you know, and then

we're done, you know, or, or, you know, or we're all going to

be nihilists, but we're going to have good food at the end.

If you eat terrible food over there. Yeah, well, the British

aren't on board with the food thing, but they are on board with the,

with the sort of, for lack of a better term,

cynicism and disillusionment and just sort of saying that this is just the thing. That

as it is, there is no happy ending here. And I don't know if that's

the knock on effect from the end of colonialism and from the

decline of the Victorian empire or

if that comes specifically out of the

British experiences that happened during World War I, which are still impacting the

continent and still impacting this globally today. Something

that everybody has talked about here. This is my next point and then we'll move

on. But something that everybody's talked about here and I think we have to touch

on this. And David kind of kicked it off, but

Claire, you also picked it up and then Tom, you didn't, you didn't mention it

at all. Probably because we don't actually usually talk about this on the show. So

it's not something that we've, we've sort of touched on earlier. But

the, the main critique that I probably had against

Orwell even before, or not Orwell, but against 1984, even before

reading it and then reading it, it sort of jumped out to me even before

the Baldwin critique was the lack of a transcendent

belief system. So we

know in Communist Russia,

we know this for a fact, Stalinist Russia

that Orwell was, was actively writing against

Orthodox Christianity was strong. We

know this. We have clear historical evidence for this. People prayed,

people did vigils, people prayed in the Gulags. Again,

Solzhenitsyn brings this up. He even mentions that there were people in the

Gulag who came in atheists and walked out Orthodox Christians

and there were people who came in Orthodox Christians and walked out atheists.

That is the transcendent piece. I don't know how Orwell missed that,

but that's the transcendent piece in here. And when

you talk about what will people, what are you willing to die for

in our own time? Everybody who follows Islam

in a radical fashion knows exactly the answer to that question.

They know it. And by the way their main critique against the West. Let me,

let me, let me restate radical Islam's main critique against the West.

You're not willing to die for anything. We are. We beat you. We

eat your culture.

Convert or die. And I'm simplifying,

but that's the message. That's the message. That's the message. They've been

screaming at us for 50 years.

They know what they're willing to die for. They're willing to die for a transcendent

idea. I would assert that politicians don't understand this,

particularly Western politicians don't understand this. And thus they say that the language,

that language that comes from a state of transcendence or from an understanding of the

transcendence, it's just naive people and just, if we give them enough

factories and like Netflix, they'll turn into

Westerners. And I don't, I don't think that's,

I don't think that's the truth. I think that's fundamentally missing something about

transcendence. And I can speak to this a little bit as a

Christian who tries to live out and walk out Christian principles

and believes that there is a soul and there is a God and I will

have to answer to, to him when I show up there and there is

someplace I am going that has nothing to do with evolution or biology.

Okay. When you speak out of that language, you write

out that language, your narrative becomes different. Orwell didn't have any of that. Orwell

believed that religion was the opiate of the masses. He, he really did believe that

whole Marxist thing. He never wrote anything about religion. I don't think he fundamentally understood

it. It's missing from 1984. So the question

here is, if Winston had had a

religion, would Winston have been more of a hero?

Would the protagonist actually have been a hero? Tom, I'm going

to start with you. I'm going to go all the way around. Tom. David. And

then, Claire, you'll have the final word on this. I,

I don't know. I, I don't know if I would, I'm not sure I would

classify it the way that you just classified it. Well, okay,

how would you, how would you classify it, then? Well, I'm just saying, like, I

don't know if I don't. I, I mean, I understand,

like, what you're saying, you know, radical Islam, I get all that. And then,

yeah, whether, whether it's Christian values or any other,

you know, religious belief system. I'm not sure.

How do I word this? I, I, I mean, maybe if you want to, if

you want to say, like, if you're trying to, if you're trying to lean toward

a yes or a no, I would probably have to say yes. Just because it

would give. What we were talking about a few minutes ago, it would at least

give him that moral compass. Right. Like, again, because

to, to David's point when he mentioned, like, there's no,

there's no North Star here. There's no, you know, religious or moral compass,

North Star, there's nothing for him. So. And again,

even if going with the, the. I was gonna say

the Brotherhood, because I was just thinking of a different book, by the way. Oh,

yeah, yeah, yeah. If I was. He was going with, with,

you know, with the, you know, Big Brother, Y,

at least he would still be considered a hero because he went with his moral

compass. Right. Even if that for him, if that was the right way to go.

But like I said before, there was no to him. There was no right or

wrong in making that decision. It didn't feel to me like he had to make

a right or wrong decision. And if he did have some sort of religious

in instinct or a religious teaching or background, then

you could lean on that moral compass for whichever way he's selected and

call him the hero. To your point, you know, when

you're on your statement, like, we can't call him a hero at this point, but

maybe you can if he's standing on something of some

sort of principle. But. So I, If I had to say yes or no, then

yes. I mean, I think it would be. You'd have no choice but to call

him. But to, but to say he was the hero. He was the hero. Okay.

I. I think it really depends. Does Winston

honor his belief? Right? Does it, does he. Does he honor it? Or is

like, is he a fair weather believer in whatever he believes in?

Right. I mean, so if we take the premise that

Winston believes in something, whether it's religious, whether it's secular,

but he believes in something and that's. Something

pushes him to, again, be that singularity, be that person. Like

you were saying, the one person says, no, I don't care. I have

integrity with my belief and I'm. If I'm the only one in the room

and that. Then fine, I'm going to be that only person in the room. I

think if there was a splash of that, I think the book would read entirely

differently and I think that that would have a very, very different

feel to it. I don't necessarily need a book to have a happy

Ending or have this kind of, like this. This kind of wonderful

resolution at the end of it. I think there's a lot of stories in history

that don't, but I think what those tragic stories lead to,

if there's this presence of, I was standing for this, I was fighting

for this. I was. I was holding some kind of moral

ground for myself or others. I think the tragedy in

that person's story becomes like the fuel that fires that kind of

burns someone else's fire. It becomes like we learned that that person

died doing this or fighting for this. And then we hear that,

and that becomes this very powerful thing for the next people. Right?

Become a next generation, next whoever hears the story. I mean, think

about, like, the whole idea of, like, you know, Leonidas, the Spartans, the whole idea

behind that. Just as one eye just off the top, like, he

died at the same time. The way he died made all the difference.

Right. And so I think that. That, to answer your question, I think it

depends on, does he, like, does

he. Does he stay true to this? And is he willing to kind of dig

his heels in to go, this is who I am. Good, better and different versus

him going, this is what I believe, and it's not convenient, so I'm not going

to do it.

Claire? Yeah, my. My

thought on that, I think, Tom, you. You already

said it. I think very well in terms of, you know, the lack of a.

And you were echoing David's comment about the North Star.

If we. If we get hung up on, if he were a religious

person, would this have been a different spin? If we change that to,

if he were a moral person, would there be a different spin? And

I do think the answer is yes. I think

what we're struggling with with Winston is

not his lack of religion, it's his lack of morality. He

did not make decisions in the book based on a belief

that something was right or wrong. It was based on an avoidance of pain.

Right. So you could say, if you really want to boil it

down, was he a coward? And therefore that's why

we could never contemplate him being a hero. Yeah, I

could probably. I could probably live with that as being a

statement on. On, you know, the character or the lack

thereof of Winston. But I do. I do think it comes down to he

lacks. Tom, you said it. He lacks a moral compass. There,

there. So he was amoral. He wasn't immoral. He was amoral.

And he made his choices not based on a moral code, but based on

avoidance of pain.

Okay. Okay. I don't Know

what to think about. I don't know what to think about all the, all y'

all with on this. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna. Well, you

know what? This is, this is why I talk to people who were kind of

all over the map, all over the place for me. I don't. I'm not living

in an echo chamber here. Right. Hey, son. Not to interrupt. Do

you, do you, do you need. Are you thinking that

it's his lack of like its lack of

belief or religiosity or that that is the reason

why he lacks that moral compass? Because I think that

the three of us are maybe taking it from saying that's one possibility, but

I think it's the other side of the coin that's equally opportune to think about

as saying that morality can exist self derived

as a reflection of the society. Right.

I guess that's my question for you is how are you determining

morality? Right. So that. Well, yeah, that's a good

question. So I fundamentally believe that everyone

comes with a world view and a worldview comes from somewhere. I find

I do fundamental. That's like sort of my fundamental, like things. Right.

And we, we don't often

articulate our worldview because we don't actually know the concrete foundation

that it sits on. And most people haven't done the hard work,

the introspective work, such as it were, or even the critical thinking work to

determine where that worldview came from. Who laid the concrete,

should it be all dug up? This is why you have a job, David. Like

people don't do that work and then they build things on top of it and

it struggles and falls apart and collapses. Right. Usually around my

age, like in the mid-40s. So to answer your question, I

do think that religion has to inform

morality. I think we've done a really interesting job in the secular

west of trying to separate both of those two. And

when you separate both of those two, I think you might. I think the clearing

at the end of the path is the meaning crisis recurring currently in.

Because if my morals are separated from a religious foundation,

and that's why I brought up Islam on purpose, I didn't bring up Christianity

because let's face the moral, let's base it on Islam. That's fine. The way we

could talk about the Quran and it doesn't come weighted with all the stuff that

the Bible comes weighted with. Okay, fine. If we're going to base it on the

Quran. Cool. You separate the Quran from morality.

Now you have people who are living or making decisions in a place of

moral laxity. Right.

And that then influences how, and I think Orwell would agree with this

part, it influences how people use language, which we're going to talk about

here in just a minute, because I think that that's actually the core of his

idea. It influences how people talk about ideas,

influences how people build institutions. And fundamentally, which is of

course the point of all this in the podcast, which of course we're going to

get, we're going to wrap up with. It influences how leaders lead.

And I think we are naive to the point

almost of danger to.

And I would even assert we're sometimes past the point. We're somewhere past the point

of danger. Actually. We're well into the wild of not understanding

the link between religion and morality or saying that it

does not exist. Which is why I said, okay, let me

think about that some more because I'm willing to,

to consider a majority point

of view and I'm willing to have my point of view be the minority report.

That's fine. But let's just. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Let's see where we wind up at. At the end of the, at the end

of the road. Right. And I think one of the

things that, so Orwell wasn't going to write anything that he didn't

understand or know about this is why Julia is

a one dimensional character. He didn't really

understand women. Wasn't, wasn't there something. What's, I read something

somewhere that said Julia was loosely based on his, his second

wife. Like the, the. Yeah, so. Yeah, so.

So it's not that she, it's not that he viewed it as he was writing

it, that she was an empty character. It was just his experience with his

wife. Is that, that's what we're led to believe at this. Yes,

yes. And I mean, marriage is hard.

Relationships are hard. You know,

and that's all I'll say about that because we all, we all know what I

mean here. Like, you know, relationships are hard. Marriage is hard. None of this

is easy. And if you're already a person who

just personality wise, again, looking at Orwell's Wikipedia

write up and some other things. If you're already a person who's sort of struggling

with what your status is and then you're, you're, you're

marrying somebody and then you're expecting to build a life with them,

but they're also struggling with that, that's going to come out in your writing and

there's going to Be clearly things that you are going to be blind to. So

I think he was blind to. To women as a

three dimensional character. As a three dimensional character in his. In his book. I also

think he was blind to, you know, religion because

Marxist ideas about religion impediments have influenced his

thinking. And I think that that blindness leads you

to create certain characters and situations in

1984, that when you're asking me to do something as

protest literature, there's a piece of this puzzle that is missing.

And the piece of that puzzle that's missing is what we've been talking about here.

What are you willing to die for?

So that's sort of my twisted

windy hook. David, answer to your question. I don't know if that got

where you were looking for, but close enough.

Close enough. Okay, that's fine. Cool. I almost hit the target. All right,

it's good. All right,

so we do. Let's turn the corner here. Let's turn the corner because we've talked

about the two main themes of the book. We've talked about. Well, one of the

main things, we talked about Orwell as a writer and we've talked about the meaning

of 1984. What we should take from it. I guess we should. Let's touch on

totalitarianism and dystopia. So

Orwell says, and this is for politics in the English language. I love, I do

actually love this quote from him. I think this is dead on from him. He

says our civilization is decadent and our language, so the argument runs,

must inevitably share in the general collapse.

The same thing is happening to the English language, he says later on in the

same essay. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts

are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier

for us to have foolish thoughts. Sort of a chicken and an

egg idea, by the way. Later on in

40 years later, the critic Harold Bloom would bring up this critique as

well when he would talk about, Interestingly enough, the

1980s, when some of us on this call were in high school

or in middle school, would talk about how

the. The American mind was shifting and there was a lack of

critical thinking that was going on, right? So Orwell was consumed. This was his big

bugaboo. And I'll grant him this, his big bugaboo was the English language. What are

we doing with the English language? Is the English language tight? Is the English language

actually expressing our thoughts in a clear, and I've taken to

talking about this way, serious manner?

1984 didn't become a dystopic novel until

after Orwell's death. And

it kind of irks me because I think, I think of it in terms

of. Just like he does with the English language and the foolish thoughts. I think

of it in terms of chicken and egg. Which came first, 1984 or

totalitarianism? Did one inform the other?

Did we already have these tendencies in our government and in our institutions

and 1984 just laid them out for us where we could all see them? Or

now let me go all conspiracy minded here. Did the Council on Foreign Relations

and the Trilateral Commission utilize George Orwell in order

to get these ideas out there to soften up the public so they could do

them all later? Because they operate on a 500 year long timeline

versus the rest of us who barely operate on a 10 minute timeline. Right.

And they relied on all of us to forget was George

Orwell a CIA plant? You know, these are the

things in my conspiratorial mind that begin to work

with 1984. Right.

I do think we live in times where the

dystopic elements of 1984 are evidence around

us. This is, I would agree with, with the younger generations here. We do already

have things watching us. So I mentioned this before. We do already have social

control. We do already have bad food and speech codes. The only

thing we are missing is like the one world uniform. That's the only thing we're

missing, like where we all get to wear the jumpers like together because we're

all on one team. I remember a comedian years ago made a joke about how

like if the aliens ever come down, we all don't have a uniform. We need

the Earth uniform that says we're from Earth, like this is the jumper,

you know, because apparently in the future everybody dresses in just one

uniform. You just eliminate the probable clothes like just right

there. We do have digital

gulags. We do have cancel codes, we do have

cancel culture. We do have social norming of speech.

Now we can argue that technology has just, and this is an argument I'm willing

to listen to, technology has just taken our tendencies that we already had to their

logical conclusions. But I think that I

saw something today like 87% of Facebook's revenue comes from

advertising on the platform. Platform. And they're just going to use AI to make

that advertising better. Better for

who? I'm not quite sure. Won't be better for the human

beings who are being advertised too, but it'll be better for somebody.

Whoever's paying. It's gonna be whoever writes the check is going to be better

for them. It's gonna be better for the shareholders of Facebook. That's who's gonna be.

So everybody. Ultimately, yes. Go by shareholders. Go by stock

and Facebook, if you can. I believe it. Today. It's at

$673.94 a share. I believe is what it is at

now.

Oh, I. I think we. I think we got the dystopia

we dreamed about in our fever dreams in the mid 20th century. We got it.

Except the only thing we're missing is replicants and bad uniforms. That's the only thing

we're missing. Like, we got our Blade Runner future. Right? And we also have

slovenly language. Some of the things I've seen

and always. And this is going to be. Claire, you're going to love this. This

is going to be my old man. Get off my porch yelling. You know, about

the language, but, like, the things I see in texting and the

things I see people talking about online, like, is that even English? Like, what are

we talking about here? Like, I don't know what a skibidi toilet is. I have

no idea. I don't want to know. Don't anybody tell me. I don't care.

It doesn't matter. I'm too old to care. And

Tom's laughing because he probably knows what it is better than I do. And I

don't care. I'm just laughing because I. Like, we have rules in my house. My.

All of my kids are adults and we have rules in my house. Like, if

you're not going to use the real word, don't say it like you. If you

say that's sus to me, I'm gonna. I'm just gonna

smack you and you're gonna leave the room. Suspect. That's very

suspect, dad. Like. Like, I

like. Although my nephews yesterday used a

word that I think is so spot on for this generation. They call themselves

screen agers because all they do is walk around on their

phones looking at their screens. I think creating new words like that

are is fine. I have no problem with that. That's more like a pop culture

thing. I'm okay with that. I'm less okay with the

shorthand butchering the actual word. Like, you know, again, let's.

I'm gonna be the man of principle on this conversation. I'm gonna say no to

all of it. I'm gonna be the main principle. This is the line. There has

to be a line. He's got the red line. Gotta draw the line.

I'm gonna be picard in Star Trek, every time we draw

a line, we fall back, and then we draw another line and then we fall

back. No, no, no, it ends here. This

thing is stopping right now. And yes, I have raised three

teenagers. I'm soon to be raising a fourth. I know exactly what I'm talking about.

I've been in the war for a while, so

I know all about lines. I'm all done. Are all gone.

Your war's done. You're. And I got one. I got one on you, by the

way, so. Yeah, you do. You got five.

Tom's revolution is over also. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's. He's well into his

reformation years now. He's ready to be for the

Renaissance.

I guess the question is,

if we take the premise. If we take my premise that we're well into the

dystopia, just with, like, better lighting and better food

and. Maybe you don't have to take my premise. Maybe you can tell me that

my premise is nonsense, which is fine. How do we

create? Well,

say what you want about Donald Trump. He's been running around saying that we're about

to live in a golden age or that we're moving towards a golden age. That

actually. Which is his sort of the Trump version of Ronald

Reagan's Morning in America kind of thing. And I'm not going to

argue about the politics of that. That's not the point of this. I'm merely saying

it's been a long time, a long time since I have

heard a national politician of any stripe talk about how

the future might actually be better.

This is the reason, I think, at a pop culture level, why all of our

dystopias, even like the Hunger Games and things like that, are just recycled

tropes from the mid 20th century, because we

got the things we wanted in our fever dreams. We got the

terrors as well. And now we don't know how to move from the

terror to the utopia. We just know we want it, but we don't know how

to move there. By the way, Peter Thiel wrote that in his book Zero to

One as well. He said that we're deeply pessimistic culture. This is why we're

not innovating correctly. He said, if you look at the Chinese,

they're pessimistic, but they make plans. We're pessimistic, and we make no

plans. Like, that's. That's the only way. That's the

comparison between the two cultures. Right. And I think he's onto something. I

think he's dead. Onto something. And so Donald Trump runs around, talks about

how we. We could live in a golden age in the future, and everybody laughs

at him because that's the pessimism, right? They think he's just a foolish old boomer.

Everybody goes, okay, Boomer, whatever, and, like, moves on.

But I think we have to change our language. I think we have to change

our idea structure. I think we have to break with the mid

20th century. I think we need to build and not

deconstruct. So I guess the larger question that I have here, and we could

break it down into all these other tiny areas if we want, is how can

leaders lead people to a golden age if they don't collectively or

individually even believe in something like that anymore? To my point, when I

was answering David's question, if they don't even underground, if they don't even under.

Understand the substrate of what lives underneath their cynicism and their

nihilism, and they don't even know that it's cynicism and nihilism because they're just living

their lives. Like, how can they build towards

anything golden ever? How can that. How do we

not just wind up just staying in the same spot?

How do we fix this problem? This is the. This is the end of the

show. How do we fix this problem? Let's out with this. How do we fix

this? How do we use 1984 to fix this? Because I

don't know how. This is why I'm asking. I have no idea.

Claire, go ahead. I'm gonna dump this on you, and then. David. Yeah? Thanks.

Thanks. You're welcome. You're welcome. Well, you're. That. You're the English major. You. Yeah,

you got the word. Got the fancy words. I know. I was hoping we were

just gonna dive into language, which I have some thoughts on as well, but, you

know. I think I dive into language. No, no, no. Let me. Let me. I'll.

I'll. I'll speak to the other. Because I do, you know, I do think

it is incredibly hard

to. To attach personal meaning to

this idea of come along and be part of this

golden age when it is said in the same

breath, and, And Donald Trump is saying it now, but he's not the first one

to try to usher it in. Right. It's just that

happens to be the. The current version, but when it is

also said in the same

conversation as these are all the things you should

be fearful of, I think that's what keeps

stunting our ability to actually put our own shoulders to

the wheel. And be willing to die for doing what it takes to

usher in a true golden age. Because it is

built upon a foundation of. This is why

those are other. This is why you need to be part of,

you know, what's. What's better.

And so as long as those things are said in the same breath

as part of the same strategy, we can't get out of the

starting gate.

I like that. I would. I mean, yeah,

the language of today is really, really complex and is really, really frustrating. I. I

think, you know, we have to realize that words are the actual building blocks of

reality. What we speak does become reality. And every historian

and what would say that if you look at every world leader, it's through their

language that they form and shape up the world as it played out.

Nothing happens because we're quiet. Everything happens because people are talking.

And I think when we think about how do we fix the problem?

Again, I always talk to people about building trust. And trust is

an equation. It's predictability plus consistency. We

don't have either one of those things with our leaders. We either get

predictable, but we don't get consistent, or we get consistent, but they're not predictable.

And so there's always these nuanced differences in what we have. And so we're

left always clear to your point going, can we. Can

I believe you? Like, I want to believe you? I want to walk forward to

it. You know, I think how we fix the problem

is, is that it seems to me just all I

do is talk with people. And it's very unique. Talking with people in

two different parts of the country at the same time. That's wild to see the

perspective of that happen. Has the one thing that's

universal is that it's, It's. It needs to be a

grassroots up, not top down. I think that's how you change

everything, is that we have got to get out of this megaphone

leadership style that we've had in every single culture that I can remember.

You know, I think, yeah, messaging is great, right? The slogan's great. Make

America. Make America great Again, Great slogan. I

can't knock him for the slogan, but I think that the jury is still out

for me and going, okay, that's just words. And we need to show we need

to see this. And I think it comes down to, again, how are we.

If we're going to go to a golden age as people, then it starts in

the communities. It starts in our neighborhoods. It starts in our. Like, how do

we frame our local. Like, how do the States become great. Like, how

does each individual state kind of come together and do that? I think if

we're going to become great again or if we're going to pull ourselves out.

To your point earlier, Hassan, I don't think we're in the dystopian future at all.

In fact, I think that we are at a very interesting schism. I think that

we're just at this very interesting crossroads in our society where we have

been kind of like Prometheus playing with all of

these tools, and we've kind of. Some things are wonderful and some things are

extremely volatile, but I don't think we've crossed into that threshold yet.

I think that there's still a lot of potential for good and a lot of

potential for positivity. But I think we're reading reaching

this very unique fork in the road as a society and as a world population.

We're going to have to come together and choose, like, which path we're going

to go. Ben, that's above my pay grade to know what we're going to do

with that. But I think when it comes down to how do we fix it.

Yeah, it's when we start focusing on what we do. Tom, I like when you

said, like, we have house rules with we say the full word. I think that's

a phenomenal example of what I'm talking about. It starts there. Well,

then if that steps into local community activities and schools

and we say we have to get rid of this, we have to have some

kind of, again, holding the line idea that you were talking about. If we have

to have some form of a grassroots starting point

that pulses out and then that starts to become.

The thing that I think will change everything about our society is that

we just have to reverse. The messaging has to come from

the other, the exit point of the megaphone. It has to go towards the cone

versus the other way around.

Tom, the podcast. Podcast audience is not like dead air. Go ahead.

It's not like what? It's not like dead air. Oh.

Look, I think, I think this, this question is

a moot point. And let me, let me explain why. First of all,

this is all definition, right? It's like, so who's going to decide

what the golden age is and what it isn't? Who's going to make that determination?

Is it going to be. Is it going to be our president? Is it going

to be the president of some other country? Is it going to be some

world global committee that somebody gets together and who's to

say that that Committee is going to define something that I consider my golden

age. Like, I, I, I think that, I think that what we're,

like I said, I, I made a comment earlier about, about 1984, giving

us the road map to a lack of individuality. And I think this

kind of question is the exact same thing, because

I think the golden age is going to be determined by us individually. Like, my,

what I think is whether I agree with you or not, whether we're in the,

this, this dystopian c set of circumstances already or

not, or it's coming or it's past, or I

think how things impact you individually is way

more valuable to

you as a leader. If you're, Again, we're trying to. The way you

phrase, the question is how do leaders bring this

into, into a golden age? And I think it's, we find

our own people, right? If I'm a leader of a company, I'm hiring the people

that are going to be, that are gonna want to believe in what I believe

in, and I don't care whether it's religious or moral or

immoral. You could be the worst person on the planet. If

some, if you get a group of people to follow you and they think you're

the greatest thing since sliced bread, then who the hell is going to tell you

that you're the worst person on the planet, right? Like, you have a whole

faction of people that are following you, telling you you're great. Like,

and I'm not suggesting that we follow terrible people, by the way. I'm just, I

mean, all I'm saying is I think, I think that this

idea of how can leaders bring us

to this golden age? I'm not following

a leader that has already decided that there's a

golden age. If I don't believe in what that golden age looks like, I'm not

following that leader. So whether Trump is or isn't or

whomever, whatever president you mentioned, like,

it's not up to them. It's up to you. It's up to me. It's

like, so if I want to follow that president, great, then I'm believing in

their, their golden age. I'm going to believe in what they're, whatever

nonsense they're spewing or. Well,

I, if I'm following them, I don't think it's nonsense. But you might, you might

think it's nonsense, right?

I think as leaders, I think it's important, important for us to, and

I've said this on the podcast several times, Hsan, I, I think as leaders,

it's important for us to find our moral compass,

to lead by example through that moral compass. The people who want to follow us

will follow us. They're going to go to that gold, whatever. They're going to go

to our definition of a golden age with us and, and we're going to be

h. Now. So does that mean that the world goes to hell in a hand

basket? But my little set, my little world is going to be perfectly

fine. I, I don't know. I don't know that I, I don't. I don't have

a crystal ball. I can't read the future. But I can tell you that

I'm always at a point of. I'm really not happy

with where we're going. I'm really not happy with where we were. But nobody

has a solution that I want to follow to the next part, to the next

point in history. Like I have, I have yet. And again,

whether it was Biden, Obama, Trump, name a president,

I still have yet to have one that I thought was so good that I

would follow him. I'll take your. David. I have not had a president

I would die for. I'll just tell you that right now. I've. I've not had

a single president in my lifetime that I would take a bullet for. It just

doesn't. Hasn't happened yet for me. So, like, I don't know. I, I

think, I think as. And I think

your guys's kind of views and vantages and how language

impacts this, I think is really valuable. I actually do,

I think because language is the definition

of what that golden age looks like, right? You have to be able to verbalize

it, you have to be able to express it, explain it, detail it. And if

you can't, then you're useless to me. Right? So

all these changes in language and all this stuff, I totally agree with you

guys that language is important. But. But what I think we're failing on and kind

of leaning a bit more toward what you were talking about, Claire, with

the, like, what are we fearful

of really? Like, if, if we're really shooting for a golden

age, then to your point, Claire, these roadblocks shouldn't even be in our, in our

purview. We shouldn't be even looking at them. We shouldn't even be worried about them.

Just go for the gold and drive, right? Just drive to it.

If you think about and, and if you come down to almost

a little microcosm and I know I'm, I'm going a little bit over in time

that you guys had here. But, but if you go down to a little micro,

like a little, this microcosm of the, of a, of this

think of like a, think of a, like a,

a gold, a gold medal athlete,

right? You don't think they've had challenges in their lives. You don't think they've had

negatives, you don't think they have roadblocks, things that could have shot, shut them down.

Every one of them have stories like that, but they just ignored

it or moved past it or persevered through it. And we can't

come up collectively as a society as how to do that. That's also

a problem. Like, I just think, I think we just,

I, I think that everybody defines these things differently. I don't think we're ever

going to get all on the same page on what that golden age definition is.

So therefore we may not ever hit it. We may not never

get, we may not ever get there. Or we're already there and we're not

seeing it, but somebody else already found it and nobody's paying attention to them

because they don't know how to, they don't know how to express it. They don't

know how to get the, their version of the language out. So I think there's

a lot of things here that, and I think this, what I just said, I'm

sure can turn into a whole nother podcast episode. Oh, I asked,

I asked a loaded question. I asked a loaded question here at the end. I,

I mean, I'm notorious for doing that. I load up the gun at the end

and then, you know, it just, yeah, I've been doing this for a while now.

He does this to me all the time. All the time. All

the time.

Okay, final thoughts. We gotta close, as I

usually say, right around this moment. Thank you to Claire Chandler. Thank you to

David Baumrucker. Thank you again to Top Libby for coming on the podcast today.

Your contributions have been amazing as usual. This is a

complicated book that opens up a lot of doors. Even though

I may have trouble with the way that it is written or some of the

ideas in it, it does engender conversation and I think it is worthwhile for

leaders to read at the very minimum, at least as a warning. Maybe, maybe a

warning frozen in time, but a warning nonetheless.

Claire, David, final thoughts.

So Tom, I, I, you're right. Everything you just sort of

unpacked for us can, can be a, a future episode. And I'm happy to

go down that rabbit. Hol and Hassan And David,

what's interesting to me is I do think, Hasan, to your point, this is,

this is not the best book ever written. We know that. But in the

true spirit of being literature, it did open up conversation.

I suspect that the combination of us can have a conversation about a paper

bag and make it, you know, interesting for two hours. So

what's interesting to me, though, you know, coming back to, I don't want to

sort of continue the golden age thing, but

there's so much noise in the political sphere

and really effective leaders. And when I think of leader,

I don't immediately go to politics for the very reasons

all of us have touched upon. There's so much noise. But the most effective

leaders of tribes of

organizations, both for profit and nonprofit,

figure out a way not to mandate,

don't bring in your political speech and don't lobby, you know, at the work site.

But they, they get their employees

energized and committed to a unifying

idea, a pursuit of something, whether you call it a golden age,

a mission, a purpose, a long term vision. And they make those

connections for those people so that they can then,

because their moral compass is in alignment with that shared mission,

they can put away the distraction of the political morass that surrounds

us every day in 24, seven news cycles

and follow a leader they feel a connection to. And Tom, that was

what you talked about. I also think it is not a coincidence

that the root of the word culture, which I do a lot of my

consulting work based on, is cult.

Right? And I think there is a profound difference

between an authentic leader who understands that they have the most

direct impact on the culture of an organization,

which not coincidentally, again, David, I love your formula for trust,

comes from predictability, consistency, all of the things,

you know, we didn't really dive too much into language. And very briefly,

I just want to get on a soapbox about that because 1984 was all about

the party that ascended into power

controlling and mandating conformity by continuing

to narrow down the language that people were allowed to use and priding

themselves on the fact that every new edition of their dictionary, the Newspeak

Dictionary, got smaller and smaller in

a different way. Leaders in high functioning

organizations try to narrow down language to come up with a

shared vocabulary so that they can get to greater predictability

and consistency in terms of how they think of success,

how they view talent, how they measure and evaluate performance,

and what they deem to be acceptable in terms of behavior and values.

And the best leaders, the one who are well intentioned around that and don't use

that in, in a way that mandates conformity but that actually

inspires conviction are the ones who are going to succeed in

the long game. Yeah, I love. I would agree

with pretty much everything you just said, Claire.

I going off you would mention the word culture. The word

I introduce people to is curiosity. Because the Latin

derivative of that, the origin point is to care. And I think that we've lost

the ability to care in our society. And I think if we're

thinking about how do leaders transform the landscape of today,

we have to reteach people how to be tolerant enough to care. Like are

you willing to sit with someone that you disagree with and care and shift

out of perception and walk into perspective with people because we have a

really, really bad problem with that in our society that we don't understand

that. I guess we have made a

really weird game of in group, out group. Right. And

to the two party system comments we made earlier. I'm

Tom, I'm very much with you. I think that, you know, a stool

with two legs is a very awkward stool. And we wonder why we always fall

over. And I think we have to sit and we have to wonder why

that has been prevented. And I think it's been prevented because this

masquerading that's hidden in 1984 of this weirdly I would say the

uni party of 1984. I don't think it's a one party, I think it's a

uni party. I think that if there's a reflection on

today, I think that's very what we have because our Congress has been

deemed fairly moot at this point. It's very obvious to anyone

who's paying attention that lobbyists and special

interests own this country. And we wonder why change doesn't

happen. And well, again, the unit party won't allow that to happen.

And so when we're thinking about again, how are leaders going

to change or impact society

building off of what both of you said, I think it comes down to this

idea of that we have to slow things

down, we have to get curious, we have to take our

time to not rush in this very, very dopamine driven,

consumer based culture we have because it's almost

as if we have failed this to recognize that because they're

making us make these decisions so fast that they're

removing our ability to contemplate what's actually going on. If

there was a conspiracy, I think that's the one I see just as a behaviorist

and someone who works with just Understanding just how dopamine

works and the structuring of recycling thoughts.

Anybody who is trying to quickly make you change your language, quickly

make you change your. Like, the laws quickly

push things through, I think those are the people we have to be very, very

careful about. And I think that going back to 1984, it seems

like a certain level of complacenc happened with the entire

population that's in 1984, that they're just like,

oh, this is just how it is. And I think that maybe that's.

You know, we made a comment about 9, 11. And I remember. I remember

sitting in 10 in my 10th grade class watching, watching that. And my

mom actually was in. Had flown

Baltimore, and I was like, she has to be in New York. That's wild. Okay.

What interesting reflection, right? Doing that. But when we're thinking

about that, we became. When it, when. When change in the

threat is instant, when we have that instantaneous hit,

boy, that is the number one study thing that

drives monumental change and monumental

adaptations is the velocity that something

hits. I think maybe the hybrid between a brave

new world and this is that maybe the society that we're living in is, what

if that change in the 2020s is not fast, but it's

very, very slow? It's like boiling the frog. It's like that.

We don't recognize how far we have slid down the hill because the

changes are so micronized by day by day, week by week,

party by party, that there's just this kind of subtle like,

Yeah, I guess it's more of the same. I guess that's frustrating again.

And we don't realize that they're playing a game of inches and we're just not

paying attention. And they've moved halfway across this whole game board already.

That's what it feels like to me sometimes. And I think that if we promote

the idea of just going back to what I said earlier about, about caring,

taking the time to be present and to care and to listen to people,

I think there'll be a radical change that would really change politics. I

mean that in Term Limits, but that's a different conversation, Right? But. But if

we were able to have that idea that the people

who are leading us would take the time to sit down and you actually felt

them caring for you. Right. That's a very different thing than

someone showing up, waving their hands. Let me sign an autograph. Okay, I'll see you

at the next stop. I think that that's kind of what our society has done.

And we do it with politics. We do it with our movie stars as we

do it with our sports athletes. There's really, you know, we hail

them for all their charity work, but really there's no person. There's very few. I'll

say there's very few, to my point, or I, maybe I won't speak in absolutes,

but there are very few people that are, that are taking

the time to actually sit down and care and make themselves be seen

that way. And I think we should celebrate those people. But I think we just

have to be mindful that that's not the standard. That's, that's,

that's the exception.

I'm going to close here with one thought

that occurs to me as everybody has spoken. And once again, thank you, Claire, David

and Tom for coming on the show today, talking about, talking about this

book and our thoughts around this book and how it applies, you know, here at

the end for leaders and, and talking about some of the major

themes that are in it

for all the problems we've got in the United States of America. And

we got a lot of problems.

One thing still, at the end of the day, we are

still a republic. And in a

republic, fundamentally, the power

for the government comes from all of us, all four of us. In

this conversation today, everybody listening today. And I'm not just talking

about get out the vote like mtv. This isn't that.

If you want better politicians, if we want better celebrities, to David's point, we

want people who understand the English language. To Claire's point,

we want people who could draw a line in their house. To Tom's point,

it has to start with us in

our families. There are traditionally,

in Christianity is a larger idea here that there are three

main institutions that God or reality set up

when the building blocks of reality were laid way back in the deep, deep,

deep parts of history, whether that's 14 billion years ago or 6,000,

take your pick. I don't care. When those bulky blocks were laid, I

was not around and neither was anybody who's listening to any of this. But those

building blocks were laid. And the three building blocks are this.

The first building block is the block of the family. Then the second

building block is the block of the church or community

with traditions, with

fashions, with, to Claire's point, culture.

And then the final building block is the block of the state.

State always comes last in the form of the government or the

pharaoh or the king, or in our case,

as David mentioned, our unit party, congress,

and some would say our imperial presidency.

Okay, okay.

Three Three. There's three spheres. And

when one sphere becomes overwhelmingly powerful and

overwhelms the other two spheres, it is a responsibility of those other two spheres

to get together and reign that back in. I talked about this on the

podcast a couple years ago. Who's going to tell Caesar he's gone too far?

Who's going to check Caesar? While in a republic,

the people who check Caesar are the people

who are running their households. That's who

checks Caesar in a republic. You want a better

republic, you want better elected politicians, you have to be in it

for the long game. I think all of us would agree on that. That. But

the long game is not a game of 20 years. The long game is a

game of not just your kids, but also your grandkids. I was talking with

somebody about this this weekend, and he's starting to talk to his sons

about who they are going to be married to. They just graduated high school. Who

are they going to be married to and who were. How are they going to

raise their children. And he's been talking with them about this their entire lives. But

now the conversations have become more sharper and more meaningful because they are at the

age where these decisions can actually be to get to have real impact. That's legacy.

We don't think in those terms in America for a whole variety of reasons.

And I don't really care what those are. What I care about

is that we start thinking about those right now.

And part of those legacy thoughts do come in

reading of books, what you do in your house,

the ways you make your people that are. That you have influence over

literate, so that they cannot be fooled by a

politician, whether a politician wants to lead them into a golden

age or not. So they can't be fooled by a leader.

So that they don't place too much weight on the workplace and

instead put the appropriate weight of leadership on the family and on the

community and dare I say, on the larger culture. That's what

we do in a republic. If we were in a

monarchy, or if we were in another governmental system, even a parliament, I would make

a different recommendation. But that is my recommendation to you.

You want to put the republic back together. You want to get a golden age?

You want to what? You. You wonder where our presidents came from.

They weren't like Topsy, as my grandma would say. They didn't just grow.

They came from somewhere and they

came from our families. We have to fix

our families and we have to lead our families before

we can create a better republic,

whatever that may mean to Tom's point which I think is well founded whatever

that may mean in our own individual houses and then our

families and our houses link together which creates communities

and then our communities create workplaces together and then we have traditions

that bind us and now we can move forward on

something thicker even than technology

Technology will not bind us together it does not have that kind of power

it only has the power to Claire used the word earlier polarize and

divide us as we have seen but

families, traditions these are the things that bind us together

these are the things I think that if we if one person listening to my

voice takes advice from this and starts building that

then I think yeah on a long enough

timeline with consistent and persistent curiosity

and caring yeah yeah we'll have our golden age

absolutely As a cynical Gen Xer this is what

I'm betting on I want to thank my

guests for coming on the show once again today and

with that well we're out.