Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the

Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode

number 176,

opening up a little bit differently than maybe you are

normally used to from our book today.

In Westphalia, in the castle of my lord, The Baron of

Thunder 10tr, there was a young man whom nature had endowed with the

gentlest of characters. His face bespoke his soul. His

judgment was rather sound in his mind of the simplest. This is the reason, I

think, why he was named Tandeed.

The old servants of the house suspected that he was the son of my lord,

the baron's sister, and of a good and honorable gentleman of the neighborhood, whom

that lady never would marry, because he could prove only

71/4 and the rest of his genealogical tree had been

lost by the injuries of time. My lord,

the baron was one of the most powerful lords in Westphalia, for his castle

had a door and windows. His great hall was even adorned with a

piece of tapestry. All the dogs of his stable yards formed a pack of

hounds when necessary. His grooms were his huntsmen. The village vicar was

his grand almanor. They all called him my lord and they

laughed at the stories he told my lady.

The baroness, who weighed about 350 pounds, attracted very great

consideration by that fact and did the honors of the house with dignity that made

her even more respectable. Her daughter,

Gunde, age 17, was rosy complexioned, fresh

plump, appetizing. The baron's son appeared

in all respects worthy of his father. The tutor Panglos was the

oracle of the house, and little Candide listened to his lessons with all the

candor of his age and character.

Pangloss taught metaphysico, theologio,

cosmologo, nigolology. He proved

admirably that there was no effect without a cause,

and that in this the best of all possible worlds.

My lord, the baron's castle was the finest of castles, and my lady, the best

of all possible baronesses. It is demonstrated, he

said, that things cannot be otherwise. For everything being made for an end, everything is

necessarily for the best end. Note that noses were made to wear

spectacles. So we have spectacles. Legs are visibly instituted to be

breached, and we have breaches. Stones were formed to be cut to

make it into castles. So my lord has a very handsome castle. The greatest baron

in the province should be the best house. And pigs being made to be eaten.

We eat pork all year round. Consequently, those who have

asserted that all is well have said a foolish thing. They should have said that

all is for the best.

Candide listened attentively and believed innocently, for he thought

Mademoiselle Cunegonde extremely beautiful, though he never made

bold to tell her so. He concluded that after the happiness of

being born Baron of Thunder 10 truck, the second degree of happiness was

to be Mademoiselle Tonagande, the third to see her

every day, and the fourth to listen to Dr. Panglos, the greatest

philosopher in the province and consequently in the whole

world. One day, Cunegonde, walking to the castle in

the little wood they called the park, saw in the bushes Dr. Panglos giving a

lesson in experimental physics to her mother's chambermaid, a very pretty and very

docile little brunette. Since Mademoiselle Cunegonde had much

inclination for the sciences, she observed breathlessly the repeated experiments of

which she was a witness. She clearly saw the doctor's sufficient reason, the

effects and the causes, and returned home all agitated, all pensive,

all filled with a desire to be learned. Thinking that she might well

be the sufficient reason of young Candide, who might equally well

be hers, she met Candide on the way back to

the castle and blushed. Candide blushed too. She said good morning to him

in a faltering voice, and Candide spoke to her without knowing what he was saying.

The next day, after dinner, as everyone was leaving the table, Cunegonde and Candide found

themselves behind a screen dropped her handkerchief.

Candide picked it up. She innocently took his hand. The young man innocently

kissed the young lady's hand with a very special vivacity, sensibility

and grace. Their lips met, their eyes glowed,

their knees trembled, their hands wandered. My lord, the Baron of

Thunder Ten Troch passed near the screen, and seeing this cause and this

effect, expelled Candide from the castle with great

kicks. In the behind, Ginogande swooned. She was

slapped in the face by my lady, the Baroness, as soon as she had come

to herself and all was in consternation in the

finest, most agreeable of all

possible castles,

Absurdity and existential dread, and

the vagaries of life in institutional systems, the perils of knowledge.

These are all themes that leap forth from the short

pages of the deeply influential book we

opened Season five with just now,

a book that, despite its lack of length, more

than makes up for in deceptive depth,

proving that writing from the perspective of assuming that your audience is intelligent

enough to get the joke has always been in the wheelhouse of the

satirist, the jokester and the comic,

and, of course, those willing to wear the literary clothes

of those same folks kicking off

the Fifth season of our show, we are going to dissect

ideas and themes and solutions that for leaders that

may lead to the restoration not only of

leadership, but maybe even of, dare I say, the entirety of

Western civilization itself. From a book

listed as one of the 100 most influential books ever

written by the poet Martin Seymour Smith and literary

critic. And he of course

was also a biographer, so he knew a little bit about this fellow.

We are going to be reading

from Candide by Voltaire.

Leaders, we are past being fooled by the

promises of the Enlightenment project. We are weighed

down now in our time with ironic

detachment which is preventing us from leading with

sincerity in this not the best

possible world, but I don't think that.

But it's the only world we've got.

And of course, back for this new season

of chicanery and shenanigans and tomfoolery

along with great books is our co host,

Tom Libby, who is by the way, closing in on

being with us for 50 episodes. I just told him that before we hit record

on this. He was not aware of that. So this is episode number 44 for

Tom where he has joined us as co host. So how you doing, Tom?

How's your new year going? I am living my best life,

as. You mentioned that last year. Yeah,

I, I, I, I always, I gotta come up with a new one, right? Because

I, I used to use, I used to use living the dream. And then I'd

say I also have to remind people that nightmares are dreams too.

And then I changed it to I'm living my best life because I can't live

somebody else's. I've got to find a new one. There's got to be another version

of this somewhere that I can, that I could make up or pick up somewhere

along the lines. But overall I'm doing pretty good. Hey, son. Thank you for asking.

You should tell people that you're living in the best of all possible worlds. I

was just gonna say because that were you. What do you said? The best of

both of all possible worlds. But there's only one. We only have one to

live in. We're. Which kind of made me chuckle when you were reading the excerpt

here because I'm sitting there thinking to myself, experimental

physics in 1750. What was that? Holding up an apple and letting it go

to see what gravity does. Like what exactly

experimental physics are happening in 1750? Like,

anyway, for those of you are who are science

buffs, I'm not making that statement as a true question. I'm

sure there were plenty of actual science things. Science was happening. I'm

not. Science was happening. It just made me funny. It just made me laugh that

somebody like Voltaire would write that in, in the book. Well, and the

thing is, like, experimental physics, even in our own time, in 2026,

some what, what like 300 and some odd years later,

hasn't really advanced. Advanced much beyond that,

except now we just use mathematical models with better computers. That's all

that. Exactly, exactly. I mean, you had, you know, everybody was trying

to. Back at that time, everybody was trying to. To

copy off of. Of Isaac Newton's,

you know, sort of massive influence. And then you also had.

Which people don't understand, and this is not to make this serious, you made a

joke. It's a good one. And people

back in that time in, in the 1750s were just

beginning to sort of figure out, not that the world was round. We already

knew that Columbus had, you know, ran across the New

World, you know, by that point, but. Or what

was called the New World by that point, the North American continent. But,

but they were, they were trying to figure out at a

practical level. So there was practical. There was practical physics, there's practical mathematics, and

then there was everything else that was like, not practical. Right. And that's where

experimental physics sort of, sort of winds up at. So practical mathematics is

like, how do you get around the globe and find like the Northwest Passage, which

they still believed was a thing. Right. You know, or how do you find like

the city of El Dorado, which they talk about actually in, in here.

Right. Which they also still believe was a thing. There was enough of the

unexplored world still around the experimental physics. Sounded really

cool when you said it out loud. Yeah.

And it made girls like Cunegonde, you know, made their

bosoms heave, you know, and all those, you know, 17th century dresses.

I don't know. I don't think about that. But I'm married.

I don't know anything about that. And nor do I need to know anything about

that because I am also spoken for.

In the best of all possible worlds.

So we, we covered a lot

of information about the literary life of Francois Marie

Arouette, AKA Voltaire. In our shorts

episode that precedes this episode, which you should go back and

listen to, has the title of it, I believe,

why do. Why do business leaders read Voltaire?

Or why should they read Voltaire instead of Harvard Business Review? So I would encourage

you to go back and listen to that. And so we covered a lot of

basic information about Him. And so we're not going to go over that right now.

But what I will say is this. And it

was also one of the points that I made in that episode. I'd like to

get some of Tom's thoughts on this. Much has been written and talked about Voltaire,

particularly during his raucous life and through his death and way

past, from misappropriating quotes from his works out of

context, all the way to mangled malproisms in

the popular culture of the 20th century. I'm thinking of. There's a whole

scene in the movie Swingers where

Vince Vaugh and Jon Favro are ordering food at the breakfast

table in the casino. And Jean

Favreau, my buddy actually showed me this because I had forgotten about this. My buddy

actually showed this to me because he saw that I was reading the book.

And the, the Jon Favro orders

something off of the, off of the menu. It's like pancakes of the age of

enlightenment. And he says, he says to the waitress, I'd

like pancakes in the age of enlightenment. And then she's like, okay,

whatever. And then she takes Vince Vaughn's order and then they walk away,

right? And this is Swingers. So, like, Jon Favreau's like, in his 20s, Vince

Vaughn is in his 20s. They're all young and thin and, like, still sexy

looking. You're so money, you don't even know it. And, and,

you know, the waitress walks away. And then John Favreau goes, trying to pick up

this waitress. And like, how's she going to know a

Voltera reference? Why would I assume that a waitress would know a Volter reference? Why

did I say age of enlightenment? That's so stupid. This is also the guy who

later on in the movie has the whole scene with the, with the answering machine

where he's like recalling all the time and trying to fix the answering machine

message because he's nervous or whatever. He

doesn't have his whole thing. And, and,

and I don't know. And, and then of course, Vince Vaughn is there to like,

sort of calm him down. And Vince Vaughn goes, you know, man, don't even worry

about it. It's fine, it's fine, it's fine. Whatever. Like, whatever. And.

And then the waitress walks past and he tries to like, change his order or

whatever to say something different. And she goes, your pancakes will come out in a

minute. Voltaire.

Or something like that, right? Like, Voltaire would love that.

He would have loved that. Yeah, absolutely. And

the way this guy was wired,

his influence over the last, I would say

30 or 40 years has sort of begun to fade from,

fade from the, the, at least the, the dominant conscience of,

of, of the Western public. Maybe, maybe not

like his. So it's the direct link.

Maybe. But I think his work in his

personality and his thought processes were referenced so

frequently that we forget that the reference is his.

I think it's not so much that, that it's not being referenced

anymore. I just think we're forgetting the source of the reference because

as we were joking when, before we, before we hit the record button

and I had mentioned that this particular book candidate.

It's basically a third of the movies ever written. Like. Oh yeah, oh

yeah. If you actually go back and read this and think of it in the

context of today, you could think of at least a dozen movies

right off the top of your head. They'd be like it's the same story as

X or same story as Y or same story as Z. And I think what's

happening is that we're referencing those movie references or the books

rewritten or the books written by today's authors or more recent

authors that are still using his work as, as the focal point

or the thought. So I, to your point, I think we're losing touch with

the fact that, that he is being quoted or referenced or whatever.

Yes, but I don't think we're, I don't think we're losing

his references. If I said that, if I'm saying that right.

Yeah. And that gets to my, my other idea that he was such a rare

world bending historical talent that

you. To your point, and I think this is absolutely valid,

we, we now have reached a point where, because

look, we're going to go into a lot more of this, but

I don't know which. How many posts. We are past modernism at

this point. We're no longer postmodern. I don't know if we're post post modern

or post post post modern. Like, I don't know when that, that clicks in. Can

somebody just come up with another term, please, please, come on now. But we

are way the hell past modernity, which came directly out of the

enlightenment. And the entire. And we'll talk a little bit about this

too, but the entire Enlightenment project was built on the idea that

human reason could figure out the world.

That was a very simple way human reason, free inquiry,

could figure out the world. We actually had the brains to be able to do

that. And of course that came out of the

Reformation, which was a direct rebellion against the power of The Catholic Church

and the way that the medieval. The medieval, and of course the Renaissance,

those two, those two streams combined together to create the

Enlightenment. Right. Well, we've gotten a lot out of the

Enlightenment. And I always admit to this, like, particularly religious people

like myself, who, who, you know, have had to

struggle through the Enlightenment for the last 400 years to justify

the presence of religion.

I have to make this point to them. We've gotten a lot out of the

Enlightenment. The Enlightenment brought you, like, this podcast. That's what the

Enlightenment brought you. Free inquiry and the ability of human

reason to figure out the world. I mean, we were joking about experimental physics, but

really, like, without free inquiry, you don't get the atomic bomb.

Like, you don't get. You don't get the Internet. Without free inquiry, you don't

get the cell phones and this podcast mic and the video that we're shooting on

you. You don't get any of that. Now there are things

that are lost in that. And

Voltaire, interestingly enough, just like Shakespeare or

the Apostle Paul or Socrates or the Founding

Fathers, is a victim of his own. Is

a victim of the Enlightenment. Success. Right? To your point, the copy of the copy

of the copy of the copy. Right? Like, we, we don't even remember the

original source code anymore. We're just, We.

It was just too successful. Like, it just worked too well. And now we're in

this weird position where. And this is part of what I'm going to talk about

this year on the podcast a lot. We're in this weird position where

deconstructionism, which

also you see in movies, where you're able to take apart everything.

Okay, that's cool. But now we're at this weird middle ground where we have to

start putting things back together and we don't know how. We've lost the ability to

figure out how to put things back together that have meaning. And you and I

have talked about this even when we're talking about, you know, sort of the Native

American narratives or we talk about

political ideas or theological ideas on this show. How do we

know how to pull the ideas apart, but we don't know how to restore them

and put them back together? And the Enlightenment was the, was the root

source code of pulling things apart with human reason, but it

wasn't. There was no thing in there because they didn't think they needed

it because there were so many things that were together already. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think also Candide remains popular to your point

because of its, Its, its, its brevity. And

its wit and its satirism. Right. So like the first time I ran

across this book, I was 10 years old, maybe 11. And I banged through it

because I was like, each chapter is only like four pages.

And I remember like I was reading it, you know, over the last

couple of weeks, and I remembered. I, I sort of flashback to when I was

a kid and I remember I laughed through this. I laughed at

certain parts of this. Just the absurdity of, of certain things that were

happening. But now is a. I'm gonna be

50 in like four years now is a, you know,

mid-40s. I know, right? Mid-40s year old man. I'm looking at this

and I'm not laughing like there's humor in it. I can see the humor in

it, but I'm not laughing at it because we're way

past the absurdity. Like illustrating absurdity by being absurd, which we'll

talk about in a little bit. But like, we're on the other side of that.

And I don't know, like, we live in a meme driven world. I don't

know how we do. How we do satire anymore. Maybe that's a good question to

like sort of kick us off with. I was going to ask you, what do

you know about Voltaire and Candy? But you sort of, sort of covered that ground

a little bit. The, the, the

satirical elements of it and the absurdist elements of it are,

I think, what makes it

consistently popular among high school students. Because you first read it in high school,

right? Yeah, I was like, I think the first time I set eyes

on it, I was maybe 15. So for me, that was a long time ago,

people. Libby ain't telling you how old

he is.

Let's, let's just say it was be.

No, never mind. I won't even get. It was a long time ago.

He was, he was there when the deep magic was laid at the beginning. Of

the Internet, folks, actually, I remember the day they

announced the AT sign and what it was supposed to be for. So, you

know, you're put, you know,

h.email.com. yeah, they. They were

telling us that this new symbol was. So you get this new thing called email.

I remember that. That news. That news.

That news episode like very clearly like, like it was

yesterday.

So yeah, my kids laugh. You know, my kids laugh

because they feel at someday I will be the same

joke equivalent to did you know, And

God rest her soul, but Betty White died five years ago. And

But Betty White, at the time of her. When she. Just before she died, the

joke Was that Betty White was older than sliced bread.

So she was born before the mass produced sliced bread was actually.

So my kids joke that that's going to be me about the Internet. So. But

when I'm older, holding gray to my grandkids and great

grandkids, they'll be like, hey, he was alive before the Internet. And they're gonna go,

no way. So anyway, all right, sorry, we can move on. I

apologize. No, it's gonna be great. It's gonna be great again. You'll be able to

tell your kids. You'll be like Gandalf in Lord of the Rings. You could have

like the beard and everything. Like, you know, and you can be like, listen,

I was there when the deep magic was laid all the way. When the kid,

when the grandkids walk in the house and I demand a hug and I'll be

saying, you shall not pass, you shall

not give grandpa a hug.

Okay, so let's, let's bring this back on the rails a little bit.

Do you think? Okay, so thinking about Voltaire, think about who he was

as, as a writer, as a raconteur, as a

man about town. Internationally. He had a

hell of a biography which again, we've covered in our shorts episode.

But do you think he would have been

shocked or disappointed at the long term impact of his words

and of his writing? Because he wrote, he wrote a lot of books. I mean,

he had a big impact in his own time. Do you think he would have

been surprised that it, it lasted? That's a really good question. You know what, I

think he might have been pleasantly surprised, but still

not as surprised as I think. I, I think if I. Again,

you. We were joking a little bit before we hit the record button on the

podcast as well about how I felt this book was essentially an

autobiography. Like if you look at his actual life in the book,

there's a lot of mirroring that happens. So he's, I think one of the reasons

he wrote so well is because he wrote about things he really did know about.

Right. Like things that, you know, that, that really, that

he could speak to from a, from an experimental

experiential perspective. Right. Like he experiment, he experienced

these things. So I, I think from,

if he, if he looked back from his point historically,

were there people to your point, you, you mentioned a couple

Aripostles, Socrates, etc.

I think he would have thought because they wrote similarly

from, from their experiences and their, you know, from the

heart, so to speak. Let's just say it that way, that. And they, they had

Some lasting. Some. Some, you know, some

la. Lasting terms to that. Could he do the same thing?

I think he questioned it for himself. And I think he. I think he thought

about it. I really do. I think he thought about, like, what would I have

to do to be the next Socrates or to be the next whatever, and how

do I need to write? And can I write from that experiential

version that will give me the same stickiness. Right.

Maybe didn't use those words at that time, but I. I do think he thought

about it. And again, I think that's one of the reasons why this book in

particular, I find a lot of mirroring to his biography. If you look about

being stuck in being exiled to

England, like being in Prussia, being in like all these things,

like, where he. He was kind of forced into some of those

things, but once he got there, he made the best of it. He's like, screw

it, I'm. I'm here. I'm gonna go kiss. I'm gonna go kiss the Tsar's daughter

and you can go fry. Like. And then when he wrote the book about the

kissing the Barrett, like getting involved with the baroness's. With the Baron's daughter,

and, And I'm like, it's the same thing he wrote. He knew what he was

writing, like, so anyway. But I think

he thought about it. I think he hoped for it. I don't know if he

believed it was gonna happen. I. Obviously we can't speak to what his. What

his. What was inside is his brain. But based on the

writings and all of the. Right. I think he had an idea that if

I write this volume, if I write the. If I write this in volume

and I write enough, something's gonna stick. Yeah. So I do think.

I do think he had some sort of preconceived notion that. And again,

look at Socrates writing and Aristotle's right.

There's a lot of volume there.

I think he did have the concept, mentally, that

volume equals stickiness, volume

longevity. So we, We. We sort of. Because we're.

We're now in the backwash of. I mean, what are we. How many

years into the Internet are we now? 40, 40,

50 years into the commercial Internet. And the level of social

disruption that the commercial Internet has created in

comparison to what was before is unbelievable to us living now.

Can't. Voltaire was born

in 1694. Yeah,

1694. 1694. So he was born because

the. The printing press officially started churning.

Gutenberg started officially churning out bibles in like

1430 or something. 1450 somewhere in there.

So he was born 200 and some odd years

after the printing press and he started

writing another probably 25 years after that. So

imagine what kind of people we will have

200 years from now on the Internet. Good point.

That's sort of where my brain goes with it because I think I do,

I hold to, and I want to say this on this episode early, I do

hold to the idea that there have been probably

two or three world bending, world

changing human innovations

just in the area of science and technology. And the first one is the

book, it's the printing press. I mean Gutenberg kind

of suspected he had something that revolutionary, but he wasn't quite

sure. But without the printing press, you don't

get the Protestant Reformation, you don't get the Renaissance, you don't get

Vasari's lives of the artists. Like you don't get people knowing about who the hell

Michelangelo is, who aren't, who don't live in Italy.

You don't get for good or ill,

you don't get Columbus coming to North America. You just don't get that

because there's no curiosity then. Yeah, okay,

they wanted to compete with the Chinese, but it would have taken a. But you

could have added another 100 years onto that process which would have pushed back a

whole bunch of other things. Without the printing press, you don't get the French

Revolution for sure. You

also don't get the American Revolution without the printing press,

you don't get the British revolution which was the Industrial Revolution.

The printing press was a world bending technology.

So is the Internet. Not social media, not the

nonsense we build on top of it, not marketing ruining everything.

Which marketing marketers ruined the printing press too. They did. Marketers

ruin everything. This is what we do. I'm talking about

the core technology of being able to connect globally

with everybody if you want to and everyone

having the opportunity to have a voice. And then you could argue the Internet plus

cell phones, but that the core technology of the Internet itself,

that's one of two just like human innovations that cannot be beat.

And so I wonder to your point,

like I think Voltaire did have an idea that things were

going to be sticky. I agree with you about that. But I don't know if

he thought they were going to be sticky across time.

No, that, no, that's, that's the, the argument I'm making. I think he, I think

he at least had the foresight of it. He. It had to

have been, it had to be in, it had to be bouncing in his brain

around there somewhere. Just the sheer volume that he wrote. Yeah. Right.

Because you know when you write at that volume,

something's gonna stick. Right. Like that's the whole like the. Into your point

about like the Internet today. Think about, think about

a guy like Joe Rogan, right? Yeah. How many podcast episodes has that

guy recorded? Right. When, when the Inter. 100 years from

now, when Joe Rogan's long gone, are people still going to be

list going back and listening to Joe Rogan's podcast? Possibly.

Just the sheer volume of it makes people think there's some value

there. Right. Like, so there. That's what I'm getting at. Like, and I, and I

think that today we think about legacy differently because of that,

because we know it's a lot easier in Voltaire's

time. You had to have something published for it to be to

that. To get to what I'm talking about being like, he wrote

so much so often, so the volume that he wrote, someone still had to publish

it. And that, that costs money. Today's world in the Internet, you don't

need that kind of money to get your stuff out on the Internet. You can

own that. You can own some sort of domain. What is

it? Hostling or bleepaddy? Whatever. You can go get a.

For eight bucks a year or whatever, and you own that domain. You can put

whatever you want on it. If you just start pumping it full of content and

catches wind of it 100 years from now, like, oh my God, look at the

volume of this up. And they re. Something's gonna. Something in there will stick to

something. Like you just. It's just inevitable at this point. So it's interesting that

you brought up Joe Rogan as the Voltaire of our time. I didn't

call him that. Hold on, timeout,

timeout. I did not call him that. I was just using

his, his. The, the, the relation

to. The relation to volume, that's all. Yeah, yeah, the relationship.

I understand the, the volume. The person putting on the

volume of our time. Yeah. So I did, I looked up the AI, looked it

up on Google and the Google AI overview says, and I quote,

as of early January 2026, there are over

2,690 episodes of the Joe Rogan experience.

There you go. Then there's a bunch of other gobbledygook after that which we don't

care about. And he's going to be recording it for the next 20 years. So

God only knows where he's going to land. Right. God only knows where he's Going

to land. That's all. That's all I was getting at. He might crack 5,000 episodes.

He may. I

would not be surprised if he did. So again, that's my

point. Right? So 100 years from now, somebody's going to be looking up content,

content creators from the early 20s, you know, the early

2000s. Joe Rogan's name is going to pop up because of the volume.

Like, who's going to beat that volume at this point? It's, it's going to

be insanity. But that's what I was. Okay, but. Oh,

we'll get to that. Okay, so this now, this now gets into like the core

ideas of Candide, which are illustrating absurdity. Sure. Because

this is. It's absurd to think that the guy

who was on Just Shoot. Not Just Shoot me. No. News Radio,

who took shots to the face on news radio and hosted Fear Factor.

Okay, we'll have enough, well produced enough volume of

podcasts on this revolutionary technology called the Internet

to be referenced 150 years from now

as the avatar

of the public voice of people in the

early 21st century. See, and this is again, what

you're talking. Voltaire would love the, the absurdity to this.

I think, I think he would love the conversation right now. Like, he would be

like, yes, I think that this is just. This

is, this might just be absurd enough to happen.

Back to the book, back to Candide

by Voltaire. We're going to pick up with chapter two here. Again. Remember, they're short

chapters, so, like, you can like, they're literally like four pages, maybe even

three. Like, literally, like bang through it in like 10 minutes. This is

an afternoon read, so let's find out what happened to Candide

after he got kicked out of the the best of all possible castles in

the best of all possible worlds. Chapter 2. What became of

Candide among the Bulgarians? Candide, expelled

from the earthly paradise, walked for a long time without knowing where,

weeping, raising his eyes to heaven, turning them often towards

the finest of castles which enclose the beautiful future. Baroness. He

lay down to sleep without supper in the midst of the fields between two furrows.

The snow was falling in fat flakes. The next day, Candide,

frozen, dragged himself toward the neighboring town which was named

Valder Berghoff Trach Nickdorf. With no money,

dying of hunger and fatigue, he stopped sadly at the door of an inn. Two

men dressed in blue noticed him. Comrade. Oh,

said one, there's a very well built young man and he's of the

right height. They advanced toward Candide and very civilly invited him

to dinner. Gentlemen, said Candide, with charming

modesty, you do me great honor, but I haven't the money to pay my bill.

Ah, sir, said one of the men in blue, persons of your figure and merit

never pay for anything. Aren't you 5ft 5? Yes,

gentlemen, that is my height, he said with a bow. Ah, sir, sit down to

the table. Not only will we pay your expenses, but we will never allow a

man like you to lack money. Men are made only to help one another.

You are right, said Candide. That is what Monsieur Panglos always told

me, and I clearly see that all this is for the best.

They urge him to accept a few crowns. He takes them and wants to make

on a promissory note. They want none. They all sit down to his table.

Don't you love tenderly? Oh, yes, he replied, I love

Mademoiselle Cunegonde tenderly. No,

said one of the gentlemen, we are asking you whether you do not tenderly love

the King of the Bulgarians. Not at all, he said,

for I have never seen him what? He is the most charming

of kings. And you must drink to his health. Oh, most gladly,

gentlemen. And he drinks. That is sufficient. They say to him,

you are now the prop, the support, the defender, the hero of the

Bulgarians. Your fortune is made and your glory is assured.

They immediately put irons on his legs, and they take him to the regiment.

They make him turn right. Turn left. Raise the ramrod. Return the ramrod.

Take aim. Fire. March on double. And they

give him 30 strokes with a stick. The next day he drills a little less

badly, and he gets only 20 strokes. The day after they give him only 10.

And he is regarded as a prodigy by his comrades.

Indeed, completely stupefied, could not yet understand too

well how he was a hero. He took it into his head one fine spring

day to go for a stroll, walking straight ahead, believing that it was the privilege

of the race of humans, as of the race of animals, to use their legs

as they please. He had not gone two

leagues when up came four other heroes, six feet tall.

They overtake him, they bind him, and they put him in a dungeon.

He was asked juridictiously, which he liked better,

to be beaten 36 times by the whole regiment, or to receive 12 lead bullets

at once in his brain. In vain he told them that the will is

free and that he wanted neither of these. He had to make a choice.

By virtue of the gift of God, that is called liberty. He decided to run

the gauntlet 36 times. He did it twice.

The regiment was made up of 2,000 men that gave him

4,000 strokes of the ramrod which laid open his muscles and nerves from the nape

of his neck to his rump. As they were about to proceed to the third

run, Candide, at the end of his rope, asked him as a favor to be

kind enough to smash into his head. He obtained this favorite.

They bandage his eyes, they make him kneel. At that moment the king of the

Bulgarians passes, inquires about the victim's crimes. And since this king was a man of

great genius, he understood from all he learned about Candide that this was

a young metaphysician, very ignorant of the ways of this world. And he

granted him his pardon with a clemency that will be praised in all

newspapers and in all ages. A worthy surgeon cured

Candide in three weeks with the emollients prescribed by

disor or disorides. There it is. He already

had a little bit of skin and could walk when the king of the Bulgarians

gave battle to the king of the Albarians,

close quote. So

Candide was in the army now. Not behind a plow.

You dig in a ditch. Son of a. You're in the

army now.

This is, this is a prime example. This is why I picked chapter two

of illustrating Absurdity by being Absurd. So to

Tom's point about Voltaire's biography, Voltaire did run across the

King of Prussia. And at that time in Europe, Prussia was its

own independent nation state. Prussia had not run across.

Well, they hadn't yet gotten to the point

where they were willing to wage wars against everybody

else on the continent in order to unite Germany into one,

into one nation state. Although Frederick the Great was sort of

the precursor to some things that were going to

happen later on in the very

war torn early 19th century.

Voltaire saw all this coming. And of course he was witness

to the marching, the turning, the lifting of the ramrod,

the lowering of the ramrod, and wondered, of course, where all of this would

lead. He understood that the best way to skewer the

present was to demonstrate the massive gap between what was idealized

and what was reality. And all of the characters in

this book, from Candide to Mademoiselle

Cunegonde, there's going to be a blind old maid that you're going to

meet in a minute. Maybe we won't get there today, but all

these characters in the book, even the characters in El

Dorado, lived through absurd situations that Voltaire

saw in real life. They experienced war, social strife,

Natural disasters. This book was published right around the

time when an earthquake occurred in

lisbon, Portugal, in 1750.

And in Lisbon, apparently this was like one of the biggest earthquakes that had

ever occurred on the European continent and killed a whole bunch of people. I think

it's something like. I'm gonna have to check the number, but I think it was

somewhere between like 30 and 50,000 people died in this earthquake. And

Voltaire was, was. Was taken aback by

this, right, because there were many people

talk about philosophy and the Enlightenment. There were many people who were exploring

all kinds of philosophical ideas during the Enlightenment

that were attempting to, of course, get away from the religious wars that were also

ravaging Europe at that point. And. And one of

the ideas was this idea of optimism,

this idea that we are living in the best possible world. And of course, Voltaire

thought that was absurd. He said, if we're living in the best possible world, how

is it that all these people died in this earthquake in Lisbon? Or if we're

living in the best possible world, how is it that people are forced into marching

in regiment to serve a king? That might be crazy. If we're living in

the best possible world, how is it that we

still have social strife and we still have. We still

have rulers who are tyrants, right? And by the way,

Voltaire was a monarchist.

He was a monarchist. So what that means is,

by the way, as a monarchist, he saw the divisions in French

society as being examples of absurdity and then of

themselves. So French society was. Was divided into three

parts. There were folks who supported the monarchy and supported the

aristocracy. Louis the 15th and all those folks and all

of his precursors, Louis XIV, Louis the 13th, you know,

what's her name? With. Let the. Let there. Let there be cake, all that, Right?

Okay. Then you had

the noble class, right? And the noble class

included landowners and included intellectuals

like Voltaire, Rousseau

and Diderot and all those other guys who would wind

up later on. And. And Voltaire did know some of those folks would

later on wind up laying the foundations of the French Revolution. So

you had your. Your nobles and your intellectuals, right, Your landowners. And then the

third area of society that you had was what

was. What was. Well, the third area of society was the church. And so the

church owned property. We often forget in our modern times, because

France is so secular

after being. After having the religion smacked out of it during two world

wars, that France was once a

heavily Catholic country and the

Catholic church owned a lot of property in France.

They fought a forward movement

against the Protestant Reformation that was kind of coming out of

Germany and specifically Prussia, interestingly enough,

Lutheranism, Calvinism, all of that was coming out of Germany and

Switzerland, the area that would later on become Germany and

Switzerland. They were fighting a, a front,

a front robust, you know,

crusade level action against all of that. And of course, this was an era

where popes out of Italy had, well, they had

armies and they used them. So this is the historical

context that Voltaire is in. And he's looking at all this and he's saying, this

is absurd. If this is the best possible world, what the hell are we

doing? And he writes Candide from that perspective.

Voltaire believed that we had to be cynical about the absurdity of the world around

us if we would ever find the moral courage to confront it and change it.

This is why it's worthwhile as a reader,

as a leader to read Voltaire rather than Harvard Business Review,

because think about the world that we are in today. The world that we are

in is equally as absurd,

perhaps more at scale, I think Voltaire would say, than

it was during the, during the time that between

1694 and the publishing of Candeep. And Voltaire was walking around

observing things. And it begs the question. No, not

begs the question, but it opens up the question which we were going to talk

about Tom, about here. How

can leaders, right,

expose and face the absurdity

just of the day to day ways they have to lead? And we've never actually

talked about this on this podcast. I was realizing that when I was reading Candide.

Like we've never actually talked in real terms about the

absurdities of leadership. We've kind of talked about dichotomies,

but there are some literal absurdities that are in leadership. An

easy one to think about is we have these HR policies and procedures that

we've created. Maybe the founder of the company has created them, or maybe the executive

board has come up with them or whatever. And

then there's this thing that happens that's outside of the

boundaries that are set by those policies. But it's

not unethical, it's not immoral, and it's not illegal. Just

outside the boundaries. And if we were in any other

possible circumstance, we would just kind of ignore this and leave it alone.

But we can't because it's in our business and we

haven't. We. I don't think we've ever talked about that, that, that situation, those kinds

of situations. And so how do leaders, what can leaders take from Candide in order

to handle that? I

think So I don't know it, it's so funny that

you, you word it like that because I was, I had, I, as I

was thinking of the excerpt you read and some of the commentary that you had.

And I already had some things in my brain that now don't apply. So I'm

not sure I'm, when I'm gonna say that or if I'm going to say any

of that stuff. But, but, but

I, I think to your point, right, like

I don't think there's anybody when, when leaders are

true leaders, when they are faced with a problem, they try to solve it. So

to your point about you've got all these policies and things that, that you

deem as your HR playbook or your HR

employee handbook or whatever, and if you've come across something that

doesn't get addressed in there, how do you like, to

your point, do you ignore it? Do you just let it go? Leaders are not

going to just let it go. That's just not, it's not in their DNA, right?

So they're going, they're going to try to find

a place in their employee handbook that they can slightly

modify to include it so they can address it, so they can handle it and

so they can move on, or they're just going to add a

chapter in their handbook to address it. Now

that being said, that's the, that's the practicality of it. That's, that's the way,

right? That's the way leaders are, are built, right? They're gonna, they're

problem solvers. They're going to look at a problem, they're going to solve it. This,

this thing is not in our employee handbook, but we need to address

it. And even if somebody says but do we have to address it? It's not

in the employee handbook. And they're going to go, if it, if it, if it

happens in the confines of our company, it needs to be in the employee handbook,

right? Like so the fact that it happened, and I think it goes back

to Voltaire's thinking, which is

think in provability, in fact, in

factualities. Don't think in ideals and ideas,

right? That, like, that's one of the foundations of his writing, which is like

you should be judging something based on what you can see, feel, touch, hear,

smell, whatever, not on ideas. An idea is

not, is not something that you should throw all of your whimsic,

your whim into, right? Like so, same, same

scenario here. So if leaders think like that, that they're thinking

practic from a Practical standpoint. And they want to see provability.

Things that can be, you know, things that can be

touched, smelled, saw, heard. What I like you can

prove that it exists. Right. Then they're going to fix

it. They're gonna. They're gonna. They're gonna. They're gonna inevitably rewrite the

employee handbook. So. So we are. Yes, they are going to rewrite the

employee handbook. And, and you're talking about. So Voltaire.

Voltaire loved divisions and classes in

society. He was a classicist in a way that we can't understand. Right.

So he, he believed in.

Yes. He believed that, like, all human beings were

equal in sort of the John Lockean way of thinking about freedom that the

Founding Fathers would eventually codify and like the Constitution and the

Declaration of it. He believed in all that. He would have. He would have clapped

for all of that. Right? He would have seen America as like the

pinnacle end of the Enlightenment project. That's how he

would have viewed the American founding. If he'd been alive long enough to. To sort

of see. Because he died in 17.

When did he die? He died in

1778. So

he died, what, two years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

And so he didn't get to see the like, the like

fulfillment of that, but he would have clapped for that. Okay,

but he was also a monarchist and he believed in kings

and he believed in classes. He's. He's quoted as saying, I. I

do. Did see this in his Wikipedia biography, and I reconfirmed it in other places,

but he did believe that the masses. Democracy couldn't

work because the masses were idiots, basically.

Our forefathers felt the same way. That's why they invented the electoral college. I'm just

saying. I'm just saying. I'm just saying, like, there's is. This is the thing. Right?

And so. So he believed in a class system. Right.

Now you're talking about

a distinction between, at a class level, between

what is practical and pragmatic

versus what

we see and idealize in business.

Right. And so there's. There's a dis. And by the way, we're on the other

side of, like, existential dread. So we're on the other side of, like, Camus, who

we've covered on this podcast. We're on the other side of deconstructionism. We're just going

to tear everything down. And Durinian deconstructionism. We're on the other

side of moral relativism. Well, you know, if it feels like it's Your truth, Do

it. It's fine. By the way, Voltaire would have rejected all that crap.

He would have said, if it feels good. What does that even mean? I have

no idea. Yeah, he would have yelled it. He would have yelled at Jacques

Derrida in French and told him he was a moron, you know, and then like,

run away. Actually, he might not have run

away. Those old boys, they actually knew how to duel. He would have challenged him

to a duel. Like, he did challenge somebody to a duel. I

believe he did, if I remember correctly. I. I'm trying

to remember who it was now. It was like, it was when he was in

Prussia. It had something to do with the Prussian king's daughter.

Yes. And the way that I can't remember now who he.

It doesn't matter. But to your point, he wasn't backing down for people because

principal met. Your name meant something at that point in history,

Right. You were not going to do anything to muddy your name. And if it

meant to defend yourself against, it didn't matter who.

Didn't matter. So. So we're, we're past all that, right?

Our names don't mean anything. One of the great lines in, like, Pulp Fiction,

when Bruce Willis is getting on the, getting on the bike and the girl is

behind him and she's like. Or not the girl. Like, it's not that scene. There's

one other scene in there where she's like, what's your name? And he's like, my

name is blah, blah, blah, blah, or whatever. And she's like, what does that mean?

He goes, we're Americans, baby. Our names don't mean anything. Yeah, there

you go. It's. Yeah, like Voltaire would be

stunned to the point of disgusted at that, that entire, like,

worldview, right? Because it did mean something.

So my question is, my clarifying question with all that there is.

If we have the pragmatism, which I don't disagree with you, I think, I

think leaders are pragmatic, but I also think leaders are, like,

trapped in this environment of absurdity where.

So for instance, I once had an employee, and this was long

before COVID and George Floyd

and any of that. I once had an employee who shall remain nameless

if he's listening to this, to this podcast, but he'll know who he is. When

I mentioned this, this incident, who wanted to go and protest

in like, some anti racism rally, okay?

And this was way back. This is before anything happened with COVID This is years

ago, like 2017, 2018, back then.

And I sat him down. Because there's nothing in that. In my

employee manual about any of that. Because I couldn't have. I couldn't.

It was only after I developed a relationship with him that I understood where his

political leanings were. And so it made sense

to me that he would go in that direction. Right. And I literally

had to sit him down and I had to say, listen,

there's nothing about this in our handbook.

So I'm going to. This seems very idealistic to me.

And you want to change the world. Actually, I think it was 2016.

That's right. Because he was a Bernie bro. That's right. That's right.

He was a Bernie bro. That's right. And he wanted to go to, like, a

rally that was going to turn into some shenanigans in Portland

at the time. That's what it was. I remember now. And I literally looked at

him and I said, I don't care about your politics.

That has absolutely nothing to do with the work that you do here. I don't

care that you go protest. That's your freedom of speech. That has nothing to do

with what you do here. However, I do care

because it was a small team. I mean, we were under 25 people. I do

care that if you get in trouble and you call me,

I can't come bail you out. Like, I'm

not doing that. That's a step too far. And

when you come here, if you have been in jail,

that's a problem. You. You don't work here. You don't work

here anymore. Yeah,

that's an absurd. To me, that was an absurd situation.

That was a candid level of absurdity because I couldn't

under. Number one, I couldn't understand what he was trying to accomplish. But because I

thought the fix was in already, which it turned out I was right. But.

But. But

because I'm just older and I just seen more. Right. But.

But it illustrated to me

the absurdity of dealing with things that are outside of the

boundaries. Right. That you might be faced with as a leader.

And I literally had to sit there. I couldn't laugh at him because

I really did. I wanted to crack up and be like, this is so obvious.

How can you. How could you not figure this out? And the absurdity

was in that he was idealistically

oriented in this direction so genuinely that he couldn't

see the absurdity himself. And that's what I think leaders struggle with.

Even more so now on the other side of 2020, because there's all kinds of

things that have occurred on the other side of 2020 that I, I couldn't even

imagine in 2016. Oh my God. If you had told me like back in

2016 that we would have like all of

the things we had post George Floyd and post Covet and all of the kinds

of absurdities that have, that have just, we've just sort of like shrugged our shoulders

10 years later and just sort of been like, yeah, okay, that's reality now.

I'd have been like, what? Yeah, I would not have believed you either, honestly.

And that's the absurdity part that I think Voltaire is pointing out with Candy.

That's why I think saturation works. That's why

memes work across the Internet. And what's amazing to me is people can't figure

out why memes work le. And I'm not just talking

about like regular people, like people who, we have titles

and we call them politicians and policymakers are

absolutely flummoxed by meme culture on the Internet.

Well, until the 20 something, until the 20 somethings are running for Congress,

it won't like we will. None of the next generation after the,

the, the, the politicians that are in power, right, the next

generation behind them are still not going to have an idea behind that. They're not

going to have a clue either. It's going to be, it's going to be two

generations, three generations away when we start, when you start seeing

politicians leverage that stuff. Yeah, the absurdity will

disappear, right? Like that's, that's really what it gets to

Voltaire's point, right? The absurdity won't disappear. The absurdity will go to a higher

level because I don't think the absurdity can disappear. Okay,

so it might not, but the absurdity that you and I are thinking of right

now will disappear. It'll be something else is my point. It'll be

more, it'll be less, it'll be different, whatever, but it'll, it'll, it'll morph into something

else is I guess, my point. But

as we have said on this podcast a thousand times at this

point. That the more 44 times, the more. Things change, the more things

stay the same. Right? So this is this what I don't think

Voltaire would think this is anything new. Like everything like what

you're talking about and how he approached the world, the thought about the world, how

he was, he was even, even self contradicting at some points with the,

the way that he viewed the, the world versus his

thoughts on monarchies and, and, and classism and stuff like that.

And some of, some of his writings would, would literally talk about

how that was absurd even as to one. One

human being to rule. Overall, he thought that was absurd, but

yet supported it. So like. So I think, I think he would.

I, I do think they're, they're. If he were alive today, I think there would

be things that he would look at us and go, no duh. Like

that's the five year old Voltaire. No duh.

How do you guys not see that this is normal? Like this is a, this

is exactly what you should have expected. Like so well,

and maybe that's the part of the continuing strength of him because he,

he hits on something that so, so you know, in the list

of notables that I mentioned along with Voltaire, which he would object to

being placed next to the person that I placed him with. But

I'm alive and Voltaire is dead. So,

so, so you know, Voltaire, the apostle Paul,

Shakespeare, Plato,

um, St. Augustine, the people that even people

that we've read on this show, I mean we've read all those guys on this

show. Show, right. They all

touched on or were able to grasp

something about a corner of reality that

to your point, the masses say no duh

or whatever and sort of move past,

but they focused in on that and said no,

you need to pay attention to this. And that's the power of Voltaire.

That's why Voltaire has lasted across time along with all those other folks. And

just like those other folks, he will continue to

either be referenced. I don't know about being read, I'm still not convinced on that.

But he'll be referenced forever and ever. And not forever,

but for a long, long time. I think it's gonna take a long time for

the water to go out on guys like that.

And where that relates to leaders and leadership I think is

in that leaders have to

understand that. I think they're playing on a longer timeline than

just. And we haven't really talked about this either, but maybe

this year we will more. They have to play on a longer timeline than just

the quarterly timeline.

So I go back to my, my, my story with, you

know, my former employee. Like that

person I had, I had a lot

of impact in that person's life. And

that person looked up to me and, and

admired me. Right. And looked at me as a figure to be admired.

Right. How much impact I had across that person's lifetime,

I have no idea. But I do know that for, you know, a very

specific narrow window of about.

Yeah. Five to six years. Like, that person was like, hey,

hey, son. What do you think? You know? And I think it goes back

to that idea of being able to treat his

absurdity as serious rather than as something to be laughed at or something to

be satirized. It's become content now. It's,

congratulations, it's podcast content now. But, like.

That'S how you know you've made it. See, before you had to be

quoted in a book. Now you become podcast fodder, and you've made

it. More absurdity.

So instead of saying the more things change, the more things stay the same, we're

gonna have to come up with another phrase that we can honor Voltaire with. Like,

the more absurd. The more absurd something seems, the more likely it

makes sense. Sense, or the more likely it is more

likely. I don't know. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it

out. Well, this is why. This is why this is the first book we're covering

in the first episode of this year, because this lays the foundation for where we're

gonna go. Exactly. All right. By the way, I did

look up the. The Lisbon earthquake. So

I want to kind of grab this information, and we're going to be doing a

little bit more of this this year also, since I do have my. I do

have my phone attached to the Internet. Wait, we're gonna. We're gonna fact check on.

Right on the podcast. Right on the pod. That's amazing. A little bit more

of that. Joan, eat your heart out. I'm gonna stop being so lazy.

So the Lisbon earthquake occurred in 1755

and occurred on the morning of Saturday, November 1, the Feast of All Saints,

around 9:40 local time. So that was. That's a big Catholic. That's a

big Catholic holiday. And it

was a 8.5 to, um, 9.0

earthquake. So it was a big earthquake,

and it killed 30,000. 30,000 people

and apparently

created a. A tsunami that was

about 20ft high at Lisbon and

65ft high at Cadiz, Spain, which is a little bit more

inland. Modern research indicates that the main

seismic source was faulting of the seafloor along the

tectonic plate boundaries of the mid Atlantic. So, yeah,

and Voltaire said about that. He

lamented the destruction of Lisbon in the earthquake. Again, this is according to

the AI The AI here on. On Google

and criticized the philosophers who thought that, quote, all's well with the world,

and the religious folks who thought that it was, quote, unquote, God's will.

So he, he. He hit to the both his left and his right, which was

typical for Voltaire.

Speaking of the Lisbon earthquake, we're going to go to chapter six in

Candide. Back to the book. This is

going to be real short. It's literally two pair, two paragraphs. It's ridiculous how

short chapter six is. This is why I picked it for my

mid. My mid. My mid. Episode transition here. All right.

After the earthquake. So this is chapter six. How they held

a fine auto defe to prevent earthquake and how Candide was

flogged after the earthquake which had destroyed three quarters of

Lisbon. The country's wise men found no more efficacious means of preventing

total ruin than to give the people a fine auto da fe.

It was decided by the University of Coimbra that the spectacle of a few

persons burned by slow fire in great ceremony is an

infallible secret for keeping the earth from quaking. That's

the absurdity that he was pointing out.

They had consequently seized a Biscayan, convicted of having married his

bleepchild's bleepmother and two

Portuguese who, when eating a chicken, had taken out the bacon.

By the way, there's a note in this. The reason that they picked the two

Portuguese who, when eating a chicken, had taken out the bacon was because the taking

out of the bacon thus showed that they were Jews and still

secretly faithful to Judaism.

After dinner, back to the book. After dinner they came and bound Dr.

Panglos and his disciple Candide, the one for having spoken and the other for

having listened, with an air of approbation. Both were taken

separately into extremely cool apartments in which one was never bothered by the

sun. By the way, those are prison cells.

A week later, they were each clad in a sanbenito and

their heads were adorned with paper miters. Candide's miter and San

Benito were painted with flames upside down, with devils that had neither tails nor

claws. But Panglos devils wore claws and tails, and his flames were right

side up. Thus dressed, they marched in procession and heard a very pathetic

sermon followed by some beautiful music in a droning, plain song.

Candide was flogged in time to the singing. The Biscayan and the two

men who wouldn't eat the bacon were burned and Panglos was hanged, although this

is not the custom. On the same day, the earthquaked again with a

fearful crash. Candide, terrified,

dumbfounded, bewildered, bleeding and quivering all over, said to himself,

if this is the best of all possible worlds, then what are the others? I

could let it pass if I had only been Flogged. If only I had been

flogged. That happened also with the Bulgarians. But, oh, my dear Panglos,

greatest of all philosophers, was it necessary that I see you hanged without knowing

why? Oh, my dear Anabaptist, best of all men,

was it necessary that you be drowned in the port? Oh, Mademoiselle

Cune, pearl of young ladies, was it necessary that your belly be

slit open? By the way, that had happened earlier. He

was going back, barely supporting himself, preached at, flogged, absolved

and blessed, when an old woman accosted him and said, my

son, take courage, follow me.

By the way, there's one other thing you note. Every time there's a new character

introduced, the level of absurdity, the ratchet of absurdity

goes up higher. So the. The old lady.

The old lady proves to have a story that I cannot read on air, by

the way, but it is a story that is quite,

quite shocking to modern ears.

Even I was surprised when I read it. I was like, oh, they actually wrote

this down? Well, I guess all these kinds of things were happening on a regular,

so it wasn't a surprise to anyone. Which

this leads into sort of my. My Act Two

idea here. So,

remember I said earlier in the show that.

That we've become enlightened. Right. And we're at the end. I. I personally believe, and

I'm not the only person to say this, I personally believe that we're at the

end of the Enlightenment project. This doesn't mean that we're not discovering new things

or that we're. We're at the end of, like, human

invention. I don't. I wouldn't be so bold as to take that position,

although Peter Thiel has taken that position. There's been several people to say

that the human race has invented what it will invent at this point. Now it's

just building a better mouth. Mousetrap. Right, right, right. Several. Several people believe that. Several

people believe that. And I think that that's a bunch of

nonsense. And not just a little

nonsense, like a lot of nonsense. Actually, there's a book that we're going to read,

our second book this year. We're going to be reading a book by

Francis Bacon called the Great Installation. And

it's. It's going to be

interesting because Bacon believed, and he was

roughly a. A.

What do you call it? Not a peer, but he was operating at the same

time that Voltaire was operating, except in England. And

Bacon was a person who believed that we actually could

resuscitate, we could renew the world,

we could take actual knowledge and scientific

theory and we could remake the world

into something else. And he believed, as

many do who say, that we've reached the pinnacle of

human enlightenment and that we have no further to

go. He would say to

those folks that what we've reached is the peak

of mediocrity, actually, and that just by building a better

mousetrap, we're just being more and more mediocre. And Peter

Thiel, by the way, believes some of this, but then sometimes you'll get him in

other interviews, he believes other things. Right, so. Or he'll say other things in

answer to the interview's question. So I

personally don't hold to that. But I do think that the project of the

Enlightenment, which was a project that was believed, that was based

on, again, the principles of free inquiry and

free human reason, I do think that project is at a close.

I think we are going to have human innovation, but it's going to be

built on different principles. And I think that's the direction we're going. And we just

don't know what those principles are because no one's laid them out for us yet,

because we're all still trying to go back to the Enlightenment because we're like, oh,

human reason, that's like the best thing for us to use. Well,

you know, at some point, you do have to look around and realize the

limits of human reason. And I think

we have reached that point, particularly in America, where we're starting to look

around and go, what are the limits of human reason here? You know, what are

the limits? Where are the boundaries? And that's a good question to ask because

I think that that ultimately opens. Allows you to find a new door

into a new place that you didn't. You didn't know existed. But it takes a

long time. It's not something that happens at the speed of a tweet.

Yeah, you know,

I think the challenges that are in our era, particularly the challenges for leadership in

this era that's also partially circling, looking for that new door,

are challenges in competence and meaning. But I also think the challenges

of courage. And then, of course, there's the tactical areas

of leadership and succession and mentoring and coaching and

supervision. We for sure, and I've

already said this, we for sure know more about the world materially and

scientifically than even people in Voltaire's time did. However,

we know a hell of a lot less about people and their motivations than people

in Voltaire's time did. And we ignore empirical evidence.

It's right in front of our eyes in favor of scientific theories about

human nature that very often prove to be mere myths. And

then we get mad when people don't live out the myths.

Case in point, every riot you've ever seen

lately about any political act,

and I'll just leave that there.

Technological wizardry has allowed us to hide from facing the hard truths about

leading people and Candide. This is another reason why you should probably read

it. Candide is about facing hard truths presented, of course, in a way that

illustrates the absurdity of those truths, but it cannot tell us how to

solve that absurdity. He cannot tell us how to resolve it.

Voltaire merely shrugs his shoulders sort of rhetorically at the end of

Candide and sort of leaves us to our own devices.

And as a person who is a religious person and also

a philosophical person, but also a practical, pragmatic person,

this will not do for me.

There are hard problems to solve in leadership. Tom and I mentioned some of them

already. Competence, meaning courage. Those are hard problems

to solve because they're so individualized.

How can leaders have the courage to actually face those hard problems and

solve them? Oh, goodness

gracious. So how. How

can they get the courage? My,

my. One of the things that. And I.

I've always had this thing like leaders

aren't born, they're created. Right? So

if you. If you're. If you're not willing

to face the hardest challenges, if you're not willing

to. To make hard decisions, are you really a leader?

Can you. Should you be considered a leader? Are we missing. Are

we missing out on a secondary title or a secondary role of

somebody that we should be calling them instead of the leader, so to speak.

Because I think that's. I think that's where those people fall. Right.

Maybe they're. They're somebody who needs somebody above them to say,

you know, pat them on the head and say, what you did was, okay, I'll

take it from here. Because I really do want to lead people. I really

do want to help people secure, succeed. I really do want to be the person

somebody comes to with their challenges. I want people to come to me with their

problems. You don't seem to be that person. Right. So

when you. So can they build up to it? Sure. Because I do still believe

that leaders are made and not born, so somebody may not be ready for it.

This goes directly to a problem that I was talking to a

colleague of mine last week about. It wasn't on this podcast, believe it or not,

Jeson, what we were talking about. Was the

fact that, like, the question that was handed to me was,

did you ever work for someplace that promoted you with

training behind the promotion? Or were

you just given the promotion and expected to lead people because

you knew how to do a job that you were doing? In the current state

of state of affairs, I think that is the underlying

problem. We take. I'll just take my area of expertise. For

example, we take a salesperson. You'll

say you have a group of 10 salespeople. Your

sales manager leaves, gets fired, quits, whatever. And

the instinct is to say, let's take our number one guy or gal

and make them the sales manager. Because the thought process is they can make

everybody else as good as them. And that is the furthest from the truth I

have ever heard in my entire life. Because what makes a

really good sales leader and what makes a really good salesperson are

two different things. Are we going to promote that person?

First of all, we're going to ask that person. You're going

to half the time in those environments where it's only one team. I'm not talking

about giant corporations. I'm talking about a small company. One sales

team they're going to take. They're basically going to say, hey, son, you're our number

one rep. The sales manager just quit. So you're the manager now. Have a nice

day. There's no conversation or

interview process or whatever because if they went through an

interview process of like, say, the top three salespeople, they

might uncover that the third best salesperson

is number three because they spend 25% of their time

helping everybody else, making everybody else on the team

better, Taking the last, the bottom guy or girl on the sales

team and trying to coach them up, trying to help them, trying to give them

some, like some confidence booster or whatever. Now, whether

they success or fail at that is not their job. But they do it because

they want other people around them to be successful. Now

you take that person at number three, make them the sales

manager. Now guess what happens? Your entire sales team just

uplifts because they're going to take the worst sales team, the worst

salesperson on that team and try to make them better. The number one

person will not do that. The number one person will be like, well, you suck.

I'm just going to replace you, right? So again, I, I go back

to, like, some of the absurdities here are

companies will promote and have expectations

without training, without conversation, without.

They'll just hope and pray that this person is going to do a good job.

You know, by the way, I would say 8 out of 10 times that person

gets fired because they suck as a manager instead of just getting

demoted and put them back where they belong. So there are, there are salespeople out

there that never want to be sales managers. They just want to do their job

and go home because they're really bleepdamn good at it. You know what?

If you own that company, let that person do that.

Why. Why are you going to take your best salesperson out of the field?

That makes no sense anyway. So go back to what the

part of this, the courage part comes from the person who

wants it in the first place. Yeah. Okay. You

can't force courage onto people. That doesn't exist. And you've seen that.

Oh, yeah, sometimes through humanity. But

courage comes from the most unlikely places at the most unlikely

times, which is where we get some of the. Most.

Honorable movies out of World War II, stories out of

Vietnam. That stuff comes from real courage. If you

want that person leading your company then,

or if that person starts a company, they're going to have the courage

to face the hard, the hard questions. You don't have to teach them that. It

comes, it comes from that experience of, I either do this or

I die. Which is why, by the way, there's a lot of companies that will

go out of their way to hire military veterans. A lot of companies I know

will go out of their way for that because they know that they've been in

some situations that they've had to make hard decisions or

follow hard orders, but still follow them well. Okay,

so. But we, we confuse the. We often confuse, I think,

in. To your point about military. Okay. We covered war by

Sebastian Younger last year. Right

in. And, and one of the things that we. That I noted

when I was talking about that book with, with John Hill,

AKA Small Mountain, is that

I always have to put that in. But one of the things I noted with

that was that

we always say courage is not the absence of fear. Right. It's doing what you're

afraid of anyway in spite of it. Right.

Okay, so. But, but we also don't make a

distinction. And by the way, Brene Brown says that courage is a heart.

And I agree. It is in. It is in the emotions, it's in the feelings.

It's not. It's not a reasoning. I can't reason your way into courage. Okay. I

agree with both of those postures. Right.

I think we still don't know. We still merge

together moral courage and physical

courage. So physical courage

is. Physical courage always comes last this is

one of the things that I am an hour and

15, almost hours, 16 minutes in. Now I'm going to mention jiu jitsu. This is

something that comes in. I mean, we, we, we offered

up movies really quick. So we did, you know, it's fine.

That's right. So this is something you learn in jiu jitsu, right? So

I can have the physical courage to step out on the

mat. But that only comes to your point about training.

That only comes with training. During which time in

training I have had to face my lack of moral

courage in going and getting a hard role with

somebody who I may not particularly like or who

I just don't like their posture towards the game. Right. It's not that I

know that they're going to submit me or that I'm afraid that I'm going to

get hit in the face or get choked out. It's not about any of that.

It's about, do I have the moral courage to

confront before the physical courage even shows up.

And we confuse those two things together all the time. And so we hire military

veterans. And I agree, there are certain, I mean, I'm in

Texas. A lot of firms in Texas chase

military veterans. Texas is very military veteran friendly.

Texas employers are very military veteran friendly. They want those

people because they confuse, I think,

the physical courage with the moral courage. You go talk to any military

veteran, man, you know what? They don't talk about the physical courage

part. If you ever go talk to any of those guys one on one, you

know what they talk about? They talk about the moral

complexity, right? Of what it is they did. How do

you live with the emotional courage? How do you live with that

thing that, not only how you live that thing that you did, but how did

you make that emotional decision to get in there and get after it

when XYZ thing was happening to your friend?

That's a moral act. That's not a physical act. The physical thing is last.

And we, we, we, we, we, we reverse the order because we don't understand

causality. We don't understand cause and effect. But I also, but I

also think, going back to the training part of it, I also think that the

moral, like what you're talking about is true, but training helps you prepare

for that. Yes, the more again, back to your

jiu jitsu analogy. You get on that mat because

you have confidence in your training. You are able to face

those moral judgments and that moral compass of yours because you have

training and confidence in your training. The same thing could apply to

Leadership, Right. We expect leaders to just be leaders. How many times have you

heard, well, just go do it, or just go do it. Like, if you don't

have the mental muscle memory to do it, then

how the hell are you supposed to. We just inherently want a sales manager

to know how to hire and fire salespeople without ever having to show them how

to do it. That doesn't make any sense. There's. There's a

lackluster. There's a lackluster attempt at

building leaders, and we don't do that. We

don't build leaders. We, we want leaders to just show

up. Right. So how can leaders get the courage? Well, if

you happen to be the leader of a company, then you need an outside

source. You need to go find somebody who can help you train to be a

better leader. A coach. Coach, a mentor, something like that.

Somebody to bounce ideas off of, somebody to run things through. Because if you don't,

and you just think you're going to do it on your own, if you are

really good at it, God bless you. You are, you're. You're.

You have a gift that most people do not have because most people need to

be shown the way and how to do those things, including the

military. Why do you think we have ranks? You are a private before you're a

sergeant. You're a sergeant before you're a lieutenant. They, There's a reason for that

because we need to train you up to get there. Well, and

we, and we laud the military. But even there, like, they struggle with.

Depending upon which branch you go into or which branch you

advance in. Even there, they struggle with

political

individuals who have more tactical understanding of how to

politically advance in a ranking versus moral courage in

advancing in a rank. Right? Absolutely. So even, even they struggle with

the training gaps there. Right. So,

yeah, and then we, we keep. Using the military as an example. But that, that

example exists in companies too. Like. Oh yeah, think of, think of any big

company you want. I've worked for. I've worked for several, and I shouldn't say several.

I've worked for one Fortune 100 company and, and several Fortune

500 companies. But even in the Fortune 100 company you go

from, they hire you at the entry level. They call it entry level for a

reason. Like you go from here to here to here to here. And then

this one particular company I work for, which I really enjoyed working for,

was one of the rare cases where I was a salesperson, got promoted to

a sales manager. I could not take hold of my Sales team until I went

through their training program. Right, right. So. So this is a thing

that I'm a partisan for. I mean, you know me, I'm a partisan for training.

I believe in training. Sure. We have an entire business

built around training. You know, you can go check out our

advisory group, bjdad advisor group.com. you go check out all that. You go check out

Leadership Toolbox. You can go check out HSCD Publishing. We believe in training.

Yeah.

I don't know. And this is not a question we have to ask now or

something we have to explore because we want to turn our corner here a little

bit because we're getting ready to close. But one of the things that we are

going to focus on. This is why I listed, you know, succession, mentoring, coaching,

supervision. This is why I listed these things. Because at a fundamental level,

if your company isn't set up. No, not even set up. If

the, if the idea of training being a nice to have

is a thing, you will

consistently fail in promotions. Yeah. Of people. And

you will consistently set up situations that are going to be

absurd for ground level managers and

supervisors. Just straight up absurdity.

Voltaire level absurdity. Like it'll be literary, what

you'll be setting up. What you'll be setting up. It'll be literary worthy.

Literary worthy, that's right. You know,

and, and the thing is the, the ground level, the

tactical guys and girls, you know, women and men

in organizations,

don't comment on the absurdity because

it's become part of the culture. Yeah, right, agree.

And that's the, that's the real, one of the real leadership

problems. But I think, I think the other thing too. I think the other thing

too. Some of the areas that you're talking, like if in my

brain, you don't become a Fortune 100 company and have those kinds of problems.

Problems like I don't think you can grow that big and

have that level of gap where your, your ground level

troops, so to speak, have no support mechanism built, have no

training built in. You kind of have to. In order to get there. You kind

of have to. What I'm worried about is the smaller companies that to your point,

they don't. Because they, they, they think that they're gonna, they're very

block and tackle. Right. Meaning, like, right, we're not going to face that problem until

it's actually a problem. We're going to ignore that until it becomes hurtful to our

company. We're doing 20 million, we're doing 50 million and

we're okay. But until that becomes a real like in your face kind of problem.

Which is basically to your question just a few minutes ago, which is how to.

How do leaders get the courage to face the reality? The. One of the problems

is we're talking about those size companies. There's no

hierarchy where the actual owner of the leader of the

company can take a step up, away and say, yeah, I can. Now I can

view my company from this holistic, this holistic approach to vanity.

And I can take these pieces and do, do this like piece by

piece and really judge it. Really take the, Take the bull by the horns and

have the courage to look inward into my. It doesn't happen because

they don't feel like they can do that. There's not enough layers for them to

do that. And you're to your point about how do you get

them to do that? You can't. Like, they have to

want. There has to be a want and a desire to do that on their

part to be better. Or more importantly, from a leadership

perspective, there has to be a desire on their part to want

to make their employees better. And if all they're worried about is their

employees performing a function, it won't work.

You have to want your employees, your employees to be better.

It wasn't, it was, it was one of the major players. Like,

it was like a Richard Branson or somebody like somebody like that basically said

if you treat your employees a certain way, they won't leave. They won't want

to leave. So the idea of continuing to train them should never

be a problem. Finding opportunities to train them

and, and find training that they want to do, find ways to make them better,

find ways to increase their, their value to the company. Because if they

leave, you're not going to be sad by the, by them leaving. You're

going to be proud that when they walk out, they're going to be a particular

kind of employee to the next person. I can't. I, I was

somebody. I, it was somebody famous. Mark Cuban, Richard Branson was one, guys.

But like, the thought behind it makes sense.

The thought behind it makes sense is my point.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I, I think that we are, we're in a.

There's a bunch of different things in there that we're going to explore over the

course of the next, over the course of the season. And I agree.

I think we also have.

Maybe the question isn't how do we get them to get the courage to face

reality. Maybe that isn't the question. Maybe the question is

more like how do we prompt those kinds of leaders in

those 20 to 50 million dollar a year, you know, revenue

businesses who don't feel as though they can step away.

Right. How do we prompt them to step

away? Because we're moving in the direction

and to sort of close around this, this point a little bit before we move

on. But we're moving in the direction of, we're moving

away from instruction

delivery based thinking and we're moving more

in the direction of prompt based thinking. And

partially that's because of AI, but it's also because of the nature

of how we engage with our technological

tools that then, in a virtuous or

unvirtuous circle, depending upon your perspective, changes our

brains in how we react with other human beings. And it

takes the lag time is huge. Right? But it does eventually show

up. So for instance, we didn't have as much social

anxiety in the 1990s when every teenager didn't have a cell

phone. Now we've got social anxiety up the wazoo and we've only

had cell phones at scale for about the last 20 years.

It took 20 years for that feedback loop to get

built. I think we're at the beginning of building a new

feedback loop, but I think that feedback loop has to be around prompting.

Right? How do we prompt leaders? How do we, how do we encourage them? That's

part of what this podcast does, but it's also part of what short form video

does and other other forms of content delivery that are out there because

everybody's trying to experiment with this while they're not using those terms. Well,

I hope, I hope part of what this podcast does is

gives people the ability to think outside the box. Right? Like, think about the, just

the title of this podcast, Leadership Lessons from the Great Books. Who would have thought

taught to go read the Great Gatsby or Voltaire's

Candy and find actual leadership lessons out of a fictional

book that somebody wrote 200 years ago. Right? Like this.

I think you're, I think, I love, I love being a guest on this podcast

for that reason. It gives people the freedom, the ability, the

encouragement to look for these lessons outside of normal

parameters. Look outside the box. Not everything you

learn is going to be in this, right?

Not everything that you, not everything that you want to learn is going to be

in a technology format like. Right? It's okay. And I, I said

the same thing to, I say the same thing to, to small business owners all

the time. There's a reason that every athlete on the planet has a coach.

I Don't care who you are. LeBron James has a coach. Michael Jordan had a

coach. Wayne Gretzky had a coach. Tom Brady had a coach. At every level they

played at, they had a coach. Coach. Yep. If your company

is at 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 million and you want to continue

to grow and you think you have all the answers, you're sadly

mistaken. Yeah, you, you yourself as

a business. Why do we think business owners that are

successful at this level don't need more

coaching? They don't need more people to bounce ideas off. They don't need people

outside of their organization to talk to through problems.

We need to encourage that out like, we need to encourage that. Small

business owners need to know that it's normal. There's, it's not

audacity, it's not a flagrant use of money.

It's normal to go find and hire a coach, go get somebody. You can pay

a few hundred thousand, you know, a few hundred. A few thousand dollars a

month or whatever and, and get some real world experience that's

beyond you. Well, it, it has to be, it has to be perceived as

at a. Unfortunately, because we've monetized everything

out to the nth degree. You know, there has to have an. ROI in the

business. I get it. You know, and I, I roll my eyes there. You

folks can't see that on the audio because I, I do think there are things

that are outside of the roi, and I understand that,

that like, we have to be ruthlessly focused on everything inside of the

roi because if we're not, we might get distracted and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah. But what happens if, what happens if

spending that $3,000 a month on a business coach just made you a better leader?

The ROI is not tangible. Like, it's not. You can't put your hands on a

direct impact like. Right. But I will tell you,

if you're, if your bottom line goes up year over year and you

don't attribute it to having that business coach, there's something wrong with you. Right,

right. Yeah. No, exactly. Yeah. No, but you're, you're, but you're, I'm telling you,

you're going to, you're going to attribute it to. Well, our,

our, our bottom line is up year over year because we

made changes to this process. We increased the budget to this marketing

campaign. We did. You're going to give it a, you're going to give it a

value to something that you physically did, but not remember

that you bounced all those ideas off your business coach and he helped you ideate

through what all the pros and cons and ups and downs and what could happen.

You made your decision based on real world information,

but the physical change in your business is what caused the roi, Right?

It blows my mind that. And that's another absurdity.

Exactly. That's another absurdity. Okay,

let's turn the corner, let's go into, let's round the corner here.

Let's start our close. Part

of one thing that also goes along with absurdity is the idea

of if we can't solve the problem, right, because maybe the

problem's too big. Maybe we don't have

access to the owners of those 20 to 30 to 50 million

dollar a year businesses. Maybe we don't have the interest in coaching them. Maybe we

don't have the skills to coach. Right. Or

maybe we're a person who to Tom's earlier point,

just wants to be a leader who shows up, does their work and goes home

and has a title maybe or the status of leader, but doesn't really have to,

don't really have to put in like any of the, any of the, any of

the, the hard work, any of the elbow grease

alongside those kinds of phenomena or part of that

phenomena. And this comes out of World War II actually is the phenomena

of ironic detachment. And

we started exploring this idea a little bit towards the end of last year

with Ernest Hemingway with A Farewell to Arms. We kind of talked

about this a little bit with Libby Younger, a little bit in War by Sebastian

Younger, which I already referenced. We kind of talked about a little bit with George

Orwell in 1984, the Big Panel show that we had.

I've come to this thesis over the course of

the last couple of years and part of it is a generational

thesis that's initially how I started it, but now I think it's actually something that's

a more broader cultural thing. And I want to

explore a little bit of this with Tom as we close because I think, I

think Voltaire would have told, would have told us to watch out for this.

So Voltaire begins Candide with

hang loss, you know, postulating to Candide the

philosopher that this is the best of all possible worlds. It's a species of

optimism, right? Voltaire never

dismisses, he satirizes

that position of optimism and he lampoons it through

satire, but he doesn't fail to take it

seriously, nor does he commit the other

sin which we have committed in our time. He doesn't separate from it

emotionally and just sort of shrug his shoulders and say, to

paraphrase from the great band of the 1990s, Nirvana. Oh, well, whatever,

nevermind. He doesn't say that either. He

doesn't allow himself to be ironically

detached from critiquing that optimism

because he wants not the optimism to change.

He doesn't care about that. He wants the world to change.

And he actually believes that, that his writing can do something.

His, his satirical observations, his pointing out an

illustrated absurdity by being absurd. He actually believes that that can actually

say, do something. And he believes it

sincerely. Post World

War II in the west, we've been robbed of our ability to be sincere. And

it's become an increasing problem over the course of

multiple generations, from the boomers all the way down through my

generation, Gen X, my generation has sharpened

that sense of ironic detachment to a sharp point. Now,

part of that is because we're the generation that was the first

latchkey kids. We went through divorce, social, social

strife at like an individual level, not a, not an

institutional over their level, but like a actual real

lived level. And ironic detachment is a nice anchor, but it's also,

it's also shield Right, because it protects you. You don't get emotionally involved.

Oh, you don't want to change. Okay, whatever. I'm going to go over here and

do this thing. You don't want to listen to me, you don't want to take

my, you don't want to take my coaching advice at $3,000 a month. Okay, whatever.

I'm going to cash a check and I'm going to go to the next thing,

you know. You, you don't want to, you don't

want to help me, I don't know, build houses in Patagonia.

Okay, whatever. I'm going to go to Patagonia. I'm going to build houses.

As a generation, we have sharpened this to a fine point. This is almost. We

don't even think about it anymore. The

generations behind us, the millennials and the Gen zers

specifically, took that to its logical

conclusion. And now they just want to burn everything down and have chaos.

Because that's where ironic detachment gets you. Because if it's all, well, whatever, then

leadership can be burned down, culture can be burned down,

politics can be burned down. All that exists then is

anarchy and man against man and every man for themselves. Because it

doesn't matter. I, I don't think Gen Z, you know, be careful what you wish

for, because they are not ready for every man for himself. But you know what

I think Gen X is our, We Wouldn't

be like, bring it. Right, Exactly. Because. Because we're the

granddaddies of ironic detachment. Okay, Bring it. Yeah, that's fine. Let's. Let's.

As I sometimes joke with my kids, that line from Tombstone, that great line where

Kurt Russell hits a very fat Billy Bob Thornton in the bar,

right, when he's beating the horse or whatever, he says, go ahead. You go ahead

and you pull that smoke wagon and you watch what happens.

And that's the position of Gen X, See? Like,

yeah. So Gen X, we're the F. We're the F around and find out, right?

Like, bingo. Yes. Like, we were the whole command. You know what?

You want to come at me? I don't. Whatever. Right? And then Gen

Z, they want to do that, but when the *bleep* hits the fan, excuse my

language, they're like, oh, they. They like.

They kind of shrink away and move. Like. Whereas we. We go. If we

make a mistake, we like, okay, here's a good example. And take

the. The fighting out of it. No, no, taking fighting

in back into it. Right? Yeah. Okay. Okay. You're on the street, you're in a

bar. You and your wife are in a bar. Guy says something to her, does

something to her, whatever. You step to him, he punches you in the mouth, you

get knocked out. You're still going home with your wife, by the way. Oh,

yeah. But your wife has a different level of respect for you because

you stood up for her, right? Win or lose, win or lose, win, lose

or draw, your wife is like, I'm. You know, you shouldn't have done that. You're

an idiot. You got knocked out. But I love you because you stood up for

me. It's me. And then we're in the

back of our minds going, *bleep* damn it, I shouldn't have done that. Like, we

always think about it after, right? Like, that guy was twice my size. That guy.

Like, that guy knew his. Whatever. Gen Z.

First of all, they're not stepping to anyone like that. Or if

they do, they back down real fast. Because I notice even, like, even my

own son. Now, just for the record here, I am not

a big dude. My son is 6 foot 3, 300 pounds. He could probably step

on me really fast and not even think twice about it. But

if I really sharply come back at him, he's like, oh,

I'm sorry. I didn't mean that way. Like, he just backs down right away, right?

Yeah. And then. And then even if they don't and they get smacked in the

mouth or they get put down it was, it's, it's still not their fault,

right? Like, oh, well, that guy shouldn't have done that. He still shouldn't.

He's still wrong. No, that's not how that works. You got

punched in the mouth. You just take your licks and go home. You don't just

now, you don't, you don't turn around and say, yeah, but,

yeah, but, yeah, but like, I don't, I don't understand it. So that

thing, that thing that we have as our

generation has aged and this is again, this is part of the thesis that I

came to towards the end of next year and we're going to explore a lot

of this this year. I came to the conclusion that

that was really good when we were young and it was

really useful when we were in our 20s and in our 20s. Yeah, yeah,

it was really useful. But now we've entered

generationally and societally a place where people

who are in our age cohort 45 to

64 or 46 to 65 in that cohort did

classic Gen Z cohort. We are now in leadership positions. An

ironic detachment doesn't work in leadership. Yeah,

I agree. And the thing that we need, and this is going to

be really hard for all of us, and this is why

I kind of stuttered when I said Western civilization. Maybe the podcast could say Western

civilization. Why I get embarrassed about it because you have to be

sincere and sincerity requires

a certain level of emotional connection to the thing.

Can I just say, like, where you. Can be hurt, by the way, that's a

huge thing where you can be hurt. Go ahead. Like, to me, the emotion

that is most missing, like, it's not, it's not even, it's

empathy. Right. The ability to be empathetic,

I think is totally missing in, in a lot of what we're talking about.

Right? Like, and I think to your point, our generation, it's not that

we don't, we want to be empathetic, but if we find it

difficult to be empathetic because it's like, it's, it's

almost like one of those like, scenarios where again, if you think about our

generation dealing with Gen Z, that's like a perfect example because,

because Gen Z has this and they can go research anything they

want. They think they know everything. And our generation is looking at them going, you

haven't lived through anything yet. How do you think you know that?

Right? Like that. So it's hard for us to empathize with a, with

a 20 something these days. Right? Well, and we have. And

we have a huge generation in between Gen Z and us, which

the millennials who shall go nameless for this, for this moment, for the first time

in their entire existence. Yeah. For the first. The first time. The

millennials are not the. We're not vilifying them, leaving them alone. We're leaving them alone

for this game. Go ahead. Sorry. Who are also.

They are what I call. Or what would be called in, if you were looking

at generational. Generational theory.

Generational cycle theory, which is where the idea of the fourth attorney

comes about or the high. Or whatever. Right.

Strauss and how. Right. All that kind of stuff. They are

the generation who is the hero generation. They're the

generation who, for lack of a better term,

are sincere and do want to run off and be a hero

and do want to save the world. Right. These are the people

between, you know, the oldest, the youngest end is

like 34, 35 now, you know,

coming into their mid-40s, who

have had a little life. Right? They have. They have a little life. I gotta.

Gotta give that to them as a. As a. Is it a younger Gen Z

or. I got to give to him. Our younger Gen Xer. Got to give it

to him. They've got a little life. Right. They've had a few knocks around. They're

a little bit. They got the little bitter sort of patina on them a little

bit. Yeah. But they still have hope that the

future will work out. That's because they haven't hit their late 40s yet. Yes,

true. But they. But they also. This ironic

detachment again. But they also have that genuine. That

genuine necessary.

And so we are in a unique position, I think, as leaders. This is something,

again, that we're going to explore the podcast as a theme this season through our

books. We have an opportunity, and I think

this is going to be really hard for us as. So this is my challenge

to all my Gen X leaders out there.

Ironic detachment is an anchor and it's weighing us down.

I think the fact is, if we don't get our crap together, we're not going

to experience a Gen X president. Not going to happen. We're

going to get skipped right over. We're going to

maybe have another boomer, but it's going to be a boomer. A young

boomer like Gavin Newsom is a young boomer. It's going to be like a boomer

like that versus like a J.D. vance, who's a millennial through and through. J.D. vance

is a millennial through and through. And that's that's, that's. Those are two perfect

examples right now in the political zeitgeist in America. Trump is a boomer.

Please. That, that's, that's, that's. That. And there are no

gen Zers right now that are. That are even politically

savvy at this point. They're just too young a generation. So we will,

if we don't get our crap together and cut away this

ironic detachment and actually get sincere about something and actually

care about something. This is where Marco Rubio as a political actor is so

interesting to me, because on the one hand, he plays the boomer game,

which we all did, by the way. We're all. We all did that very well.

But you can see in moments where he's not

thinking the camera is looking at him, where he's like,

okay, yeah, yeah, okay. He chose

the company line. But you can tell every once in a while he's like, what

the f. What the. Right, Right. And this is. And this is a guy who

was called Little Hands. Marco, everybody forgets about this in Trump's

first run to the presidency and got blown off the

stage. I think he genuinely learned. What

the hell? Tulsi Gabbard's another example of a Gen Xer.

Genuinely learned. Like, this is. Okay, okay, fine,

if Gen X, actually. And also, it's a basis of numbers, right?

We're the smallest generation between the two mountains of the boomers and the

millennials. So just on a numbers basis, we won't get one,

but we really won't get one if we don't get our crap

together. We actually. This is the clarion call. I'm putting

it out here at the end of this podcast. We were a generation that

was raised in absurdity, and we've become so inured

to absurdity that through ironic detachment and

through irony and through cynicism, quite frankly, you saw this a little bit in A

Farewell to Arms. We've sort of sharpened that to a point to protect ourselves

so we don't get hurt. In order to be sincere, to your point, we have

to be empathetic, which means we have to unharden our hearts.

And I think that's going to be really hard for us as leaders. But that's

a challenge. And the books, the great books can help us do that.

So. So I know we're going to. We're going to wrap this up in a

second, right? So just for, just for. Just

for hoots and hollers, I did something because you said that

this year you're going to do a little bit more fact checking on the, on

the, you know, because you, you put up a couple times. So just for fun,

I pulled up and I asked Gemini to tell

me what the Leadership Lessons from Candid would be and

summarize it for me. Right. So I'm not going to read the whole summary, but

I want to tell you and you, you tell me how many of these we

actually hit and this will be funny. Okay. One is

leaders should focus on tangible, productive work they can control rather

than worry about global unchangeable

problems, reject blind optimism and dogma,

adaptability over entitlement, value of experience

and knowledge and empathy and humanity in

humanism. So according to Gemini, we hit just about

all of those. I think that's pretty

funny, actually. That's actually, that's actually pretty good. So in other

words, we are the AI Hay, we are. No, I'm just

kidding.

We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna bring our hard. We're gonna crack

our hard Gen X shells and let the light

from our hearts shine out this season.

Season number five on the Leadership Lessons from the Great

Books podcast. But with that,

It.