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 one forty ain't in

chronological.

So today, we're gonna be looking at a few things.

But before we do that, we have to consider some

facts. Every good story, just like every life, has a beginning, a

middle, and an end. And the sentimental and romantic parts that

happen between those bookends are what makes for a life.

And in areas such as ours, where we are always on, always connected, and always

judging others and finding them wanting, Collectively, at this

point in time in the West, we are drifting back from the desire to know

everything about everyone all the time. As a matter of fact, before I came on

this podcast today, I just read a whole article from

someone on Substack, basically announcing their departure from Substack,

saying that it's too commercialized and no one goes here anymore.

What we really want from people is honesty,

transparency, and above all else, authenticity.

However, we are still in an era of social media curation

that's happening at the exact same time. Too many people, poorly

inculcated into a deeply visual cultural, still believe that the future is the

airbrush photo brought to you by artificial intelligence and large language

models. Except, of course, as in any other era,

the young, the sentimental, and the romantic are looking to be led out of the

space of the fake and into the space of the real.

But what does leading out of the seeming abundance of the fake and into the

desert of the real actually look like at a practical level for leaders?

How do they find their way? And what is the vision of the future after

we have sentimentalized to the past?

Today, we will be summarizing and analyzing some of the themes for

leaders embedded in the Roman a Clef,

Sentimentalizing the Decline and Fall of a Lost Generation.

Tender is the night. I f Scott, it's

Gerald. Leaders, it's

not the society that is tragically screwed up. The

tragically screwed up parts also live in all of us.

And I kinda called an audible on this intro and kind of rewrote it, which

was why if you're watching that video, Libby looks confused. But today, we will be

joined by Libby Younger back from episode number

one forty five where we did the geopolitical Victorian

romp through Ford Maddox Ford's parades end, what I

consider to be a bookend book. And later on, we'll be

bringing Libby back. We'll be talking about a farewell to arms this year

as well. But, welcome back, Libby. How are you

doing? I'm fantastic. And my little furrow

brow always gives me away. You're like,

what is he talking about? It's not rid of it, but it doesn't work.

Like, that's not on the script. Easy, and I had caught up. I had caught

up. But It's okay. It's alright. It's okay. I I called an audible. I

rewrote it because, well, this is the first episode of

our new our new format. So if you listened

to episode number one forty seven, which you should have listened to

before this, we introed Tender is the Night, and I talked about

extensively about the literary life of f Scott Fitzgerald

and some of his challenges with writing, with alcoholism,

with his wife, Zelda, and her,

insanity. We even read on that episode, the

great, not really

epigraph. It's not really the term I wanna use, but the great sort of commentary

that, F. Scott Fitzgerald or not F. Scott show. Sorry. That, Ernest

Hemingway had on her, in a movable feast, a

little piece in that book called, called, Hawks

Do Not Share. Right? Which was the first time that Hemingway

realized Zelda might not be all at home.

And that, of course, impacted how Fitzgerald wrote and the kind

of space that he wrote from. And, Tender is

the Night was Fitzgerald's probably least

selling book, of the ones that he wrote. And

he actually tried to rewrite it in the thirties, and it didn't it didn't land

in either. Matter of fact, this book sold fewer copies even than The

Great Gatsby, which is the one, of course, that everyone knows him from,

which did not sell like hotcakes initially. K?

This Side of Paradise, Beautiful and the Damned, these books sold a lot better.

Right? And, of course, Fitzgerald had his short story

output, which was incredible in the twenties and

thirties. So we're gonna open up with Tender is

the Night. We're gonna start off in chapter one, and, we're

gonna sort of lay the foundation for this,

as Fitzgerald describes the

French Riviera scene. And I

quote, on the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about

halfway between Marseille and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose colored

hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed facade, and before

it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately, it has become a summer resort

of notable and fashionable people. A decade ago, it was almost

deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Not many bungalows

cluster near it. But when this story begins, only the couple of a

dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed

pines between Gauss' Hotel des Francaise and Cannes

Five miles away. The hotel and its bright tan

prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning, the distant

images of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple

outbound at Italy, were cast across the water lake wavering in the ripples and

rings sent up by the sea plants through the clear shallows.

Now I'm gonna pause here. There's something very interesting that Fitzgerald

does because he comes from a different time. He fully and completely describes

what you are going to see at Cannes. Right? What you're going to see when

you go there. By the way, the Cannes Film Festival just took place, the

weekend before this recording. And, apparently, Jeff Bezos and,

Lawrence Sanchez were there with their yacht, which is obnoxious from

what I understand. One

more sign, I guess, of a decadent, gilded

era in which we are living.

Back to the book. Before eight, a man came down to the beach in

a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application to his person of the chilly

water and much grunting and loud breathing floundered a minute in the sea.

When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. Merchant

men crawled westward on the horizon. Busboys shouted in the hotel court. The dew dried

upon the pines. In another hour, the horns and motors began to blow down the

winding road along the low range of the mares, which separate the littoral

from true Provencal, France. A

mile from the sea is where pines gave way to dusty poplars

as an isolated railroad stop. Whence, one June morning in

1925, Victoria brought a woman and her daughter down

to Gauss' hotel. The mother's face was of a fading prettiness that would

soon be padded with broken veins. Her expression was both tranquil and

aware in a pleasant way. However, once I moved on quickly to

her daughter who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks litched to a

lovely flame like the thrilling flesh of children after their cold baths

in the evening. Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her

hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into love locks and

waves and curly cues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were

bright, big, clear, wet, and shining. The color of her cheeks was real,

breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her

body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood. She

was almost 18, nearly complete, but the

dew was still on her.

That's how we open Tender Into the Night with a description

of our character that will be moving

the plot forward and will act as a

act as a fuel, in what's about to happen

between, Nicole and Dick Divers,

a couple who are American

escapees, I guess, is maybe not the word. But,

they are they've traveled, right, to to Europe,

and they are part of the party set in nineteen twenties and

'19 early nineteen thirties, France.

And, that is one of the things you note about Tender is the

Night. Right? It is a

novel that shows how the other half lives. It is a

novel that demonstrated, in real ways

to people reading in America who were right on the cusp of the end of

the roaring twenties and the beginning of the Great Depression,

just how much they were missing in life.

And so I'm gonna open up my questions for Libby,

with this one. You know, you

mentioned last time when we were talking about Parade's End, a little bit off off,

off mic, how much you really enjoyed this book. What would you say for you

was the most captivating element, Libby, of Tender is the

Night? I think just how

universal, human your

humanity human humanity is that even as

we, you know, live in, you know, in the twenty

twenties, a hundred years later,

you know, the desire

yeah. Mental illness is, you know, is

prevalent, and, you know, they called it

schizophrenia back in, you know, the nineteen twenties, and now

a dissociative, you know, identity is

maybe the more common term now.

You know, numbing, you know, not wanting

to live in reality and numbing through alcohol,

you know, is a constant. Yeah. Yeah,

backdrop is just what is the only thing

changing. You know,

it was it was it was hard it it was hard to read.

You know, when you look behind, it wasn't that hard to read. I mean, I

you know, I as I told you, I really I love reading books from this

era. And the way that, F. Scott Fitzgerald and

Hemingway describe, the backdrops

and the people just are so real to me. I feel like I can just

plop in, and I, you know, I know the conversations, and I can

have, you know, you can have them all, and just feel a part

of it, you know, from the clothing to the smells to the backdrop, but it's

also because it's in, you know, in France. Mhmm. And

France is pretty timeless, at least, at least from, you know,

nineteen hundreds to 02/2025.

Backdrop is similar. The story

of the haves and the have nots, you know, are constant.

It it I I I I

think that the most resonating is how we'd wanna keep

mental illness to feel like a a secret

if we get out and how maybe it's a psychotherapy doesn't

work. No one has a

solution to therapy. I could've

told you that back in '2 you know, in February.

You know? But, you know, it's kind of a constant that

we have to live it through life as well as, you know, as

well as the numbing. And this pursuit

of more, more, more, doesn't

satisfy, you

know, the desire to feel real and more just

sitting back and judging and numbing. Mhmm. That's why

the feel yeah. The the need to feel

real. Well, and there's this there's this

and I think about it often when I read, when I read about World

War one. Right? We're sort of coming off grades end. Right? And and this is

all the stuff that happened after World War one. Right? So after World War one,

people wanted to party, which makes sense. After every war, people wanna have a time

of a break. They wanna party. They wanna forget the the,

problems and the challenges that were inherent in in

sacrifice that was involved in warfare. Right? Whether the sacrifice was large or small,

doesn't seem to matter. Even in our

time. Right? I mean, one of the interesting things with our twenty

year adventurism in Afghanistan and in Iraq,

is well, two interesting things. So one, we had to

party, but it all happened on social media, where everybody

across the world could see it. But then number two, that's our new

communication medium of choice. But then number two,

you know, George w Bush back at the end of 09/11, you

know, said possibly the worst possible thing you could possibly say, which was, you know,

don't worry about it. The economy is gonna be fine. Everybody go shopping. Like, that's

not that's not what you say. Right?

Which shows a failure of political leadership in our

time. Also, it sort of set the tone for the unseriousness

that we've had during the last twenty years of what are quite what's quite frankly

chaos chaos in my opinion, and we've talked about that on this podcast before.

A hundred years ago, however, and this is the thing that I always have to

think of, I have to kind of sort contextualize it. You talk about universality, and

I agree with you. However, a hundred years ago, there were some things

that were genuinely new on the horizon.

And we can speak about it a hundred years later because we're cynical, and we've

seen the backwash of it. But consumerism

was genuinely new then.

Consumerism at a capitalistic consumerism driven by

capitalism at an industrial scale was new.

You had people who were actually beginning to

live the kind of lives that later on at the end of

World War two and going into the nineteen seventies would just

become things that they expected. Right? But they were beginning to have that taste,

right, of quote, unquote the good life. And it was sort of starting to filter

down into the middle class. Then you also had celebrity,

you know, the beginning of the celebrity culture, which Tender is the Night kind of

personalizes that. And one of the things that really jumps out to me about

this book is,

Rosemary is a Hollywood Star, daddy's little girl. Right?

Which the way Fitzgerald writes about

Hollywood and then, of course, later on the struggles he had writing in

Hollywood are the exact same struggles. It's the exact same

parallel and the exact same way that people think about YouTube stars

now. The way we think about

YouTube now, if we're a Hollywood Star, is the way that Hollywood people

were thought of by people who believed that theater was the big art

form. And if you weren't in theater, you were nobody. What is this Hollywood

trash? What is this? Like, you just stand around and, like, the

camera it's it's garbage. The same thing that, like, the Hollywood people say about

YouTube now. Like, it's amazing to me. Like, Hollywood Writers will not

work in YouTube. They just won't do it. They refuse.

And and they struggle with the fact that YouTube is eating

their edges just and and actually eating the whole industry

the same way that theater people struggled

with movies eating their edges. Right? And later on, movie people would

struggle with TV in the fifties, right, at a much smaller scale. But movie people

kinda saw it coming and sort of able to integrate into that. So

that sort of struck me. So celebrity culture was

beginning. Consumerism was beginning. And

then you talk about therapy. We can only

I mean, that's that's that's the kind of statement we can make a hundred years

after because Freud was new. Like, Freud's, like,

Victorian and and Young was running around. These were

new I mean, Dick Divers is a psychiatrist. You know, all these things were

new, at the time, new ways of dealing with folks. Even

his interactions with his his rich psychiatry patients. There's one

that's in, early in book three when

when, his partner, begins to believe that Dick's not

serious after he comes off of the the fist fight with with the

Italian with the Italian cops, which is probably not wise.

But, probably not wisdom there, Dick.

But he comes off of that. He goes back to Switzerland, and then he, like,

starts his long slow, you know, decline into

ignominy. And, and it's

at that point that you begin to see how his

clients engage with him around psychiatry.

And Fitzgerald sort of shadows this early in the book or throughout the

book where he can't Dick can't even write a second volume

of his, like, medical book that was gonna make him famous. He can't get it

up off the deck. And, partially, that's the challenge of a writer's struggle,

which is Fitzgerald which which, shadows

Fitzgerald's challenges in real life with the partying and the drinking

and Zelda and everything else. But it also,

I think and maybe Fitzgerald wasn't intentional about this, but it's his

critique of psychiatry. Like, it's not there's something

that's not there, but it's too new for us to figure out what the something

is that's missing. And so you see all these things that are new. And so

I have to look back on this book when I was reading it. I say

all that to say this. When I was reading this book, I had to give

people forgiveness and grace rather than judge

them through a twenty twenty five lens. Because if I judge

them through a twenty twenty five lens, I will judge them harshly, and I will

find them wanting. Interesting. Yeah. I

didn't I didn't have that challenge. Yeah. And one of the things

that I'm thinking about is I'll probably

gonna double down on, individuals'

responses are universal. Yeah.

Okay. You know? So, right now, you

know, commercial consumerism enabled

by financial engineering and, you know, and all those

things has probably penetrated a little deeper

into, society.

But, and, you know, the

the narcissism associated with me me me,

you because there's a bit more wealth and decadence.

People are looking for ways to feel

valued and validated externally.

But I think those are all

regardless of what the trigger is.

Hate that word. I know. I know. But but it's the right it's the

right word. It's the right word. The right word for that context. Is Right.

Yep. Regardless of what the trigger is, the

struggle remains the same, which

is how to go how to

find yeah. How to survive in the world.

Mhmm. If you, you know, the base you know, getting past your base needs

from a Maslow peer inimative needs. Once those base needs

are met, we start to get into more decadent,

psychological responses to what's happening in the world.

And, you know, that's where,

you know, when people, you know, start getting what they're told is

supposed to make them feel whole, like, more

more wealth, relationships,

education. There are they continue to look

externally for answers to feel whole

that only internal, work

can solve for. So,

well, commercialization is real consumerism is really high right

now. We have the ability to be even more narcissistic,

you know, at scale than before.

You know, we have lots of people who have shifted from alcohol to marijuana

and all different types of drugs, but they're still numbing because

they can't fill the hole within within them.

Mhmm. You know, today, I don't know what the you know, we

have to move to microaggressions in order to

find, you know, a a PTSD that we need to hide

from, you know, versus back in

1920, it was legitimately World War one or,

yeah, World War one and new entrenched warfare. Mhmm.

But if you see the common thread is, I was

wounded. I'm a victim. Life isn't as I expected it to

be. And we'll look,

you know, externally for, you

know, validation, and or numbing,

in order to reconcile what I expected life to be with what

it is. And we will get yeah.

The common theme that I've been talking about since my

maybe, like, eighteen to twenty four months ago is where

right now with such a secular society, the set and the seven

deadly sins are everything that's

being promoted, at at

mass, and that's the downfall of a civilization.

You know, when you have a, a more god

fearing or religious society where

you have faith in something greater than yourself,

you're kind of released, from

needing to, you know, to, you know,

you're released from those other, you

know, from the the the self destructive sins, Greed, you know,

greed, pride,

wrath, gluttony, you know,

face in something greater than yourself is what

will put you into a place of being,

satisfied with satisfied with life or not demanding more from it than it

is, accepting life as it is. You do mention

the shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three, yeah, in three generations. I've

mentioned that several times. Yeah. It's because,

you know, that first generation is just trying to get out of the base

Maslow's pyramid of needs, and they're, yeah, and they're willing

to work hard to make sure that they have food and a structure over their

heads. Everything else after that, you know, they're told is gonna

fulfill them, and they're still left empty. Their

children still probably feel a little hungry, and they're

trying to find meaning in life, through more wealth

and education and, you know, etcetera. Mhmm. They find

that it doesn't fill them. And the third generation is like, we know that money

and all these other things you're telling us doesn't fulfill us, and they,

like, slide back down into poverty.

So these are yeah. It's all to say that the

universal human experience is the

universal human experience regardless of the trigger.

I I you know what? And you know what? When you frame it that way,

I don't I don't disagree. You know, one

of the brutal

truths that the West was able to integrate versus the

East, but but able to integrate from an eastern religion.

Mhmm. And people forget this. Christianity is fundamentally an eastern

religion, at its root. Right? But the the

truth that it was able to integrate into the West was,

to your point about, for lack of a better term, sin

Mhmm. The

material world is never going to fulfill

you, and to look for that fulfillment in the material world is

sinful in and of itself. And, you know, Buddhism kinda

goes halfway with this with all life is suffering. But then then

what would you do after that? And, and Islam

goes in the other direction to get another Eastern religion and says,

well, yeah, life is suffering. Let's just crush everything. And I know I know I

know that my my Islamic listeners are going to going to gonna get out of

me from being reductive. But I gotta be reductive for this point.

So let's crush everything and let's move on. Right? Let's conquer it

all for Allah. Judaism kinda gets

halfway there, but then locates everything in a temple, in a physical a

physical manifestation of god on the earth. And this is why

when Jesus shows up and says, I am the temple, and I'll, you know, tear

it down in three days and restore it, they all lose their minds in the

New Testament. Right? And I'm not talking about the average the average, you

know, on the ground Jewish person. That's not who I'm talking about. I'm talking about

the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the people who were in charge, and the temple really

worked for them. Right? Jesus gets to a core

truth, which the core truth isn't buried in Christianity, which is that

the material world will not satisfy you. Looking for that satisfaction

is sinful in and of itself in the material world. And the only thing that

will satisfy you is the grace and the

and the blood and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Okay.

And fast forward February, and I I

like your point here. I'm gonna restate it a different kind of way. We just

find new tools to send with.

And so, you know, twenty years from now, we'll be doing the same things

with AI. Right? We'll be doing we'll we'll

have come up with I mean, we're already down the road. We're already on the

road to AI pornography. We're already down the road to that. We're

already down the road to virtual reality, you know,

sexual pleasure, which is, of course, tied into dopamine

dopaminergic reaction. We're already down the road on that. And who

knows what sort of deviance

will will develop out of that. But it will develop because all

the technology does is give us new ways to to to to

to sort of try to to try to fill, to your point,

our base the the yawning appetites that are that lie at the base of

who we are. And going past that does require

something that is a a belief system that is existential

and exists beyond merely all of that. Right?

So I don't disagree with any of that. I was merely saying,

I gave them grace because

they the culture

that Fitzgerald came in, the cultural

context he came in, the bucket, right, was a

bucket of

coming out of the death of the Victorian era. Like, the Victorian era died in

World War one. So just like in our era

where the sixties is dying has been dying for the last twenty years.

Not fast enough. I know. I know. I know. I know. Every every Gen Xer

believes that. It's fine. I understand. The millennials will finally kill it.

They will. They were they are finally going to put it in its grave. It's

gonna be done. I'm already watching it happen, in real time.

But, the problem here is just like when we read books

on this podcast about revolution, what do you replace

that thing with? Right? And Fitzgerald didn't have an

answer for this. He just saw he was just a re he was just doing

cultural reportage, kinda like Joan Didion would do much later

on or, James Baldwin in a different context. He was

literally just writing what he was seeing. He was seeing that this

person was trying to fill it with alcohol to your point. This person was trying

to fill it with sex. By the way, there is a lot of sex in

Tender is the Night. A shocking amount. I was very surprised.

And it's not explicit. I will say that. It is not explicit. And if

you're a mature individual who kinda knows how things work, you

will see it everywhere. However, a high school student can read this book,

and it's not there's no there's no naked expose of this. Right? It's

just, like, the first time that Rosemary and Dick finally,

you know, do the thing. It's, it's one

sentence, and it's not even a descriptive sentence. It's just it's a

contextual sentence. And, again, if you know how things work between men and women, if

you've had any life on you whatsoever, you'll read that entire paragraph and you'll

go. And I did. I paused because, again, I come from a more explicit

time. I read that paragraph and I paused and I went, oh.

Oh, okay. That's what happened there.

Right. Yeah. It was it wasn't prurient. It wasn't

prurient. That's what it was. It was it's not prurient. That's

I can appreciate Fitzgerald for that. But when he was doing this, he was looking

at what people were filling that bucket with because they had no good ideas. They

didn't know what to do after World War one. Yeah. You know?

The other thing that's kinda touched on in this book, and then we'll move on,

I wanted to see if you caught this. But the other theme that was kinda

touched on, particularly with the rich folks, is a theme that I see

reflected in our own time, which was that sense of

self hatred, I guess, about their own wealth.

Because your point about shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, all of the second

generation wealthy folks that were coming to Dick

for psychiatric help either with their child

being a homosexual, the results of incest or

child abuse, using too much

alcohol, alcoholism, whatever the presenting

thing was. And we'll talk about Nicole Warren here in a minute.

She was fascinating. Regardless of the

presenting thing, these wealthy individuals who made money

all invariably had children. At least one of them, baby Warren, is is a

notorious character here, who either behaved badly

or or or were were wandering towards being socialist

revolutionaries. And that was another thing that was new in the twenties and thirties.

Like, everybody thought and I have to remind myself of this. It's really hard.

Everybody thought communism was the way to go.

Everybody thought that. They really did

because because Durant Walter Duranty went to Soviet

went to the Soviet Union and lied, and nobody had a way of

proving that he was a liar, not at the not the mass

public level. And so they just bought it. They just bought it hook,

line, and sinker. They bought the whole thing. I mean, again,

about, like, the left and the progressives who believed in it. They're no

different than today. This is what I'm saying. Like, this is the parallel I'm drawing.

Yes. This is the creative class,

and or the Uber elite that we're talking about with the

self hatred and the, you know, communism. And, you know, Marx was, you

know, a child of, you know, of wealth. You know? He

had a trust fund. You know? You know,

so I unfortunately, I think I under

like, I probably understand these people far too

well because I've walked with these people, and they're

miserable. So, like, to me, it wasn't

surprising. You know? Like,

Oh, no. It wasn't surprising to me either. It was just it was I found

it to be The self loathing is really

prominent. Like Yeah. Yeah. Self loathing is really prominent.

And that's, again, why you get to the shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves is they

feel they feel guilty like,

guilty, but they're not producing. They're not

creating. They're living a life of luxury. They're telling others how to

live, yada yada yada. I think of King Charles, like,

right off the bat. Right? Like, you know, he's

clearly a miserable man who hates

humanity, and everything's been given to him on a silver

platter literally. And, you know,

I went to a a private high school the last two years of,

of high school after having been in public school through tenth

grade. And, like, these kids, they came

from immense wealth and had everything handed to them, and

they were miserable. Like, they were super smart. Like,

they could, you know, SATs, perfect

scores, everything, you know, came really easy to them, but they had a

gray cloud around them all the like,

literally a gray cloud around them, like, all the time. And I saw it

same at at, you know, at Elite College.

You know, those of us who tend to be a little more optimistic,

I I refer to myself as a pragmatic optimist. I find great

I'm not, like, the smartest tool in the shed. The thing that differentiates

me is I'm willing to work my ass off, and I love to learn,

and I'm not satisfied with not understanding something. You

know? Yeah. You know? And there comes a

there's a a lot that comes from overcoming

challenges and doing it on a regular basis. Like, you feel you

feel good and grateful for what you've got because it

it's really hard to get. Well, I will

say this. Maybe maybe I'm in the first generation to

get some in my family because I don't feel a modicum of guilt.

Not one of modicum of guilt or self

loathing at all. No. It doesn't happen in that first class

because in the first generation because you know how hard you

are. Like, no one like, yeah. When when Obama

said you didn't do this on your own, it's like, yeah. The fuck I did.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's right.

No one else was getting up at 5AM and staying up until

12AM. And, sure, you know, one of my favorite

sayings is opportunity favors the prepared mind.

So people create, you know, conditions within

within which you can thrive, but I'm sorry. I

there like, if the if there's a wall, I'm gonna find a way

under it, over it, open a door. Like, you know, like

so, yes, the conditions need to be there. I'm not in a prison, so

you don't be in a prison, but I don't know. Like, yeah, you did it

on your own. Well, it's it's I think of Snoop Dogg's,

Hollywood walk of fame speech where, like, I I wanna thank me. I

always tell my wife, like, if anybody ever gives me an award, like, a

famous award, like, something that's really high profile, I am I'm gonna just basically steal

his entire I wanna thank me speech, and I'm just gonna do that. My wife's

like, you gotta stop. Like, you have to you can't do that. That's ridiculous.

But it is true. Like, I wanna thank me for getting up at

05:00 in the morning. I wanna thank me for not quitting. I wanna

thank me for, like, doing all the things and going the extra mile when other

people quit and weren't willing to do that thing. We're willing to take some risks

that others weren't willing to do while people are on the sidelines tell you in

the like, you're in the arena while on the sidelines telling you you can't

do it. Exactly. And make some decisions that, were

not that great, but did I learn from them? Yeah. Well well

and and well, it all and, fundamentally, I'd like to thank God for putting me

in the position where he did because you know what? I could have been born

in Russia or I could have been born in South Africa or I could have

been born in Brazil or I could have been born in Canada. I wasn't. I

was born here. And you know what? I didn't I didn't I would that wasn't

that wasn't the thing I picked. I was put here, and I took advantage of

what was given to me and the wealth that was given to me in

being put here. That's what I did. Right? That's the

free will part of the equation that, again, comes out

of comes out of a Christian understanding of sort of how the

worth is structured, and how reality itself is

structured. We do have free will. We do have the ability to choose.

And so we shouldn't have self loathing. Like, we shouldn't have that. We shouldn't have

that guilt. Now we should have guilt, I would assert,

if how we got our money was

illegal, immoral, or fattening, then

we should have guilt. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, for me, yes.

I, I agree. It's like, I'd, like,

exploiting others, using others. Yeah. No guilt about you

know, have guilt for that. For me, you know, part of what I wanted

to elaborate on the sense of faith is about also having a self

sense of service to others, wanting to help others thrive. Like, I honestly

believe other people's success is, like, is my, yeah,

is my success because I want them to be successful. Like, I help

those who are willing to help themselves. Right? That is yeah. And

that gives me great satisfaction to see others thrive,

but they have to do the work. Right. Right. Right.

Getting the material benefits from that. Great. I'm not gonna shake off of

material benefits, but I'm not gonna define myself by material

benefits. I'm not that isn't my slow pursuit. It's a nice outcome

of being a greater service to others beyond myself.

Well, there's a there's an interesting philosophical idea, which if you

don't buy into Christianity, that's fine. It's still a,

an idea that is about the cornerstone of reality, so you better buy

into that, which is, you know, the Lord gives you the

ability to to gain wealth. Now because of the pushback

I always hear from people who are

a little more, shall we say, progressive than myself, The thing they will always say

is, well, there's always poor people who are working their butts off and they're not

getting anywhere. To wit to wit, I point

out, yes. And are they

working their butts off at the right thing? Because if they're working their butts off

at the right thing and they're appropriately aligned, they will get

somewhere. Will they get as far as Dick Divers in Tender is the

Night? Will they get as far as Nicole Warren?

No. They may not get there. Will they get as far as Jeff Bezos and

his obnoxious yacht with his teak that he probably sourced from some,

like, woods somewhere in, like, Thailand that's illegal? No.

They probably won't. And and

because two things can be true at once, that's okay. If

you're an inch ahead of where you started

Like And we used right. And we used to sort of have this concept in

our in our country. If you're an inch ahead of where you started,

say thank you and be on your way. And that sense of

and this is the flip side of the self loathing if you're wealthy. The flip

side of that is the hatred of the wealthy. The

envy, which is the particular sin of the poor is, or those who don't

have as much, which if you're have a dollar less than somebody else, you're poor.

Okay. The envy and envy is about objects.

Jealousy is about people and relationships. Envy is about objects and

stuff. That's why we have to separate those two. But you will be envious

of what people have, and you particularly see this in everybody's

critique of Elon Musk. I mean, oh my gosh. The leftist critiques of

Elon Musk are all based on they're all based on envy. We we

can better decide what it is he needs to do with

what he's earned than he can. That's all envy. That's all

envy. Yeah. And I yeah. I I wanna go back to

where you started with, like, are you working at the right stuff to,

like, making the right decisions about, like, you know, like, you

know, saving your money, where you spend your money. Mhmm. And you always

hear about, like, the millionaire next door who lives really

modestly. And, you know, they worked really, really hard, and they just

put it in the bank or they invested it. Like, it's a whole set of

decisions that people are making. It's not just about how

hard you're working. Like, I always whenever I

went into a job, I knew what I was contributing, but I

also knew what I was getting out of it and where but the next three

options were that I was pursuing. It wasn't an in state.

Right? So, like, where am I growing? Where is this taking me?

Mhmm. So I always had to think about it from that perspective, but I also

knew it wouldn't take me anywhere if I didn't think about what they needed from

me. Right? Correct. Right. Right. Right. Right. How do you put yourself in

I don't know. As I've

gotten older, one of the things that's become more

maybe not animating for me. Maybe that's too hard a word. It doesn't really animate

me. It's it's just one of these intellectual things that I sort of chew over

when I'm, like, outside on my property picking up dog

poop, whatever. Yep. You know? Whatever. What do you what what else are you

gonna think about when you're doing that? Right? But,

you know, when I'm when I have time to intellectually masticate over this

stuff, one of the things that's interesting to me is I don't know, and no

human being does, by the way, how everything

links together to produce an outcome. I have zero idea. So

in working on the right stuff, I get it. If

you're poor in not understanding the correct questions to ask

because the people who came before you couldn't even couldn't even

frame where you should look correctly, yes, you're gonna

be upside down and it's and your life's gonna be hard, and it's you're probably

not going to get as far as somebody who framed the

question correctly and framed what the answer

might be correctly for you. Like, this is one of those things I try to

do with my children, and I try to surround myself with people who try to

do this with their kids. So the question is not, you know, for my eight

year old. Like, can you sell eggs on the

street for, like, a dollar or whatever? Right? The

question is, do you have everything aligned correctly

in order to be able to sell eggs for a dollar?

And if you don't have everything aligned correctly to sell eggs for a dollar,

you can go ahead and slap up something out there, but you're not gonna be

successful. And so these are the kinds of things that, like like, if that

framing isn't there for you, I get it. And we live in the

most open, free, and informed culture on the face of the

planet right now, historically speaking. We have the math

the massive sampling tool known as Google, where you can just go ask it a

bunch of questions. You could figure things out. You have zero

excuses. So we're all out of excuses, kids. We're all out of

excuses. We're all out of envy. We're all out of jealousy. We're all out of

that. And yet, because our technology allows us

to send more and just in better ways,

we we still continue to pursue this. Right? We still continue to have the

excuses. So, Well, yeah.

People will stop because yeah. Will stop

and become blocked because there's no certain path.

Right. You know, and that's why I stick to the what are my three options

out is because, an exponential number

of options out means I won't have clarity, and I won't be able to see

something as it is well. And one option

is, like, is locked on perfection and and

thinking you understand all the opportunities. Like, you don't know what's around

another corner. You don't know what's behind another door.

And too many people need certainty. And that's

why they'll sit on the sidelines, judging because they were

too afraid to just, like, take kind of some leaps of faith

about where something will take them. Mhmm. And,

you know, as you get older, you realize how little you knew

or could ever predict about what those opportunities were. You just have to have,

I don't even wanna say faith. Just know that, you know, you learn more

with each opportunity that's new and you per you know, and you pursue.

And that and your path will change because you

learn more. Yeah. Yeah. Be reckless

and, you know, and, expect the world, but

also don't stop because you need certainty. It's this balance

around optionality and just having a vision towards growth.

And, you know, even more importantly,

recognizing that from a job I always pursue economic. I

wanna be economically viable in the marketplace. Right? Because

economic viability gives me options so that I'm not locked

Mhmm. Into a specific career that may be dead ended

or a company that is dead ended. Economic viability,

it means I have optionality. I wanna make sure I'm valued in the

marketplace, so I develop skills that are valued in the marketplace.

And I am always looking at a job as, like, it's a

partnership. I am there like, they are paying me for

results. They're not my butt in a seat. They're not paying,

you know, or some companies are, but those aren't companies I

wanna work for. They're not paying for me to look busy. They're

paying me to deliver results that matter.

And so I look at, you know, am I delivering results that

matter? And it may be different if you have internal customers versus

external customers. And what skills am I gaining,

yeah, that I can take to that next opportunity? Unfortunately,

you know, too many people think a job is is a guarantee and

a right, and too many people

think that there's just one prescribed path and that learning stops after college.

Right. Yeah. Or even worse or sometimes worse, high school, which

is a whole other a whole other bailiwick. Yeah. Alright. Let's

go back to the book, back to Tender is the Night. I wanna I wanna

talk a little bit deeper about we we kinda touched on therapy,

and then sort of the model that's used in Tender is the Night. But I

wanna pick up deep into the book.

So we kinda introduced, Rosemary there.

I'm gonna kinda go into book

two. And and in book two of, Tender is the

Night, Fitzgerald, retcons. Well, not

retcons. He he he goes back into the history

of Dick Divers and Nicole Warren. And we

begin to learn that Nicole was a, a

psychiatric patient, that, Dick was, in

essence, brought in to

manage. And as he begins

to, deal with her, as he begins to treat

her for her for her mental illness, her schizophrenia,

he falls in love with her. Right? And this, of course, works

really well for the Warren family, who are wealthy and willing to throw

money around. Nicole's, older sister, baby

Warren, is a

a mini tyrant in her own right. You'll see that later on in book three,

after, as I already mentioned, Dick gets into a fight with some Italian

gendarmes, which is not really the term, but it's okay. It

works. And, and, and has and is thrown in jail,

and baby Warren is the only one that could get him out.

There's something there's something there about a screaming socialite that I wanna

say, but I don't I think I wanna just leave it there. Just wanna let

it sit. Just gonna let that sit.

But, but during the course of

doctor Diver's relationship with Nicole, they they moved to

Switzerland. And he opens up a hospital there, begins

to treat the, the patients, who

are wealthy, of other families, who are

expatriates, or who are coming from America to

Europe who want a private doctor who will keep their stuff

out of the newspaper headlines. And this creates

problems between him and Nicole, now not no

longer Nicole Warren, but now Nicole Diver. And,

the problems come to a head in chapter 15

in book two of Tender is the Night. So I wanna pick up here. I

wanna read some sections in here. That way, you can see just

how fragile things become with

Nicole. Meals with the patients were a chore

he approached with apathy. The gathering, which, of

course, did not include residents at the Glentine or the Beaches, was

conventional enough at first sight, but it brooded always a heavy

melancholy. But over it, brooded always a heavy melancholy.

Such doctors were present, kept up a conversation, but most of the

patients, as if exhausted by their morning's endeavor or depressed by the

company, spoke little and ate looking into their plates.

Luncheon over, Dick returned to his villa. Nicole was in the salon wearing

a strange expression. Read that, she said.

He opened the letter. It was from a woman recently discharged, though

with skepticism on the part of the faculty, and accused him in no

uncertain terms of having seduced her daughter who had been at her mother's side

during the crucial stage of the illness. It presumed that missus Diver would

be glad to have this information and learn what her

husband was, quote, unquote, really like. Dick

read the letter again. Ouch, in a clear and concise English, he yet

recognized it as the letter of a maniac. Upon a single occasion,

he had let the girl, a flirtatious little brunette, ride into Zurich with him upon

her request, and in the evening had brought her back to the clinic. In an

idle, almost indulgent way, he kissed her. Later, she tried to carry the

affair further, but he was not interested and subsequently, probably, consequently, the

girl had come to dislike him and taken her mother away.

This letter is deranged, he said. I had no relations of any kind with that

girl. I didn't even like her. Yes. I've tried thinking that, said Nicole.

Surely, you don't believe it. I've been sitting here.

He sank his voice into a reproachful note and sat beside her. This is absurd.

This is a letter from a mental patient. I was a mental patient.

He stood up and spoke more authoritatively. Suppose you don't have any

nonsense, Nicole. Go and round with the children and we'll start. In

In the car with Dick driving, they followed the little promenitories of the lake catching

the burn of the light and watering the windshield, tunneling through cascades of evergreen. It

was Dick's car, a Renault, so dwarfish that they all stuck out of it except

the children, between whom Mademoiselle towered mass like in the

rear seat. By the way, Mademoiselle is the, is the, governess.

They knew every kilometer of the road where they would smell the pine needles and

the black stove smoke. A high sun with a face traced on it beat

fierce on the straw hats of the children.

Nicole was silent. Dick was uneasy at her straight hard gaze.

Often, he felt lonely with her, and frequently, she tired him with the short floods

of personal revelations that she reserved exclusively for him. I'm like this. I'm

more like that. But this afternoon, he would have been glad has she rattled on

in staccato for a while and given him glimpses of her thoughts.

The situation was always most threatening when she backed up into herself

and closed the doors behind her.

Then I'm going to skip through and go

into a couple of different areas. So they

get out of the car. They go through, a

Punch and Judy show, through Khan,

and then, they get, they get back into, the

car. By the way, he also loses her at this Punch and Judy show in

the circus, so he's running around trying to find her. He leaves his kids with,

like, two random French women, which is just sort of amazing to me. I would

never do that. But okay. Whatever. I guess this is how the other half lives.

That's fine. And, they eventually,

get back in the car after getting the children who were, quote, unquote, with a

gypsy woman in a booth.

And they start driving again. And I'm gonna

pick up here. They started back with hot sorrows steaming down upon them. The car

was weighted with their mutual apprehensions and anguish, and the children's mouths are grayed

with disappointment. Grief presented itself in its terrible, dark,

unfamiliar color. Somewhere around Zug, Nicole, with a

convulsive effort, reiterated remarks she had made before about a misty yellow

house set back from the road that looked like a painting not yet dry, but

it was just an attempt to catch a rope that was playing out too swiftly.

Dick tried to rest. The struggle would come presently at home, and he might have

to sit a long time restating the universe for her. A schizophren

is well named as a split personality. Nicole was alternately a person

whom nothing needed to be explained and one to whom nothing could be

explained. It was necessary to treat her with active affirmative insistence,

keeping the road to reality always open, making the road to escape harder going. But

the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of

water seeping through over and around a dike. It requires the

unified front of many people working against it. He felt it necessary that this time

Nicole cure herself. He wanted to wait until she remembered the other times

and revolted from them. In a tired way, he planned that they would again

resume the regime, relaxed a year before. He

had turned up a hill, then it made a shortcut to the clinic. And now

as he stepped onto the accelerator for a short straightaway run parallel to the hillside,

the car swerved violently left, swerved right, tipped on two

wheels, and as Dick with Nicole's voice screaming in his ear, crushed

down the mad hand clutching the steering wheel, righted itself,

swerved once more, and shot off the road. It tore through low underbrush, tipped again,

and settled slowly at an angle of 90 degrees against the tree.

The children were screaming, and Nicole was screaming and cursing and trying

to tear Dick's face. Thinking first of the list of

the car and unable to estimate it, Dick bent away Nicole's

arm, climbed over the top side, and lifted out the children. Then he

saw the car was in a stable position. Before doing anything

else, he stood there shaking and panting. You, he

cried. She was laughing hilariously, unashamed,

unafraid, unconcerned. No one was coming on to the

scene no one coming on to the scene would have imagined that she would

have caused it. She laughed after some mild escape of childhood.

You were scared, weren't you? She accused him. You wanted to live. She

spoke with such a force, and in his shocked state, Dick wondered if he had

been frightened for himself. But the strained faces of the children,

looking from parent to parent, made him want to grind her grinning

mask into jelly.

Let's talk about mental illness.

The question I have here is probably not the greatest one about creative talent

and time such as hours. So I'm gonna ask a different kind of

question. Olivia, I'm gonna call it audible on this one. I'm gonna ask a different

kind of question here.

I don't have a whole lot of experience with mental illness, particularly schizophrenia,

at a practical level. I've known people who have

been anxious. I've known people who have been depressed. I have people in my family

who suffer from anxiety and depression. So I've seen up close what that looks

like. I myself have, been

a depressed person, and have bootstrapped myself out of that,

primarily because I'm obstinate and prideful. Those are my own two

sins. I'm also ridiculously stubborn,

and I refuse to ask for help for something that I think I can solve

for myself. So those are my,

particular problems and foibles.

But I've never dealt with someone with

that sort of split, right, personality. And I

don't know if you have, in your experience.

So I guess the question here is

or no. Not the question. The the framing around the question is this.

So the Victorians, where Freud came out of,

sought to leverage psychiatry

as a way to substitute for social shaming,

and as a way to to to to shortcut social

norming. Right? Because if we could just get people to be normal, right, and go

along, then everything would be fine. Right? And yet there's

these people showing up with these splits, and they do this thing, and then they

do that thing, and we don't understand why. And Jordan

Peterson, along with many others, I'll just use him as a a public

example. Doctor Jordan Peterson talks about how and I think this is very

interesting, particularly when we're talking about transgender individuals.

There's a there's a social

negotiation that goes on between all of us as individuals and then the

larger society. Right? We shouldn't

be trying to get the larger society to bend to our individual whims.

Instead, we should be trying to bend to the whims of society because maybe

the wisdom of crowds is actually a thing, and maybe people who

have come before us may actually know something. Okay.

Mental illness is the is the the the primary feature in

Tinder is the night. Past all of the stuff with, like,

ingenues that you get with Rosemary or

the alcoholism and the self medication which you get with Dick

and everybody else. But Nicole

and her family, the Warrens, specifically are

impacted by mental illness. And Nicole even breaks up her

marriage because she feels she is cured

of her mental illness even though there's some argument to be made that

the guy that she goes off with

Might be a little bit touched in the head himself as my grandma might say

back in the day. Well, back in the day, they I

mean, they're rough back in the day. Right?

And I'm wandering towards the question here. So I guess the question is I had

all that framing. So let me wander towards let me phrase the actual question, right,

and give you a chance to speak here. So yeah. So how do

we how do we deal with each other when we're mentally ill? And, you know,

I don't know. That that right. Like, this like, this is this is one of

the huge things for tender is the night that I could not I couldn't get

my arms around it. I can't either,

largely because it's a spectrum. Right? Right.

So you have the full on,

you know, one extreme where people need to

be institutionalized because they cannot

help themselves, and they are of physical harm

to others. Right. We see a lot of

those on the streets of San Francisco. Mhmm.

And then there's a full other

spectrum where people

just want attention and they act out for, like,

attention. Mhmm. Do that a lot right now.

Mhmm. Yeah.

And I think if you feed it too much,

it it evolves into greater psychoses

that force people into a reality that

is completely detached from reality, and they do become even more more

ill. Mhmm.

I really I I I don't think there's a one size fits

all. I I personally haven't dealt with anyone

who has schizophrenia, but I don't know if my definition of

schizophrenia is based off of, you know, Sally Field's

movies, you know, in the nineteen seventies and if that's

real or not. Ordinary ordinary people.

But I only know from, you know, for

me, similar to you, I dealt with

my my own, depression.

And I would I don't know if it was actually depression,

but I did medicate with, alcohol

and, you know, kinda that accelerate accelerated her path

into, like, shame and depression.

That is very common for, you know, addicts of any of any

type. And the only thing

you know, and I yeah. My bottom was feeling you know, is when

I am super stubborn as well, I don't ask

for help. I don't you know, I'm not someone who wants you know,

who will tell people when things are going on Mhmm. That's positive

because I'm not I don't want attention for either. You know?

Right. I don't I'm not I just wanna deliver

and do great things and go on to the next thing.

Mhmm. And but the shame when it

was no longer acceptable to be the party girl

and you're still, like, you know, drinking and doing all that stuff

was enough to start to get me on a path to wanting to

fix myself. But, shaming is

very effective.

Okay. And I but I and I think there's a balance.

I will also say I was a heavy kid. Right? Mhmm. And

heavy by nineteen seventies standards, not by

02/2025 standards. Okay. Sure. Right?

And, I didn't like that it took me a

long time to find clothes that fit. Right. And so

what did I do about it? I learned about, like, you

burn calories. Yeah. It's the it's the mathematics

of your what you take in and what you burn. Mhmm. And

I found great ways. I found out I liked tennis, and that tennis would make

me not only did it help me to lose weight, but I felt

really great afterwards. Mhmm. I found things that

opportunistically, I didn't, like, find, like, one path that worked.

But I was like, oh my gosh. Like, tennis actually feels really great.

Hitting the tennis ball against the, against the

garage door or playing tetherball with myself. Like, those were ways that I just

got myself out of feeling bad and

victim and into trying to do something about it. Those are

words that I use today. Those are words not words that I had when I

was eight, nine, 10, 11 years old. Right. I just knew what

felt good. And for me, fortunately, it was

things that were you know, had actually

led to a healthy life and to being successful because I was willing to work

really hard. And it felt a lot better to work hard,

than to sit and complain that life wasn't going my way.

Yep. But that's how I'm wired. Right. Right.

And and this is okay. So this is this is one of the

challenges of reading, a book like this or,

you know, watching a movie like I mean, I did make the joke, Ordinary People

or, you know, any other joke about mental illness. I mean, I think of the

movie in the nineteen nineties with Billy Bob Thornton with who's the autistic guy,

Sling Blade. You know?

It's one of those things. Again, I don't I don't understand how reality is put

together. Right? I I just I just don't. I'm trying to figure it out. Right?

And I don't understand at how how

mental illness operates at multiple levels. Right? And

I don't think anybody does, by the way. I think even the most highly educated

people don't understand how it works. Right? Even the most highly educated

in this space. They could just tell you what the best guesses

are because it's individualized,

and there's certain aspects of treatment

that only work for certain kinds of people and don't work for others.

So one of our one of our guest hosts, cohost, Dave Baumrucker,

works in the clinical psychological space.

And, a good friend of mine, we we were we were rugby teammates

years ago and went to college together, and he's gone off and done other things.

I've gone off and done other things. It's been amazing.

But in that space of clinical psychology,

it and it's not just when I hear him describe it. It's other clinical psychologists

who I've heard describe it. It seems a lot like whack a mole.

And not to lean too much into the religious pieces of it, but I do

think there's a spiritual element to this, which, again, we do not understand. We

just don't get. I do think it's there because why would it be everywhere

else but not there? Okay. That makes no sense. And

you even kinda touched on it a little bit where you you said at

an emotional level where you, like, you decided, I don't like this thing, and so

I'm gonna go over here and leverage this skill that I know I have here

to get this outcome here, to go into the backdoor, to get this

outcome here, to stop this thing here from happening. That's a

multifaceted solution that's unique to you. I wouldn't have

gone and picked up tennis. I just would have doubled down on the drinking probably

because I'm just that guy. Right? Or

I would have because, again, because I'm hard headed, I would have just run into

a wall eventually at a certain point. No. It wasn't like an

overnight. It wasn't an overnight Sure. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No.

No. No. No. And I'm not I wanna be very clear. I'm not being reductive

in your experience. I wanna be very clear about that. Right?

And it did it did take time. But when we're

dealing with, like, Nicole driving, you know, the

car over, you know, off the road, at that

point in the book where I was there, I

stopped reading. I just stopped reading for a little while and walk away from it

because I thought, I don't know how he didn't kill

her. I I I don't know how he didn't strangle that woman in

the car. I don't know how that didn't happen because this isn't

like, you know, cars with airbags in 2025. Like, this

isn't that in rollover and all that. Like, a car in 2025, it's a

bad thing. Don't get me wrong. But it'll survive a rollover accident, whatever

airbag safety features. This is a car in the nineteen twenties. So it's probably closer

to, like, a model a or a model t, one of those

crappy Renaults. Like, there was no safety anything.

Like, there's no seat belts.

So but I I what you're what you're getting at is a is

a whole another a whole another question. So one, what's the solution

to mental illness? And two, what's your response

to someone else's you know, mental illness? Absolutely. Yes. Okay.

Sure. Yeah. The latter is detaching yourself from, like, one

of the the greatest skills that I've

developed over the last, like, twenty years is detaching yourself from

how others perceive you, or detaching from how

others treat you because their experience

you know, I I actually I I think I'm just

a target based off what someone else's life experience has been. It has

very little to do with my intention. It has very little to do with how

I've delivered or what I've done. You know, they're acting based off of

their life experience. You know, today,

I can create boundaries so that person is no

long so I'm no longer in physical danger or emotion

or I don't have to deal with the emotional up and downs that that that

individual can create or the drama that they can create. I can

have compassion for their situation,

but I won't I no longer take it personally.

Mhmm. Right? I and, you know, and

if Nicole yeah. Yeah. I would have been livid,

but me being mad about it won't change it. Right? And

that's very different than where I would have been twenty years ago. Twenty years,

I would have been irate and yelling, but that's not gonna change the

situation. So that's what what do I do now.

Right? I I can I I would've I would've been irated

Nicole as well if it had just been me in the car? Yeah. It was

a kids. Yeah. And now it's my kids. And

I've invested a lot in these people. That's

what your next set of actions are. Right? Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Take take the children away. You need to put her into a place where she's

safe because she's she now is not safe for society

and or the family. Right. Right. Right. And now I have to make I have

to have a hard conversation with I mean, I have to have

a hard conversation with my children. Mommy's gotta

mommy's gotta go for a while. Mommy mommy can't stay. So that's gonna

be one hard conversation. The other hard conversation is going to be with

Nicole's family, which we'll get to that in a second here.

But, I can't have this person around my children. I don't care how much money

you have that Yep. Set it on fire like the dark like the Joker or

the Dark Knight. Whatever. I don't care. Doesn't matter to me.

You don't you don't have enough. Okay. And then because

that's gonna be one hard conversation. That's gonna be second hard conversation. The third hard

conversation is going to quite frankly be with Nicole because,

you know, when she's not in her right mind, it's not

gonna matter. Which when she is in her right mind and is gonna wanna know

what's going on, you can't have, sort of

a, you know, Rapunzel kind of posture.

Like, you can't just lock her in a tower and hope everything's gonna work out.

You know, you have to sort of get some info. And, again, this is this

is all about me not understanding how all this clicks together.

And so looking at those three hard conversations, I love it how

you talked about boundaries in order to to avoid taking it personally,

but also being equipped to have those conversations. And

weirdly enough, because the because

Dick Diver's doctor, Dick Diver's, was so clinical,

the way Fitzgerald wrote him,

because I don't think Fitzgerald actually did research into clinicians. I think he just based

it off of what he saw Exactly. Yeah. And put a chunk of

his own personality in there. He didn't have the ability to put the

boundary in, and so Dick didn't have the ability to put the boundary in, much

less have the hard conversation. He just sort of and this is Dick's end.

He just sort of took the Warren's money and, for lack of a better term,

ran. And I hate that. I hate framing it like that, but it's

true. It, yeah, I mean, that and it happens way too

frequently. It's it's the expert class. Right?

Right. It's about putting faith into the expert class

even when it's not you know, the the psychology of

the time was the expert and but it's not working.

Right. You know, so

Well and you can see it in the way the book ends. Like, the

the I won't ruin it for folks, but when you go read it, like, the

last page of the book book three, which is the end of the book,

it's just sort of a

on the one hand, from a writer perspective, from a creative perspective, I

think Fitzgerald struggled with how to end this. He didn't really

know where the ending should be. Like, how you because this could just

go on and on. This is just, like, whatever. You know? Oh, I'm thinking yeah.

All I'm thinking about is addicts, actually, and I think

that's really good. I mean, it is a it it is a

mental I don't like calling it an

illness, but it's an a mental condition. Mhmm. And, you know,

one of the things when friends come to me and they're dealing with addict you

know, addicts in their family, it is really hard. It's like,

you know, I would actually it is gonna be a long

journey, and there's no guarantee of

success. Yes. So you think about what's gonna be like, I know

you love this person who is in your family and an addict,

But when it gets to one place,

all addicts do is lie, and all

they're thinking they're not thinking about you at all.

And you may want to believe that they're thinking about you. They're playing

games and telling you that they're thinking about you, but they are not. All they're

doing is thinking about their next fix and how to get it and to

make sure that you continue to be there,

to facilitate, enable their addiction. Yeah. So

there is no easy answer in all of this. But

that's kind of late stage, And,

one of my you know, sadly, I'm a very rational

person. And, you know, one reason, like, relationships have not

are not, like, at the top of my

list outside of professional relationships is because I'm like,

you know, talk about it once, talk about it twice, but third time,

I'm out. Because I'm about taking action and not just

sitting in fear or, you know, or masturbating to an

idea. Like, let's talk about it once, talk about it twice, and we're out.

And so I don't have a lot of tolerance. You know, I'm not gonna be

an enabler. Let's just say Mhmm. Sure. But in an

early early in a relationship with someone who may not be

well, like, you can't you're you're not in a position to make those types

of judgments because you don't know Right. So addiction is

just easy to talk about. Yeah. It could just be someone just

drinks five nights a week, yell, a light drink,

and you may make a comment, but then it starts

to accelerate and you make another comment. But you

gotta start putting in boundaries where that individual

is not is is capable of making decisions in your best interest,

but they're not. And so that's where you have to have boundaries.

The challenge with, like, schizophrenia and others is are they ever in a

position to make the best decision for themselves?

And at what point do you let them out to fend for themselves

for AO so that your life is not negatively

impacted. And that's the gray area that I I do

struggle with because I don't want people living on the street. I don't want

people, you know, I want people cared for. So when

do you actually bring in institutions to help, an

individual? Right. Well, in a point that has

been made to me by various

people over the last, I would say, ten years in different contexts,

in different conversations,

has been that

we shifted around the laws around

institutionalizing folks in the eighties.

And Ronald Reagan or Reagan's administration,

shifted around a lot of the institutionalization models in the

eighties. And that was doubled down on in

the nineties. And now to fully come

back around to what you were talking about with, homeless people,

right, on the street, the vast majority of

homeless folks, if you take out the attics, right,

although a lot of there's a lot of overlap in these two areas, but do

suffer from mental illness. And it's hard to know is

the and I will call it I'll call it mental illness. It's it's fine. But

it's hard to know where the intersection and the overlap is

because the self medication follows from the other things.

Right? And so we're in a state culturally

of of where we looked at

what went on in the institutions. And this is that cultural

weakness that we're apparently going through, or a lack of

cultural confidence is what I say. So we have a lack of cultural confidence in

a lot of different areas. One of the big areas areas is immigration. Like, we

don't even wanna hear the word assimilation. We don't wanna hear. We don't wanna hear

that things are gonna pause and then we're gonna make these people be Americans, whoever

they are for wherever. Right? I don't care if they're from I don't care if

they're from South Africa, The Ukraine, or if they're from coming across the border.

We don't like that word assimilation because we don't have the cultural confidence

to believe that America is the best because, guess what,

people chose with their feet to come here. Okay. Fine. We don't believe it. Cool.

But then that cultural confident that lack of cultural confidence

drips into other areas. And so, of course, we have a decline of trust in

the institutions. It's a it's a it's a circle.

Right? So the population loses loses trust. The

institution becomes less effective. The institution then changes its

laws in order to regain trust. That doesn't work because now you've lowered the

bar. And now we just have the slow downward slide between institutions

and the culture with a lack of trust and a lack of

confidence until you finally wind up in, you know, San

Francisco in, you know, whatever that park is in San Francisco where people

are doing it's an open air drug farm. And there's there's and you can't tell

the difference between people who are schizophrenic and people who are just, you know, on

fentanyl laced heroin. Like, you just can't tell the difference. Right?

Made a difference. Doesn't doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

Correct. And so

Yeah. Bringing back the institutions is important. But one of

the things that we have done is we almost

glorify, like,

mental unwell unwellness. Well, that's a sign of hedonism

but that's a sign of hedonism and decadence and too much wealth. Right?

Where everyone's a victim, the victim Olympics, suppression of

Olympics. You know? But the whole Jordan Peterson,

well, I think is really important is we don't want a society,

you know, a society that, moves to the whims of

every individual. Mhmm. And we also don't want a

society that doesn't allow room for individuals to

be individualistic. Right. Right now,

people are trying to force their whims on all of us. Yeah. That's why the

language is constantly changing so that we can never come to a common,

definition or solution to, you know,

to anything. Mhmm. But,

the the we have to everything is about

trying to find balance in the whole in the whole ecosystem and continually

to measure, like, the effectiveness of things that are working.

You know, Newsom, he said he's yeah. No

one's never done more for homelessness than him.

And, yeah, how let's define what he's done for it. Like, is

he defining what he's done for it by the amount of money he spent?

Or are you defining it by the outcomes of

the money and how it's been spent. I would look

at the outcomes, and say, the

outcomes, yeah, you've done a lot more than anyone else,

but the outcomes are negative. You know, you gotta reevaluate

what you're doing and how and why.

But, one of my concerns with where

we are now in a society is everything's an

external answer. Everything is like a pill or food

or, some sort of external

effect. And that if you bring in institutions that they're just

gonna institutionalize all of, you

know, all of the poisons that are, actually

could potentially be exacerbating kind of the Mhmm. Mental

illness that that is out there. So how do you

I I always worry about institutions going too far

because they, you know, in the regulate regulated role that we live in right

now, but institutions just wanting to grow and continue to,

take on power if we are institute create institutions for mental

illness. Like, I wanna make sure that there are boundaries

and very strict and small boundaries

of what is, you know, meant institutionalized mental illness and

how we take care of those folks. The rest of it to me is

about working downstream and with families and

education and, a lot of the other

salute things that have been ignored that are

pre are prerequisites for accelerated

mental illness and self, medication. And that's

where we get to with in Tender is the Night

Nicole Warren. Not Nicole Diver, Nicole Warren.

Nicole Warren's father abused her and created an

environment where he was actually the one responsible

for her mental or or or well, no. No. I won't say he was yes.

Yes. Actually, no. I would say responsible. Absolutely for sure. I would say his

his actions. No. Because you could be responsible. Right?

But not But not be right. But not accountable. Right. You can

also be responsible. Say. Are you right. Responsible,

but I'm the only one who's accountable. Correct. That's right.

That's right. You could also be responsible

and not at fault. But this is a situation where he was

responsible. He avoided accountability because of his

wealth, and he was the one who was at fault, I

think, for the split inside

of her brain. Yeah. And he was

also responsible and at fault

for the damage he did to his older daughter in creating

an environment where she felt she had to protect her younger

sister, leveraging his money. There's a whole scene, a

whole incident that happens where she's we're at the end of book

two, I think, where the where Warren is, is dying or

whatever. And, you know, Dick comes and sees him,

and he's like, you know, he's doing he's in the hospital and, you

know, he's talking about the regret or whatever, and,

doctor Diver, for lack of a better term, sort of fails that fails that

test, a little bit and is going to you know, and gets a letter

and then delivers it to Nicole. And, you know, she's trying to make the decision

if she's gonna go see him. And then, of course, because it's a it's a

weird not weird. It's a it's an inappropriate relationship,

already, because of the abuse. She, of course, runs to see

him, and he has gotten up out of his bed

and escaped or gone back to America. And then he just is like, he just

walks out of the story. He never is referred to ever again. And it weirdly

enough reminded me a lot of this book reminded me of the movie Magnolia, Magnolia,

in the nineteen nineties directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. And, the

old guy played by Jason Robards, who is, Tom

Cruise's father, right, who's,

who's dying in the bed the whole movie, you know, muttering about regret.

And it's just it put that thing in my brain because I'm a I'm a,

you know, cinema cinema guy as well. So put that thing in my

head, and I'm, you know, I'm hearing the Amy Mann song under underneath

it and, you know, having the whole having the whole experience, right, while

I'm reading this. And

that character in Magnolia didn't get

forgiveness. Well, no. The son had to forgive him because the son had been

abused by the father. And that, of course, turned him into this

person who wanted to seduce and destroy all women.

Okay. And he blamed his mother for leaving and dah dah dah dah.

Okay. The the the same

dynamic happened in Tender is the Night. Just you just flip the you just flip

the genders. Right? And you can see this most notably

in how Nicole ends her marriage to,

to, to Dick through intentionally,

you know, pursuing an extramarital affair, and

then sort of in a very post

Victorian, pre World War two kind of way,

allowing two men to fight over her. And Dick just

doesn't he's like, I'm not number one, you're a boxer, so that seems to be

a bad idea. And this is back in the day when every man could handle

himself. And he could handle himself. Like, he wanna go be I mean, he'll go

be a problem. But, like, how much do I wanna get messed up over this

woman who's trying to manipulate me into

some shenanigans or nonsense that I don't want you to be manipulated into?

Right? And so the whole thing just sort of collapses in on itself.

And that leads me to turning the corner here because we've gotta

wrap up. And I wanna I wanna thank Libby for coming on the podcast

today. This is this is one of the I thought it was gonna be easy,

but this is one of the more deceptively tough books that we've covered on the,

on the show. And we've talked a lot about a lot of things today. We've

talked about, you know, the obsequiousness of wealth. We've talked about mental illness. We've talked

about addiction. We've talked about sort of the nature of

where we are at currently a hundred years later and how nothing much has really

changed. It's just our technology has gotten better for us sinning.

And we've also talked about the nature of, family secrets

and how do you deal with mental mental illness in a family

when it endangers people. Okay. Lot of different areas we've covered.

I'll ask the penultimate question, which is the question we always ask in this podcast.

What can leaders take from Tender is the Night? If I'm a

leader and I'm a hardcore, like, hey. I'm gonna get

psychological insights from, like, Adam Grant.

And I'm not I've mentioned him, like, four times today already, and I don't know

why he's living in my head rent free. I have no idea why. But, anyway,

I'm gonna get insights from that person or from Daniel Pink. Right?

And that's gonna be a better use of my time than reading this book. Why

isn't reading this book better than reading something by Amy Edmondson

or Daniel Pink or, therefore, mentioned

mister Grant or any other leadership book writer you could read?

What are you gonna get out of this that you can apply,

to yourself probably first and then your team?

Allegory.

Yes. This is why we're gonna take a break from Shakespeare this year. This is

why. Yes. No. Go ahead. Keep going with that.

Yeah. Don't get me wrong. I love Daniel Pink. Adam

Grant, not so much. I think he's overly simplistic and not yeah. I think he

he thinks he's smarter than he is.

But, yeah, you could have just asked Libby ninety percent of

the that he says. Just ask Libby. Just just

ask Libby. But Daniel Pink

gets into, more of, the

NLP type of stuff even though he doesn't discuss he doesn't call it

that specifically. Yep. But he's

none of them get into the reality of the

human experience and the challenges of dealing

with different types of individuals

and personalities, and you need to be adaptive

Mhmm. To individuals, and their

different needs while at the same time not enabling

and creating boundaries and when necessary removing

them from situations where they're impacting,

you know, others. One of my favorite and,

most true statements is that you never fired someone fast enough.

You can never fast them, fire them fast enough.

You know, to me, leaders there is never a leader who said I didn't fire

them fast enough. Like, they always say, I wish I'd done it sooner.

You need to take toxicity out of the workplace, and toxicity is about personalities that

are that are creating havoc on the

teams. How do we do that when we are in a space right now in

our world where and I wrote this wrote this word down because I see it

a lot where we are

almost commanded like a came down on a tablet from

Mount Sinai. Like, Moses delivered it

to us. You know? Well, you know, this is this is the way it's

framed. Right? We are commanded to our firm.

Right. How do we well, but but this is this is the point of all

the DEI programs, and this is the point of affinity groups, and this is the

point of this is the point of all of it. Like, how do we

deal with that dynamic? Yeah. When you

recognize really what it is, it's not good faith. The affirmations are not about

good faith. The affirmations are about, trying to

control others. And they typically

yeah. Or typically especially in the workplace,

you know, I see them mostly employed

by people who are afraid of doing the real work

and work that is designed to deliver results. So they focus

on the small stuff and not the big stuff.

Mhmm. I want true diversity in the workforce,

but it doesn't need to be talked about all the time. It's just about how

you show up. And the way that you address it

is like the guys at Coinbase did. It's like, yeah, we're you

know, that stuff for you. Like, I'm all about you living your

true your truest life. Yeah. We're a business. We're about

delivering results that matter to our customers,

and respecting all individuals. And we're focusing on delivering a

great customer experience at a economically viable price.

And, you know, we want you know, the way that I'm gonna my my

promise to you is that as you deliver, I'm gonna create opportunities

for you to thrive in the workplace based on the,

based on the results that matter in the workplace. Yeah.

So you just gotta be strong. It they're basically spoiled children

trying to be, you know, trying to dictate their, you know,

dictate their to their parents, how their parents should react.

Well, then it's another example, and I've been working on this idea through our shorts

episodes. It's yet another example of many of,

a thesis I'm working through, which is we ask the

workplace to take on too much. Yeah. We put too much

weight on the workplace. And so, do

I want people who are genuinely going through a

mental health crisis to be supported to be supported

by their workplace in their workplace telling them to go off and get help because

you can't get help here? Absolutely. That's the

correct move. Go off and get help because you can't get help here. We're not

qualified to do that. Heck, even if it's even the people

running a mental hospital should probably go take them if you can hey. Hang on.

If you mess up, go go go to right? Don't ask the mental hospital where

you're working to be the place where you get right. Okay. So

this is that's the extreme example. Right? I absolutely am in favor of

that. I am not in favor of

the, to your point,

the whole self movement that has that has sort of

taken taken hold of our culture, where the leader

in the environment, whether that person calls the title of manager or

supervisor, is asked to affirm the whole person,

that's too much weight to put on that leader. And quite frankly, it's too much

weight to put on that workplace because to my point earlier about

families and your point earlier about families,

family is where that weight should go. And yet

because we have moved over the last twenty years more and more towards

this atomization of family, we're

gonna have to struggle to get back to that. I'm write I'm writing a whole

thesis on this. I might publish it on my substack that no one goes to

anymore, and, and see if anybody will read it. But I've got

some I've got some ideas. I've got some thoughts on this because I think we're

putting too much weight on the workplace. You we we put way too much,

weight on schools. That's why. And now we're

doing it on the workplace. And, you know, we need to

you know, communities are there to support you for your extracurriculars and

the things outside of the workplace. The workplace, yeah, we want you to feel welcomed.

We want you to feel like you're, the conditions are there for you to

thrive, but there are gonna be boundaries for that. And

Yeah. And, and there need to be.

Yeah. And Yeah. Well, otherwise, we can't get the work done and then

It I I think, yeah, part of this is a product of there being too

much money being thrown at companies right now, and there's no accountability about

results in the workplace any right now, because

there's just so much money chasing a lot of business ideas.

You know, accountability like, we're not in a hard time right

now. So people can waste precious time

and resources on, things that don't create

value for the workplace, in place of the things that

do create value for the workplace. Well, and one of and one of the

I'm not insensitive to people's needs, but those are not things you bring

into the workplace. Like, there's a time and place for all of that.

You know? And it's not We should we should have a species, I think, of

hard headed empathy. So our empathy should not be

Yeah. Well, our empathy should not be weaponized against us,

to to achieve a particular outcome as a form of manipulation.

The Marxism. Right? And that's what it is.

It's about yeah. That's what again, politics is all about weaponizing

empathy as they cry you know, as they, you know, gain power

and then, you know, changing the rules, you

know, again, you know, you know, to create more

places of power, but it's all about empathy

Right. To gain power and control. Look at David Hogg.

Like

And with that right now?

Because he realizes that you know? I

I will not say because this is another three hours. I will not say anything

about that beyond this. I was surprised

that that he was the person

that the DNC selected. I I will just say I was shocked because

it doesn't on the surface, it doesn't click any

it doesn't check any of the boxes that we have been told the

Democratic party checks for the last at least fifteen years,

we've been told. So I don't know what shenanigans are going on

underneath that, and we don't have time to explore those right

now. Maybe we'll do that on the next episode of the podcast with the

just a male parent in the workplace again and not the children running

the Yep. Not the children running the institutions. Running institutions.

Yeah. Well, I think that's a good place to stop. So I

wanna thank Libby Unger for coming on Leadership Lessons from the Great

Books podcast today, talking about

Tender is the Night with us by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I would encourage you to

go out, pick up a copy of that book. And with that, well,

we're out.