Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

Hello. My name is Jesan Sorells and this is the Leadership Lessons

from the Great Books podcast. Bonus. There's

usually no book reading on these bonus episodes.

These are usually long form rants, raves, or interviews

with interesting people doing interesting things at the spacious

intersection of literature and leadership.

Because listening to me talk with interesting people about interesting projects

is still better than reading and trying to understand yet

another business book.

In the continued spirit of violating our own

rules and boundaries this year on the show, or at

least maybe not this year, maybe this quarter, we are introducing to you

today a short essay that relates to leadership

even though it happens to be a critique of literature

and storytelling from the late nineteen thirties.

I discovered this essay as background to yet another

essay I was reading that was critiquing the

postmodern problem, the uniquely postmodern problem

of providing narrative advice or wisdom in

a postmodern world of fragmented communications

to people who are desperately in need of, well,

wisdom. In reading the essay

that we are going to cover today on the show which comes in at 14

pages and is subdivided into 19 different sections,

it is not an easy one to mentally digest.

However, on this show we have covered many difficult texts and

we aren't going to stop now.

The author of the essay we are analyzing for leaders

today would appreciate, I think, the ultimate

conceit of what we are attempting to achieve on our podcast

by discussing his work and leveraging insights

from it to offer solutions to a core problem that

bedevils us in leadership even almost a

century later, especially

at the end of our fourth turning.

Today, we will be reading excerpts from and

summarizing some of the interesting ideas within

the essay, The Storyteller, Reflections on the Work of

Nikolai Lesko by Walter

Benjamin. Leaders.

The communicability of experience is decreasing, which has

damaging results for the transference of wisdom based on life

experience and book knowledge across generations.

And despite our best efforts in the West to locate it, the abyss of

the problem seems to have

no bottom.

And so we're going to pick up today from The Storyteller,

Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov by Walter

Benjamin. You can get a copy of this essay. It is

open source online. You can actually get it

from, Stanford University, MIT,

Cambridge, and a number of other locations

online. I wouldn't recommend going and grabbing the

PDF of it. It's worth your time as a leader to read.

Starting at the beginning, we're gonna read section one paragraph

one. Familiar though his name may be to us, the

storyteller in his living immediacy is by no means a present

force. He has already become something remote from us and something that is

getting even more distant. To present someone like Lescov as

a storyteller does not mean bringing him closer to us, but rather increasing

our distance from him. Viewed from a certain distance, the great simple outlines

which define the storyteller stand out in him

or rather they become visible in him just as in a rock a

human head or an animal's body may appear to an observer at the proper distance

and angle of vision. This distance

and this angle of vision are prescribed for us by

an experience which we may have almost every day.

It teaches us that the art of storytelling is coming to

an end. Less and less frequently do we

encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly.

More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to

hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to

us, the securest among our possessions were taken from

us, the ability to exchange

experiences. One reason for

this phenomenon is obvious. Experience has fallen in

value, and it looks as if it is continuing to fall into

bottomlessness. Every glance at a newspaper demonstrates that it has reached a

new low, that our picture, not only of the external world, but of the

moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never

thought possible. With the first World War, our process

began to become apparent, which has not halted since then.

Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the

battlefield grown silent, not richer, but poorer in communicable

experience? What ten years later was poured

out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth

to mouth, and there was nothing remarkable about that. For

never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than

strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic

experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical

warfare, moral experience by those in power.

A generation that had gone to school on a horse drawn street car

now stood under the open sky, a countryside in which nothing

remained unchanged but the clouds. And beneath these

clouds, in a field of force, of destructive torrents and

explosions, was the tiny, fragile

human body.

There are several points in that first section of the

essay that resonate, with me,

particularly as a person who reads literature looking,

searching, examining words of the

past and seeking out wisdom that can be

applied in the far flung future from when

those words were originally written.

I wasn't the only one looking for wisdom in

leadership and when you look into and

explore and learn a little bit about the life of Walter

Benjamin who is a name that I had

known, or at least I had recognized floating around

underneath several other essays that I had read

over the course of many years. You begin to realize that

his ideas about the need

for experience and his philosophy and cultural critique

of media influenced many many

folks including Marshall McLuhan and

many others down through the twentieth century.

Walter Benjamin was born July 1992

and died 09/26/1940.

He was a German philosopher, cultural critique, media

theorist, and of course an essayist.

He was associated with the Frankfurt school in Germany which

automatically tags him as a Marxist. However,

he was a contextual thinker who combined insights from

German idealism because he was German, Romanticism,

of course Marxism, Jewish mysticism, we'll talk a little

bit more about that later, and Neo Kantianism,

to understand a post world war one Germany and a

world in general that was in the

intergerum between the end of world war one and the beginning of world war

two consistently and permanently in chaos.

Sound familiar? He was friends with the

playwright Berthold Brecht whose plays we will be covering later on this

year on this podcast so stay tuned for that. He's

also related by marriage to Hannah

Arendt whose book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann,

we will also talk about on this show in June.

That's gonna be a vibrant conversation that you won't want to miss.

Benjamin considered his research and writing to be theological in

focus though he eschewed recourse to understanding the world

through the lens of either a Christian or the presence of a Jewish

God. He was much like Kierkegaard

looking for the transcendent without actually

wanting to talk about or deal with the

actual meaning of the transcendent.

In 1940 to escape the encroaching Third Reich

who was looking for him desperately as they were for any intellectual Jew

in Europe, Benjamin committed suicide at the age of

48 and he had always flirted by the way he'd always

flirted with suicide, and flirted with thoughts

of suicide. So he even had friends

who had committed suicide. So this was not something

that was sudden or an idea that was

unknown to Benjamin. Upon his

death, his work achieved more recognition than in the

decades than in the decades following his

death, than it ever did in

his life. He had the unfortunate

bad fortune, depending upon your perspective, to be born at

a time when a man such as him

was merely seen as a person howling

impotently at the moon.

Back to the essay, back to the storyteller reflections on the work of

Nikolai Lesko by Walter Benjamin.

By the way, I think Benjamin would be fascinated by the presence of the

internet. I think he would drown in the deluge

of social media but I also think that he would

have severe critiques for a communication

culture in which instant communication

that would seem to say nothing actually now

has fully manifested at scale.

But don't let me try to convince you. Let's

listen to what Benjamin has to say.

We're gonna read section five of his

essay. And I quote, the earliest

symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the

rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. What distinguishes

the novel from the story and from the epic in a

narrower sense is its essential dependence on the

book. The dissemination of the novel becomes possible

only with the invention of printing. One can be handed on orally. The wealth

of the epic is of a different kind from what constitutes the stock and

trade of the novel. What differentiates the novel from all

of the forms of prose literature, the fairy tale, the legend, even the

novella is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes

into it. This distinguishes it from storytelling in

particular. The storyteller takes what he tells from experience,

his own or that reported by others, and he in turn makes

it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The

novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the

solitary individual who is no longer able to express himself by giving

examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled

and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means

to carry the incommesurable to extremes in the representation of

human life. In the midst of life's fullness and

through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence

of the profound perplexity of the living.

Even the first great book of the genre, Don Quixote,

teaches how the spiritual greatness, the boldness, the

helpfulness of one of the noblest of men, Don Quixote, are

completely devoid of counsel and do not contain the slightest scintilla

of wisdom. If now and then in the course of the centuries,

efforts have been made most effectively perhaps in Wilhelm

Meister's Wanderer to implant instructions in

the novel. These attempts have always amounted to a modification of the

novel form. The Bildungsroman, on the other

hand, does not deviate in any way from the basic structure of the novel.

By integrating the social process with the development of a person,

it bestows the most fragile frangible justification on

the order determining it. The legitimacy

it stands it provides stands in direct opposition to

reality, particularly in the bildungsroman.

It is the inadequacy that is

actualized.

The nature, the true nature of storytelling

there put forth by Benjamin

is that of a process

that should come out of the oral tradition. Right?

It should somehow deliver

profundity. It should somehow deliver wisdom.

The storyteller, to quote from Benjamin, takes what he tells from

experience, his own or that reported by others, and he in

turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his

tale. The technology of the novel, and we'll talk

a little bit about technology not in this section but in the next area, the

next part, the technology of the novel disrupts

that just like the technology of the cell phone or the

technology of the movie camera or the technology of

the computer or the technology of the Internet or the

technology of the car. Technology seeks

ruthlessly to disrupt the

transference of wisdom via telling of a story

from one human to another and of course at scale

this fractures and has terrible consequences

for all of us. This is because

storytelling is an artisanal form of communication that

can be tied deeply to craftsmanship care,

and the best parts of articulating wisdom from

contending with the boundaries of material reality.

By the way, this is reflected in the book that we

covered last month in our bonus episode, Matthew

Crawford's shop class as soul

craft. Storytelling,

which again is an extension of the oral tradition

as Benjamin noted was killed probably five

eighty five years ago by the gradual grinding forces of the

technology of the printing press.

The nature of the technology that underlies the

novel itself resists the transmission of

wisdom in a way that the oral tradition does not.

There's an example that Benjamin points to, in

his essay, and it's in section

six seven, section seven, in the second paragraph.

It's a it's a story, that he relates

from, the Greeks, and I'm gonna read you the story.

He says this and I quote, the first storyteller of the Greeks was Herodotus.

In the fourteenth chapter of the third book of his histories, there is a story

from which much can be learned. It deals with, Semonites.

When the Egyptian king Semonites had been beaten and captured by the Persian king

Cambyses, Cambyses was bent on humbling his prisoner.

He gave orders to place Semoniteis on the road along which the

Persian triumphal procession was to pass, and he further

arranged that the prisoner should see his daughter pass by as a

maid going to the well with her pitcher. While

all the Egyptians were lamenting and bewailing the spectacle,

Pasa Minaitis, sorry, stood alone, mute and

motionless, his eyes fixed on the ground. And when

presently he saw his son who was being taken along in the procession to be

executed, he likewise remained unmoved.

But when afterwards he recognized one of his servants, an old

impoverished man in the ranks of the prisoners, he

beat his fists against his head and gave all the signs

of deepest mourning.

Make from that what you will in our modern

time, But that's a story,

not a novel, not a novella, not a movie,

not a TikTok, not a Facebook post, not a tweet,

not a YouTube video. That

is a document. That is

a set of information, right, that does more than

just give us facts. It gives

us a feeling. It might be a feeling we don't like. It might be a

feeling we have to struggle with. It might be a feeling that causes us psychic

trauma, but it is a feeling that comes

directly out of the oral tradition nonetheless.

The preference of people for consuming information via new technologies,

which are many of which I've already mentioned like the printing press, novels, newspapers,

magazines, cell phones, even social media versus accepting received

wisdom via an oral tradition has a psychological

basis. People like

the new. That's why people read the

news. Heck, this goes back even

further than Walter Benjamin if we want to get

real. When the Apostle Paul was going

to speak to folks in Athens,

the men of Athens were curious to hear from him. You can

read about this in Acts seventeen and and eighteen. They were curious to

hear from him because, and I quote, they always

wanted to hear about new things.

Back to the essay, back to the storyteller, reflections on the work of

Nikolai Lesko by Walter Benjamin.

By the way, in this, essay, he does, in

his attempt to analyze storytelling

wisdom and the transfer the psychological transfer of

wisdom from one generation and even from one

society to another. Benjamin does critique

the work of the Russian writer Nikolai Lesko. And I'll say a

little bit about him. Lesko was a contemporary

of Tolstoy and even Dostoyevsky,

but he was less read than both Tolstoy and

Dostoyevsky. As a matter of fact,

in the essay, Benjamin has this

has this quote when he talks about craftsmanship

and he says and I quote, This craftsmanship storytelling was actually

regarded as a craft by Lascaux himself. Writing he says

in one of his letters is to me no liberal art but a craft it

cannot come as a surprise that he felt bonds with craftsmanship but

faced industrial technology as a stranger

Tolstoy must have understood this occasionally touches this nerve of

Lescov storytelling tap to sorry. Tolstoy who must

have understood this occasionally touches this nerve of

Lescov's storytelling talent when he calls him the first

man who, quote, pointed out the inadequacy of economic

progress. It is strange that Dostoevsky is so widely read,

but I simply cannot comprehend why Lescov is not

read. He is a truthful writer,

Close quote. That's from Tolstoy. Right?

And I think the reason why Leskov was not

read and Dostoevsky was is because of the impact of

nihilism. A craftsman attempting

to deal with the bonds of material reality without

being nihilistic or defeatist

particularly in the early days of the Industrial Revolution

when no one knew anything and the industrial revolution in

a Russia that had just come out of serfdom,

well, that writer was going to be seen as naive

at best and uninteresting at worst.

Particularly as a formerly oppressed people. We're in

a rush to consume the new.

So we're gonna pick up with section eight.

I'm gonna read this paragraph from Walter Benjamin,

and I quote, there is nothing

that commends a story to memory more effectively than the

chaste compactness, which precludes psychological

analysis. And the more natural the process by which the

storyteller foregoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the

story's claim to a place in the memory of the listener. The more completely

it is integrated into his own experience, the greater will be his inclination

to repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or

later. This process of assimilation,

which takes place in-depth, requires a state of relaxation, which is

becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical

relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation.

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.

A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His

nesting places, the activities that are intimately associated with boredom

are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well.

With this is the gift of listening is lost,

and the community of listeners disappears.

For storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost

when the stories are no longer retained. It It is lost because there is no

more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to.

The more self forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what

he listens to impressed upon his memory.

When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tale in such

a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by

itself. This then is the nature of the

web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled.

This is how today it is becoming unraveled at all its

ends after being woven thousands of years ago in the

ambiance of the oldest forms of craftsmanship.

Matthew b

Arnold would agree, the author of shop class as soul

craft. He would agree that

this process of assimilation, which takes place in-depth, requires a state of

relaxation, which is becoming rarer and rarer.

There are authors, some of whom will remain

unnamed, who have said and who have agreed

with Benjamin on this one as well, and I quote, if sleep

is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental

relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg

of experience. Well, what is the thing we

demand from our technologies today? What is the thing we demand

from even our stories?

Well, we demand that we never be relaxed because we live in a

world of anxiety which is the obverse of

depression. We demand that we never be bored.

I think of the titular line from

Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana.

Oh well, whatever, nevermind. Yeah, okay. That's not

the titular line. The titular line is here we are now.

Entertain us. The

yapping cry of the twentieth century was to be

entertained particularly after the horrors of both World War one

and World War two. I mean the Harlem Renaissance

and the jitterbugging of jazz of folks in jazz clubs occurred at the

exact same time in New York City as the

jitterbugging and entertaining of folks in the Weimar Republic occurred

in Germany at the exact same time that

f Scott Fitzgerald was noting

that Gatsby couldn't find himself no matter how

much booze and how much dancing and how many

women he bedded

spastic activity does not bring wisdom

medicating for anxiety and for depression does not

bring wisdom being

entertained constantly either by

a supercomputer in your pocket or by other people at a

party does not bring wisdom

boredom silence sleep

these things allow us to integrate

all of the wide variety of experiences that we have in

our lives that we seem

to take for granted and they allow us to

use our brains which by the way we talk a lot about evolution in

our society and cultures this is just a side thought we talk a lot about

evolution in terms of natural selection but we don't talk

about evolution in terms of the evolution of silence

when the Egyptian king who beat

his head upon seeing his

house servant in a Persian procession

when he beat his head with frustration he did

so in a world where noise did not

abound he actually had to think about

it unfettered

capitalism progressive socialism authoritarian marxism

quote, unquote our democracy or constitutional republicanism

can't provide wisdom to the postmodern

western man. A man drowning in

noise so loud he can't even get bored enough

to relax, much less to hear

himself think.

The essay that drove me in the direction

of this particular essay and got me thinking about this, which I

think is relevant for our podcast and for the leaders

listening to it, the essay that drove me here was out of the

Hedgehog Review by a fellow named Alexander

Stern, published this year,

in 2025 in late January.

And the title of the essay is, the story of advice,

Narrative Wisdom in a Fragmented World.

And, in the essay right at the beginning, he relates

this, and I quote, in a column for The Point

magazine, Agnes Callard, a philosopher and professor at the

University of Chicago, comes out against advice.

She makes her case using an anecdote involving the novelist Margaret Atwood.

Asks about her advice for a group of aspiring writers, Atwood is stumped

and ends up offering little more than bromides, encouraging them to write every day and

to try not to be inhibited. Callard excuses

Atwood's banality, blaming it on the fundamental incoherence of the

thing she was asked to produce.

Advice for Callard occupies a nebulous terrain between what she terms,

quote, instructions and, quote, coaching. You give someone instructions,

she writes, as to how to achieve a goal that is itself instrumental to

some further goal, Whereas coaching affects in someone

a transformative orientation towards something of intrinsic value

and athletic or intellectual or even social triumph.

The problem with advice, according to Callard, is that it tries to reduce and

condense the time intensive personal work of coaching into

instructions. The young person is not approaching

Atwood for instructions on how to operate Microsoft Word. This is from

Callard's writing that Stern is quoting. Nor

is she making the unreasonable demand that Atwood become her writing

coach. She wants the kind of value she would get from the second, but she

wants it given to her in the manner of the first, but there

is no there.

There. Close quote. I agree

with mister Stern. There is no there. There.

And in his critique of instructions in his critique of

coaching and advice he mentioned

benjamin essay and thus got us here.

By the way, other writers have commented

on this problem of there being no there there.

Steven Pressfield talks about it in his book, The War of

Art, and Seth Godin talks about it

in his great non business business book

linchpin. One of the ways I think to overcome

this problem of a lack of boredom are our

confusion with instructions and coaching with wisdom.

One of the ways to overcome this postmodern

deeply fragmented incoherence we have in the world.

One of the ways leaders I think can be helpful to have the positional

authority and the status to be able to insist

on a certain standard. One of the things that we need to do, one of

the things I think that would that would benefit us one of

the pieces of well advice I would give

leaders is that the reprioritization of memory

has to occur and it has to occur as a way to deal with the

death of the past But it also has to occur

as a tool, designed to create epistemic meaning for

the future. Because this is the thing that we have been

robbed of as leaders in our postmodern era,

which makes us open to all kinds of information, but

not real wisdom based on promises

delivered by split tongued technologists.

So you may say that I don't,

I'm a I'm a little bit of a split tongue hypocrite myself. You might say

that. You might say, hey. You have a podcast and you offer

advice and you offer instruction and you read these pieces

of literature and you you read these essays, and

you read these nonfiction books, you assiduously try

to avoid business books, but you go into

places, novels included,

where, you know, everything that Benjamin talks

about the novel itself is guilty of. And so what are you

doing? Are you undercutting your own project? I

don't think so. I don't think I'm undercutting my own project by talking about what

Benjamin or by addressing Benjamin here and introducing Tim to

you in this episode today. I don't think I'm undercutting myself

at all. Matter of fact, I think I'm I'm I'm shoring up

the eroding beachhead

of this podcast. So podcasting

technology in and of itself is designed to tell stories.

Think about maybe the true crime podcasts that you listen to

or think about a really really good Joe Rogan

interview or Theo Vaughn or

whoever. When you listen to those people

they, yes, are seeking to pull information out of their guest or

out of the topic but at a certain point a switch happens

and people start telling the host, telling

themselves, telling the listeners

stories. Storytelling,

and this is where I separate from Benjamin, is going

to be consistent in our lives. It's gonna be something

that we as human beings can't abandon, but we

will, and this is the hard part, we will

abandon the the transmission

of wisdom through that storytelling

medium because we actually don't have any wisdom

to give. The piece

that sent me off on thinking about this the critique

of fragmented a fragmented

fragmented communication world.

The piece that set me off on this critiqued Margaret Atwood.

Now I got to admit I don't think much of Margaret Atwood as

a novelist. I don't think The Handmaid's Tale was

that brilliant. I've tried to read a couple of her other books.

I just can't get in to Margaret Atwood.

For me personally with Atwood as an author

there's no there

there. But that doesn't mean that there's no there there for others.

Right? And so what may not be for me

might be for someone else. By the way, that's wisdom. That's

not instruction. But how do I get to there? How do

I how do I make that determination?

How do I wind up lapping up on the shores where it's

okay for me to dislike Margaret Atwood and use the technology of the podcast or

dislike Margaret Atwood? I don't know her. Dislike her writing. Podcast or dislike Margaret Atwood.

I don't dislike her. I don't know her. Dislike her writing. Right? And for me

to say that on the technology of a podcast, utilizing the technology of a

podcast, imagining myself talking to someone who is sitting

across from me today, even though no one is is sitting across from me today

this is a solo show and to do it in a way that hopefully

gives some sort of wisdom to leaders who might be listening

and might be along this journey with me.

How do I get there from here? Well, Benjamin, of course,

gives me an idea. In section nine, he says

this of his essay, and I quote,

the storytelling that thrives for a long time in the middle of work,

the rural the maritime and the urban is itself an

artisan form of communication as it were. It does not aim to

convey the pure essence of the thing like information or a report.

It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller in order to

bring it out of him again. Thus traces

of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of

the potter cling to the clay vessel.

Close quote I love that when you

tell a story you're bringing a piece of yourself to it

and in the best forms of human communication human interaction

I can see people still insisting

that the clay pot they are getting, yes, it must contain

something in it. But even more importantly even more

importantly, it must have the it must have the

handprints of the potter embedded in it.

What does this mean for us

here at the end of the fourth turning as leaders? Well I think it

means a few things. Number one: every generation has to relearn the wisdom that

the previous generation considered to be table stakes for existing

in the world, for understanding reality and for preserving

the gift of feedback which is also a story by the way to the

future. There is wisdom that

defies the technologies used to transmit it. Some of

that wisdom comes out of some of our oldest books like the bible,

the Torah, the Quran, Benjamin

even brings up Herodotus those things

will survive regardless of what technological form they

are put in and they may even outlast

the earth itself these

forms of wisdom ancient and deep encompass

the oral tradition but the oral tradition then leverages

the technology to avoid being rendered extinct

by it and if you are a leader

that's really the wisdom there not the tip

such as it were that's the wisdom leverage technology to

avoid being rendered extinct by it

we are coming up at the end of the fourth turning

we are turning into a high into a first

turning and the wisdom

achieved and attained the hard won wisdom achieved and

attained in a previous chaotic fourth turning

during a first turning, during a high, when the

jitterbugging is going on, the alcohol is flowing, the

jazz is thumping, and everyone's feeling pretty good. The

wisdom that was attained in the

past chaos, no matter how it's transmitted

or what technology is used to transmit it, is typically

ignored, dismissed, or shuffled away. And this is

because of the principles of the first turning the

ideas and the psychological posture that underlie

the people who are living through it and I

quote from the wikipedia article about the first

turning according to Strauss and Howe the first turning is a high

which occurs after a crisis during the high institutions

are strong and individualism is weak society is

confident about where it wants to go collectively

though those outside the majoritarian center

often feel stifled by conformity.

Close quote. The next generation

of folks we have coming up, generation alpha

and behind them generation beta, I

guess we're gonna start with the alphabet again, are

going to be profit idealists in the mold of

folks who, well the mold of

folks who in the last great turning in

America were either very very

hyper confident GIs coming out of World

War II or if you go back a little bit further

were the folks that were very very confident going into the

civil war profit

idealist types always exist in a high

and folks like myself nomads the thirteenth

generation such as it were we always get dismissed

in a high our wisdom gets shuffled

away all the way to the edges outside

the majoritarian center.

This time will be a little bit different though because of technology, because

of our insistence on the internet, because of social media. It will be a little

bit different this time, but I don't know that it's going to

be that much different. I think our technologies

that I think I know our technologies serve us

and increasingly we serve them But it's a

weird symbiotic story that we tell each other.

What I do know is this this is a piece of wisdom at the close

here leadership will still be necessary even in the first turning. As a matter of

fact leadership will probably be even more critical in the

first turning because the naive,

the ingenues, and the people

just not paying attention will need

all of the wisdom they can get from

wherever they can get it because wars

strife depression and upheavals

insist on happening in

every turning.

And, well, that's it

for me.