Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

Because understanding great literature is better than trying to read and

understand yet another business book, on the Leadership Lessons from the Great

Books podcast, we commit to reading, dissecting, and analyzing the

great books of the Western canon. You know those

books from Jane Austen to Shakespeare and everything else in

between that you might have fallen asleep trying to read in high

school. We do this for our listeners, the owner, the

entrepreneur, the manager, or the civic leader who doesn't have the time

to read, dissect, analyze, and leverage insights from

literature to execute leadership best practices in the

confusing and chaotic postmodern world we all now

inhabit. Welcome to the rescuing of Western civilization

at the intersection of literature and leadership.

Welcome to the leadership lessons from the Great Books podcast.

Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the

leadership lessons from the great books podcast, episode

number 134.

There are some books in the world that are so

difficult, so deep, and that bring up so many complicated

and important ideas that they require us

as readers and as leaders to taste,

chew, and swallow them

slowly. Some such books, some types of

those books we have covered on this show, and we will

revisit, this year as time and temperament

permit, including War and Peace,

About Face, by, Colonel David Hackworth,

and Crime and Punishment, and, of course, Sitting

Bull, his Life and Legacy. By the way,

we'll also be revisiting the Count of Monte Cristo this

year as well. However, the book we are

introducing to you today is one with which I had little

familiarity initially. This is not to say I didn't know the

title of the book. I'd actually had it sitting on my bookshelf in

my library for at least, I think, 4 years

up to this point. And I had heard about the

author. I'd heard his name pop up occasionally floating

through the circles of reformed theological thinking

on Twitter or x that I sometimes still

run-in. But this author, at

least for my particular position in the

universe, hadn't really made a dent.

Once I cracked the book open and began to read it, I

discovered, that it was a book that is

so relevant for leaders and for leadership. I

wondered what exactly it was that had put me off from

reading it for so long or

put me off from reading it up until this particular

time and this particular moment.

Other than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Piersig,

I am unaware of other books that so artfully, clearly, and

masterfully describe in philosophical

and pragmatic details the intersections between

manual labor and the challenges of an increasingly

digitized narcissistic and solipsistic

national culture. What this book we're covering

today offers a way out of our current predicament

and provides pragmatic solutions to the challenges inherent

in the existence and in us existing

in what is still deeply a material

world. After all, I'm still walking

around in a body just like you are. I'm still sitting in

a studio behind a microphone recording this podcast,

and it's cold where I'm at, so I still have the heat on.

By the way, I'm sure you're still dressed while you're

listening to this. The hard, cold

material world won't go away. No matter how much the tech

bros of Silicon Valley and the Madison Avenue

marketers would desire to will it to be so.

So today, we're going to read a book that's a that's

a direct punch in the mouth to all those folks.

Today, we will be covering the introduction

and a little bit of the first chapter and summarizing the

ideas within those two sections of Shop

Class as Soulcraft, an inquiry

into the value of work by Matthew

b Crawford. Leaders,

take hold of the material world around you. Build

something with your

hands.

And so we're gonna open up today with the introduction

to Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford.

Now just so that we can get this, off the table early, this book

was published by Penguin Press in New York in 2009.

And as such, we will not be reading

directly from the book. Instead,

what we are going to do is we are going to go through,

the introduction. I'm going to summarize some of the core ideas

from this book, and then we are going to

discuss those core ideas, break them down, and give

some pragmatic conclusions that you can take from the

book as a leader. So when you open

up shop class as Soulcraft and inquiry into

the value of work, you, of course, hit the introduction, and he opens the

book Crawford does with an anecdote about

a good friend of his who used to teach,

a shop class in Richmond, Virginia,

called Noel Dempsey, who is,

well, who was rescuing at the time of the writing of this book,

was rescuing tools being sold

off by high schools that were getting rid of shop class

in across the country in favor of turning students

into, quote, unquote, knowledge workers.

Crawford moves very quickly through a description of

Sears catalogs and, how

consumers back in the past used to be able

to access their material goods in order to fix

them and repair them with their own

hands. He also laments this idea of a wedding

of futurism to what might be called virtualism, a

vision of the future in which we, and I'm quoting directly from the

book the introduction here from Matthew Crawford, quote, a vision of the future in

which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a

pure information economy. Crawford

posits that building things in the material world is an antidote to

the ways in which the scientific managerial

structure created around this type of virtualism,

this type of fantasy, and

and and is it serves as an antidote to that. He also,

asserts that material work in the material world creates a

different kind of moral structure around work. And he's

going to talk a lot about the moral structure around work and what that

actually means in later chapters, which we'll cover in

later episodes of the show this year.

But it's an important point to remember from Crawford.

Also, in the introduction, Crawford,

states that he believes the ideal of manual competence

is an antidote to, quote, unquote, more ghostly kinds

of work. He, he doesn't degrade

knowledge work. He doesn't degrade the working of the mind,

but he definitely favors it. And by the way, we'll talk about the

background of Matthew Crawford here in the next section. He

is not an unintelligent person himself, not a person

who, is ignoring the cognitive load.

But he is a person who believes that cognition

and manual dexterity must go together.

Finally, he predicts that many of the challenges we're going to have at scale in

the future of artificial intelligence software, that

completely disintermediates the scientific manager and provides

the ability at an even deeper level to, as I already said, glide about in

a pure information economy. He predicts that those challenges are information economy,

he predicts that those challenges are going to

increase. One of the reasons why I think,

we needed to read this book now and cover this book now on the podcast

is because we are at this next technological revolutionary moment. I've talked a little bit

about technological revolutionary moment. I've

talked a little bit about AI on this podcast.

I have not focused on it necessarily.

And, yes, I have spoken about it from what may be interpreted as

a doom and gloom perspective, but AI is

just a tool. Crawford would assert that it's

yet another tool, a now

computational tool built on top of electronic

tools. That's a term that he used back in 2009, which were built on

top of scientific tools in the 20th

century that were designed

to delude and to create phasma

to phasmatagorical worlds for the

purposes of separating a worker from their

work and at a deeper level, for the purposes

of separating a human being,

men and women, but a human being from this

idea of competence, creativity,

and here's a big one, agency in

the material world.

So who is Matthew B. Crawford?

What type of literary life has he led, and why should we bother caring

about his book? And by the way, Shop Class as Soulcraft was

his first book. He's written

3 others focused on the intersection of

work and virtue, talking about,

vehicles and the power of driving in America

and what it means to actually have a vehicle in America.

And, and he's written another book. I can't remember the topic, the particular topic of

that one, but you can go and, you can go and find that book on,

on Amazon. He seems to be a thinker that

is living at an intersection

that has been abandoned by many thinkers.

Crawford was or is an American writer

and research fellow at the Institute For Advanced Studies in Culture

at the University of Virginia.

But before that, he was a physics major as an

undergraduate and then turned to political philosophy

in the early 2000. And in Shop Class as

Soulcraft, he chronicles his journey

from being in a graduate and PhD

role, a graduate student role pursuing his doctorate,

and applying for and thinking about the moving into the

academic world more deeply and the sense

of, dysfunction

is not really the word, disconnection that he had from that

because from that particular world, because

alongside his physics understanding and

his political philosophy graduate work, he

had been working as an electrician, and

he'd always worked with his hands. He'd been interested in mechanics

and in automotive work and, had been supporting himself as

electrician working during the summers while in while working as

an undergraduate. I'm not sorry. Not working. While matriculating

as an undergraduate and matriculating as a graduate student. So he'd

been doing that, and he'd also begun to develop, ever since he

was a teenager, an interest in

motorcycles and, in particular,

cars, in particular, a VW Beetle.

As of the year 2020, he,

was a contributing editor at the New Atlantis

and had continued to be a motorcycle mechanic

with a shop, Shockoe Moto in

Virginia. Matter of fact, in Richmond, Virginia. So if you Google

Matthew Crawford, you'll find Matthew B. Crawford. You will find,

a whole bunch of different things on him, including a very interesting

interview that he did with NPR

back in the day. Matthew

B. Crawford is one of these folks who came from

humble, humble origins. He

was, he was raised in a commune, from,

the time he was born until he was about 12 years old.

He learned how to engage with manual competency

and learn the power of agency that went along with that. His

father had a background in physics, and he talks about his father

in Shop Class as Soulcraft and how

his father's conception of the

world didn't really help him when he

had to fix a material problem

with a vehicle he was frustrated with,

that aforementioned VW VW Beetle.

I believe probably that would have been in the late seventies early eighties because

Mr. Crawford is, is, getting into his, into

his sixties by now. So

that's a little bit about Matthew B. Crawford, a little

bit about his literary life, his background, and his

influences. I strongly encourage you to check him out. And,

well, check out his work because

the intersection that he lives at is an important

one for us to get to as leaders

with our own unique backgrounds.

Alright. Back to the book. Back to shop class as

Soulcraft by Matthew B Crawford.

So we're gonna pick up, where we left off, and

we're going to jump, from the introduction, which is

all kinds of full full of all kinds of good stuff,

to chapter, to chapter 1. Now I mistakenly said

there that the introduction started off with a story about

the gentleman, buying things on eBay from,

from old, from old shop classes. And,

actually, the introduction, really does start with and

I, again, I need to correct this, a

dealer of a machine tool

warehouse, in Richmond, Virginia. Chapter

1 of Shop Class's Soulcraft, a briefcase,

for the useful arts, that's a subtitle of the chapter. The title of the

chapter begins with Tom Hull, who used to teach

welding machine shop, auto shop, sheet metal work, and computer aided drafting

at Marshfield High School in Coos Bay, Oregon,

who says, and I quote, a lot of schools shut

down their shop class programs in the 19 nineties when there was a big push

for computer literacy.

And he's right. They did. Matter of fact, I graduated high school just to make

this a little personal. I graduated high school in 1997.

I had to think about that for a minute.

Anyway, I graduated high school in 1997,

and I

did not take a shop class, actually, during

the course of my high school career. Now I did learn

how to, pull an engine out of a

vehicle and drop a new engine in to a vehicle,

but I learned that from my, from my

stepfather rather than from the

public school system.

So in chapter 1 of Shop Class's Soulcraft,

Matthew was making a case for the useful

arts, and he he delineates, he

separates, the useful arts as

those that are tied to manual labor, this idea of

craftsmanship, and how he characterizes it. And I

love this characterization. A brute understanding of the

character of the material world.

So just to make this really simple, every time a

natural disaster shows up, the

hurricane that hit North Carolina last

year, the fires currently

burning Los Angeles, in

Southern California, when a

hurricane strikes New York City or

when a earthquake strikes San Francisco.

When a volcano goes off somewhere in the world,

or when a winter storm

shuts down our very fragile, in the United States anyway,

electrical grid system. When these

systems collapse in the face of

brute nature, we are reminded as

sophisticated urban oriented

individuals. Even if we're rural, we still many of

us have cell phones, and we're still on Instagram and on

TikTok, and we can still see what people are doing in other places.

The urban and the rural have merged together. So in this

world where everyone knows everything about everybody or at least

can find it out, where the world has

flattened, where the distinctions between urban and rural,

between the work that is flashy, like that of being an influencer,

and the work that is practical, like that of being a plumber,

where those lines have attempted to be blurred, the

useful arts deal with the character,

deal with the brute character of a world

that is natural, a world that is material.

Think about it this way. When a mudslide happens,

an Instagram influencer isn't going to show up to your

house with a backhoe. Now, the

guy who shows up to your house with a backhoe and clears

the mud out of your front yard might,

matter of fact, probably is on Instagram. But they wouldn't

identify themselves as, at least not probably

primarily as an Instagram influencer. And this is the point that

mister Crawford is making in the first chapter of

or the first part of the first chapter of Shop Class's Soulcraft.

He states that, quote, craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for

a long time and going deeply into it because you

want to get it right, close quote. I can't

think of a better description for what leaders

are supposed to do. Not managers. If you're a manager listening to this, you

can become a better leader, not by becoming a better

manager, but by actually dwelling on the task

of leadership for a long time and going deeply into it because you

actually want to get leadership, not management,

right. Crawford addresses as

well the cognitive demands that are

required, that are placed on us as human beings by the

doing of manual work. I already mentioned plumbers

and the guy who runs the backhoe, but construction

workers, carpenters, automotive,

not technicians, but mechanics, the people who lay

road, and the people who lay brick.

There are cognitive demands to all of that work that in an

information and in a more technological age, we actually dismiss. And, by the

way, in the world of AI, world of large language models,

the work that is done in those areas defies large

language models because that work creates

experiences in a material world that the LLMs are

still shut off to. The

cognitive demands of manual work create a certain species of wisdom,

Crawford continues. And he points out that the

original idea of wisdom began with a

Greek root, a Greek word

that focused on the acquiring

of technical skill through disciplined

perception. Matter of fact, in a

quote, in the tradition that developed in the west,

wisdom lost the concrete sense it originally had in Homer.

In religious texts, on the one hand, wisdom tended towards the mystical.

In science, on the other hand, wisdom remained connected to knowledge of nature.

But with the advent of idealization, such as the frictionless surface

and the perfect vacuum, science too adopted a paradoxically

otherworldly idea of how we come to know nature

through mental constructions that are more intellectually tractable than

material reality, hence amenable to mathematical

representation. By the way, he doesn't

dismiss mathematics, but he merely says that it can only

take you just like software

so far.

So does god or nature really like a

builder? And how does god or nature

define a builder? Well, I'm of the

personal belief, and that was actually sort of the subheading of this particular

section of our podcast today, this particular moment

that we are going to have together that god does like builders.

One of the things that obsesses

parents and children alike, and Crawford talks about this

much later on in his book, and we'll talk about this as we go through

the book this year. But one of the things that obsesses parents

and children alike in America is

this idea or the idea of getting a, quote, unquote,

good job, making a good living, and living a,

quote, unquote, good life. As a

matter of fact, I have people in my life who are older than

me, and I'm in my mid forties, who are

still concerned that I'm not making a, quote unquote,

good living. But what does that actually

mean? What does that mean in the context of a K

through 12 system and, later on, a college

system consisting of graduated undergraduate work

that no longer aligns with the world of

work that is misaligned, or or

as Crawford would assert, that is too overly

aligned with the world of work.

What is the point of the K through 12 to college to

quote unquote urban employment in a large global city funnel

if the people produced by that funnel, if the product of that

funnel are unable to even know,

identify, or fix what's wrong in their own

material world. Sure, you can

read an Excel spreadsheet, but can you

mount a door on a hinge if it falls off in your

house without having to call somebody to do that?

Sure. You can edit really, really fast

using an AI program, or you can make really cool

looking videos for YouTube, but you can't hammer a

nail. Sure. You

can, go ahead and order a

really cool latte from a really cool

coffee shop in town with really cool people in it.

But when that little check engine light comes on in your car,

you don't even know what it means, much less what to do

if you're ground out in a 102 degree

heat in Texas or negative

15 degree cold in the mountains of Colorado.

To paraphrase from a movie from the 19 eighties, when you get

in trouble in the material world with all of your

degrees and credentials that your parents encouraged

you to get, who are you going to call?

These are increasingly important questions to ask,

and they were beginning to be asked in the

early 2000. I know I was there. I

was in college in the early 2000 as an undergrad

and then as a graduate student. And I worked in colleges and

universities for about the first 15 years of what is

nominally considered to be an an adult life attempting to make a,

quote, unquote, good living. And I've spent a lot of time

around academics, and I've spent a lot of time intersecting with the

academic institutions that make this country

what it currently is.

And none of these questions that I've asked can be answered by the

academic institutions because they don't consider them to be part of their

purview. They consider those questions to be part of the purview of, quote,

unquote, private institutions or, quote, unquote, larger society

or, quote, unquote, individuals or, quote,

unquote, systems.

They don't consider those questions to be

even relevant. But parents do consider

those questions to be relevant, or at least they should, and so should students,

particularly students in their late teen and early

twenties. Does autonomy, agency, and

competence mean anything in a world where everything is a distraction,

consumption, and the globalist universal message of a post Cold

War political and economic system

still doesn't have all of the shine quite off of it

just yet? I think autonomy,

agency, and competence mean everything. Matter of fact,

during COVID, and I'll go on a little bit of a rant here, during

COVID, we saw a decline in competency,

not in the plumber or the road builder

or the garbage man or the automotive mechanic.

We began to see a decline in competency in the

service person, the delivery driver,

the waiter or waitress. Isn't

that interesting? A decline in competency where people

are serving people in the material world because we still need to

eat food. But there was

an increase in competency

in interactions between people around

objects in the material world.

I think autonomy, agency, and competency mean quite a lot. I think

Crawford would agree with me about this. And ShopClass'

Soulcraft makes that assertion as

well. Look.

We've been asking these questions at a higher and higher level since the early

2000, and we've been asking these questions and demanding answers

more and more insistently, not just from

academic systems, but overall from the western culture

in general and, of course, the educational systems of the United States.

And we haven't been getting good answers. And so parents and

children have been wandering away from these institutions,

not in mass, not in gigantic

flood like deluges, but in small drips.

The pitter pattering of little feet as they go out the door to

explore other options. The

COVID 19 crisis of 2020,

2021, and 2022 fully revealed,

fully lay bare

the assumptions that we've been operating

and laboring under in the United States anyway for at least the

last 100 years, Assumptions about a quote unquote good

living. Assumptions about living in a quote unquote urban

environment. Assumptions about the value of an

advanced degree and assumptions about

the work that goes in to delivering

you that latte. Reality,

reality likes material reality. And we are

seeing a bifurcation in America and

globally between people who really, really, really like living in

the virtual machine, the virtual electronic

machine of pretend, where we can be avatars

with voices and faces and bodies that are

not, well, that are not real.

A bifurcation between that world and the world of,

well, natural disasters, the world

of fires and floods, mudslides

and earthquakes, the world of pandemics and

roads, the world of plumbing

and homeless people, the world of buildings

that are no longer maintained and fall down, and bridges that

cannot be rebuilt because we do not have the knowledge

to do so that has to exist in people

who operate with autonomy, agency, and competence

against or maybe with

the people who live in a virtual world.

It's time for leaders to

decide in which world

they are going to lead.

Hello. So I'm gonna do some shelling here,

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Now back to the show.

Back to Matthew Crawford. Back to shop

class as Soulcraft. We remain

in chapter 1, summarizing,

talking, asserting.

Flipping forward or flipping through chapter 1, a brief

case for the useful arts. There's

another piece in here,

where Crawford talks about arts, crafts, and the

assembly line. And this is something that, I am very

much, oh, gosh. I shouldn't say in

favor of talking about, but I wish more people knew the history

of. You can read writers, marketers,

or no. Sorry. You can read writers like,

Seth Godin, the marketer, but others

who Doug Wilson, the theologian, who have talked

in-depth about one of the most dynamic

inventors of the early 20th century, a man named

Henry Ford, and how he constructed not

the car. Everybody thinks that that was his big insight

or his big innovation. And in reality, the

big innovation, the big insight was the

assembly line. And Matthew Crawford takes apart

the assembly line, and he

opens with talking about how, quote,

early in 20th century when Teddy Roosevelt preached the strenuous life

and elites worried about their state of over civilized

spiritual decay, the project of getting back in touch with, quote,

unquote, real life took various forms. 1 was romantic fantasy about

the pre modern craftsman. It was understandable

given changes in the world of work at the turn of the century, a time

when the of economic life was rapidly increasing the number

of paper shufflers. As TJ Jackson

Lears explains in his history of the progressive era, no place of

grace, the tangible elements of craft were appealing as an

antidote to vague feelings of unreality, diminished autonomy,

and a fragmented sense of self that were especially acute among the

professional classes, close quote. So

Crawford begins opens up this chapter on the assembly line

by talking about the progressives. Right? Most

people don't understand the history of the progressive movement. As a matter of fact, I

would encourage you to go back and listen to the episode that we published at

the beginning of last year, 2024,

when we talked about Woodrow Wilson's book, with Libby

Unger, and, his little screed that he wrote.

Woodrow Wilson was the classical Democrat

progressive, By the way, his great grandchildren

are Alexandria Okashia Cortez,

and every blue haired progressive that you've seen on Blue

Sky. But on the right wing in

America, there is also right wing progressives. Right

wing progressives progressivism began politically with

Teddy Roosevelt, and we also covered some of his writing and thoughts on the

podcast. I would encourage you to go back and listen to some of those.

His great grandchildren came down in the form of,

or in the visage of everyone from John

McCain to Mitt Romney to

Liz Cheney.

Anyhow, I'll leave out the political implications of this. You can think

through that on your own. You're a you're a smart and erudite

listener. If you weren't, you wouldn't be listening to this show.

But Crawford's point is that progressivism really

looked at craftsmanship as a romantic escape from paper

pushing, a romantic escape from bureaucratization.

And the elites pursued this, fiddling around on their

boats, having their properties at their estates, riding their

horses, these kinds of things. But the average person in the

early 20th century still worked on a farm. And most

farm workers had not transitioned into the

urban environment that basically was going to be built

out because of, well, because of the technology

known as the car.

This sense of a bureaucratized economic

life, and diminished autonomy and human agency in a

material world was looked at as a loss.

In our time, it's just looked at as the way things, quote,

unquote, are. But in the early 20th

century, this was looked at as a real loss. And Crawford points out that

institutions used the decline in craftsmanship

to create a new work order. Not a new

world order, a new work order, a new

scientific order. And even because progressives

starting all the way back with the abolition of slavery really like this

project, a new moral order, but

a moral order divorced from religion, a

moral order divorced from the fundamental

realities of the material world, a moral order

around technological fantasies

first brought to you by the assembly line

and later sold to you by the marketers on

Madison Avenue.

In chapter 1, Matthew Crawford makes the point

that bucking the quote unquote moral weight of egalitarianism,

that this sort of idea

of the assembly line applied to k through 12

education implies bucking that moral weight of

egalitarianism would take courage for high school principals,

to push students towards the cognitively

rich work of manual labor.

So what do we do with that idea? Right? What do we do with the

idea of the assembly line being taken from

making cars in the early 20th century to

making a new type of man, to selling

that new type of man to the new type of man, to

inculcating the young through the k through 12 educational system,

and to the decline of manual competency

in an increasingly difficult material world.

What do we do with all this? How do we stand

athwart history as William F. Buckley would have infamously said

back in the day, a product of the k through 12 system himself, as well

as the Ivy League Educational Elite Institutions

that produce the thinkers and the philosophers who come up with the justifications

for this new progressive order? What, he would

say stand to thwart history? How do we stand to thwart history and

yell stop?

And how do we do such yelling in light of

the fact that we are at the end of or approaching the

end of an 80 year cycle of history

known as the 4th turning and that we are about

to embark on another 80 year cycle

of history that will take us all the way to the end of this

21st century,

an end that I will probably not live long

enough to see.

What do we do with all of this? How do

we change the systems? Because here's the thing.

The material world isn't going anywhere. Right? Manual

labor still has meaning. You still have to

deal with the land. You still have to move the trees and

move the rocks and move the dirt and build the houses

and build the buildings. And by the way, you have to do it competently so

the buildings don't fall down, the roads don't crack, the

trees don't fall over on the kids, and, of

course, so that everyone is safe

physically so that they can all go run around and

be unsafe, virtually.

How do we manage this next transition of man

from what Crawford described as electronic back in

2008, 2009 when he was probably writing this book,

to digital, to now algorithmic,

which is the current transition we're in?

Well, if you're a leader listening to this, you're probably wondering

when I'm going to get to the point, and here is the point. I've been

looking for a strong antidote to the utopian level of marketing

hype from the usual suspects technologists

around what is now being called artificial intelligence.

This book, Shop Class as Soulcraft,

along with a couple of other books, including and I've already mentioned Seth Godin,

but Seth Godin's great book, Lynchpin, and Doug Wilson's

book, Productivity. These three books together

represent an antidote to that marketing

hype. Matter of fact, I would encourage you, if you're

listening to this as a leader and you have a student who's getting ready to

return to college for the spring semester or you have a

senior in high school or even a junior who is wondering what to

do with their lives and they're not exactly excited about going to

college, but they don't have the skills or

manual competency because you didn't have those skills and you couldn't give

them to them, and no one in your

family could either, I encourage you to get them those 3

books. Shove them in their hands and

then send them off to maybe trade school or maybe

apprentice them to a plumber or an HVAC

person or an auto mechanic in your local town.

Don't worry. They'll make a good living.

These three books are an antidote

to that marketing hype. Such utopian

hype, I worry, will only widen the chasm further

between human thinking and human doing. And Crawford

talks about the difference between those two things, and we're gonna cover that

later on as we explore this book more this year.

We just did the first chapter here today.

By the way, that chasm, the chasm between human thinking and human

doing didn't just open up during the 4th turning.

It actually opened up at the end of the second

turning in the United States

and continued to open up during the 3rd turning unraveling

in the 19 nineties when the Internet was turned

on. And, of course, just like most things during a

time of force turning chaos, that chasm has only grown

as more and more white collar work even, not just blue collar

work, but white collar work, has disappeared into the

gaping maw of the computer algorithm.

One of the things that people don't understand is that the computer will eat your

job if you allow the technologist to do

that. As I said

before, college students need to read this book.

And, yeah, there's been famous people who have banged the drum in

the years between when Shop Class as Soulcraft

was published back in 2009. And now,

on the same things that Matthew Crawford was writing about back

then, folks like Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs

and other folks. Andy Frisella, I'm thinking

of him as well, banging the drum and banging the drum and banging

the drum. But the problem is the problem is

that up until about the COVID crisis, too many people were still

too invested in the system thinking that, of course, if we

just throw more money at it, if we just throw more people at it, if

we just throw smarter people at it, it'll all

work out in the end. By the way, that's the conceit of scientific

managerialism brought to you by Frederick Winslow

Taylor, the guy who brought Henry Ford, the

assembly line, and made it better.

This year on the podcast, we are going to talk about solutions to

problems in pragmatic ways. And I know I promised a lot of that last year,

and we got to very few solutions, I feel, with many of our books that

we covered. But this year, we really are gonna talk about pragmatic solutions.

We really are going to talk about how to begin with the

basics as we go into

a cyclical spring.

So let's, let's address

that.

So solutions to problems. Right? REM back in the day

infamously said or sang in their great

song, it's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

Offer me solutions. Offer me alternatives. And, of course,

as being avatars of generation x during that period of time

in the nineties, they intoned, and I

declined. Anyway, I am gonna offer solutions

right now. I'm gonna offer some some ideas.

And there are ideas that you could find in shop class's Soulcraft by

Matthew b Crawford.

There are solutions, but we have to begin with the basics. And here's

some of the basics. We can't return to manual

competency without someone to train people in actual

manual competency. By the way, the people who

will train people in manual competency, the people who will train

people in how to do that work and how to do the work that

requires autonomy, agency, and competence well in a in a in

a world that is real, where there are upper

boundaries and limits to what can be achieved. The

people who are going to teach that kind of

work, the people who are going to insist that

people take on that cognitive strain are

probably not going to be, and this is part of the basics, they're probably

not going to be nice people. They're

probably not going to say the right words or put

them in the right order. They're probably not going to

be people that are going to make the right jokes

or or avoid inappropriate innuendos.

They're not going to talk the way that Hollywood writers writing for

people on Twitter, who will give them claps, would

write them as characters in movies.

They're going to speak roughly. They're probably going to use

slurs. They're probably going to have

retrograde attitudes towards minorities and women

even if they are a minority and especially if they are

a woman. They are probably

not going to be nice people

in terms of what we mean now in the world as nice, but they

will be wise. So here's one of

the basics that we're going to have to begin with, the kind of people that

we're looking for to teach these

sort of skill sets, the people who will have acquired

these sort of skill sets will be people who will

be competent but not and wise but not nice.

They will be hard, but not loving.

At least not squishy, warm. You can get

away with fuzz balls loving. They're

going to be hard. They're going to be not nice. They're going to

be difficult to get along with. They're probably

going to be taciturn and not tell you or tell

their students everything all at once. And they will probably be people

who would rather show than tell because too many

words can sometimes block

out intuition.

We have to begin with the basics. We have to begin with the kind of

people we are looking for. Leaders,

if you wanna be one of those kinds of folks, you're gonna have to go

and get information and competency and skill

and spend time with the kinds of people

who probably you wouldn't pick

to work with and you wouldn't pick to lead.

With the ruthless expansion of intellectual technology, building

things in the real world with real people helps increase autonomy,

agency, and competence way more than working

in services or manipulating consumption

through the exegesis of finance or through the

mysticalness of marketing.

The other thing that we're going to have to understand is that the acquiring of

manual competence requires us, all of us,

myself included, to put down our narcissism, put down

our overweening self regard

because we can successfully manipulate an algorithm

or we can get an LLM to do what it is we want it to

do, or we can navigate Instagram really

well. But this person who can hammer a nail, well, they

can't they can't manipulate the Internet, so they must not

exist.

We're going to have to put down our narcissism. We're going to have to put

down our overweening self regard. Narcissists tend

to become uncomfortable in the presence of manual competence

because their presence means that there's actual friction

in a place that a narcissist basically has

no foothold in. The material world.

A place where, as I said before, there are boundaries, there are barriers,

and there are borders.

At a basic level, leaders in organizations of

all sizes, but let's start with the small ones and then move into the medium

sized ones because as you go to scale, this becomes infinitely harder. But

leaders need to push back on the myth of a coming

singularity. There is no and will

never be a digital electronic or virtual eschatology

that will be able to successfully compete against the

brute reality of the facts of the material world.

Let me be blunt. If

you build your AI computing data banks

on land next to

a hurricane prone coast and a

once every 20 year hurricane comes, it's

going to kill your

server houses. And you're going to

have to find somebody to pour the concrete to

rebuild them. And that person

better be competent the first time.

Leaders need to speak this out to their organizations, their networks, their

families, and their communities. If they don't, they'll have

no one to blame but themselves when competency

and agency or as competency and agency continue to

drain out of the world. By the way,

the kinds of people that you're looking to teach these sort of

basics in the useful arts to the young,

the unwise, and even the incompetent.

The kinds of people you are looking for are people who are serious.

Maybe not necessarily intellectually serious,

but they are intuitively serious. They

know a valuable idea when they hear 1,

and they know what is not valuable when

they hear it too. By the way, they have a not nice

word for things that are not valuable.

It is time to lay the cornerstone of a new world

right around the corner that will look geopolitically,

and this is at scale now, like the world before World War

1, economically, like a return to

real gold backed material currency.

And psychologically, this new world will look like a return

to a humble acknowledgment of the

practical limits of hard material reality.

What you can do and what you actually can't do.

And saying no to what you can't do

while fully exploring what you can

do. But in order to do all this,

we have to continue to explore pragmatically

and understand pragmatically where to

go ahead from here.

And, well, that's

it for me. Thank you for listening to the Leadership Lessons from the

Great Books podcast today. And now that you've made it

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I've heard. Alright. Well,

that's it for me.