Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

A Conversation on How to Lead in a Post-Literate Work World
---
The panel examines the meaning and crisis of literacy in a post-literate society and what it means for 21st-century leadership. The discussion highlights how declining long-form reading impacts critical thinking, decision-making, and social cohesion, while exploring the evolving responsibilities of leaders as communicators, teachers, and curators of insight in a digital, short-attention world. Practical strategies and perspectives are shared for bridging generational gaps, fostering book-based conversation, and adapting leadership to new realities.

Mentioned Book Titles and Authors:
  • Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
  • Leadership Lessons from the Five Books of Moses by Jonathan Sacks
  • The Odyssey by Homer (referencing Emily Wilson’s translation)
  • Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  • Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
  • Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
  • Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
  • The Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers
  • Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Outwitting the Devil by Napoleon Hill
Host: 
  • Jesan Sorrells
Guest Panelists:
  • Richard Messing
  • John Hill
  • Tom Libby
  • Brian Bagley
  • Hana Kabele Gala
  • Neal Kalechofsky
  • Dorollo Nixon, Jr.
  • David Baumrucker
  • Christen B. Horne
  • Dr. Moumin Quazi
  • Hana Kabele Gala
---
The Articles that Inspired the Conversation:
---
---
---
★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Creators and Guests

Host
Jesan M. Sorrells
Host of the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast!
Guest
Brian Bagley
Financial Advisor | Comprehensive Wealth Management and Financial Planning Solutions
Guest
Christen Horne
https://t.co/UgUGxrTS9I
Guest
David Baumrucker
Guest
Dorollo Nixon Jr
"We are all born mad. Some remain so." Samuel Beckett
Guest
Dr. Hana Kabele Gala
Guest
John Hill aka Small Mountain
Sales doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to make you feel gross.
Producer
Leadership Toolbox
The home of Leadership ToolBox, LeaderBuzz, and LeadingKeys. Leadership Lessons From The Great Books podcast link here: https://t.co/3VmtjgqTUz
Guest
Moumin Quazi
Prof, Beatles fan, Musician, Announcer, Writer, Animal steward, Trying, Following knowledge “like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”
Guest
Neal Kalechofsky
Co-Founder AwardIT NDF Consulting
Guest
Richard Messing
Founder, World Ethics Organization | Solving chronic human problems that resist conventional methods and interventions

What is Leadership Lessons From The Great Books?

Understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand (yet) another business book, Leadership Lessons From The Great Books leverages insights from the GREAT BOOKS of the Western canon to explain, dissect, and analyze leadership best practices for the post-modern leader.

Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and this

is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books

podcast, episode number

200.

That's right. This is our penultimate, such as

it were, 200th episode.

Now, we've covered a lot of books on this show. We've had a lot of

conversations with a lot of interesting people. Folks who

have brought a lot of insight to you, our

listener, and brought a lot of insight to me as a host.

And today, we have a collection of guest co-hosts who

are rejoining us for this 200th episode to

discuss a topic that I think is very

important in our time, a topic that I think is critical for

all of us who are readers and who are leaders. And that

is the topic of, well, literacy.

What does it actually mean to be literate? What does it actually mean to

have comprehension in a society that

is rapidly becoming and transforming

into a post-literate society?

What does post-literate mean? Well, post-literate means that

the average person fails to finish at least

5 books in a year. Regardless of genre,

regardless of topic, regardless of interest,

fails to finish. What a post-literate culture

means is that individuals have the ability

to read words in a book, but they don't have the attention spans in

general, nor do they have the comprehension of what those words

mean and the ability to bring those words

and the meanings behind those words and the impact

behind those words into their daily lives.

This is going to impact all of us because quite frankly, we are coming

off of and we are exiting the long 20th century, which

was a century of literature. If you don't believe

me, think about this for a minute. Reader's Digest

condensed great books between the 1950s and the

1970s, and they sold something like 30 to 50 million

volumes of these condensed books. What that meant was

people were actually interested not only in reading,

but also appearing literate. And in a

post-literate society, people aren't really that concerned

with appearing literate. They're very much concerned,

however, with having opinions about things that make them

sound as if they have been or are

literate. This is a challenge for leaders. This is a

challenge for followers. This is a challenge for all of us,

not just in terms of education, in terms of comprehension,

but also in terms of civic leadership, in terms of who we vote for and

how we vote. Now, we don't tell

people how to vote on this show, and we don't tell people why

to vote. We do encourage people to think about their

civic engagement. And all civic engagement, I fundamentally believe,

begins with literature. But what does that mean?

And this is the question before our panel today. What does that mean in a

post-literate society? So I have an august

panel here, like I said, of several, several folks, and I would like to go

through and have them all each introduce themselves. I have

prepped them beforehand for what their introduction should look like. So you should

be able to hear this on the audio and watch this on the video of

this show. Thank you. I would encourage you to check all these folks

out. I will have links to all of their websites and all their resources in

my show notes that are below the player of this podcast upon which

you are listening. And yes, I'm hoping today that this will be a

wide-ranging conversation. So

I am going to start off with sort of the panel introduction

with the person who is directly to my

left. Okay, I'm going to start with my upper left-hand side. side, and

then he is going to pick the next person on his

screen. So he needs to be looking at that right now. So the person to

my left is Richard Messing. Richard's going to go ahead and introduce

himself, and then he's going to pick the next person to introduce themselves,

and we'll go around the room. We'll go around the panel that way and then

get started with our conversation. Go ahead, Richard.

My name is Richard Messing. I'm the founder and executive

director of the World Ethics Organization. Uh, this is

my third, uh, opportunity to be on this

amazing podcast with Hassan Sorels. Uh,

the first time we discussed a book called Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor

Frankl. The second, uh, time we

discussed the book called Leadership Lessons from the Five Books of

Moses by Jonathan— Lord Jonathan, uh,

Jonathan Sacks, who was the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom for

22 years. and wrote 40 books himself.

And then we're going to be talking about— in the

next one, which will be before the end of the year, is a book by

Melanie Phillips, who's a world-class journalist,

about the decline of Western civilization

and how to turn the decline around.

The book is called The Builders' Stone. Thank you very much,

Hasan, for giving me this opportunity to participate with these amazing people today.

And I'm sure this is going to be an amazing podcast.

And the next person to introduce themselves,

I select John Small.

My name is John Hill, aka Small Mountain. I run a company

called Adapted Growth. We are a sales training, coaching,

recruiting consultancy. I've been a guest a

couple of times. It was always thrilling to come back and

kind of spar with Hasan over the ideas and things that we take from the

books. Most recently we did Coriolanus. We've also done

Duane Geordi's Dream of Electric Sheep. And the first one I ever did with

Hasan was Musashi, Book of the Five Rings, way back in the day. So

excited to hop in with a bunch of other readers and hopefully get some good

nuggets from my own, own to-be-read pile, which is massive and

growing by the day. I

pick, let's go Tom Libby.

Thanks, John. Hey, everybody, Tom Libby. I am the

owner and CEO of a company called Smarketing Connect. We are a sales and marketing

consulting firm. I also work on projects like Growth

Graph and a couple others that kind of move around

the sales and marketing atmosphere, stratosphere, I should say.

I think it was funny because you asked us to mention the last book we

reviewed with each other, but the last time you and I did the podcast, we

didn't review a book. We were doing Project Hail Mary and

the massive impact of He-Man on the

universe. But in fairness, we have also done

books like The Good Earth from Pearl Buck and

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. We don't always stick to the great books when

it comes to

Novels. Sometimes we will do some historic fiction and things like

that that we tend to talk about, because that's really the genre of reading that

I prefer is historic fiction. But yeah, I'm

happy to be here. I'm excited to kind of throw my 2 cents in here.

As John mentioned, I'm not always right on the same page with Hasan, so sometimes

it becomes very fun to debate these things. But

I will pass it over to— who's to my left is Brian, is

the guy to my To my side here.

Awesome. Hey, uh, so Brian Bagley, that's my

name. Uh, I do, um, lots of different things.

Um, I was, uh, spent several years in military

service, oiling management. Um,

I was a pastor for a while. Um, latest gig is, uh,

Uh, in financial services. But, uh, but, uh,

man, some of the, some of the podcasts we've done, Hassan, uh,

been mostly religious in nature, although we did a great one on

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. That was a great, uh, great conversation.

Uh, When the Man Comes Around by Douglas Wilson was a good one, uh,

that I really enjoyed. Um, but there have been others, and again, just

super grateful for the opportunity. Uh, and let's go

with Uh, Hannah Gaila.

Hi everybody, it's Hannah and it's a

pleasure to be here. Hi, Jesan, uh, good to see you again.

We actually met fairly recently.

I've been on different podcasts in different

contexts with Hasan in the past, but the last one

we discussed Dostoevsky Notes from the

Underground, which was wonderful. And

as you know, the conversation usually spans

way over the actual topic. And

I'm a big fan of Dostoevsky, hence the invite.

And otherwise, in my actual life, I

am a neurocoach and I'm a professor of

business management. So I have a very unique

skill set, and generally speaking,

clients come to me when they're high achieving and

they don't feel like their brain capacity can solve

whatever holds them back. And that's my specialty.

And I'm very excited about today. I am

deeply disturbed by the Numbers

that you shared. I actually think that reading 5

books is over the top considering where we are. I think

that if people read 1 book, it would still make them

illiterate in a way, but even that would

be a success. The numbers are horrible when you look at

how many people don't read any book in a year.

But I get ahead of myself here. I'm going to call

Neil, uh, as the next guest.

Uh, hi everybody, Neil Kalachofsky. Uh, I'm a,

uh, I guess in my background and training I'm a physicist.

Um, and, uh, Hassan and I have,

um, know each other professionally, um, through

Growth Craft, but I've also been a guest on his podcast where we

talked about G.K. Chesterton and then had a, uh, a

journey that touched on J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and

Pink Floyd. And that was a lot of fun to kind of throw all that

into a single podcast. And finally,

and the irony of this is not lost on me, I am

about to publish my first book.

Given that we're discussing the death of literature in America,

but That's me. And

DeRolo, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. DeRolo Nixon, you're next,

sir.

Can y'all hear me or no?

Excellent. So this is DeRolo Nixon Jr. I'm an attorney.

It's great to be back. Thank you, Hasan. Welcome to all of you.

The last episode I was on was episode 196 on

the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers. So I'm a I'm a

federal trial lawyer, so it may not be ironic

that Hasan and I like to talk about our country's founding documents a lot,

as well as the 18th

century's version of podcasts, right? Because

that's what they were, right? A great media campaign to make sure that the

Constitution passed because we were all done with those articles. So

happy to be here. Excited to talk about

I mean, I don't think literature is gonna die. And I'm sure

we will talk about its elite status anyway, but it certainly doesn't bode

well for freedom and for democracy to have an illiterate population.

That's actually a recipe for tyranny. So

great to be here.

Let's see, when I look I don't

see— oh, yes, I do. So

let's go with Dr. Qazi. Hey,

everyone. My name is Momen Qazi. Thank you, Darrell. I

am a professor of English at Tarleton State University. I

have a degree in theology as well and a radio, TV, film degree.

I do a weekly radio show called The Beatles and Beyond. So I really

like the references to like Pink Floyd and so forth.

I've done a few podcasts with Hasan. I met him

in Granbury where he was the founder of

the Granbury Jazz Fest. And so we know each other,

you know, because of music and literacy. And so

those connections are strong. I've done a podcast with

Hasan regarding Joseph Conrad's Heart of

Darkness, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

And then fast forward way into the—

actually, go back to the beginning before Joseph Conrad.

We went to Sir Alfred, Lord Tennyson and talked

about his poem, great poem, Ulysses.

And so we've had some great discussions. I really enjoy

Hyesung's take on things. And I like, again, I think

John mentioned that or maybe others as well about kind

of bringing a little friction, you know, and

pushback, and but all in a spirit of

great dialogue and discussion. And I thoroughly

love this podcast. So I'm happy to be part of the

200th. It's awesome, you know. So thank you

so much. And I'm looking forward to maybe

mentioning later on

Because I teach at Tarleton State.

Every semester I teach The Odyssey. This morning in my

classroom, one of my students, I kind of— she almost had a boastful

tone, said, I've never finished a book in my life. And I'm like,

oh, so hopefully we'll change that this semester. But

yeah, it's a challenging time to be alive.

Thank you, Ehsan.

To my left, both, both have spoken, so I'm gonna pick on—

I think Kristin Horn is someone I've not, not heard from yet.

That's right. I'm, I'm here. Thank you. I

apologize if you guys hear the noise. I've got both my AC on and

2 toddlers in the room with me, so hopefully my mic is doing its job.

But I'm Kristin Horn. I am a classically trained

musician, but I'm also an author and Like Neil, I'm also— I think it was

Neil— I'm also getting ready to publish a book, um, hopefully

in the same vein, following in the, uh, tradition of Tolkien.

Um, so I write fantasy. Um, that's my favorite. Uh,

in the past I have been on, uh, Jesan's podcast. We did Ender's

Game first. Uh, that was a blast. Um, we've done Shakespeare's sonnets.

We did Count of Monte Cristo a couple of times, and we still didn't get

through it, all of it. I think the last one I was on was Mere

Christianity, which was an amazing discussion. And then the next one I'm uh,

on is actually Children of Huron towards the end of this year. Uh, very

excited about that. Um, and yeah, as a prospective

author/writer, it's, it's

an interesting— that the article that he sent from The Atlantic was just

thrilling to read but also incredibly depressing. It was like, okay, what do we do?

What do we do about this? Especially as a mother of 2 small children who

thankfully I can honestly say love to read. So

Yep, that's me.

And last but not least, I believe— I'm the one who forgot.

I'm so sorry. I've been sitting here every time. David, I think you're—

David, we'll wrap it up with you. All right. I'll be the

caboose. My name is David Baumrucker. I'm a practicing psychotherapist stepping into

my 8th year. I run my practice with my wife.

Before I even did that, I worked as a kind of a behaviorist. We did

a lot of clinical research, so studying people's behavior. And we talk about reading

and focus. One stat that I just came across the other day that blew my

mind was when people are on social media,

1.7 seconds is the amount of time that people take before

to qualify if they're going to look at something longer or not. Doesn't

matter what kind of content. I found that to be— kind of jarred me a

little bit. I imagine I have the privilege to be on several

different podcasts with Hasan. I did Crime and Punishment, and then we did Orwell.

I did a mashup. I cannot remember exactly which episode the last one

was. Um, But, you know, and in terms of reading,

I've actually not been reading for myself, but I've been reading a whole bunch of

children's books because we just had my first son. And so it's been a totally

different lens for me, kind of diving into the world of what

that is and making sure that that's appropriate for my son. But I'm

excited to be here. Sometimes I'm aligned. Again, I think a lot of people said

this really well. Sometimes I'm very much aligned. Sometimes I'm in

a different planet or over there and with the conversation. So I look

forward to this conversation, talking with all of you.

All right. Excellent. Excellent. Very good. We went around the horn

there. Great introductions. Folks will be able to,

to, to keep track and to, to monitor

who's talking there. And so we're gonna

follow the bouncing ball a little bit. If you're listening on audio, this will probably

be a little bit of an easier thing for you to watch, a little bit

of easier conversation for you to pick up on video. I would encourage you to

watch the video of this. It will be on our YouTube channel. So go ahead

and check that out. But if you're following the audio, we're, we're And we're gonna

try to, we're gonna try to keep this as, as clean as possible.

So let's open up the door here because

many of us are, are, you know, working

in spaces and working in places where

reading is fundamental to how we got to where it is that we are,

right? Whether that's reading in psychotherapy research, whether that's reading in

ethics, whether that's even reading and

understanding music theory or the law. Reading got us to

where we are today. And, uh, I don't want to pick on Momen's

student at all. However, I do believe

that not only is she the canary in the coal mine, her attitude

is the coal mine itself. We're long past the canary in the coal mine

idea. We're now probably 4 miles deep and we

keep digging deeper. And so I I think the question

before us, and anybody on the panel can jump in to start.

And again, keep your, keep your comments tight today. We have a lot of people

here and a lot of different ideas. And as folks are talking, of course, take

notes. And as you hear things, you know, that you want to respond to, please,

please feel free to do so. But let's start with this idea.

Well, we'll just jump in. You know me. I'm just going to go

for it, right? I'm going to go for the jugular. Here we go.

If we no longer believe that reading is fundamental, which we say we

do, but our behavior, our cultural behavior says we don't.

If we no longer believe that reading is fundamental, okay,

what is a leader to do? How does a leader lead if

reading is no longer fundamental? And by the way, I'm not talking about reading fiction.

Let's start with the lowest-level thing. Let's start with the safety

manual at work so you don't spill

chemicals on yourself. Or, you know, you don't— to

Neil's career, you don't wind up opening

up a black hole to like Alpha Centauri and sucking the entire Earth in because

you didn't read the safety manual. Okay?

How do we lead people? How do we manage

folks in our organizations and in our businesses

If reading is not fundamental? I kick this out

to anyone. Go ahead and start.

Sure, let's do it. So

I've thought a lot about this, and I find myself in this space a lot

with clients. My take is this. I

think that the world we're going into is going to be prompt-based.

And I think that The age of the self-directed learner is over. And

so if leaders are going to lead, the leader needs to find a way to

meet the people, or the people they're going to lead where they are, not where

we wish they would be. And so this idea of prompt-based learning,

you see it everywhere. You see it with how our social media is

tuned up. You see how people almost find themselves like a deer

in the headlights when they are asked to do something intuitive. Yet the

second you start to give them the kind of the what's next prompt, what's next,

and you kind of cue them in, I don't get it. I'm

not going to get into where I think that all comes from because I think

it's a longer discussion. But I think when we think about what we're going to

need to do as leaders, I think we have to fundamentally

take some time to really look at going, how do I

invite them into a process that I already have an intimate connection with?

Because I need to prompt them into the engagement. Because I think it's the

engagement itself that's under attack. with people not reading

anymore. Because again, the attention economy has made it so that everybody

essentially is looking voyeuristically and they're not actually engaging.

So we need to find something that actually pulls them out of that space. We

need to invite them with some kind of prompt to engage with us as the

leader.

Anybody can jump in. Thoughts on that?

Uh, yeah, I, um,

but I just want to, uh, say that,

you know, when we read something, what's actually happening

is the author has something in his mind

that he wants to transmit into the minds of others.

So he puts it down on paper, and so that when people read it,

hopefully what the author has in his mind will end up the

same way in other people's minds. And so

that's actually what's going on with reading.

It's a way of

communicating precisely what you want

other people to understand about what's going on with you.

And so therefore, if people just stop reading,

What's gonna happen is you're gonna have to actually just verbally

tell people what's going on in your mind and explain it to them,

explain it to them in detail, and have a back and forth interaction with

them until you're convinced they understand what's going on in your mind, that they

have the same thing in their mind that you have in your mind. So I

don't— I think that

that's what's going to

happen. It's gonna— I mean, it happens this way anyway. And so if

people just stop reading, and people are gonna stop writing, and instead

we're gonna be communicating with each other more, more that way.

I personally don't think there's anything new under the sun.

The— what writing and reading enabled us to

do is to be able to put our thoughts

down on paper And then we could make copies of

that paper, make copies of what's in our mind, many

copies, and then distribute it to massive numbers of people.

That's the— that was what the invention

of the printing press and writing actually enabled us to do.

So we can influence many, many people in a

very leveraged way. We can scale it. And so I

think that just the scaling is going to be different. Then

instead of books, it's going to be some other mode.

Hannah, go ahead. All right. So my

take is a little

different. I do agree with what Richard was saying

about sort of, look, books are

a medium. It's a tool how we

communicate, right? Okay, fine, that has changed over

the years, but that led me to bring up Marshall

McLuhan's idea that the medium is the message,

right? So we need to,

back to David's point, remember that the medium

shapes and informs the

idea that is being communicated. So

When the writer has time and struggles with

finding the right words and, you know, like pours his heart into

or her heart into the content and then the reader has the

time to sort of wrestle with those ideas,

etc., etc. That no longer seems to be the case.

We are in a TikTok, you know, what was

it, 1.17 seconds timeframes,

et cetera, et cetera. Your original question was,

what is the leader to do? And to me,

it leads to 2 outcomes. One,

to echo what David was saying, you actually need to meet

people where they are. And if your

millennial, you know, or even Gen

X workforce, let alone the Gen Z,

is all about 1.17 seconds

attention span, you have to get your messages

to them and you have to communicate with them in a way that they will

respond to. And to me, that means that it

will lead to the outcome of

storytelling becoming even more important

than ever before. That's number one. And number two,

you better make sure that you are crystal

clear in your message. You don't have time. You

have to be really, really crisp in your thinking.

Messy thinking, messy writing. You have to be very, very

good at communicating. And also what that

means then as a consequence is those who

actually hone those skills and can

communicate well, quickly, short, you

know, content will get ahead of the

PAG who's just consuming. So that's, that's my

opening salvo. All right, Momen, you're, you're

next. Yeah, thank you. So one of the things that

I like to open up a semester with at the university is to

introduce Plato's introduction of Socrates

in Apology. And one of the things that he says, and it's kind

of a well-known quote, and it's the idea of the

unexamined life not being worth living. And so what

I want to do with my students is just basically say, hey, look,

lots of different tribes, clans,

cultures, groups have already

prepackaged because they've already preexamined

lots of these answers that we're all thinking about. Who am I? Where am

I from? Who are we? What is our purpose? And so on and so forth.

But it's about who— where are you

going to get those answers? And if you want, you can

not ever read anything, and you'll just— you can just go out and

accept any prepackaged

answer that are very much part of

our cultural discourse. Or maybe you can come up with some

of your own ideas, but I think doing that requires some

reading and some thinking and examining.

And so that's just something I wanted to add into it is, is it as

a leader, do we want to encourage our constituency

to also be a leader by, by going out and

perhaps thinking about the packaging that we're— that they're

accepting or creating in their own lives? Or are they going to go out and

just accept the prepackage? Tom,

go ahead. I just wanted to bring it back a little bit into

the actual original question where Hasan was saying, what is the leader to do that,

you know, with this safety manual that we're talking that we

originally came up with? And I, there's a small piece of

me that says, you either read it or you don't have a

job. I mean, there is a certain point where we just have to put our

foot down, right? And say, There are like,

like consequences to actions. And if the action is to not

read a safety manual, what are we talking about here? Like

the subject of this podcast we were all getting on originally, like when we were

talking about like, and I know you guys started kind of dipping into the,

like, you know, is the post-literature for leaders going

to be a problem? And I agree with all that, sort of, sure. But the

prompt, the initial question of the safety manual. Yeah. There's a piece of me

that— listen, I spent 10 years in the kitchen, and if I

gave somebody a safety manual about what to do and what not to do in

a kitchen and they didn't read it, they're not working in my kitchen. I don't

care what their attention span is, and I don't care if it's 5 seconds or

5/10 of a second, right? So I think just kind of putting into

perspective the prompt that was given to us, I think we're going

beyond it real quickly, and I just want to make sure that I just kind

of threw my 2 cents in there. If it is specifically about a safety manual,

I don't care what their attention span is. They're reading it or they're not having

a job with me. I just want to throw that in there.

All right, Jon, go ahead. I mean, to

Tom's point, like, there is some ground to where I'm like,

yeah, right? Like, then there's the other

stuff, right? Like, I mean, a safety manual, sure, there's no reason. Now,

I do think that I like trying to meet people where they are,

but I think the bigger part of that is that if you're a leader, Like

you can't just talk about being someone who's well-read. You need to be the

example, right? Like being someone who reads a lot and talking about it

with all of my clients and everything, I've gotten people to be more

curious about it, right? But for me, it goes back to like

being a little kid. I was, I was a reader then and I would go

ask my mom like, what does this word mean? And sometimes she didn't

know the answer, but she would just say, well, if you go look it up,

you will then remember it. If I just give it to you, you're not going

to remember it. And then fast forwarding to whenever I started to like actually take

work seriously and I started reading all these books about sales and leadership and

personal development, I was working with a business partner and he had this

line. He goes, man, I wish all these business books were

1/3 as long as they are because

2/3 of it are like, here's the stories about why you should trust us. And

we would have this argument that if it didn't have that Those case studies,

those ideas in there, no one would learn anything from these

books, right? So it was like this very interesting point we would talk about all

the time that he wants the learning, but he doesn't actually want to go through

the process to learn it. He just wants it to be like, like a Matrix

download. And all of a sudden he can fly a helicopter because his eyes fluttered

really quickly. And unfortunately, like, that's not it. But I do think,

I do think that if you set the example, like if you talk about what

you're reading, If you talk about being in book club, if you talk about challenging

yourself, upskilling yourself, you can be the example that other

people can do too. I think that the hollow leadership of do

what I say, not as I do is going to lead to a lot of

people in very uncomfortable depths. And then they have

to pass all the knowledge verbally. And we all know how bad that can be

because most of— like, there's a reason why the written word is

better at passing down knowledge. than the verbal word is, because

we're not really great at it overall.

So. Brian Bagley, you're up.

Sorry, there's been so many great comments.

One, just right off the bat, Richard, just really something you said

really resonated with me was that That the, the

book is an author. It's an author having a conversation. And

so many of the, the great books

are just full of wisdom and, and

they've, they've already faced many of the challenges that we

currently face. And by just shutting that off and saying,

we're just— I'm not going to read this particular book or whatever,

I'm just not going to read books. To me, as a,

as someone who leads other people, what, what that does to

me is a couple of things. Number one, I,

I need to budget for the fact that if, if most of the people that

I'm leading are getting everything from reels on TikTok or Facebook

or whatnot, I need to budget for

manipulation. I just got to budget for that, that they're

not getting the whole story, that there's going to be some— we need to have

longer conversations. And,

and then, you know, and be aware of, of the, of what those messages

could be and just ask great— be, be better at

asking questions. Follow-up questions. If someone says something,

where did that come from? Help me understand that. Can you, can you

draw that out for me? Where— just get them to

talk and think about what they just said. Uh.

Is, is really helpful. I have 3 college-age

kids at the moment, and, and we have a lot

of great conversations over the phone about things that have been said by their friends,

what they saw online, or some, some podcasts. You know, there have been

times in history where, you know, we didn't have a lot of books.

Okay. I mean, we, all we had was oral traditions. And, you know,

I feel like we're in a moment where we've never had more access to

more information. And yet we're back to the oral tradition, long-form

podcasts. You know, great storytelling audiobooks,

which is great. All of that's wonderful. But I think we just have to

realize the moment that we're in and, and, and, and

see the challenges that we're up against and budget for it.

All right, David, you're up, and then Richard, and then DeRolo. Go ahead,

David. Yeah, these are great, great reflections.

I think the question that came to my mind was, what do we do when

common sense is no longer common? And when we're talking about what leaders do,

what we can do in a post-literate society, I think

we need to just pause. And this is my lens, is there's a generational

tribalism and Gen Z is winning the generational tribalism.

We can argue all day that they're not, but they are because they control

social media and they control the internet. And when we think about what's

happening, we have to pay attention to who are the kings of that social tribe.

And if we are going to be leaders and we are inevitably going to have

to hire in people from a lower From a different generation,

then one of the things we have to be mindful of is going, if we

do not do anything that has any kind of affiliation, any

kind of reflection to the

dominant tribe, the dominant energy of the time, then

we— it feels, it feels

like it's nothing more than just a conversation with ourselves

then. Because if For me, the

question you were saying in the beginning, Hassan, was what are leaders to do in

a post-literate world? Adapt. It's adapt or die.

And I get the point where we have to draw a line. I fundamentally get

that. But I go back to what I said earlier. Common sense isn't

common anymore. So this idea that we're going to draw a

line on the basis of what? And are we going to not

have any understanding of, like, what's the middle ground? I guess what I'm trying to

get is, we have to meet people at a certain point, and we have to

have an expectation, and I think what we're trying to do in this conversation is

trying to kind of crowd around and create a centralized

arena. Like we're trying to form an arena in this conversation about what we do.

That's my takeaway, but I'll leave it there. I mean, that's just— I think there's

been some great reflections, but I fundamentally think that

we're up against a social hierarchy situation here, and the

hierarchies are governed by generation, like the

tribalism of each generation. And in my opinion, just from talking to

people for thousands of hours, Gen Z is winning hands down.

All right, Richard, go ahead. You're up, and then DiRollo, and then Hannah.

I'd like to suggest that the greatest

leaders are the greatest teachers.

In the Jewish tradition, that's definitely the case. the

great rabbis were just teaching people. That's what they were doing.

They were just teaching all the time. Moses said to the

Jewish people when they were about to come out of— when they

came out of slavery, out of Egypt, teach your

children what happened here. Teach them. And

so education has always been the foundation

of the Jewish people. And so, but it's very

interesting You know, if we end up in a culture

where people stop reading, great leaders are gonna have to

teach people what they're not learning through reading.

So if you have a safety manual that people aren't gonna read,

if you're a leader, you better teach people how to be safe.

The other thing that's interesting that— who was

it? Yeah. Mauman, you

mentioned Socrates. Socrates, isn't it interesting

that he was one of the greatest leaders that ever lived, but yet

he didn't write anything? It was all through

conversation. He taught, he was constantly teaching,

constantly teaching through conversation. And so I think

that's the greatest leaders are going to

be, have to be great teachers. So I'll

leave it, I'll leave it there. And yet we know Socrates through the one who

wrote, and that was Plato, his student. Yeah, right, right, exactly.

All right, DeRolo, go ahead.

Oh, hear me? Perfect. So you can argue,

Richard, that we only know of Socrates through the writing of

Plato. And of course, one would wonder, you know, would we know

Moses without, you know, the Torah being written,

right? Um, but that's, that's just a

response to what you were just saying. Uh, and I, I find it, um, a

powerful insight that teaching and leadership go hand

in hand, that one requires the other, that teachers, uh,

at least from the 1950s to the 1970s in America,

formed, uh, like a core of, of some of the most

powerful leaders in America. And thus it's fitting that as

public education at least began to disintegrate from that point forward,

that leadership moved elsewhere. But

this is where I wanted to start. Why read at all?

When I think of a manual, say for example, to

tell me how to make the tech of this laptop work so I can be

heard, I don't want to read anything. I want a video.

And I was born in the '70s. I want a video that shows

me how to do this thing that I don't like that is important

so that I don't have to think, to read, to figure it out.

Now let's go to the other end of the scale. Okay.

How do you learn how to do a federal trial without doing the

trial yourself? You can read an excellent work about how to do

trials and the various submissions you have to do, the various

briefs. You can read copies of the briefs. That's all great. It's all important.

But it's also important to watch a video of a federal trial because then

all of a sudden certain insights click and you realize this thing that I

thought was important is irrelevant. And this other piece that I did not

think was important, it's actually important. And so,

you know, I can— I mean, I'm a published

author. I have a book I'm working on, a book I finished in

December, a book I published in November of 2020,

naturally about President Trump a week before the

2020 election. But anyway,

so I can appreciate, you know, I can

appreciate that writing allows you to

deliberate, to take with you that conversation and mull through it,

right? It's just, I think on some level with where

tech has moved from Gutenberg's press to

Netflix, now among the things, and actually TikTok's a better

example, I think one of the things we need to think

through is, okay, so we understand that

we need literature. We understand that there's— there are going

to continue to be books that are published, but maybe certain

aspects of knowledge are better communicated through,

you know, not a soundbite because nothing really is, but that's just

marketing and advocacy, a soundbite, but a video.

You know, and I've, I've had jobs in the law where the training was

not a manual. It was a video and it was mad boring,

but it allowed them to present it here.

Here's the content. Then they could ask questions. Do you have any questions about what

you saw? Okay, go through that next, next,

next. So that's my 2 cents on that.

Hannah, go ahead. All right, I raised my hand and I

had so many comments, but I'll try to tie it

together. First of all, I think Richard was talking

about the teachers, and to me

it's like, yeah, sure, yes, teachers,

we, we need that, and that's where essentially the leaders

are now, the teachers. But then

That teacher isn't just dispensing wisdom. The

key is in the discernment, in the

decision, okay, what is important and what isn't?

And then they have to meet the students

where the students are. I think that David was talking about it,

and it's everything. I mean, I have a teenager at home, and I will

tell you, if it is a book like this, if it's

interesting, he's gonna read it. And if it's, you know, boring but it's this

big, he's not gonna touch it. Videos are so much

better and for many things. And, you know, we might

be looking at the time when very few

people will read books. We're gonna have like

a Harpsichord situation here when that's like

a niche, unique, kind of like a quirky Oh, you

know, she reads, hahaha. But really, majority of

people will be learning through very different means. And

AI is here to stay. And, you know,

the question is how we're going to leverage it. I think that to the

point of

who said it just before me, Dorolo, you said, you know, like

not only videos, but also just living through and learning

behaviorally. That is, would

people— where people learn the

best and deepest, but also then

what kind of training or

discovery we put in front of them, that's where the leaders

have the biggest kind of leverage. And I think

that going back to, well, you're the ones

who are The older generation carries

the torch of the wisdom and knowledge and all

of that. But then I need to know— I'm going

back to my earlier point about clarity— I need to know

what in this federal trial is

a roadblock, what could be complicated, what

can trip you. And I want you to

do this, to sit in front of this mad boring video

to actually get it. Like, there's so much

content that the selection, the filtering, and

understanding what gets through and why— like,

you need to know this because it looks like a footnote, but it's gonna

break you. That is the role of the more

wise, you know, more experienced person on the

team. That should be the leader. There were like 15 other

notes, but I'm gonna let other people go.

Don't worry. I'll have you all back on the remainder of this year. So any

notes that you have, hold onto them for other books that you're showing up for,

because we're, this is gonna set the table. This kind of conversation is gonna set

the table for where we're going, not only for the remainder of this year, but

also for, um, a good chunk of, uh, of season 6. And

wait till you see the season 6 book list. You'll understand exactly why I'm bringing

this up now. Uh, Kristen, go ahead. I

just wanted to speak to, uh, maybe this is top of mind both as a—

I was up until recently a music teacher, and then I've, you know, I've got

2 toddlers here, but I was thinking a lot about expectations is what came to

mind. Um, and

our— I maybe I shouldn't say our generation, there's people much older than I am.

I'm a millennial. But I think it comes down to expectations

and what, what do we expect

people to be able to know how to do.

I think that's just what it comes down to, and that is what's changing.

And then somebody said it here before, because that is good leadership,

is you adapt, but you, you meet people where they're at and you help them

rise. Um, I think that might be, um,

kind of a follow-up question, is, is how, how

do we start to approach that? And I really love what Hannah has been saying

about engaging them, or engaging people,

followers, whatever. But this,

it can lead to a lot of frustration, this

disconnect between what our expectations

and their expectations. And then

they don't even know, people who don't read, they don't know what they

don't know. Right? And they don't know what

they can't do. And we're just looking at them being like, why can't you do

this? This is like, everybody used to be

able to do this. And they're frustrated because they're like, nobody my

age knows how to do this. And so we're just mad at each other.

And so I think that might be the bridge that

leaders really need to look at and start to engage.

I also loved some of the comments that David has been making. But

there's a gap that we need to bridge for sure. And I think

that might be the how that we're all kind of like trying to tackle. But

also, you know, this thing that is so near and dear to all of our

hearts is this reading, these books that have meant so much to us.

Books were my best friend growing up. I didn't— I was very shy. I was

introverted. I didn't make friends. I just had my books.

And so that's one of the reasons I'm so passionate about passing it on to

my kids. But reading the article that you sent us, it was like, oh,

I hadn't even really put together that reading is what

allowed me to do that. And so, um, to some of these other

folks' point is communicating that.

What does reading get you? It's a marketing thing,

right? I think there's at least one marketer here, right? It's a marketing thing. You

got to tell people this is what reading gets you. And

if you don't do it, this is what's going to— and,

and the one of the things that people are so frustrated about

is we do a lot of reading. Uh, it was— there was, there was something

you said at the very beginning, and I was like, we gotta define that because,

um, again, the article you sent, we read more than ever, but we read— it's

all short form and not always well thought out

and often inflammatory and Very

one-sided. So the longer form, the things that really

require the deeper thought, contemplation, that's

disappearing. There's no room for it. Not in TikTok when you have

a second to make an impression.

Where am I going with this?

The benefits, I think, I think that's part of what is being

lost is the Again, I hadn't even thought about

exactly what, what all does reading do for me. That might be

a starting point is just really starting to communicate over and over and over

again, using things like TikTok and being

like, hey, if you do not read, this is what you're

going to learn. These are the dangers. Here's all the benefits that reading gets you.

Let's find something that will engage you in a reading.

And then, I don't know, maybe offer some letter ladders.

laddering, right? Give people the

reading content where they can— where what they can enjoy

and engage with, and then give them a step up, and then give them a

step up. Because we, we often go to Charles

Dickens, Shakespeare, and if you can't read that—

Dostoevsky— if you can't read that, well then you're not a reader and oh well.

And I think a lot of people, especially younger, even people my age—

I, I have personal friends who've been like, well I don't get it,

and I never have. And so I'm just not gonna try. So I guess I'm

not a reader. I guess reading is not for me. Um, and so there is—

there's, uh, somebody else mentioned middle ground. I think

there needs to be a middle ground, finding something. That was

my one issue with that article, is

she talked about one of the bestsellers. And you know what,

I didn't love the sentence that, that the Romantasy Bestseller that

she mentioned. I didn't love that sentence either. Um, but

be careful about looking down

or criticizing too hard, because at least they're reading.

And if they're reading, that is some common

ground, no matter what they're reading. And

if you criticize that too hard, you'll lose them completely.

All right, cool. Thank you, Kristen. Momen,

Dr. Kazi. Yeah, thank you.

There's so many great comments that people have made, and,

but I keep coming back to what Tom said of, if they don't read, they're

fired. You know what I mean? Like, I think there is a pragmatic element to

it. But anyway, let's come back to a big

conversation that just recently occurred and And then when I

asked my students if they had seen the film The Odyssey

directed by Christopher Nolan, absolutely

the entire room, their hands were down. In other

words, nobody over the summer, all my students, none of them

went to go see that film. They could have cared less. But boy, all

my friends and all the people in my generation and all the people my age,

it was such a big debate. Even Emily Wilson, the

translator that Christopher Nolan was inspired by

to do his version of that film or that story,

kind of dissed the movie in some ways, not the cinematic aspect

of it but the writing part of it. What I was going to say

about The Odyssey is there's this entire conversation, this dialogue,

heated back and forth, people just fighting to

the you know, like down to their nails about it, you know,

and, and there's an entire other generation that could have cared less even

about the movie, not just the book by Homer. So,

and then who is Homer? That's a whole different conversation. My point is, is

the director of the film, Christopher Nolan, he was inspired

by a translation that focused a lot on PTSD.

If you're even involved or interested in that conversation,

The person who got to kind of direct

that conversation and trailblaze in a way

a new way of thinking of Odysseus, it

was Christopher Nolan who was a reader, who is a reader, right? And

so the thing is, is if you go to the

film and you watch the movie and you don't know Homer, boy,

there's a lot he left out and even some things he rewrote and

The ending is Tennyson's, and it's sort of like there's a whole

lot of stuff that a really informed person is going to say,

well, that's not quite Homer, but that's definitely not

a Greek way of thinking about certain

aspects of heroism and so forth, or being

brilliant and clever or complicated or a man of twists and

turns. And but at least Christopher Nolan is the one

who, as a leader, is

reframing the narrative or even rewriting the story in some way,

right? And then Emily Wilson comes along and kind of disses him,

but is grateful for all the books that got sold. But I don't know

who read them, but it could— what might— you know, hopefully

they'll read Emily Wilson this semester.

My bigger point there is,

the people who have read The Odyssey are

gonna go to that movie and think, oh my goodness, this is wonderful,

but boy, he sure left a lot out, right?

Mm-hmm. And then it happens that way with every great, you know, like

whether it be a Lord of the Rings adaptation or a

Silmarillion adaptation on Amazon Prime or whatever,

someone always says, well, the book was better. Well, it's because we

got to see all the, the extra details and all that

inner texture and nuance. And so whenever

we're leaders, of course, are readers, but then what do we want to

communicate to our students that they're just missing out on so much of the

story if they're not also readers themselves?

Thank you, Mauman. Tom, go ahead. Yeah, so

I wanted to— I was a little abrupt, I guess, when

my first comments came up because I wanted to be clear here.

I'm not just saying read this or die. Like, it's not read this or you're

fired. I wanted to make sure that you guys understand that I would go through

the whys. I would compromise. I would go through that process of

trying to get them to understand. Then if they didn't read it, they'd fire me.

I want to be clear on that, number one. Number two, I think Richard brought

up a couple of really nice points with the oral histories and

And oral histories, I think there are cultures out there that still leverage them

really, really, really well. And they're not required

anybody to read anything about their oral histories, but yet expect—

their expectations to their youth are very different than what

our expectations in general society are to our youth when it comes to that kind

of stuff. And then lastly, not lastly, but Darula, I

think one of the things that you said is probably the most vital and important

things that anyone has said so far, which is You either have to lead by

example, learn by example, or learn by doing. And all of that,

none of that really can be done on whether or not you are or are

not reading, or whether you are or are not watching a book, watching a video.

So some of it is just you have to do it, and you have to

take the advice from somebody who's been there and done that before you and do

it. The last thing— that was the last thing about the comments. Now, my new

comment here is, I think the one thing that we're missing out on that we

don't are not emphasizing enough that what literature gave us

that needs to be either replaced with something else or

reemphasized through literature is the value of critical

thinking. It's really about critical thinking more than anything else,

because you can get critical thinking through oral histories. You can get critical thinking

through video and movies and tutorials and all that

stuff that we're talking about. You can get all of that. But somebody else had

mentioned something about the expectation. I think, Kristen, it was you. Like, I think that's

The, the degree of difference between our

setting our expectations of what we can teach and what we can learn

versus what the critical thinking aspects are of it from the

material that we're leveraging to do that. I think that's where the biggest

gap is, and I think it would sadden me to

think that it— that if literature was lost, we would lose that critical thinking

skill. But I have this weird feeling that, that

They're just figuring out a way to replace it. It's not so much that,

that the— it's the medium that we're all

holding on to that might lose its ground, but it's not—

it's— we're trying to figure out other ways to get critical thinking through the

process. And David, I would love— I'm not going to bring it up here, but

I would love to debate you on this whole Gen Z thing winning, because I'm

a father of a bunch of Gen Zers, and I don't think they're winning anything.

I'm just being very Honest. I, I, I,

all of my kids are Gen Z. All of their friends are Gen Z. I

am around them all the time. I don't think they're winning anything. And we can

debate that another time, but I would love to, I'd love to talk with you

about it more in depth. Right. I will set up, uh, I

will set up side quests. We'll do a little side quest. Maybe we'll do some

extra, some extra bonus episodes during the year. Please send me

your, uh, send me your, your hot takes. I want to have hot take episodes.

You know, you open, you Look at Tom making, giving me new

content, new things for, new things for clipping on YouTube

Shorts and TikTok. All right. Don't put it on TikTok that I think

TikTok, the Gen Z is losing this battle. Don't put that on

TikTok. Well, we'll go viral. That'll be a thing. We'll go viral.

John, go ahead. Well, I was, I was thinking

about what DeRolo said a second ago about how like on certain things he wants

a video and I was like, Okay, you know, like this past weekend my coffee

grinder broke, and so I'm, I'm deep into YouTube land trying to figure out how

to break this thing apart so I can get the right part and do this

thing. And I was like, okay, wait a minute, wait a minute. But here's, here's

the thing that I come back to: I had to go watch that video because

I didn't know enough about troubleshooting that specific kind of

electronics with that kind of stuff. And so because I'm missing

the foundational knowledge, I have to go

Right. So if you're not reading, if you don't have a base level

understanding of the thing that you're trying to get good at, right? And I

love like the musical theory stuff, right? Hasan and I

originally connected because of martial arts, right? You are not going to get good at

martial arts from reading a book. I promise it's not going to happen. I've also

been a poker player. You're not going to get good at poker just from reading

a book or being in sales, right? But if you read enough,

And you have some conceptual understanding, some discernment, then the

books become actually really, really helpful, right? So I think part of the

problem, and this is maybe opening up a can of worms, is the transactional nature.

This might come back down to expectations of read this, it's going to make you

better. Be a reader so that way you will be the,

the kind of professional person you want to be. But just thinking of like, oh

my God, I got to read this book, is probably putting it on a

level to where expectations are never going to meet up to those, to the, to

that level. And we're forest for the trees kind of situation.

Being a reader means that you can figure anything out, you can go upskill yourself

and everything else like that. But I think a lot of people get stuck on

read this and then you're going to be great. And I think that transactional nature

is ruining most of what I think this hobby has

become for all of us here, because it didn't start out with that

tit-for-tat kind of situation.

That's all I got.

Richard, and then Neil. Go ahead, Richard.

I wanted to make, actually follow on what Tom was talking about, critical

thinking. 20 years ago,

when I pivoted and took a new direction for my career and my

life, I started to write a book. I didn't know if I could

write a book. I'm still writing that same book, by the way.

And, but what happened was I

started eventually realizing that the writing of

the book was actually

part of the way I think. It's like my thinking process

was accelerated by writing the book because if I couldn't write

down my thoughts, I couldn't articulate it in writing,

then I wasn't clear. I, I had to be able to write it down in

order to be— to know that what I, what I was thinking about and developing

in my mind was actually clear, it made sense. So

I think that, uh, that, that's what's going on.

So when people are writing, they're thinking. It's a part of the

thinking process. And if people— and therefore it's

very valuable if you can write something down and what

you've written down is valuable

because you put an enormous amount of thought in it and you've developed

this, this, this whatever it is you develop in your mind and you're able to

write it down and then other people are reading it and it provides value for

them. You're not gonna get that value

unless you read the thing. And it's

gonna be very difficult in my, I

think you just, there's just not another medium where you can

actually develop one's thoughts

and thinking in any other way other than writing it,

than writing. I just don't know what other medium there is like

this. And so I think what's happening is

technology is dumbing down

our youth. Because if our youth, if they're

not, if the youth aren't writing, and they're not reading,

and they're just into these short video clips, and these—

then they're not really developing their intellect. And eventually

society is going to realize this, and, uh,

there are going to be those that are not going to read and they're just

going to look at videos, and, and then it's going to be like 2 different

classes. It's going to be an intellectual class, and then there's going to be

those who aren't intellectual.

Thank you,

Richard. Neil, you're up, and then DeRolo and Brian and Dave.

Yeah, John, I figured out the problem, by the way. Critical thinking.

The frequency of your voice and the frequency of my air conditioner in the corner

there are actually kind of the same, because I could hear everyone else, but

I couldn't hear you. So I shut off the AC, and you came through loud

and clear, sir. So no problem. So

I guess the original question was,

what's the role of a leader in the post-literate

world? And one of the things that I find interesting about this discussion

is that there seems to be this acceptance that the electronic

culture, social media, is here to stay and that we

have to live with that. And I'm going to challenge that to say,

I don't think so. I think there's actually a coming crisis

in the online culture, and it's coming fast. And I think in like

maybe the next 3 to 10 years, and the crisis is gonna be one

essentially driven— so someone said AI is here to stay. It is. And

that's the problem. The problem is that fundamentally, eventually you will

not be able to trust almost any communication that comes to you

electronically. Am I really on this call?

You don't know, right? Hey, Hasan's met me once,

right? But you don't actually know. I could be an

avatar, right, having this conversation. I would sound like

this. I would look like this, right? And so to me, the job of the

leader— and I, I don't have the answer, and I don't think anyone on this

call has the answer— but is to navigate to whatever is waiting on the far

side of that. And something on the far

side is going to require books. Because when

you consume a book, it is fundamentally different from consuming

electronic media in terms of

the way your brain engages with it, in terms of how it fits

into, you know, everything else. I didn't see a YouTube

video that said, hey, the issue with why you're not hearing

John correctly is, you know, the AC in the corner. I

just kind of went back to some basic, you

know, understanding I'm sure I read in a physics book 35 years ago

and said, oh, that's probably what it is. And it turned out actually that that's

what it is. But the, the, the main thing I just want— yeah, uh,

I just want to, uh, sort of, uh,

communicate is I don't think that

where The job, I'll say this, I think the

job of the leader is to plan for the

post-electronic culture world where we can no

longer trust anything that comes to us

electronically. And I think there will be some kind of crisis and

it's eventually, you know, maybe when

you simply cannot have an electronic communication that you can

rely on at all. It's going to be bad

for a while, by the way. It's going to be sort of like the collapse

of the Roman Empire, and there'll be some kind of

bizarre dark age that, that, uh, follows it.

But I think on the far side— so I think the, the job of the

leader is to try to craft whatever is on the far side of that

collapse. But I think you can see it. Hmm.

You can see it. I think partly the anxiety levels you see in people are

driven by the fact that they don't know what to believe about

anything anymore. Well, you know, well, you know,

Neil, leadership is the—

it's not the solve for anxiety. But

leaders are in the role of, to your point, crafting a

vision. And if leaders aren't doing

the reading and doing the work to craft that vision, and

don't even know, quite frankly, the right questions to ask, even to begin to

craft that vision. Well, as it

says in a book older than, and one that we've referenced even on here,

without a vision, the people perish, right? And I would not be, I am

not the first person to say that. So, all right.

Oh, and by the way, you'll never really know if I'm not an

AI. You'll never really know. That's the point. That's true.

DeRollo, You're up. Go ahead. And then Brian, Dave,

Momen, and Hannah. Go ahead, DeRolo.

Wave your hand around. Do the thing with the audio. There you go.

Working audio. Perfect. Thank you, audio. There's like some kind of box around

it that tells me the sound is working, and I'm colorblind, so I won't tell

you what color it is because I don't know. Anyway, first, so Tom,

I think it was Mr. Hill and Professor Kabili-Gala

who who, who, um, came up with those insights you were talking about.

Um, what— so I'm gonna pivot from that. I just wanted to

state that because I think it's important. Um, what I find

interesting is many of us had a college

experience where we were reading these books, and because I went to school in the

'90s, we were reading books. It was not— we weren't reading stuff on a computer.

But then you're sitting in a cafe with others and you're debating ideas, you're talking

about things. You're drinking some kind of beverage, hot, cold, or both,

and, um, you're having these lively discussions

about ideas. And I just wonder, um,

as we depart from or move past a literate culture,

um, is it merely coincidental that

also children, right, college

students, whatever you want to call them, aren't meeting in cafes and debating

ideas? Or if they are meeting in cafes, they're meeting in cafes

like this, right? Even for the

people right across the table, right? And

so that lively exchange of

humanity, right? Ideas, views,

emotions, saliva, sweat,

odors, right? That, that's— Odors. That, that's

not happening. And I, I don't think it's, it's

merely coincidental. I think it's causative right now.

I think, and I can live with the bias, of course, because I'm a

humanities guy, right? I have a degree in English lit, and I

write for a living and argue stuff. I'm an attorney, right? I'm always dealing with

words and have to write things. But, um, how does math

work when you can't read? How

do you learn physics when you can't

Read and then show your work, you know,

because I think that the professor who accepts that you can do

the complex equations in your head and then spit out

the answer and allows that needs to be fired, you know, like she needs to

lose her job. And, or she just needs to say, okay, good, write it

down. Show me, show me how you got from this equation we

gave you to the answer. And so, you know,

Reading enables us to solve more and more complex problems.

And so, as we move from that to— forget about just

information on TikTok— as we move from that to

just people are consuming content on TikTok,

um, I, I just think the ideas that we can handle will just get

dumbed down. And I think just like the Atlantic piece, which

is here on the other computer over there, that's what I was looking at. Points

out, you know,

just the complexity of the ideas we can

handle evaporates. And so we're more susceptible to

believe things like all policy

problems are capable of being solved with

a basic common sense solution or compromise.

There's millions, tens of millions of Americans who think that that is true.

And I mean, I've done politics. It's not true. It's

false. The wool is being pulled over the eyes of

those newly minted voters. And that's

dangerous because they will accept that conclusion.

Listen to someone try to explain or read

in a newspaper someone trying to explain to them, no, this is

actually Very complex. That's, for example, is the reason why we have

2 major political parties, because we still can't agree on this, this, this, this, this.

I just think that they're less likely to accept that and more likely to

accept a demagogue. And so one of the principal

points I keep asserting is that the

post-literate world is one where tyranny is

easier to assert over greater

amounts of people.

Definitely agree with that.

David, and then Momin, Hannah, and then

John. Go ahead, Dave. Yeah, again,

great point. I want, I want to go back to— I mean, one aside, I'm

with Neil on the, uh, social media death. I think that Gen Z is having

their Timothy Leary moment right now, um, because 25% of them

have dumb phones and Just a fun aside.

But we're thinking about how do you bridge the gap?

I think we're having that. That was my thing I was thinking on. So much

of my job is about psychoeducation. People know what they don't want to feel, but

they don't know how to get there. That's 99% of my job. And

a lot of what it is is helping people get out of recipe knowledge. Like,

they know there's an engine in the car, but they don't know how the engine

works. Well, we do that with mental health. We do that with psychology. We do

a So to do that, you have to—

and I'm with Richard here— writing, there's something to writing. And

so to get people to start journaling about their thoughts helps them

gain the ability to forecast their feelings. And so to get them to

have more dynamic engagements with themselves journaling, I take the

time to find very unique excerpts

from things like Napoleon Hill's Outwitting the Devil. To Carl

Jung, to Jim Rohn, you name it. I find all these little excerpts that are

very, very provocative, and I'll send them

homework and they get this. And then we spend time in session talking

about the interpretation, about how this is relatable. And this is why I'm bringing this

up. I think that to me is the magic bullet here. Finding

a way to make it relatable seems to be the thread that

we're all talking about, is we don't know how to relate. Something that has

been so transformative or so maybe eye-opening to us.

Yet at the same time, for Gen Z, and why I made the comment earlier

about just the generational tribalism, I think it was what

Dr. Kwasi, you were saying about no one in your class saw The

Odyssey. Well, no one in the Gen Z sphere, the leaders of

that sphere said it was cool. So the mob doesn't go to see it. So

it's not a relatable function. And so I think when we're talking

about how do we lead, I think there's a big piece of this.

And, you know, someone mentioned critical thinking. Absolutely.

You have to make critical thinking relatable. And so you have to find ways

to give them almost like a buffet, like a sampler platter of all

these small little things that in my world is I'm

trying to see what you grab onto. I'm trying to see what actually

stimulates you. And then I'm going to double down on that. Because if that's the

vehicle that takes us there, let's go. And we're going to use that, the thing

that's going to pioneer our way forward. And then from that, we build. That becomes

our trunk and we build branches off of it. But I think that that's where

leadership has to go on some level, is that we have to find something that's

very relatable to use as the vehicle. And we kind of have to take

a shotgun approach to say, I'm going to give you a whole bunch of different

things, and I hope one or two of these things resonates with you.

Then we're going to clear the table and I'm going to go, okay, those two

things. Now we've got what we're going to do, and now let's move forward. And

it doesn't matter where we start. We're going to go visit everything, but let's just

figure out where you want to start. And that's the point I was making earlier

about meeting them where they are.

Excellent. Thanks, Dave. Brian, you, you unfortunately

tapped out and then you unmuted yourself, but I'm going to go to you and

then, Momen, I'm going to go to you. Okay, so Brian, go ahead and don't

tap yourself out. There we go. There we go. Now my

hand's down. Hey, no, I I—

so many things, guys, have been said so good. Um,

I just— to kind of pile on, I think what some of these,

um, some of the challenges— I, I think a lot of this is

just emphasizes like local relationships

are going to be so important. Like, like how does a leader

exercise influence? And the, the, the sheer

volume of content that's out there

on, on literature. Like, I mean, commentaries people

do like ours, like this one, the, the

curated list of books is amazing. But there's a

lot of— there's a lot of content out there on, on these books.

And how do you know which ones are worthwhile? I mean, who has

integrity, who doesn't? And I think it's going to be a lot

of Um, local relationships are going to be so

important going forward. You know, that, that kind of that dark age that somebody was

talking about, I, I can see it coming. The way that you get through it

is it's, it's the people in your neighborhood. You gotta know

them. Go over, you know, take them a plate of

cookies. I don't know, talk to them. Yeah, you know, there you

go, new tribe, whatever. But, but like, but, and then, and then in

that, that's where you exert your influence. Okay? That's where you begin

to ask the questions. And, and I think a leader in

that setting is going to be able to like help

curate and gatekeep some things.

Okay, like there's going to be, there's going to be an alpha that rises in

that bunch. Okay, who is that going to be? If you're the leader,

then, then help, help be the gatekeeper. The problem is, you know,

ABC, NBC, CBS, those gatekeepers are

gone. Like they're like, there's, you know, information is just free flow these

days. And so, and some of it's great, some of

it's terrible, some of it's just decent. Okay, fine.

And so, you know, I think there

is some— we got to plan for this

post-election, this post-electronic culture. And I

think being intimately involved in your

local school board, your local

city council, Like, that's where change is

going to happen or be— or sanity preserved. Bowman,

you're up.

So I just want to say how much I appreciate everyone's comments

again, and I especially appreciated Neil's optimism.

He kept on referring to the future.

I want to say that dystopia is already here,

but, you know, Anyway,

I'm in the trenches now. I mean, I think I'm in the

maybe the last part of my career. I've been

teaching in the university for 36 years, and

so I'm kind of like near the end of

a very long career, but I'm there, and

I want you all to be assured that professors,

at least in the English department at the Tarleton State, we

are encouraging people to have those conversations across

tables, in person, with

people, with a book, taking notes,

and doing all those things that a lot of us remember doing back in the

'80s or the '90s, whatever, in the 20th century.

The biggest issue, though, is, and it keeps coming back to this notion of

critical thinking, If people don't have

the initial skill set, then AI is just gonna

replace and they're not gonna know how to discern between

excellent, good, or crap, right? And

so what we're doing even now in 2026 at the university

level, and I know a lot of people are bashing universities now, but we

are still, many of us, fighting the good fight. And

that is trying to get people to think, read,

and write, not generatively with AI or

ChatGPT, but also, I mean,

literally using their minds. And ultimately, the whole

point, and whether you're a musician or a poet, and by the

way, I didn't know we were, you know, pushing our books, but I wrote one

back and it's called Migratory Words. The issue is

the life of the mind, imagination.

And, you know, whether you're reading the,

the, the Pentateuch, or whether you're reading the Bible, the Quran, the

Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, or Machiavelli's The

Prince, man, it's so amazing when your mind can go to

town on what's going on in those words that are written down.

So I just wanted to come back to that and assure you and our

audience who listens to a great podcast like yours, Hasan,

and that is it's still happening. There are people who are fighting the good

fight. And yes, it feels like the dystopia, the future is now,

but we're, we're trying to hold on. And I think that's one of the

reasons that your message and the whole

lessons on leadership from great books and classical literature

is so important still. It's about the life of the mind.

Imagination. Hannah, go ahead. Thanks. I think it's my turn, and I

will push back and say

possibly preposterous, um, thing, but I actually,

um, don't think that for

the non-readers, for the Gen Z, for

beta, who— whoever you want to— the people who are

not reading The issue is, or the goal

isn't the life of the mind. It isn't. It is for you,

maybe. It is for me. I love being on the walk and

thinking about— I read this fantastic passage 2 days ago

and I still think about what that means. For most people, I

think going back to what David was saying, and actually

Kristen was saying it earlier too, it's the

pricing versus value. Show them the value. What's What's in it for

me? That's what I want to know, right? And so

for younger people or for those who are currently not

reading, what's in it is that in that small community— and like

my kid, going on walks, talking to

friends, being in real world really has a huge value, an

increasing value, and they are picking up on that.

But when you have that small group of friends, They

need to, um, they need to know what the books,

what the great books are good for them. And the answer is, oh,

you want to make a friend? This is what you do. Oh, that friend betrayed

you? Read this. All of these very practical

things. And I think that it was, Kristen, like, we need to start with the,

with the ladders. We need to start with the smaller blocks. And the

number one building block for them is

A, showing the value first, like, hey, I got here

because blah blah blah blah blah, or like, when you have this problem, this is

the answer. That's critical. And then secondly,

when you have— and I have classrooms of students who

you put them at the round table and say discuss, and

they don't know what to do because they don't know how to

ask questions. So the moment we start

with the building blocks, I would say,

ask the right questions. And that goes back to the leaders. Like,

what questions do we need to ask? And there are,

you know, hundreds and thousands of books

on questions that leaders should be asking and then communicating to their

teams. Like, okay, what's in it for us? How does it apply to

me? What does that mean for my department? All of these things

so that students, kids understand that

the art of getting from not knowing to knowing

is asking questions. That to me is

where we're kind of failing because we

have been doing a lot of the dump of

data and dump of information, But now

what is not exactly what we spend a lot of

time talking about. And I think that is where we need to kind

of go back to. At least I would like to. And I'm just saying, that's

what we're doing in English classes still. That's what's happening on

Wednesday. As a matter of fact, you just took my syllabus right up. All right,

great. John, go ahead. And then

Richard, you're up. The part that I think was really

interesting, um, and you and I talked a little bit about this on our, on

our last podcast episode, right? That reading with other people. Like, I

dropped out of college before I really hit a place to where I was

going out and, you know, finding minds to sit in front of and to share

ideas with, right? But I was reading during that time. I was just reading for

personal pleasure. I was a sci-fi fantasy nerd. And then

what happened was me and a group of friends that I was training martial arts

with we created a science fiction book club, which is about the

nerdiest thing you can possibly imagine. A bunch of kung fu guys reading science

fiction fantasy books. But it was so helpful

because until that point, I never really had to go in and defend why

a book was garbage through my own interpretation of it and stuff like

this. And I can remember the book that I hated the

most, right? I was reading this book and I'm about to bail. I'm

about to bail because I'm my God, this book is just garbage. Like, oh God,

like, who would write this thing? And then the thing I was like, wait a

minute, I've been wrong enough by this point to where I'm

like, let's just finish this. Let's withhold some of my own judgment and let's go

have the conversation. Because thankfully, one of the guys in this book

club was and is a

professor of English at TCC. So am I really

going to argue with him, like, like about some of these things. Like, I mean,

there's the realm of taste and preference, and then there's the realm about if it's

good or not, you know. So go read with people who,

who you care about enough that you're not just going to dismiss their opinion out

of turn because they're dumb or a different generation and stuff like

that. I think that that's such a, such a major part of it. And I,

I forgot who brought that up, but I'm glad that other people are talking about

this because like, go read with friends. That you really gotta

show up in a certain way if you're gonna debate the topics of the book.

Because this one book now, I'm never gonna read it

again, promise. Like, I'm just never gonna slog through it again. But

I have such a warm place in my memories of that book

because of the conversation that I had about it and knowing that I'm gonna have

to go talk about why I hated it so much while also being open

to the idea that maybe I'm just the person not on the And I think

that's such an important part. The book, because it's over here in the chat,

it's a book called Light by M. John Harrison.

And it is a very weird book. Like, I won't ruin it for anybody, but

my wife even read it, and she's a big reader as well. And about halfway

through the book, she just started cursing about this book because it was

so off-putting to her as well, which was like a note,

like a note in my favor. I'm going to be honest about it, but I

was still like, but wait, my friends had some really great things to say about

it, right? So go read with other people. It'll make you just better,

right, about talking about why you liked it and why you didn't. And I think

that matters. Thanks, John. And, um, and

to John's point, listen, I have been saying to anybody who will listen to me

lately, having things in common with people is

easy. Everybody likes ice cream. Everybody likes sunny days.

Everybody likes, you know, puppies and kittens. That's easy.

What's hard is finding things you dislike in common.

That's what's difficult. Oh, I really dislike that. And, oh, I

really dislike that. Oh, I never knew that. Oh my gosh. And now

we can unite around our dislikes. Very hard to

do in a really meaningful way. But we've been talking about— and I love how

DeRolo brought this up— local nature and and, and, and, and

engaging with folks in local community. I also

think we've been talking about, I think we've been talking about what's in it for

me. Right. Not just, not just at a tribal generational level,

but also at an interpersonal level. What's in it for us? The power

of video and what video can do for us. And what does that

video look like in relation to other ways of

communicating and, and getting ideas across?

Before I go to Richard, yes, I see you have your hand up. Before I

go to Richard, I want to make a point here, and I've been making it

on the podcast lately, and I think it's relevant for— to

drop into this moment as we begin to turn the corner and wrap up. And

thank you all for participating. This has been a great conversation. We've thrown a lot

of things in here. We've created a bouillabaisse or a goulash,

and folks are going to have to think through this and move

through this. And so I want to thank you all for your contributions. The idea

that I'd like to bring, though, to the table here as we close is,

I think one of the things that we've gotten to here is that books allow

us to solve problems at scale. Really

difficult problems. Yes, there's an oral tradition, but

an oral tradition dies out, right? Or it hits a

ceiling at a certain point, right? And what a

literary tradition does Good, bad, ugly, or

indifferent, is that it allows us to solve

larger problems at scale because what books do is

they smuggle ideas across time.

They smuggle really good ideas. So

Plato writes down Socrates' ideas, and we're still

talking about them over 2,500 years later. Uh,

we can argue about a translation of the Odyssey. But we're still

reading fundamentally the Odyssey,

even if we're reading it in chunks, even if we're reading it in

1.8-second long clips. You know, we're

still consuming the Odyssey, right? We're still doing that.

The idea, right, of freedom or the

ideas of democracy, Lockean ideas. Somebody

mentioned— Dr. Kwasi mentioned Machiavelli.

Machiavellian ideas. Neil is in a C.S. Lewis group.

C.S. Lewis has been smuggling ideas across time for the last

back half of the entire back half of the 20th century to people who would

never have looked at apologetics or theology before.

Books smuggle ideas

across time. This is hugely powerful, and we are in a

moment where we are forgetting the importance of

this. And I think that that is actually

also what we are mourning here a little bit in this conversation,

because how do you smuggle an idea, particularly an idea

that can cause a society or a people

to scale to greatness? How do you do that and go

past the ceiling of the oral tradition? What's the tool you do for

that effectively? And by the way, I'm not opposed to—

well, I'm not opposed in principle

to artificial intelligence or the internet. I think the internet is probably the most

transformational communication tool human beings have developed since the

printing press. Let me go down on record as saying that this

is the most transformational tool we've developed. I was joking with my kids one time,

probably a couple of weeks ago, and I said, if I would ever have the

ability to go 500 years into the future, The very first question, if I

were Rip Van Winkle and I was like, go to sleep now and wake up

500 years from now, the very first question I would ask is, are there still

crappy people on the internet? Like, are we still using it for that?

Or have we solved that problem 500 years from now? Or is it like

worse? Like, that'd be my, literally my very first question upon waking up.

Not, you know, do I have a great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great

grandkid? Not any of that. Just have we solved the internet problem? Did we fix

that? Because we're at the beginning of a revolution right now.

And the same conversations we're having about the internet

and about reading and about literature, these were the same

conversations that people had when the printing press

first hit ground, about the oral tradition

and about people's memories and knowledge and about what this new

technology of the printing press was going to do to people's memory. And what's

going to do to people's knowledge and what's going to do to the oral tradition.

These were the— we're having the exact same conversations, just about a different

technological medium. So we're at the beginning of a

revolution, not at the end. And it's good for

us to have these conversations and to record them and put them on the internet.

That way people can see them and can remember

what was lost or even celebrate what was gained.

Richard, I'm going to let you begin and go

final thoughts because we're going to wrap up here. I want to be cognizant of

everyone's time. I want to thank you for, for giving me a bit of your

time today. This has been great. Hopefully, you're all exchanging

LinkedIn profiles and connections all in the chat. If folks,

if you're watching it on video, you've seen me crack up a few times just

because the chat is very lively. People are, people are talking and engaging, which is

great. So, Richard, I'm gonna let you go ahead and do our final

thoughts, and then you can go around the horn just like we opened. Just go

to the person next to you and call on them, and then we'll go around.

Richard, go ahead. Hey, Hasan, first I want to thank you very

much for doing this, but I also want to thank you

for your, your last comments, because when you spoke about

what books do is to bring thoughts

and ideas smuggled them through time.

And you talked about the Odyssey, and you talked about some other books.

The number one most widely read book that's ever been

written, and it's still the most widely read book that's

ever been written, is the 5 Books of Moses, is

the Old Testament. That book was written

3,500 years ago. And that book

first talked about a guy called Abraham who lived approximately

500 years before that. And to this day,

half the population of this planet claims that Abraham is

their forefather. Now, if we're going to learn about how to,

you know, how people get influenced, how to influence people,

we probably should learn about Abraham because this is a guy

who just was a guy. He looked at—

he looked around the— he looked around society, looked around his, his, his

culture, is that— and he thought there was something wrong. And he decided

he's going to carve a new path. He's going to leave everything behind and start

all over again. He didn't have a— he

didn't have a big army. He didn't have— he wasn't like super

wealthy. He, he

just had a vision. He just

committed himself to discover what life's all about.

And then he taught it to his son, and then he saw it, taught it

to his sons, and then it just grew. And then eventually

the Bible showed up and told that story.

So I think that there's no

question about it that the people who are going to be the most

influential people the leaders. I mean, I can't

think of a better leader than Abraham. He was the most influential person

that ever lived and still is. It's going to be

somebody who decides, you know, there's something wrong going on here and we have to

carve a new path. And he has to figure out how to

teach it.

And it was eventually written down

so that other people can learn it. And I

think if people don't learn how to write and read

and make that a major part of what they're doing on a regular basis,

not a lot of progress is going to be

made. AI is probably the most dangerous thing

that's ever been invented. And unless

people understand what the dangers are of AI, It could

also be the greatest thing that was ever invented as well.

It's going to be a wild ride. That's for sure.

Thank you, Richard. Why don't you pick who's next?

Neil, on your screen.

What am I— am I summing up? Is that the idea? You're summing up. Yeah,

you're helping us around the corner. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, I'll sum up with a

couple of very recent anecdotes. So, Haysan,

you know the work that I do. I was talking to a potential

client recently and I used the term Catch-22 and they had no

idea what I was talking about. Never heard the term.

Never had no idea. I had to explain it to them, right? And then the

other one, I think maybe the group will get a small kick out of this,

is I'm not an

online guy. I'm not involved in any social media, but there was a

recent Wall Street Journal article that happened to be about a law firm where I

have some family members that work there. And I was reading through

the comments and at the bottom, you knew there was going to be one

about, you know, the comment was King Lear had it right,

meaning, you know, the famous Shakespearean quote, the first thing we do is kill all

the lawyers. And I made one My first comment ever,

which was, A, that's not King Lear, it's Henry VI.

And secondly, the guy who's talking is a bad guy,

right? Shakespeare was not saying, hey, here's a great

idea, right? You know, so it goes

to the, you know, man, someone decided to get

on the internet and make a comment thinking that they were, you know, I

guess sagely quoting Shakespeare, and they got Not only the play

wrong, they actually got the whole point wrong, which is Shakespeare was

trying to say this is a very bad

idea. And again, for the lawyers on this

call, I just want to say, especially, I thought it was an

especially bad idea.

So I guess I'll just, besides

relating those 2 anecdotes, I'll just say say, I

am basically an optimist by nature, and I mentioned C.S. Lewis earlier, and C.S.

Lewis has, I think, a fantastic

book called That Hideous Strength, which is the 3rd in his trilogy. And in

that, most of the heroes in that book are doing

nothing. They're just living regular lives

while evil rises and falls

around them. And there was at one point actually where one of the

characters in the book says, what are we doing? raising

vegetables here. You know, I mean, in what way are we, you know, fighting

the great moral fight of our time? And, uh,

I, I'm not gonna be able to quote the exact response here off the cuff

on this call, but essentially the, the leader of the group, whose name is Ransom,

says, you were doing what you were supposed to

be doing. You were obeying and you were keeping the faith. And I think one

thing we all share on this call is we all have faith in books.

Whatever those books are, we all share that faith.

And I believe, I have to, maybe this is the optimist in me,

that reading and books will survive the tsunami

of social media. Maybe because social media will

ultimately collapse on itself, or it will just find its own value

proposition and people will go back to it. And someone on this call, and forgive

me, I don't remember who, just cited that Some of Gen

Z or some of the younger generation are moving away from social media. They're

moving away from smartphones. I have 2 children. One

is 30 and my daughter is 26, and she has

completely divorced herself from social media for that reason. She finds it depressing

and anxiety-driven. So that's a data point of 2

amongst the 9 billion people on this planet. And that— I'll yield the—

Microphone to John. You're to my right, John, so you're up next.

Um, I think for me, uh, I do get a little

too zoomed in, so it's helpful to hear how like Moomin has been doing

this for a very long time. And there's always been

people that don't read. There just is, right? So the idea

that everyone is going to become a reader, we've never really had that, right?

But I think The thing that I am kind

of just like sitting here thinking about is like the reason why I read now

is to keep upskilling myself, to keep learning new things, right? And

I kind of take this idea that if— that it's a little egoic

to think that I'm the only person that's going through any problem

state season that I come across, right?

There is an example, and it might not be exact, But there's an

example out there that's close enough that if I'm willing to pick up a book,

slog through maybe some paragraphs I don't like, I don't have to

recreate the wheel from zero. I can find someone that's been somewhere close to

this. And as a guy who works for himself and likes to work for himself,

doesn't want to go back to work for someone else— I've done that, not my

jam— like, learn for your own

development, learn for your own skill set at a bare minimum. Otherwise, you're

always going to have to go and work for someone else and make do with

what they're willing to give to you.

Let's go. I'm curious as to David's

wrapping up thoughts on this.

Yeah. I take kind of the Wonder Twins,

Wonder Friends kind of approach to this, meaning that I think that

even in this group right now, I can tell that there are some people who

are large consumers of knowledge and there are people who are really good at

are good at applying knowledge. And I think there's some people that are really good

at delivering knowledge. And I think when we think about the

future or like, what are we going to do as leaders, it seems like there

has to be some kind of roundtable formation amongst— and I

think that maybe that's also what John was saying earlier about the local, like a

local level of that. But finding other people who are leaders

and really tapping into their skill set, we can't all be everything.

So finding those of us who have unique

qualifications, skill sets. Like, for instance, Hasan has the ability to put

this together. He is a facilitator. And I think that that's a skill

set that is very, very powerful. I think those people, again, who

are teachers, very powerful. Those people who are just also

contrarian, these are all powerful things we need that go

into this kind of roundtable of leadership. And I think that, I guess, from my

perspective, it feels like that's what's the future

needs. The future needs these, almost like we need to clap

together. We need to find a way to organize ourselves so that

whether it's a unit of things and we all find ways

to either create a product or create some kind of thing that is across the

internet, or it's very face-to-face and it's very literal and it's very local,

I think both are very powerful. But that to me is what

the thing that I just take away when looking at all the notes I took

during this conversation, it's very much about that. There's so many different

unique insights, and I think that finding ways to bring them

all together is kind of like the sum of the parts transcends. It very much

has this very much magnifier effect. I think

that's what I would like to see personally about just not just for what I

can do for myself with other people, but I think it'd be wonderful to see

that kind of sprout up around the United States as kind of just almost like

maybe a movement or an organization for people who are older, kind of coming together

and then disseminating that stuff into the future.

Awesome. Thanks, Dave. Who would you like to go to next for closing thoughts?

Let's go to Hannah. My apologies.

I almost felt like I could read your lips, and it sounded

Or looked like me. I'll start with a shout

out to Neil. I am on a huge C.S. Lewis kick

and have been through the trilogy, and

just, just the idea that somebody writes a sci-fi

in 1942, and

it's just— it's that right there is why we

should keep reading, just because it's so amazing.

I wanted to maybe say 2 things. One,

I— 3 things. One, I really enjoyed this

conversation and it gave me a lot of food for thought, and I

know that I will be processing in the next few days and kind of things

will come back and come up. So I want to

thank all of the participants, and Hazan, a huge

thank you to you for organizing and bringing us together.

That's one. 2, I think that we talked a lot

about what books

communicate and what ideas are from, as

Richard said, Abraham through history. We

talked about Socrates, mentioned

Shakespeare, and I think that we

talk about ideas But what John mentioned just now,

I thought was so critical because I think that's the bridge

to the new generation. It also

captures how you feel. The way

you feel, where, like, that is at

the, at the, you know, core for so many people. That's

how they discover literature in the first place because they feel

like crap and they think that they're the only ones who ever experienced

this. And this is the first time it ever happened in the history of mankind.

And I think that understanding that this is a human

experience and the books are the medium, how we have

been communicating this human experience, is

what can bring people back to a

certain degree. I have a very contrarian idea as well,

which is I think that ultimately we want to know what the

who the other person is, and books are

somewhat filtered in many ways.

And I think that the rise

of the reality TV and now TikTok,

where you're watching people just being themselves,

I think that the reason why it has such an appeal is because it

gets to this very thing of I want to

know what my human experience versus your

human— like, I want to know your human experience as

unfiltered as possible. And so,

and the last thing was, I

really think that we might be looking

at the books becoming sort of a niche,

and we might be coming to a point where we don't

read anymore because we communicate nonverbally

and we're just chipped and elevated humans and/or

augmented humans. And I hope that it

will take a couple decades before we get there because I really like the

books, but I also think that it's not bad

to think about it and to just give it a try even

intellectually to see what would that look like

because I think it is possible. And that's my closing

depressing idea.

No, you're fine, Hannah. Go ahead, pick who can go next.

Of course, I forgot. I'm going to go to Kristin.

Okay. I guess my closing

comments are, first of all, I definitely

feel like I'm the dumbest person in this room, but it has been so wonderful

sitting here and just absorbing everybody's perspective and

Um, it's good on the first— that's not

meant to— that comment is not meant to be like fishing. I wasn't

fishing for comments. I think that is something

that people probably my age and most of

us maybe don't do often enough. So I'm very, very grateful to have been

here, and I hope that everybody that is listening to this podcast is

feeling just as enriched. Um, I guess I would

close though with a plea, and it just kind of goes back

to the one of the few— I think the one thing that I said

or felt like I needed to contribute is, is don't, um,

don't look down on other people. Don't— oh, if somebody tells you

they don't read, if somebody says they haven't read

a book this year, if somebody says they've never finished a

book, if somebody says

anything along those lines, please do not sneer

at them. Please don't look

down on them. Please don't turn your nose up. Whatever it is, whatever it is,

this, um, I'm better than you because I'm

reading— that's not, that's not anybody's here. I

don't think that's, that's not the point of this conversation. One of the

reasons that books are— we want to fight so much for

books is because of how enriching they are.

And so ask a question

instead. Use that opportunity to become the

leader that invites them to read

something. Again, whatever it is,

wherever they're starting, however small the start is,

if it's a children's picture book, If it's,

um, oh my gosh, C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia,

if it's The Hobbit, if it's whatever it

is, invite them.

Meet them where they're at. Invite them to join with you and experience

what we know to be so valuable. But

yeah, use that opportunity to become the leader yourself and just ask that question.

Ask a question. Don't, don't talk down to them. Don't say you should be

reading this many books because that, again, that expectation

for someone who's never finished a book, has graduated high school and has never finished

a book, is in college and never

finished a book. Don't— that just— it's

a mountain that's too high for them. So this is where

really every person, every single person has an

opportunity to be a leader and

help the tide to rise all boats.

Awesome. Thank you, Kristin. Go ahead and pick who goes next.

I forgot again. Um, DeRollo. Can't

hear.

Can't hear. Can't hear you.

He'll go in a minute. Hold on.

Oh, perfect. Oh, there it is. All I had to do was do a circle

motion saying go on to somebody else, and then the

tech comes on. Oh, you know, this was a new computer last year, right?

Exactly. I'm—

thank you. Thank you, Kristen, because I

wanted to speak in response to what you said,

because I want to nuance it, because I— there's a way in which I

disagree and agree at the same time, which sounds like I'm not taking a

position. But basically, I think you're

right to say, don't make these people feel bad

that they don't read. At the same time, I think reading

makes humans better. I think we become better humans

by reading. And so we need to invite them, like you were saying, we need

to invite them into this experience that we're having, right? That

allows for cafe culture and literary societies, that

allows for increased political understanding, that allows for not just

work but more complex work. Because I may

say, hey, show a video, but if we're talking about

how to repair the control rods in a nuclear reactor, that

person better be able to read, whoever he or she is, and you're not watching

a video to show you how to do that. You know, you get it, you

get the physics, you know how to do it, or we have a big problem.

And so I think that reading is an essential

way that humans just become and do better. And so we need

to figure out how to encourage— leaders need to figure out how to encourage and

lead those around us into more reading. Therefore, y'all

keep reading, keep talking about what you're reading. Okay,

start a book club. Put actually challenging

books in the book club. One of the things that

Hasan will tell you that I love doing on the podcast is he will say,

we won't talk about X. I love talking about whatever X is. I

love doing that because I think it's important. I think driving

an idea to the place where now there is disagreement is

what's necessary. And also, you know,

this is to respond to something that Hannah brought up, you know.

One of the problems with reality TV is that there's so many people

certainly connected to Hollywood and being put in these shows who

just live terribly. And so instead of watching the

ideal, the heroic, right, we're

watching the banal and we're finding that

entertaining. And then first we're laughing and whatever. But

what's happening is we're normalizing their nonsense.

Instead of being shown, here's a model that's

challenging, you know, like, why don't they do a reality show of

Mother Teresa? We'd all be crying. We'd feel terrible and look

at what she did and say, wow, that's amazing. And then look at ourselves and

say, I got some work to do, right? And it's just like reading

allows us to do these things and to get to a place where we can

say, hey, look, this is how we tackle

complex problems. Like, We cannot do that without reading, so

we need to be about that. Thank you.

All right, you get to pick who goes next. Oh, excellent.

Tom, have you spoken or no? No, sir, not yet. Excellent.

I was gonna say, I was perfectly okay going last, though. If you want to

go Mormon, I'm fine with that. It's up to you. All right, so for me,

first things first, again, like everybody has already said this, Hasan, and you've You

probably invited so many of us on here so you could hear the

words thank you to Hassan so many times. I know that you're like that. So,

totally kidding. He's not like that. But, but no, but I do want to thank

you very much. I think being a part of— and as Kristen, to your, to

your statement too, I, I feel, I always feel humbled when

I'm in a room like this full of very, very intellectual people. And

coming from somebody, as, as John had mentioned,

going to college and not finishing his degree. I never went in the first place.

So when I get into a room like this with very, very intelligent people, it's

very humbling to me to realize that I can have conversations with them. And

most of them probably don't know that I didn't go to college. But anyway, but

that's not the point. The point is that education to me

is very important. Education to me is very valuable, whether you go to

college or not. I think it's one of the things

that the— as a species, and when we talk about

what elevates us from other species.

It's not the ability to learn and educate ourselves.

Other species do that. It's the willingness and desire to continue

it after we've already learned certain things. Like, we learn so much and

we want to continue learning beyond the simple survival

tactics. The reason I say all of that is because in my

heart of hearts, I believe books are the easiest way and the fastest way to

do that. Because you can learn pretty much any topic

you want. The nuclear rods that Darullo are talking about. Sure. If

I, not a nuclear engineer, wanted to go understand what he was

just talking about and where those nuclear rods— I can go find a book

and read it. I may not be able to physically go do it, but at

least have a better understanding of what Darullo is talking about when he's talking about

nuclear reactors or nuclear rods. Same,

same understanding with any of you guys and the principles that you're talking about.

And, you know, when Richard's talking about Abraham, I've

never read anything about Abraham, but if I wanted to, I can now

go from this conversation and say, I really want to learn and understand

what Richard was talking about Abraham. I can go educate myself. I can

go find a book and learn those topics that are there.

So, I think it's not going to be a niche

hobby, is the term that I think— I believe the Atlantic

article was talking about. I

don't believe it's going to be a niche hobby, but I do think it's gonna

be a differentiator of educated people. And again, I'm not

talking about people who go to college or don't go to college. That's not relevant

to me. I'm talking about people who educate themselves and continue to

educate themselves, continue elevating themselves in a thought process that

goes beyond the knowledge they have today. And I think books are

always going to be a medium to do that, regardless of whether or

not the percentage goes down from 40 to 20 or 20 to 10.

At some point, it will go as low as it's going to go,

and it will stay there or get better from there. So I

just think, and again, I thank you for having me on here. I think everybody's

comments were awesome. And David, I hope you

got that. Like, I wasn't trying to be the contrarian. I was just trying to

make, you know, be I needed to make it worth something for the

listeners to not just hear all of us boast about the same thing over

and over. I had to throw something in there to make it sound a little

different. So I just picked on your topic. So I appreciate the

fact that you're a very good sport about it. So thank you.

And now, Dr. Kwasi, you're the last one. Saved the best for last. So

go for it. Oh, no, no, no. I find it very odd that we saved

the English professor for last, by the way. Talking about— yeah,

I thought that was kind of interesting.

Serendipity. I put it in the chat, but I'll say it

out loud for those who aren't reading the chat, the

podcast listeners. There's a quote by Walter Ong,

a very noted sociologist who, who wrote about

orality versus or and literacy. And he said, basically, the reason

that we write is not to remember, but to forget.

And that way you can write something down, you can go away from it, you

can abstract, you can think about it, and you can come back to it.

So I just think it's— it is, it's a remarkable tool. The technology

of writing, of literacy, is one of the most— well,

it's, you know, like there's fire, there's the wheel,

there's reading, you know, and literacy. I want to

celebrate Richard Messing's

idea about Abraham, you know, who wrote nothing. But then, you know, of

course, later on, Jewish writers did write down

what happened with Abraham and then Moses. But 1,000,

1,000-plus years before that was a writer who

wrote in the same region. And he wrote in cuneiform.

And we got the Poem of Gilgamesh, the Epic of Gilgamesh.

And it's a great book. And I just want to give a shout out if

anyone ever wants to read maybe the first book that's written in the Western

culture. It's called The Epic of Gilgamesh, and it's, it's

amazing. And it says a lot about friendship. Can you put it in the

chat? Sure. Yeah, The Epic of Gilgamesh.

And, and I love the others that are writing, talking about and celebrating

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. And, oh, I mean, just

so, so great. I love The Great Divorce. Maybe one of these days we can

talk about that, Hasan, the Great Divorce or the problem of pain.

But to end, my wrap-up,

I think, are just a couple of clichés. One of them I

love reading because it combats the dangers of

univocality. I love heteroglossia. I love

polyvocality. You know, I love the idea that,

you know, writing can push back against there's just one right answer.

You know, it gives us lots of perspectives. I loved what

was said earlier. I think it was by Hannah, and that is

the idea of, you know, asking lots of questions. I think whether you

are reading a billboard, whether you are reading someone's clothing, whether you are reading

someone's body language, whether you are reading a book,

the bridge from observing something to then

interpreting something is to ask a lot of questions.

And, and then ultimately, I believe that not only are

readers leaders, but I think, and we all agree,

leaders are readers.

Thanks, Hyesung. Thank you, Malcolm.

Put it in the chat, please. Oh, yes, I will. Yes. Yeah, he'll put Epic

of Gilgamesh in the, in the chat. We will also be

reading the Epic of Gilgamesh next year. Oh,

on the podcast. Yeah, I'm gonna kind of drop— you might have already found your

co-host for that one. I think I might have. Yeah, I think I'm gonna put

your name on the list, gonna pre-populate. Please do. I teach

it every semester. So yeah, we love having

folks come on who know these works

at an even deeper level even than I do or than others and

really kind of pulling things from them in order to Well,

in order to bring those ideas forward once again across time.

We've had several folks drop off, but that's okay. I would like to thank everybody

who participated in this conversation for our

200th episode of the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books

Podcast. I encourage you to go out and connect with all

these folks that you've heard today. You heard all their intros

all the way at the back at the beginning of the episode. And of course,

I will We will have links to all of their LinkedIn

profiles and ways to get in contact with them as guests on

this show. You also have the opportunity to go back and listen to previous episodes

of them on this show and check those out and those conversations that we've been

having. Finally, I would like to thank you, the listener.

Look, there's no way I would have done this show for

200 episodes without somebody listening to me talking

about it somewhere. Uh, you walk up to me in real life, you have

conversations with me when I'm, well, when I'm in random

places in my local community and even further than my local community.

And, uh, please keep doing that. Please keep telling me what you think of the

show. Please keep commenting. Please keep liking. Please keep subscribing. And

please keep recommending this podcast to

not only all the readers in your life, but also, uh, to paraphrase and to

jump off what Kristen said here. In her closing comments, to those folks

who are intimidated by reading. This is an easy way

to get involved with a book. It's a little, little, little

bite, a little snippet of something that allows you to go into the book at

a deeper level and tie it to your own

leadership life. Once again, I'd like to thank everybody who was on

the show today. And as usual with that,

well, we're out.