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 154.

This is going to be kind of a long intro, so bear with me

on this show. We have discussed the writing of

Alexander Solzhenitsyn and talked about

gulags. We've addressed the long, dark night of persecution

brought to us in the documentation of Eli Weisel.

We've talked about the importance of leadership from Rabbi Jonathan Sachs.

We have talked about war and peace, slavery and

ethnic cleansing, freedom and conscience, tyranny and

totalitarianism. And we have done it all while groping

towards what those things may mean at a practical level for leaders

in their real lived leadership lives.

But we've never to this date on

this show asked or attempted to answer this

disturbing core question. Who

exactly are the types of people, the types of leaders

who would perpetuate bureaucratic orders

without evincing a conscience of any kind?

And what can possibly be done about them?

The post World War II Nuremberg Trials of members of the Nazi government

of Germany sought justice for the outcomes of the bureaucratic acts of

such leaders without addressing the basic psychological and

spiritual question, what type of people were these?

Without fixing such justice within a shared religious, Jewish or Christian

framework. The secular humanist modernists who won the war

by leveraging all the tools at their disposal, including the frightening new weapon of the

atomic bomb, attempted to reassemble a world broken by war and

shocked into silence by the evidence at Auschwitz, the

Buchenwald and all the other Nazi concentration camps at

Nuremberg. And they succeeded

for a time. The reassembly of

the world and the justice delivered at Nuremberg reinforced

unambiguously, at least for a little while, via popular

culture and education, and convinced a couple of generations of

Americans to accept that such reassembly was, quote, unquote, just

the way things are. This was assumed as part and parcel of the

secular humanist ethic for most of the remainder of the 20th

century. However, in our contemporary

era, 80 plus years later, this is being

deconstructed or forgotten. Take your pick. As

the post World War II secular liberal world order is falling

apart everywhere as far as those with eyes can see in the

West. The COVID 19 pandemic. It weighs both

great and small, but brought this question and many others to sharp relief

in the minds of many people in the United States, including

for the last three generations of people, most notably the Gen Xers,

Millennials and gen zers.

These three new generations of post World War II Americans never

stared the atrocities of concentration camps directly in the face.

Generations whose connection to that World War II world is only through grainy black

and white films like the one I just watched the this weekend

or via Baby Boomer generated film hagiographies produced in the

last 30 years like saving Private Ryan,

hagiographies that extol the Greatest generation and seek to

reinforce the importance of seeking justice in a

secularist, humanist society.

However, confronting the terror of blank bureaucratic

disinterest, governmental insistence on legal and social compliance, and the

application of state power to those who rebel or would rebel

feels new to us living right now.

But these dynamics would have been very familiar to the pre World War II generations

who fought in the trenches, freed the concentration camp prisoners,

and prosecuted the war's losers.

Today on the podcast we will be talking about an

author who wrote most of her work in direct and vehement

opposition to totalitarianism in the forms of both fascism

and communism. She was unapologetically

politically philosophical during a post World War II era where women were just

finding their feet in the space of political and social philosophy and

where the individual was being gradually morphed into

becoming just another one of the masses.

By the way, the themes that we're going to be exploring on the show today

dovetail quite nicely with the themes we explored our previous

episode on 1984.

Orwell would have quite a bit to say to this woman. I think

today on the show we will look at the major themes and explore the

controversies within Eichman in

Jerusalem, the report on the Banality of Evil

by Hannah Aaron Leaders.

I am personally convinced, and this is why I'm doing this book on the show

today, I personally convinced that we are forgetting the moral and ethical

lessons of Nuremb, and that is to our detriment

in the West. And today on the

show I'm of course joined by our regular contributor Tom

Libby. How you doing today, Tom?

I am ecstatic to be here today.

Jesan, I,

I thought that would get a reaction from you. Well,

it's, it's going to be a thing today. This was a book I read

probably about a year ago

and I wasn't going to do it on the show because we do a lot

of heavy books on the show that are similar or that are in this vein.

And then current events, you know, started catching

up with me a little bit. And I started thinking about some things that I've

been seeing online. And I thought, this book is a book that leaders need to

at least consider reading, and we at least need to consider offering some of our

thoughts on it to them. Um, and then I went and looked at Hannah Arendt

and I looked at her life and I looked at her. Her opinions on

things. I. I sent you, actually, a. A YouTube video from her. Her

foundation or whatever, and I watched that whole interview, and it was

fascinating to. To listen to how she had grown up and what she thought

about herself and especially what she thought about this book,

particularly as it generated so much controversy when it was initially published and

continues to generate controversy still. So I think

there are valuable lessons for leaders around that question of what kind of people.

Well, what kind of people just follow orders?

And how, as leaders, do we. What responsibility do we

have for not allowing that to happen on our watch? So.

So let's pick up with Eichmann in Jerusalem. I'm going to read a

couple of pages from this. By the way, you could pick up this book, a

PDF version of this book online. Okay. So there is a publicly

available copy. And while I'm not reading from the publicly

available copy today, you can also pick up

and download the original New Yorker

correspondence, the original New Yorker article that she wrote that

eventually became this book back in the early

1960s. And I

quote from Ikea to Jerusalem. This is from the postscript. This is her wrapping up.

This is Hannah Aaron wrapping up. There is, of course, no

doubt that the defendant, and that was Adolf Eichmann. And the nature of his acts,

as well as the trial itself, raised problems of a general nature which go far

beyond the matters considered in Jerusalem. I have

attempted to go into some of these problems in the epilogue, which ceases to be

simple reporting. I would not have been surprised if people had found my treatment

inadequate. And I would have welcomed a discussion of the general significance of the entire

body of facts, which could have been made all the more meaningful the more directly

it referred to the concrete events. I can also well imagine that an

authentic controversy might have arisen over the subtitle of the book.

For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so on the

strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which

stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not

Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been

farther from his mind than to determine what Richard III quote to prove a

villain, except for an extraordinary diligence in looking

out for his personal advancement. He had no motives

at all. And this diligence in

itself was in no way criminal. He certainly would never

have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put it

the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.

It was precisely this lack of imagination which enabled him to sit for months on

end facing a German Jew who is conducting the police interrogation, pouring

out his heart to the man and explaining again and again how it was that

that he reached only the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the ss and that it

had not been his fault that he was not promoted in

principle. He knew quite well what it was all about. And in his final statement

to the court, he spoke of the quote re evaluation of the values prescribed

by the Nazi government, unquote. He was not stupid.

It was sheer thoughtlessness, something by no means identical with

stupidity, that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.

And if this is banal and even funny, if with the best

will of the world, will in the world, one cannot extract any diabolical

or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that it is still

far from calling it commonplace, it surely cannot be so common

that a man facing death and moreover standing beneath the gallows should be able to

think of nothing but what he has heard at funerals all his life, and that

these quote unquote lofty words should completely be cloud the reality of his own death.

That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreck more havoc than all the

evil instincts taken together, which perhaps are inherent in man.

That was, in fact the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.

But it was a lesson neither an explanation of the phenomenon

nor a theory about it.

Seemingly more complicated, but in reality, far simpler than examining the

strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil is the question of what kind of crime is

actually involved here. A crime, moreover, which all agree, is

unprecedented. For the concept of genocide, introduced

explicitly to cover a crime unknown before, although applicable up to a point, is not

fully adequate, for the simple reason that massacres of whole peoples

are not unprecedented. They were the order of the day

in antiquity, and the centuries of colonialization and imperialism provide plenty of

examples of more or less successful attempts of that sort.

The expression administrative massacre seems better to fill the bill.

The term arose in connection with British imperialism. The English deliberately

rejected such procedures as a means of maintaining their rule over India. The phrase has

the virtue of dispelling the prejudice that such monstrous acts could be committed only against

a foreign nature or a different race. There is

the well known fact that Hitler began his mass murders by granting mercy

deaths to the incurably ill and that he intended to wind up his extermination

program by doing away with genetically damaged Germans heart and

lung patients. But quite aside from that, it is apparent that this

sort of killing can be directed against any given group, that is that the

principle of selection is dependent only on circumstantial

factors. And it is quite conceivable that in

the automated economy of a not too distant future

men may be tempted to exterminate all those whose

intelligence quotient is below a certain

level.

We talked in my introductory episode to this episode I would go back and listen

to that was episode 153. We talked about Hannah Arendt and her political

philosophies and her background and where she came from. We also have

a link in the show notes to the video where she talks about her own

background. I would recommend going and watching that

either after you finish listening to this episode or before

in that. In that episode 153 I did mention

this that Erin constantly prioritized political

over social questions and that this got her into trouble

over various years as people insisted on pushing her

towards a political understanding rather than a social understanding

of things like, well, evil.

Aaron is of course remembered for the controversy surrounding her reporting on the trial of

Adolf Eichmann, particularly the conclusion that she wrote

there. I think she was attempting to explain

to herself as a German Jew who had been arrested by the

Gestapo and had just barely missed going to Auschwitz

herself.

She was trying to look at Eichmann and explain who

this person was in a way that seemed in a Post World War

II context, rational without converting or

reverting to a spiritual explanation. And she had

nothing but spiritual language to describe what she was seeing there.

However, her explanation was seen as an apologia, an apology

for totalitarian systems and for how ordinary people become actors in

those systems and for the phrase the banality

of evil. Some thought that she was robbing

evil of its power by claiming it or making the claim

that because Eichmann was thoughtless

he could also be evil. She wasn't saying

those two things at all. She was saying that thoughtlessness led to

his evil. And this paraphrases or this goes along with something that we read

about in our episode nine covering 1984

and talking about Orwell in the English language. Back in the

1940s, Orwell made the point the British Orwell made

the point that we are lazy in our thoughts and

thus our Speech has become lazy. And when our speech becomes

lazy, our thoughts become lazy. I think Arendt would

agree. And lazy speech and lazy thoughts

leads to bureaucrats who just

comply thoughtlessly and commit

evil. As

usual or not as usual. I often

send Tom resources on the books that we are reading. And I don't think Tom

had read this book before or even knew of its existence.

So I'm going to ask Tom the typical question. I don't know

if you watched the video. I know you clicked on the other link and read

the other thing and we'll talk about that in a minute. But what did you

think of what was your first impressions of Hannah Arendt? And I know we just

read that little piece there from Eichmann in Jerusalem, but what do you think of

her, some of her ideas here that I've sort of laid out so far?

Well, I think, I think interestingly, first of all, I

tried, I did watch some of the video. I didn't finish the whole thing, unfortunately,

because I just ran out of time. Yeah, it's long. It's an hour.

It's long. Yeah, it's an hour. And I played it on 1.25

speed, even though you have to read the whole thing. So I was even trying

to get through it faster by trying to speed it up and reading it was

fine. I had no problem reading it at one point to five speed. But.

But I find.

I, I had a. Lot of mixed emotions watching and

like hearing the. She.

She seemed ahead of her time. First of

all, number one, and I don't mean that in a negative or positive way, just

in the sense that being a woman back then,

being involved in like being at one

point labeled a philosopher was unheard of for a woman back then

being. And then trying to pigeonhole her. And even

in the conversation you can tell by the, the person doing the interview

is trying to like kind of force her to answer things in a kind of

certain way. She wasn't having it. Which again, for a woman back then

was pretty strong willed again. Oh yeah. Whether you like her or not or disagree

with or agree with her or not, I do think for the time

she was relatively unique. She was relatively unique in the

sense that she didn't worry about

voicing her opinions. She wasn't concerned about repercussions

about her thought processes or anything like that. And, and to your point

about her, you know, with the evil scenario, and

I'm just paraphrasing one of her more famous quotes and I don't know the

quote well enough to Quote it, but paraphrasing it basically saying,

you know, someone who, who performs an evil act isn't inherently

evil. That just means they just did some stupid stuff. Like, you know,

like, but, but like we don't view that the same way

anymore. Like we look at like a single

act could basically

classify somebody for the rest of their life. Again, like we look at

even psychology today. You have a, you know, an eight year old kid that, that

purposefully goes out of his way to harm a small animal.

And now all of a sudden that kid is being followed by,

you know, people so closely because they just think he's going to become a serial

killer. Right. Because he's evil. Right. He hurt some little animal when he was 8

years old, so now he's evil. And in her philosophy that one act

does not necessarily make that person evil. That

it's, you know, you have to be an evil person to be considered evil.

You can't just perform an evil act. So. Right. And that, that goes

back to like to your. When you were talking earlier about

some of our disassociation with, with,

I mean, let's face it, that was pure evil. Like what happened.

So, but we're, we're so removed from it now that

we don't view it the same way. And we're starting to see

the, the,

you know, again in films we're starting to see the, the

glorification of the outcome. Right. Like, so the

glorification of the outcome downplays the seriousness of the

actual like, which I think, which I think is what, why we're

desensitizing to some of this stuff. Right. We're losing some of that,

that guttural. Most of the

World War II veterans are starting, they're dying off at like a 15000

a day clip or something like that. They're not very many left. Yep.

I remember growing up listening to their stories thinking, oh my good God,

I hope this never happens again. Our, our next generations

are not hearing those stories from real life people who were there.

Like, you know what I mean? Like, so that they're not getting that direct,

that, that direct impact like my grandfather, my gr. You know,

whatever had to live through this, my GR had to fight this

evil. Like they don't have that. They're getting this glorification of

it from cinema and, and books that people who

weren't there are writing and they're not going back and reading her

stuff because Hannah's stuff because it's not modern and

popular anymore. So they're just reading Today. I don't know. I. I know I'm going

off on a tangent here, but. No, no, no, I don't. I think you're onto

something. I mean, look, as much as I'll use an example, because we always talk

about film eventually. So I'll do it early. Always. Always.

I like the Dark Knight, the Batman movie from like the mid

2000s. I liked the Dark Knight. Right. The main character of the Dark Knight was

the Joker. The Joker is a sociopath. Yeah. He's an element.

He's represented there as an element of chaos. And

because it's a movie and because to your point, we've been

desensitized. You know, he blows up a hospital building,

you're a sociopath. Right. Like. Like

the, the constant pushback or challenge to Batman as character.

Even going back into the DC Comics,

the constant question is, if you have the ability to kill that guy, why don't

you kill that guy? Because every time you let that guy go or let that

guy get locked up in Arkham Asylum for the mentally insane, he's going to escape,

you know, this, and he's going to kill more people. So, what. How.

What, What. What culpability do you have, Bruce,

which was my father's name, interestingly enough. What culpability do you have, Bruce?

Mr. Wayne. Right. And. And. And we don't deal with

any of that. And of course, you know, the. The Dark Knight ends with, you

know, the Joker getting. Getting locked up, of

course, because, you know, if Heath Ledger hadn't died, I think he probably would have

been in the sequel. But my point is

that that desensitization

leads us to. In an attempt to

deconstruct everything or find truth everywhere.

We're trying to find truth in villainy,

and there's no truth in villainy. There's no truth in. To

your. I'm going to use the word. There's no truth in evil. But to your

point, we've been desensitized to it. Plus, I have younger kids.

And then you do, too. Your kid. Your younger kids are

probably older than my younger kids. But I look at my younger kid,

my youngest kid, who was born in the mid 2000s,

and I just go. I think I was thinking about the other day, I was

like, he's going to live to the end of this century. He's going to be

so far away from World War II, it's going to seem like ancient

history to him. Yeah. And

so how do we pass along. This is something I'm obsessed with, which is one

of the reasons why I do this podcast, one of the many reasons. How do

we pass along the lessons from the old things to people so they

keep that visceral pull. You just read it in the passage you

were talking about. Here's the lies. The biggest problem in

my opinion. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

Listen, World War II and the genocide of the Jewish people was not the first

time something like this has happened. No, it was not. And by the way, it

also wasn't the last. No, it was not. So. So

it, it. What frustrates the absolute

bonkers out of me is that we have not figured out

a way to actually learn from the past and not

reproduce it and not go and, and do this stuff all over

again. We've had genocidal act actions

throughout the course of history. Go look, look, in the course of history, it doesn't

like pick an era. It doesn't even matter. Pick an error. And I,

I'm gonna be bold and say within 60 or

75 years of any date you pick in history, there was some form of

genocide. I'll challenge people on that. Because

even within the, the history of

the United States alone, 250 years, whatever it was, I think we

just know. Sorry, 400. We just celebrated the.

Actually so where I live, the town of Plymouth,

Massachusetts just celebrated a few years ago

its 400th anniversary. 400 years.

Yep. Let me just remind everybody that

from 4. Even in our own 400 year history, you cannot put a

pin in within 70 years, not find a genocidal act

in our history. I'm not talking about on US soil, I'm just saying in

the world's history and just in the, in the existence of the United States

from 1620 to now, it doesn't happen. There's

been the Kumar Rouge, there's been World War II, the Jewish genocide, there's been

Native American genocide here in the United States. There's been the Cambodian genocide. There's

been. It repeats itself over and over. So until

we figure out a way. And by the way, I'm just, I'm gonna throw

cinema back in there again because we don't even

learn our lesson in movies. One of the largest grossing movies

of our, of our time right now, Avatar.

If you. The little blue, you know the giant blue on the planet.

Yep. Did you, does anybody ever stop and wonder why

the blue people, if you listen to their act,

if you listen to their accents, they sound either African

or Native American. There's a reason for that.

There's a reason that they picked those two cultures to be

represented on that movie. And by the way, just

where it happens to turn out the other way, where

they win. Great for them. But that didn't happen so much here in the. On

our planet. But, but the. But, but, but that's what I'm saying. When we

glorify some of these things in movies, right? Like, so we're glorifying

evil. And. And by the way, in that movie with Heath Ledger,

everybody I know, Heath Ledger was their favorite character in that movie.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. So, yeah. So we're picking our favorite

characters as the. As the personification of evil in that

movie. We're picking a movie and giving it the most amount of

money any movie has ever made for the

annihilation of another planet. And another.

Why, until we start learning these lessons of, like, we shouldn't be doing this

stuff, we're gonna continue. So I. I hate to say it this way, Hasan. This

is what I'm getting at. I know it's long winded. No, no, you're fine. Your

son is going to see this happen again.

Like, he's going to see it. Whether. Whether he remembers World War II or not,

whether he learns it in his history books or not, it's going to happen. He's

going to see it live. He himself is going to experience this, because we all

have in one form. And it frustrates the hell out of

me. So the last piece of this is where I think my son

and people who are born in his generation will see it. This is why I

sent you the. The one article I did. And we're going to talk about this

in the next section, but I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna put it right here.

It is quite conceivable. This is from Hannah Aaron. It is quite conceivable

that in the automated economy of the not too distant future,

men may be tempted to exterminate all those

whose intelligence quotient is below a certain level.

Yeah. Yeah. That's where we're going,

kids. So it may not have anything to do with the color of your skin

or the place you were born or whatever, but. But that's still the. It's

a genocidal act either way. When. When the guy who's running

the World Economic Forum or was slated to run the

World Economic Forum, Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote a book

called Sapiens and believes that there's no such thing as free will.

Right? When. When he says that most people

on the Earth are. And again, this is a direct quote from him. You can

go to Google and find it. Are quote unquote, useless eaters.

And he's merely thinking bureaucratically.

Okay, so I'm useless eater and my kids a useless eater, and

Tom's kids are useless eaters and Tom's a useless eater. But you, you've all,

somehow, you've ascended

to what? And really Yuval is not really the problem

because he's the tippy top of the mountain. The, the problem

is all the little Eichmanns, all

the little bureaucrats that are going to help him get where he

wants to go. And those are the people, I think, that have to be

disrupted. That's where we have to go. And so the question that

lays before us today, as I said in my very long opening there is

what kind of people,

what kind of people are these? So I'll use, I'll use a, I'll use a

modern example. So the Sacklers, right?

Sackler family, who created, well, not created, but

they were the ones that owned the pharmaceutical companies that

allowed the opioid crisis to develop. They

were sued to the tune of

several millions, billions dollars, whatever. It's a large number.

Okay, we're going to drain the

Sacklers of their money. But that, the money is

not the thing. Because eventually after you

spread the money out to all the victims and the states get all their cut

and the taxes get taken out, you still

get less money than the life would be

worth or the value that would be created by a person

who, to your point, you use the word genocide. I would not use

that term with. I think a term has to be kept very

specially for certain specific things. Sure. But when a high

school student gets on an

opioid for pain medication,

then can't get off of it because it's so addictive, then gets into

heroin and fentanyl and then OD's, you know, 10

years later or five years later. And the Sackler

family is paying out billions of dollars

in aggregate. But what will come out to be merely thousands of

dollars of the life of that dead high school student, and by the way, hundreds

of thousands of other dead high school students across the United States in the last

15 years, just at minimum, 15 years.

Where was the administrator inside of the Sackler

foundation that said, this is evil, this has to stop.

Where was the little Eichmann in there that needed to get

checked? Heck, I'll go a step further. Where was the leader

who should have checked that middle manager and said, we're not doing this

anymore and it doesn't matter if we're fired and our whole division is gone. We

can't be a party to this because we know what's happening. By the way, we

did this with the nicotine, we did this with the tobacco companies back in the

1990s. We said the tobacco companies were so

evil that tobacco itself

needed to be quote unquote sued. And yet

Philip Morris still exists. RJR

still exists. Sure, they're called Nabisco now, but they still exist. And

it's easy, by the way, for us to point at corporations for this kind of

evil. I did mention the Sackler family and the tobacco companies.

Those are private corporations because you don't have to get on opioids.

Okay? You could just gut it out. Sure, okay.

But government, you can't escape government.

Government takes my taxes and rjr, Nabisco's

taxes and Google's taxes. Government takes all

of our money. Government's supposed to, in the liberal world

order, understanding of government, serve all of us. And yet,

and yet we saw bureaucratic

thoughtlessness that would rival, particularly during COVID 19. That's

the most recent example. But we've seen bureau, I can name other examples during the

course of the last 40 years. It's just the most recent one where government

bureaucratic thoughtlessness that was at the level of

Adolf Eichmann killed people, led

directly to their deaths. And yet we all sort

of shrug our shoulders and we go, well, what are you going to do? You

can't fight city hall. And then we walk away. It

might be worse than Eichmann. Honestly, Hasan, because think about

it. Eichmann being, I mean this. So, so the World War

II situation, what Hannah's referring to, I mean, she's talking about

that it's like our current military, right? You're taking an order from

an order from an order. You're, you're doing, you're doing your, your job. You're

disconnected from the top of the ranks far enough that you

don't question that order because you have no idea what they know and what they

don't know. The government, the government bureaucracies and the government,

people that should be fired or

prosecuted for being evil is

different because they know, they have first hand knowledge and they do nothing

about it. That's, to me, that's different, that's more evil than

Eichmann. And I'm not suggesting Eichmann wasn't evil, you know, yeah,

anything that, that happened. But there's, there's a level, there's a level of

consciousness that happens that, that, that a bureaucrat that a. That

a politician looks at and they make this decision based on, do

I want to do what's best for the country and the best for our people,

Do I want to do what's best for my constituents? Or do I want to

do what's best for me and take that lobby money and vote whatever

way they're asking me to vote on and protect that bureau, that

corporation from prosecution over X, Y or Z,

whatever. That's how the tobacco companies were protected for so long. We eventually

got. We eventually got politicians in office that weren't in their

pocket. But quite honestly, that's. To

me, that's more evil. You are making a. That is not an

unconscious decision that you're making that you are not just following orders. You are not

disconnected from the upper ranks of the military so that the order came down so

many times that you just. You can't. You can't question it because it's

different. To me, this is. This is way more pure evil where

the lobbyists and

the big corporations can spend enough money on a

politician or a group of politicians to circumvent or

even better, change the laws in their favor so they don't even have to circumvent

the law. They can have the law changed to benefit them. And now I'm

voting that. I'm not voting my conscience. I'm not voting the constituents. I'm

not voting the country. I'm voting money because it puts money in my

pocket. How many politicians do you know sit in Washington that. That are not worth

millions of dollars? Zero. I don't know a single one that is

worth that is not millionaire. So these

people and, and we can claim all we want that we have

control where the. We're the. We are the people. We can vote them in, vote

them out. But do we really. We don't really, because when they get down to

the nitty gritty in our. In our local constituents and they. They take their tie

off and they look human and they're talking to us like we. Like they're the

same kind of person as we are. We vote for them and then they go

do whatever the hell they want in Washington anyway. It's like. It's so

frustrating to me. Like this whole. Frustrating. No, no, no.

This is, this is. This is something where.

Well, well, I. Go ahead. And by the way, I. Because I. I just had

this conversation this morning. I was talking to somebody. It's so funny about your article

because it brought up a conversation this morning. I was talking to somebody else about

AI in, in our, in our work environments and that the

whole concept of the conversation was AI friend or foe. Like do you

think AI is great? Do you think it's bad? Whatever, right? So we had this

conversation and I brought up another conversation I had with my daughter over the

weekend who happens to be in her early 20s. And she, she

was telling me about, about a

post that she saw. I believe it was on Tick Tock. It was a,

it was an, it was an AI

newsreel, 100% fake.

And they, by the way, I'll give the, the person who created it credit

very like told everybody it was fake. He just wanted to show

everybody how cool it was that he could make AI look real.

My daughter flat out told me that this newsreel could have, could

pass as real if they, if they just posted it and didn't say anything. People

would have bought into the fact that this was real. And by the way, it

was an image of Washington D.C. getting bombed from

what's going on in the Middle east right now. Like somebody in the Middle east,

it doesn't matter what it is, just sent over a missile. It blew up one

of the buildings in Washington before the US could react. And now the US

is on full alert and we're going full steam ahead with our military

that if that looks that real. You think that the American public

are, you think they're going to go fact check that Anyway, I bring that up

because I think what you're talking about with the article that you sent me, at

some point, do we not realize that we have to have some sort of

governing body for this? Somebody has to stand

up and say we've got to, we've got to put our heads

and our hands around AI. We have to start thinking about governing

this. And I'm not talking about censorship and I'm not talking no

creative liberties, go for it, whatever. But there should be some

sort of foundational knowledge that it is AI. When you're looking at something

on a screen, screen like, right, so something, so somebody has to start

the process of, of making sure that we know

what's real and what's fake. Once it starts getting so real

that we can't tell the difference with our own eyes,

it's craziness. And by the way, that what I was getting the whole. Now wrap

this up in a little bowl for you. Because the problem

again, these bureaucrats and these and these politicians,

they're not doing anything about it because they're making money off of It,

So they have no. Because until people start dying over

this, we're not doing anything about it. And that's because that's a tragedy in.

Itself or because they don't understand it. Which

part of the. Some of them don't understand it. Just in case you

don't believe me. Just, just look at the last time that, that Mark

Zuckerberg was dragged up in front of the, in front of Congress.

And you know the youngest senator there was ted

Cruz at 50 something. And he was the

only one that knew how to ask Mark Zuckerberg the correct questions

about the algorithm because he was the only one that didn't need

notes from his 20 year old staff members who no

longer use Facebook. Right. And everybody else on that

dais, if you go look at the video,

was over 60. Yeah, yeah,

right. They don't understand what they're looking

at. They really don't. And they don't understand the

implications of it. And then the middle

managers below them

are thoughtless bureaucrats. But let me, let

me, let me make my point. I'm going to let

Tom hang on this one for just a minute because I'm going to bring up

something else. There's another thing that we need to bring up. Kind of been talking

about this other article. Let me, let me introduce this idea. So back to the

book, back to Eichmann in Jerusalem. We're going

to pick up with chapter eight, Duties of a Law Abiding Citizen.

I'm going to read this short piece.

So Eichmann's opportunities for feeling like Pontius Pilate were many. And as

the months and years went by, he lost the need to feel anything at all.

This is the way things were. This was the new law of the land based

on the Fuhrer's order. Whatever he did, as far as he could see,

was as a Tom's point, law abiding citizen.

He did his duty as he told the police and the court over and over

again. He not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law.

Eichmann had a muddled inkling that this could be an important distinction. But neither the

defense nor the judges ever took him up on it. The well worn coins of

superior orders versus acts of state were handed back and forth. They

had governed the whole discussion of these matters during the Nuremberg trials for no other

reason than they gave the illusion that the altogether unprecedented could be

judged according to precedents and the standards that went with them.

Eichmann, with his rather modest mental gifts, was certainly

the last man in the courtroom to be expected to challenge these notions and to

strike out on his own. Since in addition to performing what he conceived

to be the duties of a law abiding citizen, he had also acted upon orders.

Always so careful to be covered, he became completely muddled

and ended by stressing alternatively the virtues and the vices of blind

obedience or the obedience of corpses.

Cadaver gorshom, as he himself called it.

The first indication of Eichmann's vague notion that there was more involved in this whole

business than the question of soldiers carrying out orders that are clearly criminal

in nature and intent appeared during the police examination

when he suddenly declared with great emphasis that he had lived his whole life according

to Kant's moral precepts and especially

according to the Kant definition of duty. This was

outrageous on the face of it and also incomprehensible. By the way, let me pause.

Hannah Arendt knew a lot about Immanuel Kant, who was a German philosopher.

She read him quite extensively and studied him quite extensively in college,

where Martin Heidegger and

Carl Jaspers were two folks that she was

intimately two other philosophers giants of the 20th century.

Although Heidegger did have sympathies with the. With the Nazis

and was a member of the National Socialist Party,

a fact that Hannah Arendt actually critiqued him about and

critiqued him over, over the course of many years in a post World War

II concept or construct. Sorry. All right, back to the

book. Since Kant's moral philosophy I'm going to

pick up with the sentence is so closely bound up with man's faculty of judgment,

which rules out blind obedience. The examining officer did not press

the point. But Judge Rava, either out of curiosity or out of indignation at Eichmann's

having dared to invoke Khan's name in connection with his crimes, decided to question the

accused. And to the surprise of everybody, Eichmann came

up with an approximately correct definition of the categorical imperative

quote I meant by my remark about Kant. The principle of my will

must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws.

Which is not the case with theft or murder, for instance, because the thief or

the murderer cannot conceivably wish to live under a legal system that would give others

the right to rob or murder him.

Upon further questioning, he added that he had read Kant's Critique of Practical

Reason. He then proceeded to explain that from the moment he was charged with carrying

out the Final Solution he had ceased to live according to Kantian principles,

that he had known it and that he had consoled himself with the thought that

he no longer, quote, was master of his own deeds, close quote, that he was

unable to change anything. What he failed to point out in court was that

in this period of crimes legislated by the state, as he himself now

called it, he had not simply dismissed the Kantian formula as no longer

applicable. He distorted it to read act as

if the principle of your actions were the same as that of the legislator or

of the law of the land, or in Hans Frank's formulation of the

categorical imperative of the Third Reich, which Eichmann might have known,

act in such a way that the Fuhrer, if he knew your action, would approve

of it. Kant, to be sure, had never intended to say anything of

the sort. On the contrary, to him every man was a legislator the moment

he began to act. By using his practical reason,

man found the principles that could and should be the principles of the law. But

it is true that Eichmann's unconscious distortion agrees with what he himself

called the version of Kant. For the household use of the little man.

In this household use, all that is left of Kant's spirit is the demand that

a man do more than obey the law, that he go beyond the mere call

of obedience and identify his own will with the principle behind

the law, the source from which the law sprang.

In Kant's philosophy, that source was practical reason. In

Eichmann's household use of him, it was the

will of the Fuhrer. Much of the horrifying,

painstakingly horrible, painstakingly thoroughness of the execution of the

Final Solution, a thoroughness that usually strikes the observer as typically

German or else as a characteristic of the perfect bureaucrat, can

be traced to the odd notion, indeed very common in Germany, that

to be law abiding means not merely to obey the laws, but to

act as though one were the legislature legislator of the

laws that one obeys. Hence the

conviction that nothing less than going beyond the

call of duty will do.

I think we're there in America, we just don't know

Kant. I think we've been there for

a while and I think what scared the hell out

of all of us, people who are outside of the legislative or

bureaucratic systems, whether they are corporate or governance. I think

what scared the hell out of all of us with COVID was just how far

that thinking has gone. And it has never been critiqued

or exposed in the way that Hannah Arendt just exposed that.

Because how many public intellectuals do we have that are even smart enough to

explain it to us? Which is of course, one of the

declines that we are experiencing or have experienced in the last 40 years

in the West.

Eichmann, you've brought this up before on this, on this podcast too. Isan.

It's. It's also a lack of, it's also a lack of new,

young, observant writers. Like, yes,

so, so, like that era that you're talking about, there was so much

going on and people, people were writing about it to

the depths of like, like she's coming up with her own

theories and pro. Like, we don't have that anymore. Like, we don't. At least

not to my knowledge. Like, I don't know anybody coming out with. Even today's

journalists are even kind of. I was gonna say a joke. I don't want to

make. I don't want to. I mean, they're still in danger, like in, in war

zones and stuff like that. So I'm not suggesting that they're. They're not doing. But

they're not. It's not the same. Like, you're not, it's. They're not coming

at it from a, a perspective of like,

you know, this, this, this shouldn't happen. Or why. Why are we doing that? Like,

they're just reporting. Yeah. Another bomb went off.

Look how destructive this is. We have or, or even children

dying. In the streets over here. Like that's okay. Or even, or even

worse. They want to be influencers. Yeah. Or they want to like, they want to

like, they want to like, tell me what their inner thoughts are on blue

sky or on X, wherever the hell they're going.

Sub stack, of course, is also becoming popular, is a place where they're going to

like, spat off about

whatever. Look.

But they're not intellectuals. They're not intellectuals. Right. They're not doing

stuff like this. They're not. They're not. They're not looking at it and dissecting it

from a, from a philosophical, political, analytical

standpoint. They're, to your point, they're just spouting off stuff to get

likes and clicks. It's like, it's crazy to me.

Well, and what we need is what we require for the

safety of a civilization. To your point earlier, that you were making

about doing about, about human beings

performing genocidal acts once every 60 to

75 years. What we need if we are

going to break that cycle, here's what we need. We need

people in roles. And I wrote this down.

We need people in roles who have the moral courage to say

no and have the

intellectual. And I'm going to go a step

Further, the spiritual language

to talk to other people in real terms and move

them so that they don't do the thing. Look,

look, all you need

to stop a genocide, all you need, and we

see this repeatedly, all you need is a bunch of

people to basically just quietly

and confidently, with courage, say one

word, and that word is no.

Yeah, that's it. And now if they said now, now here's all the

consequences, because people now want to engage in consequentialist thinking. When you start talking about

this, well, what if they send drones to my house? What if they kill my

kids? What if they lock me up? What if, what if, what if, what if,

what if, what if you get hit walking

your dog crossing the street?

What if those are cowardly

considerations? Now, now, you may question my

bonafies on saying this, and I've never

gone public about this, but I'm going to go public now.

I resisted masking during COVID for a whole variety

of reasons. I just did.

I resisted the thing underneath it, the initial

explanation underneath it, because I thought the science was nonsense. I

absolutely did. People are gonna argue with me, that's fine. Argue with me all day.

I thought the science was nonsense, by the way that's been proven later on.

I thought the reasoning behind why we were social distancing was nonsense,

by the way that was proven later on. You can go, look, I also

resisted getting the COVID 19 vaccine.

I have never gotten it and I will never get it for a whole

variety of reasons, partially health related, personal

health related, but also because the way

that was pitched to me, the way all three of those things were

pitched to me, looked and sounded

far too much like echoes

of the categorical imperative for the little man. It

sounded far too much like, to my ears, not for anybody

else. I wasn't running around advocating. And by the way, by me disclosing

this, I'm not telling you what you should do. You do what you need to

do for your own family and for your own household. And I do know people

that went in a bunch of different directions. And that's fine. You do whatever

you do. I'm not going to judge you. I'm not saying what you should have

done or shouldn't have done. That's another thing for Kant, by the way, shoulds and

odds. And I know the difference between the shoulds and odds,

okay? Oughts are based on things that can go back to

tradition, like, I don't know, we ought not commit, as

Hannah Arendt brought up, we ought not commit murder. That's an odd.

I shouldn't get the jab. That's a should.

Shoulds are flexible, oughts go back in

tradition and can appeal to something that's bigger than

myself. In order to think about that effectively and

guide my family through that, I had to actually be able to engage in critical

thinking.

And then, and then, and then I didn't give a bunch of excuses. I just

said no. I, I actually like the way you're, you're talking about

that to your, to your point, right? So the, I think the, the

main point to that is whether you did or didn't or should or should.

The critical thinking part to me is the most important because so my experience

through Covid was a little bit different than yours, but not by

much. So like, so again, again, you got to think of

access to information, right? When we first, Absolutely. When the information first

hit us, it was, it was, it was

just fear. It, Fear and fear mongering, like,

just like information overload and all the negative. So my initial

re was like, okay, I'm gonna put the mask on.

I put the mask on. But to your point though, as I started

understanding and I started watching the science come in, I'm going, okay,

what, what, what, what are we doing here now? Like, right? I take it off

and I'm going, something doesn't seem right here. Like,

how is this a, like, I, I, I started even

like, understanding definitions of pandemics, epidemics,

like, starting, I started researching, like, what does that mean? And like I'm saying, so

I take the mask off and I went, no,

I'm not doing this. So now, so, but again, in fairness,

my initial reaction was to put it on because of all of the information that

came at me all at once. And it was all fear mongering right?

Now, as for the shot, I got it. But

there was a, there was a very selfish reason for that.

Okay? They wouldn't let me go on vacation unless I had it. So

I was like, I was like. Listen,

just, I'm going to, I'm going to the Bahamas. Just stick it. I don't give

a crap. So there was, there was a, there was a, there was a gain.

The pro and con of gain from my family was that we all went on

vacation and nobody else was going on vacation at that time. So sure, we had

an awesome cruise. There was nobody on the boat.

And because we had that, that card that said, said we had been

vaccinated, we didn't have have to wear masks on the boat. We, we were able

to walk around the Boat free and clear of the so again. But it was

calculating, it was critical. Think to your point. Exactly your point. We

used critical thinking and, and pros and cons and weighing the, the

risks for our family based on

the information that we had. Right. So again to your point about, and by the

way, I, I, I, I, I feel

kind of sheepish like I followed the sheep in the beginning of that because like

I said, I just, I fell for the, the fear mongering that happened.

It only took, it took me. It took us a couple weeks once we got

through all the, of the, all that initial wave of like, oh crap,

this is like the world is ending like that. Because that's the information we got.

All the news media, every, the world is ending. You're all gonna die.

Everyone's gonna die. Like this is gonna kill everybody. This is gonna be the next

Spanish flu that kills. Oh, this is the next bubonic

plague that's gonna kill X. That's all we heard

for weeks on end. So anyway, so I,

it's not that. No. And then by the way, I'm not suggesting you made the

wrong, like you were saying, like I, I don't feel like I made the wrong

choice because again, once I realized the facts

that off and throw it away. Yeah. Excuse my language. But I was like, forget

this, this is dumb. Like what are we doing here, people? Like, this is, I

think, I think. I only wore a mask once and that was because

somebody who I personally knew and trusted

ask me to do so in an environment to protect I believe

was their, their mother in law. Okay. And because

that person asked me directly, not the state

compelling me. Yeah. Not a bureaucrat on TV

saying stuff. Right. That I could then go back check

on this great sampling tool we have called Google.

Not because of any of those reasons, but because somebody who I knew and

trusted said, hey, go do this. I

said sure, because I trust you and because I value our relationship

with you. Yeah. I don't care in

this environment, in this moment, to your point about fear, when

the entire narrative is being pushed through a fear based

lens and we're not letting go of that. And then of

course it's going to spiral out into a bunch of other different things. We don't

need to get into all that. I'm just keeping this very narrow. Yeah. Yeah. I.

And maybe it's my temperament, I'll admit that. And temperaments are

different among people. Maybe it's my psychological makeup.

Maybe I'm just designed to be more rebellious. Whatever. Maybe.

But I just Said no.

Now, if you ask me during that time why I was saying no, I

could give you the, the meanings and the understandings all the way down. And by

the way, I talk with my family about this. And we made decisions all the

way down, some of which, by the way, cost us money.

There was, there was no consequence free decision here, by the way. That's what

adults understand. There's no consequence free decision. Leaders understand

this. Every decision has consequences. Do I know people who died of

COVID Absolutely I do. Do I know people who got the.

Got the vaccine or got the jab, however you want to frame that, and then

had problems later? Absolutely. And do I know people who got

it and we're just fine. Absolutely. Yeah. There you

go. Got it. And we're just fine. Absolutely right.

And went on vacation because of it. And went on vacation because of it. Actually,

I know a guy who he. He couldn't get his pilot's license

in a, in a branch of the military that he's in.

And he was like, well, this is my job. I got to feed my family.

And so he made that decision based on that. And I've talked to him subsequent

to that and he said, I probably wouldn't make that same decision

again. These are the kinds of

dynamics that have to. My intro

sort of brought up all this stuff that, that, that Hannah

Aaron was talking about with Eichmann and what is

the duties of a law abiding citizen. Now we're in a

space and I want to revisit what Tom said about AI. We're in a

space now where the algorithm, we are

outsourcing our brains to the algorithm. If the algorithm tells us what to do. We're

already seeing this with people, though. The algorithm tells us what to do,

we just do what the algorithm says. And instead

of it being the rule of nobody from nowhere,

now it's the rule of an AI from

nowhere. When the AI screws up. Here's my

giant question. When the AI screws up and gives us

the wrong information and we all followed it off the cliff like lemmings and no

one, or very few say no. That's

a disaster. That's a disaster. Bigger even than Covid.

Who will we hold responsible? Because the AI cannot

think. And if there were no.

The 2008 financial collapse, one of the massive critiques from the left is that during

the 2008 financial collapse, no

banker was put on trial or went to jail.

That's a legitimate point. I have a problem with that. One

of the critiques of some of the things around COVID

19 has been, not one bureaucrat has been put in jail

are made to do a perp walk. That's a legitimate

critique. Not one. As a matter of fact, there have been

a lot of articles written from places like the Atlantic and other

approved outlets like CNN and MSNBC that we should all just

sort of forget this and just sort of move on. Okay.

When there is no one to perp walk, when there

is no one to blame, when it is the algorithm, and the

algorithm does not think, what will we do then?

I don't think we have an answer for that question. Matter of fact, I don't

think we're conceptualizing it. No, we don't. But that's kind of what I, I. Said

earlier, and that's what you said earlier. Yeah, somebody, somebody has to

put some guardrails up. Somebody has to start governing

this. Like it's like, it is what it is. Like.

Okay, we, we, When Google first came

out and people were getting all this information thrown at them by Google,

nobody said we should be making sure this information

is legitimate. But somebody

did. Eventually us as consumers pushed back and said, hey, Google, why

do you keep showing me this crap like I keep asking you for, I

don't know how many, how many

orangutans are, are left in Borneo. I don't know, whatever. I'm just. Yeah, yeah, whatever.

No idea where that just came from. But you know,

you ask that and it comes up with some random crap and then you're like,

so eventually Google had to put its own guardrails up, but it was because

we had massive amounts of people saying, your search is giving me

crap. Like, your search is giving me garbage. Your search is giving me garbage. Like,

fix it, fix it, fix it. And they eventually fixed it, but it was,

but we have some, we have to start doing that now with

the AIs of the world because we're already starting to see what

you're talking about. And you just said that. So a

large language models are starting to produce content

at a, at a pace that is

unprecedented in our, in, in our history. And

it's, that's, that's not even the right way to word it. It's,

it's. I, I, I heard a statistic the other day and I, I have

nowhere to justify this, so we can fact check it later or whatever. But it's

something to the, to the point of like,

every year more data is created

than every year behind it combined. Or,

yeah, I've heard that effect. Right? I've heard Something like that. Yeah, I've heard something.

Yes. Think about that for a second. So every year, meaning,

let's just use small numbers for a second. Okay, sure, yeah. One

plus one plus one is two. Two. So the next year

it's five instead of two and the next year

it's 10 instead of five. Like that's what we're talking about here, people.

Every single year more information is putting, being put on

the Internet now. Especially now because of things like chat GPT and

Claude and perplexity and all these other AIs

that nobody's policing what the information is in

worse off, the AIs are starting to use each each other

as reference. So like, okay, again just

let's be clear here. Chachi PT produces a

document that nobody fact checks and just

gets put on on the, on the Internet. The next AI

reads that document, it doesn't know if it's right or wrong or good or

bad or, or it just uses it as a reference point for,

to produce another document. We are having bad

decisions like influence bad decisions influence

bad decisions at an enormously increased clip.

At some point, at some point you know that, that

old adage, garbage in, garbage out. Like, like you put garbage in, you're going to

get garbage out. Well, we're seeing the garbage come out right now, people.

Can we, we should, can we stop it please? Like, can we

should, we should have, we should have a logo for all the LLMs. LLMs.

Allowing you to make bad decisions faster. Yeah, right.

And I'm not saying they're all bad. Don't get me wrong. Like, is there a

place for AI? Absolutely. I think there, there's use cases for it. I think AI

is helpful. I think there's a lot of benefit to it. Blah, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, all that stuff is right. But if we, if we

take just the good and ignore the bad, we're going to

end up in a bad predicament later.

So I guess the core question as we kind of round the corner on this

episode, there's a ton of other stuff in Eichmann in Jerusalem.

I strongly recommend you reading leaders reading it.

There's even a good. Oh, not a good. There's a, an

interesting piece in there. An interesting chapter.

Not piece interesting chapter in Eichmann in Jerusalem.

It is,

is the, the chapters on the way. Not every country

that the Nazis conquered deported their

Jews. We tend to think that every country went along

and not every country did. Matter of fact, a notable country that did not go

along was Denmark. And actually the king of Denmark

Just simply said no.

Pushed back. Right. And pushed back on the furor and said, just, no, we're just,

we're not sending you our Jews. And if you come to get them.

Oh, no, actually it wasn't that one. It was. What do you say? Because it

was the star to identify them. He's like, okay, well, everybody in the country will

wear. Will wear. Will wear a yellow star, so good

luck. So

there was leadership, courage during

World War II. Yeah. From a country that couldn't even fight back either.

Like, that's the other thing. Like, they didn't even have the mechanism to fight. If

Hitler decided, okay, fine, then I'm just gonna go destroy everybody with the star.

Like, he would have wiped out the whole country. And. And they would. They would

not have been able to do much about it. But he stood up.

You. This is again, the core lessons in here

are not about a rebel yellow and a

southern flag. You know, they're not about

rednecks or MAGA or any of that other kind of garbage that people

think of when the right people thinking. The right thinking people think of

rebellion. It's not. That's not the lessons. The lessons in here aren't even about

good old fashioned American, because those are people in Europe. Good old

fashioned American cussedness. The Patrick Henry type that we have a

strain of. I've talked about those podcasts. A strain of that runs in

our national character quite strongly and of

course came out during COVID uncritically, but did come out.

This is about humans, human leaders

looking at the people who are working for them

and saying, we're not going to have any Eichmanns here and it doesn't

matter if everybody else goes off the cliff with the AIs,

which is what's going to happen in the future. It is going to happen. Someone's

going to go off the cliff with the, with the algorithms. The ones

who don't go off the cliff with the algorithms will be led by leaders

who will do two things. One, combine a

thoughtful bureaucrat to monitor the AI

and back check it. But then number two,

will also override both the thoughtful

bureaucrat who can be convinced of something and

override the AI and say, kind

of like in the great submarine movie Crimson Tide

or, you know, the Hunt for Red October. No,

we're not going to launch the nukes. We're

just not. Well, what if we die? Well, then I

guess we die. It's been glorious.

I'll see you all on the other side, I guess. Or maybe not.

I Hope you. Hope you're praying up even tithing like good

Catholics. But this is the posture

that we have to take as human leaders, I think, moving forward into our

AI driven future. Because when we have the rule of nobody from

nowhere, to paraphrase from Matthew Crawford, we don't want

to have people in those bureaucratic positions who are like

Winston in 1984, who will just comply and say, two and

two is five, no matter what their eyes actually see.

There's a. There's a fundamental problem that I think we have too, as leaders.

So, like, okay, so let's say. Let's say you're. You're trying to build

an organization that gives people that autonomy to

say no, right? Like, you're, you're looking at it from a. You know,

again, we, We. You've seen this a thousand times where people will say,

well, I'm the kind of owner of a company, or I'm the kind of president

of a leader of a company, whatever. People can come to me with any idea,

no idea is a dumb idea, I'll listen, blah, blah, blah, Great.

If I, if I tell people to do something, I want them to push back,

if they, if they feel compelled to do so, great.

That. That's not the challenge. Saying that is easy, right?

When it happens, your reaction is

the hard part. Because here's what I've

experienced in my lifetime with, with leaders who were

saying that they accept all of what we're talking about,

what they never, what they have a hard time learning. And I, and I,

I, I would love to hear your thoughts on this and where we can learn.

How do you learn how to be better at this? When

that person tells you the idea, how do you make

them feel like it's not a dumb idea when you're not going to do it?

Like, so you're. I want you to give me all your ideas. I know. No

idea is a dumb idea, right? Okay, Hasan, you got this great idea. And I'm

thinking in the back of my head, this guy's a complete idiot. What is he

talking about? But I can't say that to him, right? Because I want this culture

in my company of willingness to say no, willingness to push back,

willingness to come with ideas to the table, all that stuff that

we're just talking about. And the first words out of my mouth are, you

know what? Hey, son, that sounds like a great idea. But. And as soon as

you say but, they shut down, they're like, I'm out. I'm done. I'm not

listening. Because you don't. You don't really think my idea is good. You don't really

like me. You don't. You don't want to hear me. You don't want to listen.

You're not really listening. Like, they go off on this

tangent in their own head. Oh, yeah, how do we not do that

as a leader? How do we take that environment that

we want to build, that we all want to build? Well, I would

imagine most people listening to this podcast, that's why they're listening to it. They want

to hear. That's good. Lessons, leaders.

I've never found anybody. Now, I'm not excluding myself, by the

way, because I try to have that open dialogue and that opens all the

time. But I am one of those people that'll say, hey, listen. And

I tried. I think I'm being good about it, right? And

I can see it right in their face. I can. I watch the micro

expressions in their face just look definitely defeated. And I don't know what else to

say to them when I say, you know what, hey, son, that's a great idea,

but we're going to go a little bit different direction because, you know,

the, the research has shown this, studies have shown us that

whatever. And, like, so we're going to go in this direction now on

a rare occasion where somebody says, but, Tom, the research is wrong,

you're looking at, you know, go check this and go check that. Okay? But that

doesn't happen often. It. I think it's the. I think what we're

asking people to do is learn and have the ability to say no twice.

Like, at least twice. Because you say no once and that you get

pushed back from the leadership and you become defeated and walk away.

If you're willing to say no twice and stand your ground on your moral

compass or your. Or your whatever, where it is. We're talking about

your thought process, your own research. You did, like, you went and

you found something for the company or whatever. If you

can say no twice. And it makes me now really check

my theory and philosophy about running the, the company being a good leader.

If you say no to the second time. And I'm like, okay, hold on a

second now. All right, let me, Let me hear the whole thing now, because now

you got my attention. Like, but leaders don't.

It's not that we don't have the ability to do that. It's just that as

soon as we say no, but, you know, or. It's

a great idea, but thanks for bringing that to my attention. But as soon as

we say the word but it's over. How do we say that to

them without saying the word but so that we can tell them that we want.

To engage you Say the word and.

Walk me through that. I like, I want to hear. I want to

hear how. Okay, so here's how it would sound. So you're going to bring me

this wild and crazy idea right tomorrow and you're going to tell me something

that's totally, completely the opposite of the vision or maybe goes

a different direction of the vision or the goals than what we, than what we

want to have or whatever. And I know what the vision and goals are. I

know that you don't have all the information. You bring me the idea

and I let you talk. That's the first thing. I created an environment where you

can actually talk and you feel comfortable to bring it to me in the first

place. So it's not a fear based environment. It's actually a growth environment.

Okay, so that's sort of the, the table stakes,

right? To begin with, I eliminate. But from my response,

I say, Tom, that is a great idea. And I would like you to go

do some more research on that, find me everything that's possible about that

idea and come up with a plan for me for how we can execute on

this in the next six months.

I didn't say I wouldn't do it. I didn't say it didn't fit. I didn't

say I wasn't interested. Even my facial expression, my micro expressions are

ones of curiosity and are ones of interest. I'm not

telling you what I don't, what I know. Because see, here's the thing most

leaders fail to understand.

This is going to be a hard truth coming out of here. But I think

Hannah Arendt would appreciate this. Most leaders have to

understand that most people don't really care what you

know, they care what they can bring

to the table. They care very much about how they feel about what they

can bring to the table. And they care very much about

the advancing of themselves coming to the table. It

is rare that you are going to find someone who can handle the

butt in that sentence and still go away undefeated.

So since that's a rarity in the beginning, we have to create the

table stakes of the environment. This is what I would do if I was advising.

This is what I would say. We have to create the table stakes of the

environment where that trust building can begin. And then we have to

continually build on those building blocks with every single word that we say. And

so it has to be intentional. So we replace the but with

an and. We replace the but with an or.

And here's the other thing we do when that person comes back

to us because they will. We

take seriously what they have brought. Brought to us. And we

say, thank you for bringing this to me and doing the research. You clearly have

looked at this. This is what I've seen. Where are the gaps?

And now we're actually collaborating. Now we're actually being innovative.

Now we're actually moving the thing forward at

scale. This defeats us because at a certain

point we can't know everybody and everybody's personalities. By the

way, Dunbar's number says that we can only keep track of about

150 people. 150 different relationships in our head at any

given point. Any given point. Most humans can't go past that.

And so scale defeats us, which is why we have to have good lieutenants

and good captains who are also trained in not saying

the word but.

And that's really hard.

So I gave you the correct answer. And I also gave you the

answer that's really hard, which is why it's the correct one.

I get it. And

Tom's gotta go. Tom's got a hard stop here coming up in about three

minutes. And we didn't really resolve anything today, but.

But we did. I'm out. You said, but I'm out.

We did successfully discuss and talk about some of the

themes, a couple of the themes, anyway. I think the core theme actually in

Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt. I would encourage you to pick this

book up if you are a leader and read it closely. I would also

encourage you to watch the video on Hannah Arendt and the

article that we are going to link to about AI from Matthew Crawford that are

going to be in the links in the show notes

below, the player of whatever podcast player you are listening to

this podcast on. And I would like to thank

Tom Libby for coming on and joining us today. And with that, well,

we're out.