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 135.

There are some books that define

what it means to be a leader in ways that are

counterintuitive. And we spent a lot of time on the podcast

last year exploring some of those books and exploring

what counterintuitive thinking around leadership might look like.

All the way from looking at, how

to network via the war of 18 12, all

the way to how to think about and how to engage

against, propaganda and ideology and the power of the powerless

by Vaclav Havel. And finally, wrapping up

towards the end of the year, we looked at Huckleberry Finn and what it

means for leaders to engage with humor in a world that

might indeed be humor less or increasingly humor

less. Although, I think we're at the end of that. I think we're in a

slow healing cycle from that. Then there are

some books that challenge us in deeper kinds of ways and

combine ideas that have come from other places that we may not be

familiar with and really make them succinct. And today, we're

going to be covering one of those books.

Now I got to admit, when I first read this book, I was not convinced

that it was a leadership book, at least not by the title,

even though it has the word leadership in it. I was convinced that it was

something else because of the provenance of the book, the nature of

the publisher, Cannon Press, and the type of man who is

behind the publisher, Doug Wilson. But

we covered, in the final episode of 2024,

Doug Wilson's commentary on the book of Revelation when the man comes

around. And so I decided to start off this year, a

year where we opened up with Shop Class as Soulcraft by

Matthew b Crawford. I decided to continue that process

of noodling into what does it look like to engage with material

reality in a world of anxiety, trouble,

and strife with this book. And I'm not going to show it to

you because, guess what, I don't have a physical copy of this

book. But I do have a digital copy, and we are

going to be talking about, insights from that book, and insights

from the digital copy of that book today with

our guest cohost from the end of last year whose name and

voice you will recognize when I say it. So today, we'll be

extracting leadership lessons from what I consider to be one of the best,

probably straight leadership books of 2024,

Leadership and Emotional Sabotage, Resisting

the Anxiety That Will Wreck Your Family, Destroy Your Church, and Ruin the

World by Joe Rigney.

Leaders, here's a question for you. How do you solve a

problem like Ed Friedman?

And today, we will be joined in our conversation by our first guest cohost of

2025, who, as I've mentioned before, was our last

guest cohost to the final episode of 2024, where

we did discuss that commentary, on the book of Revelation by Doug

Wilson, when the man comes around.

We are joined today by my friend and former

pastor, who I've never really mentioned that on this show, Brian

Bagley. How are you doing, Brian? Hey, man. I'm

I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

So, Brian has on his, very

snazzy vest. I have on my flannel,

which is lined with sheep's wool that I got from, that I got

for, for Christmas. My wife says that I look very

much like a farmer now. I look like a blue collar guy, which

kinda goes along, I think, a little bit with the nature of the book and

the kinds of things that, Joe is attempting to get

to here in Leadership and Emotional

Sabotage. So you'll

see that on the video. You won't hear any of that on the audio, but

you'll see that on the video. So it'll be good for you. You look great,

by the way. You look great, by the way. You know, I it's interesting. So

I was, like, I was looking at we were doing our prerecording, kinda going through

our prerecording checks with my, my, production assistant.

And I was looking at the video, and I was like, oh my god. Like,

all gray on that side. What is happening?

Well, you know It's wisdom. We

something's well, something's coming out. It might be might be that something's coming out. I

don't know about coming, you know, going in. But, let's see if we can get

to some wisdom today. So just like with most books that are new

or relatively new, we're not gonna read directly from the book today.

We're gonna comment on it, and we're gonna talk about larger themes in the book.

And we're going to I'm gonna ask Brian some questions, and we're gonna kinda walk

through some of the big chunky ideas in the book.

This book is short, and, it's only a 108 pages.

So it's easy an easy read. And I was kind of

I will admit, I was kind of perturbed when I when I figured out how

short it was because I was, like, really, how how good could it be? But

short, small books are what Canon Press is known

for. Books that distill down the BS and the

nonsense and really get into just this is what this

thing is, right, that we're talking about. And we'll talk

a little bit about Joe Rigney. And we'll talk about his

background, why he wrote this book potentially, and sort of some ideas I

have about that. So I'd like to kick off with a brief

a brief summary of the book. So what Joe Rigney is doing is

he's taking ideas that were, formerly proposed in a

book called The Failure of Nerve, by a guy named Ed Friedman,

many years ago. A book that was,

to my knowledge, never fully completed. And, he's taking these

ideas, which were written with a focus on evolutionary

biology, a focus on psychology, and a focus on secularism. And he

is applying a biblical worldview to

these ideas and placing them in a biblical context.

And Rigney, the author of Leadership and Emotional

Sabotage, picked up a few principles that Ed Friedman had

talked about. But not all of them. But he he picked up a bunch of

them. And those include ideas of emotional systems

being, around in the world. Chronic anxiety,

triangulation, a concept called herding, which we're gonna talk,

a little bit about today. What

it means to be and what it is what it means to be and and

who is a well differentiated leader.

Empathy. We're sure gonna talk a lot about empathy today,

particularly weaponized empathy. We're gonna talk a little bit about that.

And, because Joe got into a little bit of trouble talking about weaponized empathy a

few a few years ago. And this idea of

emotional sabotage, which, Friedman never really discussed

because Friedman didn't really believe, just like most secular atheists don't

believe in a fallen world. But Christians

do, and they know that we have to we know that we have to operate

within that very carefully. In chapter

1 of Leadership and Emotional Sabotage, Rigney draws on the

bible, Shakespeare, Homer. And he does all of this to

show how anxiety that's current in our society,

is not just a general crisis, but a crisis of degree. And he

he makes some distinctions with the difference in the book that I think are

important in the first few chapters.

In chapter 2, Rigney builds on that concept of a crisis of

degree, by talking about and addressing this

question, how can a leader lead through a crisis of

degree? What does that actually look like? And then in chapter 3, Ricky

describes the concept of emotional sabotage.

One of the things that's interesting to me and why I wanted to talk with

Brian about this is because, the dynamic of emotional sabotage

occurs a lot in churches, and has occurred a lot more, I

think, as the crisis of degree has increased over the course of the

last, I would say, 25 years. And it has led to church splits. It's

led to church leadership being questioned. The probably

most public example that I could think of recently that has happened that's

in the public zeitgeist is all the dynamics between Beth Moore

and anybody that you can mention in the Southern Baptist

Conference.

As growing leaders and this is from a review of Joe

Rigney's book. As growing leaders begin to exercise renewed biblical leadership, the

pushback is often negative and pronounced at first. How can a leader lead

through this? And I don't think it's just in I don't think it's just in

churches. I think as leaders and we're about to see this, I think, with the

new Trump administration, at a macro political level,

but I also think we're about to see this at a micro political level. As

corporations move away from DEI and other initiatives that they

have that they have pushed for the last

well, since that mostly peaceful summer of 2020.

What you're going to see is a lot of emotional sabotage. I'm

already starting to see the little tiny spring shoots,

the leaves coming up on the trees of that on places like LinkedIn and the

Drudge Report as the quote unquote resistance

to well, to being emotionally manipulated

really begins to kick in. And it's gonna be interesting to see how these

CEOs and these leaders respond to the pushback,

that is negative and pronounced against emotional

sabotage. So these are some of the main ideas that are at the

front of leadership emotional sabotage. And I'd like to kick off

by asking Brian Bagley,

what do you think about this? What do you think about this book? Talk about

it. I know you had mentioned when we started talking about talking about this book

that you had started it and then you put it down. Now you've gone back

into it. What do you think of this book? Yeah. No. I think it's

a I think it's a timely book. I think,

there it there's a lot of application in not just in

the church. I think it's I think your your

analysis there, you're you're drawing the line between the the

DEI, and emotional sabotage, I think

it's absolutely absolutely spot on. I think there's,

there are plenty of examples where,

people have made appeals to a motion,

that I think in a bygone era would have

just been, you know, shrugged off. You know?

In a more masculine era, there those

appeals to a motion would have just been dismissed. But we don't live in

a masculine era. We live in a feminine era. And so there's a lot

more weight being been given to emotional

appeals, whether it's through mass media,

politically, even, unfortunately,

as much as I hate to say it, theologically. And,

you know, you would you, you would hope that that theology your

theology would be, you know, theology is the is the thing that's at the the

headwaters of any society. It's their their what they think about God and

man. And so, you know, if your theology is

warped, then everything downstream of that will be as well.

And so so I think, you know, just from reading the book

and I I think Joe Rigney has

I think he's ahead of the curve with this book. I think he's got

some things he said some things that need to be said,

and I'm excited that he wrote it. I'm I'm glad that I I was able

to get through it, and, and I look forward to applying it in the coming,

months years. Well, it's interesting that you mentioned that religion

and you and I have had this discussion. Theology is or religion is

is upstream or other things. I let's frame it this way. Other things that

we value in civic and public life are downstream from

religion. And someone who is non sec who is secular

will listen to this and will say, rightly so,

they will say, well,

that may be true, but religion is just a social

construct of man. Now, we're not gonna get into the objections to that or the

the the or the ideas around that. Otherwise, we'll be here for 4 hours, and

we don't have that kind of time today. Instead, what we're going to do is

we're going to grant that argument that religion

is a social constructive man for the purpose of

talking about where that social construct sits. Right?

And religions all the way always go back to worldviews.

Right? What do you view where do you view your place in

the world? Where do you view Right. Who you are? I would

assert that worldviews go directly to and and the misorderedness

that we have in our worldviews go directly to the postmodern meeting

crisis that we've had for the last now going on 60

no. Almost 80 years, actually, in the west

overall. We've had an increasingly misordered sense of

meaning ever since, particularly in Europe, Christianity

died its last death, in the bombing of Dresden,

I would say, probably, in, in 1943, 44,

whenever that happened. I think it just it just that event

just wiped out. And it's not just that event. It was a culmination of a

lot of things, but that just sort of wiped out Christian Europe and

allowed for the rise of deconstructionism that

infected academia and other areas of our of our of American

public civic life over the course of the last 80 years or so.

Joe Rigney, I think, would probably agree with us in all this.

Just a little background on the author. He earned a bachelor of arts degree

in communication from Texas A&M University, followed by a master of arts in

biblical and pastoral studies from Bethlehem College and Seminary, and a master's

degree in classical Christian studies from New Saint Andrews. That would be

Doug Wilson's outfit in, in Idaho, and a PhD from

the University of Chester in England. He also served for

a brief time as a briefing pastor or maybe currently serves

as a preaching pastor at Cities Church in Minneapolis.

Let's talk a little bit about Joe Rigney. So

John Piper booted him from his little conclave up there in, in

Minneapolis. Can you tell the listeners why that happened and who John

Piper is? Because maybe most folks may not know. Yeah. John

Piper is a great preacher, pastor, and he's kinda he

kinda cut his teeth. He kinda became

famous in the 19 nineties for a series of,

I would say, college age,

it was a movement of of mainly college students at that time in the early

nineties. It was called the Passion Movement, and, it was

it was sort of the the awakening of this, reformed

movement among Christians, especially

younger Christians, and that gave rise to other aspects of

the reformed church planning movements such as Acts 29.

And there were some other things that kinda sprang from passion,

but but, Piper's sort of the the grandfather of

that that whole movement. But he's very it's interesting because,

reform guys tend to be more Presbyterian

ish. You know? You see you see there there are lots of reformed baptists. I'm

probably gonna get the smack down online about this, but but there are reformed

baptists, and and Piper is certainly one of them. I mean, I would say

you know? And I'm Baptist, and I I I would say I lean more towards

the reform way of thinking about things. But but bottom line

is, Piper is he's like the

granddad in in all of that. And so so,

you know, he founded Bethlehem College. He was the pastor there at

Bethlehem Baptist Church and had a very, very successful

ministry for a long time. Started, I think he was in charge. I

think it was Crossway Press. I'm not sure. Maybe it wasn't Crossway. But there's there's

some big publishing outfit. It's Crossway, I think, that he

founded, and it's huge. It's got a lot of a lot of publicity. It's a

great it they've got a lot of great resources. So Piper's been very

successful. And, and so Rigney kinda grew

up under him and and but Rigney, kinda

took a little bit of a you know, he he developed his own ideas

about some things, based on his own theology.

And, and so I think that's where you were going with that.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. And we'll get into a little bit deeper of

that or around that when we talk about sort of some flack that

Rigney has gotten. But I think, leadership and

emotional sabotage comes directly out of Rigney's

experiences defining what is going on in the

public culture in a way that goes that cuts

against the grain of the pipers or the Tim

Kellers, or even, I

would say, Alastair Beggs of the world.

And the reason why it cuts against the grain of those types of

folks is because those folks, to your

point about Piper, cut their eye teeth on building in the 19 nineties when we

lived in a much more Christian positive culture. I mean, it was still

becoming Christian negative, but it was it was nominally still Christian

positive. And now we live, I would assert, in a fully Christian

negative culture. Mhmm. You wouldn't believe the kind of pushback I

get from people when I talk about Christianity on this podcast. You wouldn't

believe the kind of pushback that I get. And

it's I'm I'm not talking about it in terms of, like, oh, I'm a martyr.

Feel sorry for me. No. Like, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm

saying there are people who genuinely just sort of skip past these topics and

go right to the other books whenever I talk about a book based in theology

or the bible. Or they'll they'll skip past because they it doesn't mean

anything to them. They're like, that doesn't mean anything to me. Christian

negative doesn't mean hostility. Christian negative can just mean passive

aggressiveness or even just, like, I'm just gonna ignore the thing

because it doesn't matter. And I think that's where we're

at as a culture in the United States. So Rigney came up,

like and I think Rigney is right around our right around my age. I'm in

my mid forties now. He came up during a time when

the transition from Christian positive to

Christian negative was almost fully complete. And he could see it in his

own peers. And so he writes from that perspective versus Piper who's

writing from the other end and leading from the other end of the telescope. The

The other thing I would say to that, if if I can jump in, is

just Yeah. There there's another there's another you're absolutely

right about that, Haysan. There's another aspect of this, and

that's the s the eschatology. So

Piper is gonna be more of a premillennialist,

and Joe Rigney is gonna be more of a postmillennialist. And so that

and the reason that gets into the the

civil sphere and Christian nationalism. K? So

so Piper and,

oh, you Tim Keller, couple of other guys that you mentioned,

premillennialists. Right? And so they take a much

more conciliatory tone with the

world. Why? Because they don't really see it as their

job to necessarily, build anything. I'm

I'm not I'm not saying they don't care about building things, you know, building a

church or or ministry. I'm not saying that. But they fundamentally

believe that that that things are gonna get worse and worse and worse, and

god's gonna Jesus is gonna come again in the second coming and just

rescue rescue the church from a really bad situation.

So they don't feel any pressure to be involved in

politics, to try to reform politics, to try to, reform

the the the public sphere in any way. Right? We're just gonna preach

Jesus and be nice and pray this

prayer, this simple prayer, and, you know, just think about keep you

know, think about your life in a Christian way and just love God and

and get along with folks and and it'll be okay in the end. And

Rigney's you know, he's not looking at it like that. He's saying, no. Christ doesn't

return until until the enemies of God are are made a

footstool under his feet. So that only happens through

the execution of the, the the gospel plan, the the

great commission, if you will. And so that means we have to go into these

spheres and, conquer them for Christ, if you will. So

that's the whole the whole point of Christian nationalism. We have 2 different ways

of thinking about how to confront a secular culture.

And the and they're they're I I wouldn't say they're diametrically opposed,

but they're they're clearly 2 different paths. And so,

so that's another thing in play. Well, in that and then you get into,

like, essentially the article. You get into, like, infant

baptism, which I'm not gonna get into. I'm just not gonna get into on this

podcast. I'm a I'm a I always say I'm a

recovering Catholic, a recovering orthodox

Catholic. And so,

maybe next time maybe sometime this year, we'll come on and we'll talk about the

intricacies of infant baptism for our audience. That'd be interesting. I

don't care. Because there's some definite, oh, let's put it this

way. We're the the orthodox and the the orthodox Catholics and

the Catholics, the western Catholics are reading the reading

the, the passages around baptism differently than the baptists are. Let's

just say that. They're just reading them differently. True statement.

So True statement. It's interesting, though. Let's let's talk about Christian

nationalism because this one's a little bit more this one actually irks

or pokes the secularist right in the right in the eye.

Particularly, the more leftist a secularist happens to be

politically oriented, the more

Christian nationalism riles them up.

And the reason why, I think, and I wanna go to a

deeper thing other than the nationalism or this weird

heuristic shorthand that's always put out thereof. Well,

we gotta separate church and state. And Christian nationalism just wants to combine churches.

We're gonna have a theocracy, Handmaid's Tale, blah blah blah blah. Then they start, like,

foaming at the mouth, and they create a golf and create make a Hulu show

or something that a bunch of people on the on the East Coast and the

West Coast watch.

Christian nationalism, I think, irks people of a political stripe

because they are of a purton they are of a particular psychological

temperament, I would assert. I think Rigney would agree with me, and I got this

from the book too. So Rigney is very

much concerned with what has happened and how to solve

it, which is great. He's describing the what. He's saying,

this is emotional sabotage. This is,

this is, weaponization of empathy.

This is, what what what what's the other things on my list? Oh, yeah. These

are the emotional systems. This is what anxiety looks like in the church. This is

what triangulation looks like. He's very much consumed with, like, this is the what,

and now let's move on to the how do we solve it, which is

great, right, for for the podcast and for where we're going this year. Great for

our show. I am, of course, a root cause

guy, which means I'm I'm very interested.

And and you can say this is for my own self referential reasons.

Sure. Okay. I'm very interested in the why

and the how. Mhmm. So

the reason why Christian nationalism hoax

people of a certain temperament, I think, is because of the

problem in our world today that if you mention it, we get you booted from

polite society. And Brian actually already mentioned it. So but boom. Brian's

already been booted from polite society, so it's fine. It's fine.

And he still eats, and somehow his kids still have clothes, so it's cool. Like,

being booted. Yeah. Boot boot boot for life is fine. This is fine.

But I think the problem is this, or the the why is

this. We have we have a dominance

or preponderance, maybe this is the best way to put it, of the

prioritization of a more feminine temperament in communication and

social situations. And that has slowly come to overwhelm

public discourse over the last 40 years. As a matter of fact,

probably the biggest example of this is the recent hearings for the

secretary of defense, Pete Heggeseth, and

just go online and search Pete Hegiseth female senators.

And you will find all kinds of memes and videos that will pop up,

in your browser. And if you are at work

in a place where HR is looking over your shoulder, you might

want to make sure to not go through the VPN at work

when you look at this. Because HR will have feminine HR will have a

conversation with you. Whether that feminine comes in the form of a man or a

woman, I do not care. It's a temperament issue. Right? That's

right. And I think that but I think that people

are searching around for why that feminine temperament has has come to so dominate

public discourse in work, in churches, in schools, in government. And I think

the why is because it's it's several factors. But I

think there's been changes in social structures and changes in

globalized communication patterns, with the advent of the commercial

Internet. I think the commerce this is one of the things that the commercial Internet

opened up. It opened the door to a

feminine temperament dominating

public discourse because the nature of

the applications built on top of the commercial Internet, most notably

social media, prioritizes

social norming, a a

tamping down of conflict,

and making sure that everybody stays in on track. And by the way,

you can see this from a masculine version of the feminine temperament, which is surveillance

and data gathering. That would be Google. And you can see this in a

more softer feminine version of

this in feminine temperament. And this would be, exemplified by

Tinder and online dating. Oh, and even, by the way, OnlyFans. Let's just

throw it out there. What the heck? Why not? And I think that

all of this has taken leaders who were raised again like Piper

and made their bones like Piper, has taken them all

completely by surprise. Because they came out of a more masculine temperament, a more

masculine way of communicating and dealing with problems. And this has

led to a failure to function in relational systems. And that's

what Rigney, I think, is trying to diagnose, but he doesn't talk about the why.

Otherwise, his book will probably be twice as long. Do you think I've hit on

anything here, or am I grasping at straws? No. I I think that's

good. I I do think you're I I I think Britney is not

concerned about why we're here. He's assuming

that you agree with him on that point, I think. Right. He's just

saying he's just saying, hey. Just look around.

There are people who, are resisting leaders

through emotional manipulation, and and I think I

don't think you you you could disagree on the

the temperament of of the, society, you know,

whether it's masculine or feminine, and know as a leader that there are people

trying to emotionally manipulate you. I mean, that

is that is happening in corporate boardrooms

and cubicles all over America. So Okay. So

so why has that worked so well in the

formerly strongly nonpolitical or conservative organization

like the church? And I mean the the the church in a western sort of

context, not necessarily a specific denomination. Yeah. Because this is this disease

is striking everywhere from the I mean, the orthodox are resisting,

but I think they're the last Yeah. Bulwark, you know, backed up

against the wall. But everything else is like even in Protestantism,

everything else has fallen to this. Why has that happened? You you you hit on

something really, really good when you were talking about it's a it's it's a matter

of temperament. Right. Right? It so when we're talking about men and women, we're not

talking about men and women, good, bad. We're talking about we're talking about men,

women the way that they are. Right. So women are

more emotional. They are, they tend to be

more nurturing. Now I everybody can sit here and think of a woman who's not

nurturing at all. Like, you you've got one in your head. Nope. She's not a

not one nurturing bone in her butt. Okay? And then we can all think of

the one guy who we know who's like, oh, he's the sweetest

little guy I've ever met. So gentle. Okay. Okay. I'm not talking about

your exceptions. I'm talking about broad categories in general.

Okay? Women tend to be more nurturing than

men in general. Okay? Men tend to be less

nurturing, more direct in general. And so I

think I I think that's what we're talking about here. We're you're talking about a,

a society that has, deferred to a

more feminine way of communication

over time. And so I think you see I think you see

that in you're talking about in churches, you know, like with Piper,

with with Tim Keller. The way that they planted those church

efforts in those big cities, they knew they

were going into negative world. New York City was already

well on its way to, to negative world. And so

rather than confront that world head on, they chose a

more winsome approach. Like, they were you know, they wanted a they wanted a

conversation. They wanted a dialogue. They wanted to, you

know, rather than come in there with a Billy Graham crusade and pray this prayer

and give your life to Christ and repent from your sins, it was like, well,

hey. Let's have a conversation with with someone who's not a Christian or

an atheist or, you know, a a seeker as it may be

called, and and let's see if we can convince them. Right?

Let's win them over, and those

and and so but in an increasingly negative world, that just doesn't work.

Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. So

We've talked a little bit about Brittany, his background,

Christian nationalism. We have not touched on infant baptism

because I'm just not gonna do that today as I already mentioned.

But both all those things kind of led him to being booted out of,

of, Piper's outfit up there in, in Minneapolis, Bethlehem

College. And, he landed on, and began to

work with Doug Wilson and created this book, Leadership and

Emotional Sabotage. And I think this is the

first book of many that's gonna come from Rigney's, Rigney's

pen. By the way, the Internet has also given us

the opportunity to publish.

And so it's taken the person who would normally have

stood on the street corner with a clapboard and said

the end is near ringing a bell. And

now that guy just goes to Idaho and blogs

all day. And, eventually, he finds people

who are doomers and gloomers. But he also

finds people, if he's really sophisticated in his communication,

who understand that if he's taking flack for saying the end

is near, he must be over the target. And so I wanna talk

a little bit about that.

One of the things that Rigney talks about in his book is courage. Right? Courage

of the world, courage of the church. Talk a little bit about that, Brian. Like,

what does it take to confront these

individuals and even systems? Because it's really systems thinking. That's the thing that attracted

me to this book. Because I'm a systems thinker. Like, I see how things click

together and that's also what makes me a root cause guy. Because if

you could figure out how the system is clicked together, then you can go you

could basically engineer reverse engineer the system Mhmm. Figure the

thing out, and go, oh, okay. That was the seed. If we just go

pluck that out, we can solve we can solve the problem. Right? Yep. So

but that takes courage. Right? And the the venture capitalist, Peter Thiel,

once infamously said the courage has always been in short brilliance is always in short

supply, but so is courage, basically. And I'm butchering that that

phrase. But it's true. Like, courage has always been in short supply.

So in a time where

and I'm not gonna talk about I mean, the easy examples to bring up are

cancel culture and things like that. Those are easy to bring up. But in a

time where we,

as leaders, have to have courage, how do we do that in the face of

weaponized empathy and in emotional sabotage? How how do you

avoid being emotionally manipulated as a leader? Yeah. I

think you have to be willing to speak to the elephant in

the room. So a lot of times, people will

know that

there's something wrong, but because

they don't want to ruffle feathers or there's some sort of

protected, I don't wanna say protected class, but like a

there's some protected idea. It could be protected class. It could be a

you know, there's just we we don't wanna acknowledge,

that this problem could be something else because of,

you know, what whatever it is that we're protecting. Right? So

it could be, sexual orientation. It could be anything. It could be a number of

things, right, that we're we're saying, oh, that's off limits for voting. Don't talk about

that. Don't address that. And then people use that to

sabotage some some effort that's being done. Okay? I'll I'll

use an example even even better than sexual orientation. We don't do any

or not any. We do very little psychological research

around IQ anymore in this country. Absolutely.

Because it's brutal. It's absolutely brutal. That's right.

Particularly, the correlations. And nobody likes to

use this term because now they think you're leaning into causation when you say

correlation. No. I'm saying correlation, and I have a relatively

high IQ. So it's okay. I've done pretty good. I know what I'm talking

about. But the correlations between IQ and ethnicity,

No one wants to do any research touching on any of that ever since Charles

Murray got slammed back in the day. Yep. And if

you don't do that kind of research Mhmm. Then

you can't solve the problem because what that what that IQ

research takes you into is a space where you

don't know what to do about IQ. Because as

a researcher with a limited number of

scientific materialistic tools at your disposal, you're now wandering

into a space where that tool those tools don't work.

And so there's to your point, there's a lack of courage around IQ. Forget it.

Answer. There's all kinds of beliefs. Yeah. There's all kinds of things that you're just

not allowed to talk about because Right. You know, well, we

don't we don't we don't wanna talk about the underlying cause. The underlying causes are

gonna cause us to confront some other truths that we don't like. Right.

So so I think when it comes to courage, it's,

you know, Elon Musk is a great example of this. I think,

you know, Elon Musk has, you know, people were

trying to bully him at Twitter, into silence

or into, you

know, like, I think it was was it him and Bob Iger? Somebody was

trying to basically deny they were gonna

punish Twitter by not they were gonna punish Elon Musk by by

saying, hey. We're not gonna give our advertising dollars to you until you can either

shut your mouth or say what we want you to say. And

and, Rogan had some or not Rogan. Musk had some choice words at that

interview that he gave. I don't know if you saw that. But, yeah, it

was but but, basically, he was saying, like, like, look.

There's there's this this whole this whole problem with free speech in

our country, and people are trying to bully me with money.

Like, like, I'm not gonna do that. Like,

agree with me or don't agree with me, but that's not like, you're not gonna

back me down on that. And and I think when it when it

comes to sort of this emotional sabotage and,

oh, you don't care about people. You you don't like this person, this this class

of people. You don't care about them. You you know? That that's that type of

emotional sabotage that I think we're Rigney is trying to

address in this in this book.

Brene Brown, the writer of Darren Greatly, talks about

courage being a heart word. And and she's coming from, again,

you know, a social work background, which is

a a field that is dominated by a feminine

temperament. And that's fine. That's that's sort of the

nature of sort of where a, where

a where a occupation is

going to go. Right? And I don't disagree with her. I do think

courage takes heart. It is a heart word. But when we

search our hearts, as it says in the bible, we find that they

are, to paraphrase from Jeremiah, deceitful above all

else. Right? Who could know them?

One of the things that the heart of man has to run up against

invariably, and we talked about this in our episode on shop class versus

shop class at Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. Invariably,

the heart of man has to run up against the boundaries of limits of material

reality. Like, I'll give you an example.

So no matter how much Brian and I,

who are separated by a few 100 miles. Right? I'm

recording this right now. No matter how much we may want to be in the

same room physically, unless I

can manipulate my atoms

over distance to go to where Brian is, and Brian can

manipulate his atoms to come over distance to where I am, we can't

physically be in the same spot. There's a limit to that

reality that we are trying to aggregate by utilizing

this platform to have a conversation.

There are limits to the material reality of me being physically in the same space

as Brian and Brian being physically in the same space as myself. And no matter

how much fantasizing or anger or

disgust I have, no matter how many regulations I

write, no matter how many senators I buy,

there's nothing that's going to change the reality of me taking my Adams and going

them taking them over to where Brian is, and Brian taking, yeah, his Adams and

bringing them over to where I am. And by the way, the reason why I'm

using that example is because we have a lot of people who right now are

trying to defy material reality and claiming

that the virtual world defies material

reality. And if that's true,

that becomes a religion. Mhmm.

Yep. But from those headwaters come the poison fruit of emotional

sabotage. Because if I don't get my way and I run up

against the limits of material reality, I just I

already said that, like, material reality

can be abrogated. That's my religion. But

yet, the water's still wet. The wood is still

there. Something's gotta break. Either I'm gonna break or

material reality is gonna break. Talk talk to us

a little bit about or talk with us a little bit about what

leaders can do to help those people who can't because there I think

there's a lot more of these people than we think there are. Navigate the limits

of material reality. Yeah. And who and who default, by

the way, to being inside of these Internet spaces and these social media

spaces because there, they feel as though they are free. Mhmm.

Yeah. I I think just just

material the the world that we exist in is not

material. It's not merely material. There are all kinds of immaterial

things as well. There are immaterial

categories that we can't define even science acknowledges that we

can't define. There are dimensions that we don't

have access to that physicists are just saying, yeah, like, we

they exist, and there might be up to a 150 of them, and we can't

even get to them. Right. So so,

you know, even the the, the old school atheists

of, you know, the Scopes monkey trials are having a much

harder time holding to that worldview as they

get the further they get along. And, I mean

and so, anyway, I just say that to say to the to anyone

who's, you know, a hardcore materialist,

that, you are making assumptions about the

unseen world that can't be proven.

And, you know, you can't you can't prove that everything's material. You're

making that assumption. And and and that's a

and from that assumption, you're drawing metaphysical conclusions,

based on that assumption. And and that's fine,

but just know that's that's what you're doing.

The one thing that you you mentioned a little bit ago about,

empathy, one of the one of

the problems with empathy,

is there are, yeah. And

empathy is a good thing. Empathy can be can be wonderful. I mean,

there are times, like, even if you ever dealt with somebody going through grief,

the emotions that they're dealing with cannot be

explained in a material way. I mean, like, you're

you're dealing with the departure of a

human being. The grief that

you're experiencing cannot be explained

materially. I I mean, it's not just mere

chemical, reactions in your

brain. I mean, it's a it it's in your mind.

It's in your soul. It's not just your body. You do have a a

physical reaction to grief, but your your your reaction goes way

beyond mere physical. And so

so dealing with someone in grief, it

does require empathy for sure, but

you can't stop with empathy. At some point, empathy

has to give way to sympathy.

And and what's the the difference between the 2 and I

think I think where where the discussion gets lost, and and I

I I think Brene Brown's great. I think she's done some great things. I

think Brene Brown, the one thing she has missed

is is, she dismisses sympathy. And she's

even said so in some of her videos that I've watched some in her YouTube,

and she's like, sympathy is not blah blah blah blah. You I don't

care if you you have to have sympathy because,

so let's say somebody's in a you know, stuck in some quicksand. Okay?

An empathetic person says, oh, I see you stuck in that

quicksand. I'm gonna get in that quicksand with you. K. The problem

is now we're both sinking in quicksand. We're both going to die.

A sympathetic person would say, that quicksand looks

terrible. Hey. Let me hand you a stick. Let's see if I can

pull you out of there without getting in with you. Right? That's the

difference, I think, between, the the clearest difference that that you

can make between empathy and sympathy. Again, it you know, when

somebody's grieving, empathy is very, very appropriate.

But after a period of time to help that person move

on, you have to move over to sympathy at some point. I'm not

saying, you know, it's gotta be day 1 or even day

365. I'm just saying there is a difference.

Right. Well, and Joe Rigney, in his book, Leadership and

Emotional Sabotage, hits on something, I think, that is an extra

aspect of this that Brene Brown misses. The

scientific materialist mindset misses, the

political progressive mindset misses. And they miss it because when you

when you when you deconstruct God,

when you do the Nietzschean thing and deconstruct God all the way down to the

bottom, or at least you try, and you try to deconstruct the bible and

it's not really deconstructing God. It's deconstructing the bible as an avatar

or stand in for God. When you do that, you also

deconstruct evil. And

Ed Friedman, Renee Brown,

both these folks on either side of the spectrum on empathy. And I

think I think Ed Freeman would agree with you about empathy. I think he would

absolutely agree with you about the difference between empathy and sympathy. Absolutely. And Ed Freeman

was writing, you know, failure of nerve 30 years

ago now. Right? 40 years ago now.

Evil intent has to be factored

in to people's hearts.

So to your point about sitting with someone in grief, I

can absolutely sit in someone grief sit in sit with somebody who is

grieving their loved one.

The challenge for people who do not have a worldview that

includes, quite frankly, Satan or Luciferian

intent is that they don't know what the hard

limits this goes back to that idea of material reality. They don't know what the

hard limits of their empathy are because they don't have a good Richter scale

internally for when it goes from being

grief stricken, genuine remorse about something that has

happened to manipulation. And

this is the problem we're having. This is the core of the point of the

problems we're having today. And I think pastors are facing this in counseling

sessions all over the place and talking with people who are, to your

point earlier about Piper's Church, seekers. They're seeking. Well, what

they're seeking is a defined,

clear, black and white, and I know we hate black and white, but a clear,

defined black and white definition of what is good and what is evil and where

the boundaries are. And the

courage to say that in a counseling session I mean, as a former

pastor, you've been in counseling sessions before. How many people let's frame this

question this way as we begin to round the corner for our close here.

Short book, short episode. I recommend you pick up I recommend you pick up Leadership

and Emotional Sabotage. You're gonna get a lot of this from this book. But, how

many how many folks as a pastor, as a former pastor, did you sit in

rooms with where the line between what they were doing

that was good and what they were doing that was evil was very clear?

Yeah. It's not clear at first. It takes a lot of time. It takes a

lot of conversation. And and sometimes it's not even clear to the

person. That's the thing. The person who's doing the manipulating, they

don't even know they're doing it. Right. It's it's a behavior

that was learned maybe from their parents

that because their parents were good at it and they just and they that's just

the reality for them. Like, they don't know any other way to interact with someone.

Right. And, and so it takes time and

energy to work work through help them first off, they have to see

it. They have to understand what it is. The the hard

part for a materialist, someone maybe with a

Darwinian worldview, like, if if, like, if if you're the

survival of the fittest, I mean, this is just another technique, right,

to get what you want. I mean, this is a stipulation that just just gives

you an edge up on someone. Yeah. Why wouldn't you eat your neighbor?

Yeah. Right. I mean It's fine. Right? I'm trying to I mean, I'm in

it for me. And so, like, if if you're a secularist, you're

you're worried about today. That's what secular means. It's a todayist. It's a presentist.

Right? I mean, there's I don't mean to worry about the future. I'm just trying

to get what I need for the day. I mean so,

you know, I I to your point, I just I I I I

would say that that, that

empathy is is definitely a tool that a leader needs,

but you you you can stray,

and and you can be played and you can stray away from that and get

into

core leadership and be taken advantage of as a leader, and then your

business or your your people suffer because of that. And that's,

I think that's the point of the book. Yeah. I think that

one of the great things about Rigney's book for leaders

is that Rigney, in a positive way, kind of like Saul

Alinsky did in Rules for Radicals, he's provided a

book where where he understands

the rules of the system better than the participants inside

of the system do, and thus, he can take apart the system. That's what Saul

Alinsky talked about in Rules for Radicals.

And Rigney is continuing a tradition that Doug Wilson started in Rules for

Reformers where he understands the nature of the

system. And understanding the nature of the system means,

yes, making a judgment about it because you're going to you're going to examine it,

you're going to hold it in judgment. Absolutely. But it also

means that you're going to analyze it, critique it, and,

yes, I'm gonna use this term again, deconstruct it,

but for the purpose of rebuilding something else. And I think

that this book, along with the book that we covered last week and the books

that we're going to cover this year, can provide

in toto a way to

a way forward, for leaders,

inside of a world of emotional sabotage. Although,

I do think I do think that we are returning to a

public discourse, at least to a small degree,

a public discourse that is a bit more, and we've already used this

word feminine, masculine in its temperament because of the

nature of, bad orange man Donald Trump

and the way in which she communicates, which is very much a masculine temperament method

of communicating. And by the way, for those of you who don't know, that method

of communicating is you and I are gonna have an argument. We're gonna tussle it.

We're going to confront each other directly about what the issue is.

I don't really care about your feelings. You don't really

care about my feelings. Not in the

global Kantian one world, we are the world,

we are the children kind of sense. I don't care about your feelings. I care

about solving the problem. So let's solve the problem, and then we worry about our

feelings afterward. We worry about how we feel about the solution afterward.

And that is a masculine method of approaching conflict

and confrontation that, Trump does very

well, which, by the way, puts the

fear of, if I shall be so bold, god, into those

of those who have dominated the public discourse with feminine temperament

currently, which is why you see so much catterwalling about Trump.

Yeah. I think I think, you know, for for the for any leader who's listening

to this, you know, one thing I would encourage you with is, you

know, there's there's nothing wrong with acknowledging

feelings. The the thing that, as a leader, you have to do

and and lead your people to do with their feelings is understand

that, you know, feelings like, let's say

you're on a road trip. Okay, and you're you're driving a car.

You've got yourself maybe you've got your spouse in the car with you,

and you've got your kids in the car in the back. Do you have kids?

Okay? Maybe a pet, something. I don't know.

But, you would never let your kids

drive your car. K? Especially if they're, like, little kids. You would never do that.

Okay? There's gonna be 2 results. Either either,

you're gonna crash the car, it's gonna be a terrible wreck, or you're gonna get

there late. Okay? And feelings are the same way. When you let feelings

drive your life, k, when you let your feelings drive your

decision making, drive how you respond to

certain situations, you

inevitably crash your life

or you get where you need to go too late. Okay? You take a

wrong turn. You make a mistake. You end up saying

something you shouldn't have said. A whole bunch

of things. Okay? You become passive. Whatever it is.

But, and so feelings are great because they can tell us that

something is wrong, but they can't tell us what to do.

And as soon as we start letting them tell us what to do,

that's when leaders begin to fail. And so

so I think this, you know, feelings are fine. It's fine

to know them and be and acknowledge that they're there, but don't

take direction from them. And I think that's where I

hope the resurgence of this, you know, as you think of this

masculine temperament and leadership, whatever, you know, I I hope that

that's where it takes us. You know, that, because I I I don't wanna say

we, you know, completely ignore feelings. Right? They they are

helpful. They are useful. They're they're there to tell you something's wrong. They just can't

tell you what to do about it. I would add to

that. We also need to and and I've been saying this for

many years in a lot of different contexts, in leadership development work that

I've done with clients. We need to be able to

very calmly and very quietly when emotional sabotage shows

up, recognize it, call it out for what

it is. Mhmm. And then, here's a word that leaders need to have

in their quiver. No.

The word no. Now you could follow that up with

whatever you want after that. However,

no is a sentence. It has a beginning,

a middle, and an end.

It's got a subject object. Subject. Yeah. Subject and a verb. Done. Subject

subject verb. Done. Done. You yeah. It implies subject to you and then the

verb is no. No. That's right. And and

by the way, female leaders can use no. Male

leaders can use no. Oh, really? You know, people with a

feminine temperament can use no, but people with a masculine temperament can use no. Anybody

can use no. No is available to every leader out

here. And because 2 things

can be true at once, too many leaders equivocate on their nose.

They want room to negotiate later on because no, while it is also

while it was a sentence, no creates boundaries and puts

you and puts the other party sometimes in a box.

When emotional sabotage, however, has occurred, when emotional

manipulation is occurring on your team, a box is

exactly the spot where that manipulation sabotage needs to

go so that it can be exercised and, and dealt

with. I would also

say that leaders need to appeal to an objective

standard, an objective standard outside of

themselves. Now Brian and I think the Bible's pretty

good. You may not wanna bring that to work. Okay. That's fine.

You may wanna bring the Bible in your heart to work. That's fine too.

But bring an objective standard, rules, regulations,

something that exists outside of the participants in the conflict,

something that exists outside of the participants in the confrontation or the really

rough communication interaction that's occurring. An objective

standard, the word no, these are

tools that will allow you to be successful,

as a leader in the face of anxiety, which we didn't even touch

on. But the face of anxiety, the face of emotional sabotage, the face of

emotional manipulation, and, of course, weaponized empathy.

Alright. It was a short book.

I don't feel that we did it short shrift. If anybody knows Joe

Rigney, get him a get him a link to, this audio right here. I would

love to have him on the show, talking about the book. I'm sure I could

reach out to him directly. But if anybody who's listening could find him, go find

him and tell him he needs to send me an email. Otherwise,

Brian, do you have anything else to add before we close today?

No. I would just, encourage encourage your leaders to to pick

up a copy of that book. I think it's, it was very helpful. And, yeah,

Joe's a great guy. Excellent. Yep. And it's only a 100 and 8 pages. Six

chapters. It's like an hour and 12 minutes to read, something like that on,

on Audible, but it's a good, a good use of your time. Alright.

With that, well, we're out.