Hello, my name is
Jesan Sorrells, and
this is the
Leadership Lessons
from the Great Books
podcast, episode
number 184. Opening
up from our book
today with a well,
with a poem and I
quote to Edmund,
Clara, Hugh Bentley
A cloud was on the
mind of men, and
wailing went the
weather. Yea, a sick
cloud upon the soul.
When we were boys together, science announced
nonentity and art admired decay. The world was old and
ended, but you and I were gay. Round us in antic
order their crippled vices came lust that had lost its laughter,
fear that had lost its shame. Like the white lock of Whistler that
lit our aimless gloom, Men showed their own white feather as
proudly as a plume. Life was a fly that
faded and death a drone that stung. The world was
very old indeed. When you and I were young, they
twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named. Men
were ashamed of honor, but we were not ashamed. Weak
if we were, and foolish. Not thus we failed. Not thus.
When that black bale blocked the heavens, he had no hymns from
us. Children we were Our forts of sand were even
as weak as we. High as they went, we piled them
up to break that bitter sea. Fools as we
were in motley, all jangling and absurd. When all church bells were
silent, our cap and bells were heard. Not
all unhelped. We held the fort, our tiny flags
unfurled. Some giants labored in that cloud to lift it
from the world. I find again the book we found. I feel the
hour that flings Far out of fish shaped Pomonok Some cry
of cleaner things and green carnation withered as in
forest fires that pass roared in the wind. Of all the
world 10 million leaves of grass or sane and sweet and
sudden as a bird sings in the rain. Truth out of Tusitala
spoke, and pleasure out of pain, Yea, cool and clear and
sudden as a bird sings in the gray, Dunedin to Samoa
spoke and darkness unto day. But we were young, we lived
to see God break their bitter charms. God and the good
Republic come riding back in arms. We have seen the
city of Mansoul even as it rocked relieved.
Blessed are they who did not see, but being blind
believed. This is a tale of those old
fears, even of these emptied hells, and none but you shall
understand the truth, the true thing that it tells
of what colossal gods of shame could cow men and yet
crash of what huge devils hid the stars yet fell
at a pistol flash the doubts that were so plain to
chase, so dreadful to withstand. Oh, who shall understand
but you? Yea, who shall understand the doubts that drove
us through the night as we too talked to main and day
had broken on the streets, Error broke upon the brain
between us. By the peace of God, such truth can now be told.
Yea, there is strength and striking root and good
in growing old we have found common things at
last, and marriage and a creed and I
may safely write it now, and you
may safely read.
There are certain books
that remind you of things you have seen
other places. Partially
that's because the books themselves influence other
mediums, but also it's partially because we all have short
memories. There are books that have been adapted to
movies, and usually not well, then there are the films that
would work better as books or stories. And of course, in our
time of declining attention spans, dopamine driven
distractions, and the technological hijacking of the
brain, there are certain social media performances that
don't translate to any other medium at all. I'm sure Neil
Postman would have something to say about that, and I'm
sure that none of it would be good. But before Postman,
there was our author who wrote the poem I read just now, who
we are covering today. The writer of over 80 books, several
hundred poems, 200 short stories, 4000 essays which were
mostly newspaper columns, columns and several plays.
This author was prolific in the way that only a man, a
denizen, such as it were of the 19th century could be. And
the book we are going to address ourselves to today is
probably the most psychedelic story I've read by a 19th
century author in a really, really long time.
It starts out with the reader believing and
contemplating and trying to accept the reality
that he's building in one way, and ends with we
believing a totally, completely different
thing. Now, of course, you could say that all
good literature accomplishes such a dramatic
two-step, but only rarely does a piece of
literature accomplish such a two-step so well.
The term that I've heard used for this book is so
paradoxically, today on the show we are
exploring meaning and what it means for leaders
from one of the more entertaining and
profoundly Catholic books we've covered on
this show, the man who Was Thursday by the great
Catholic apologist and prolific writer G.K.
Chesterton. Leaders, there is no dark side in
literature. Matter of fact, it's all dark. The
only thing that makes it look light or sheds any
Light upon it is the sun. And I'm joined today
back from back for this episode from his last
foray into the space. During last year's mashup
episode where we talked about the weird
intersections between Pink Floyd, all quiet in
the western front, and Lord of the Rings is a
growing friend of the show. This is the second time
he's been on. So that's two more times than most, folks.
Neil Kalakofsky, how you doing today? Neil, how's it
going? I'm doing great, Jesan. How are you? There's no dark side
of the moon, really. It's all dark. That's right. I
wonder if you were going to pick that up. Yes. Oh, yes.
You were not going to slip that by me.
I think after reading this book, I think that
Chesterton would have been a big fan of Pink Floyd. I think he would have.
Yeah, I think he would have. He would have shown it to all their
shows in a rumpled, rumpled suit, and he would have critiqued them,
you know, with that big mustache and the, the bad combover.
But it would have been sharp, it would have been ribald, but he would
have gotten the paradox. He would have understood what they were trying to lean into
or lean out. So, so. Well, the thing, and we talked about
this a little bit last time, you know, that's a little bit paradoxical. I think
that's going to be our word for today about Pink
Floyd is that these guys were
in some ways godless rock and rollers, and yet they were really, you
know, crying out for faith, right? Oh, absolutely. They were
decrying the lack of faith, the lack of humanism,
and the. What
I think Chesterton might have said is you're looking in the wrong
place. You know, you are, you're not. You're. You're. You're trying to
find God without, you know, finding God. Right?
Well, he would have also. He would have also. And we talked about this on
the, the episode, the mashup episode that we did. We touched a little bit on
this. But he would not have been a fan of
the psychedelic experiments of Aldous
Huxley. He would not have been a fan of any of that. He would
have. As a matter of fact, he would have. And you could tell from the
man who was Thursday how he goes after Nietzsche. He
would have seen that as a direct line from Nietzschean
worldview and would have rejected the dominoes all
the way down the path. Right. But I
also think he would have been shocked by how
popular Huxley got and then how influential he got. And that probably would
have disappointed him. I. I can imagine that would. He would have taken that badly.
I think the fabulism, he would love. It's the fact that it
descends so quickly into hedonism. That's the, you know,
almost. Almost. Almost like there's no red, you
know, light at all on the. There's just. There's no red light.
There's no kaboom. Right down. It's a kaboom.. There's no William F.
Buckley on the highway. It's just. You're going, yeah, well, saying this much
and no more. Right, right. Yeah, it's all the way. But, you know, you think
of Lewis Carroll. Right, Right. Who Chesterton must have.
He may even have crossed. I'm not
sure of the timeline, whether they were contemporaries in any way,
but certainly they were literary. Close enough. Literary
contemporaries. And, you know, Lewis, Alice in Wonderland is some
pretty wild stuff. Right. But it doesn't descend. There's never an
orgy in Alice in Wonderland. Right. There's no Eros or loving or
anything like that. That would have been. Lewis Carroll would have just
been completely bl. By stuff like that. And then 100 years later, you
have Grace Slick singing White Rabbit at, you know, at Woodstock and.
Which my neighbor was at, by the way, he was telling me. And he saw
that performance. Really? Yeah, Just. Just
as an aside, it was kind of funny. He sent me a clip of Grace
Slick singing White Rabbit, and he says, I remember this like it was yesterday.
And I wrote back. I said, I'll bet she
doesn't.
Yeah. Chesterton was born in. He was born in. He was born in
1874. And looking up. Looking
up on Google, just. Just because it's interesting that you sort of. Alice in
Wonderland sort of. I don't know. Go ahead, tell me. Yeah, so Alice in
Wonderland was written in. Let me go ahead and
pull that up, because I don't have it off the top of my head.
Alice in Wonderland was written in 1865.
So, yeah, I mean, a little bit earlier than Chesterton
was born. So he not only would have. Would have. Would have been
exposed to Carol, it would have been one of those
background influences that was just sort of floating around there
now, how much she would have. How much she would have, shall we say,
embraced Lewis Carroll, for lack of a better term. We don't know
that. But. But yeah, he. I mean, Lewis Carroll had a long life in the
middle of the middle of the 19th century. He was born in. Let me see,
it was like 1836
or something. So he had a. He had a long and all. Let me
pull this up. He had a long lifespan. And then I'll tell you the
other guy who jumped to mind when I read Besides the obvious, C.S.
Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, which. Yeah, the influence is, you
know, jump. Jumping out at. You know, like, even in the poem you
read. Yep, I noticed. So at some point he mentioned Dunedain,
which. Yes. In all
to. To be clear, I looked up on Wiki, and apparently it's an island somewhere
in the South Pacific. It is, but in the Lord of the Rings, the
Dunedain were the noblemen.
Right. Who survived the fall of Numenor and then
come back to. To Middle Earth. And. And there's no way
that's, you know, a mistake. No. No.
Coincidence. Yeah. No. So Lewis Carroll was born
1832. He died 1898. Okay. Alice in
Wonderland was, like I said, was 18. Now was
1865. G.K. Chesterton was born in 1874, died
in 1936. Right. So while Chesterton
overlapped a little bit with the end of Carroll's
life, most of Carroll’s work would have been in the
background, probably for him. Which it's weird to
think about that because we tend to put these
people on pedestals, literature, whatever. But,
you know, like. Like his relationship. Like
Chesterton's relationship with. Oh, what was the
author, the eugenicist and author. Um, Bernard
Shaw. George Bernard Shaw. Right. So he was. He was a
sparring partner against George Bernard Shaw for years.
Right. And roundly opposed the Fabian Society, roundly
opposed Fabian socialism, thought eugenics was nonsense.
There are some, depending upon what you read in his
Wikipedia article, there are some intimations that maybe
he might have been anti Semitic, but maybe not. Nobody
really knows for sure, you know, but it was one of those
things where, you know, Carroll is in the air, Tolstoy's in
the air, Dostoyevsky's in the air. And these guys are just
reading them like. Like we read YouTubers. We're like, oh, yeah, that's just the
critical drinker over there. Or that's, you know, whoever that we're going to on
YouTube. I don't know. You know, in 100 years, who knows? Who knows who's gonna
be. Who knows what YouTuber will rise in the back of your mind somewhere.
Right, exactly. The other guy that jumped to
mind, unfortunately, also known for his anti Semitism was Roald
Dahl. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. At the end, I was getting. This
is very Charlie and the Chocolate Factory a little bit where people are just flying
up in the air and you know, it is.
Yeah. And I think Dahl was much less. He must have been
50s and 60s again, I guess. But, you know. Yeah,
but I was, I was actually kind of.
Yeah. Flashing on some Roald Dahl there at the end. But. And
then I think I was telling you earlier, before the podcast, you know, some of
this seems like the early movies of, you know, Keystone
Cops or, you know. Yes, yes. When the
anarchists are running around Europe, you know, I picture them running around in
stilted fashion like they're being filmed, you know, in 1912 or something.
I had a Buster Keaton flashback. Yeah.
When they're, when the whole, the whole section occurs in the book where
they are chasing them across the field and they're chasing them through the town and
it's just like chapters, long chase and. Yeah,
it's Benny Hill, man. It's. That's it. Yes. Oh my God, I'm glad
you brought this up like this. And I'm like, oh my God. Oh my God,
the Benny Hill music. Yakety Sax.
That's right. Ah. Oh. Got that song
stuck in my head. I remember Benny Hill. Oh my God. Yeah. Like
1980 British TV would come over and
you could see like clips of Benny Hill, like 11:30 at night or something.
Yeah. So this will tell you the, the. Just the age
gap that we have. I was exposed to Benny Hill. So
I'll frame it this way. Before I would go to school in the mid-90s
or I go to high school, there were two programs I'd watch. If I got
up early on PBS, I could watch the last 10 minutes of Benny
Hill, where usually the last 10 minutes involved some
lady in scanty clothes running around doing some. Something. And
then the music would come up and then I would immediately change from that
to Sports center hosted by.
Oh, what's his name, the guy who's sort of gone off the rails lately
on MSNBC. Keith Olbermannn. Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick.
Those are my guys. And this is before we knew how crazy Keith
Olbermannn was. This is before Dan Patrick had a podcast, you know,
all this time. Right. And. And Stuart Scott would come on sometimes
and I'd watch Stuart Scott with Dan Patrick and I would just watch Michael
Jordan highlights and eat my cereal. And then I would go to school. Like
that was my whole entire. That was my. That was part of my exposure to
like Benny Hill. And now
this. Interesting. So my nine year old, we got a bunch of chickens in
my. On my property. And like a bunch of chickens, like not a few,
like. Like 12 to 15. It's ridiculous for chicken farmers. And. And
whenever he's chasing the chickens. Chickens around. I play the Benny Hill music.
It's basically Yakety Sax.
Yeah. Like he's chasing the girl. Yeah, exactly. He's got his hands out. Like,
he's got his hands out the whole nine yards. You could not put that on
TV today. I think that would be. Benny Hill
would be immediately canceled. Like, immediately. It wouldn't even get out of the writers room
before the music ended. They would be closing that show down.
Oh, my gosh. Okay, well, getting back to the man who
Was Thursday. Let's. Let's focus this for just a minute. Yes.
So The Man Who Was Thursday was published in 1908. It is one of
G.K. Chesterton's more famous books associated with him.
It was written as an adventure story, a detective story. And
as I put it in. In my writing, in my notes here, a boisterous
narrative with an unexpected denouement. And it is an
unexpected denouement. Like, it takes a.
It takes an immediate left turn in the last two chapters,
and you don't know what he's going to do. Like, I. I was. I was.
I looked at the book and I go, oh, my gosh, this is so short.
Because the chapters are short. It's real easy to read. It's written in a flowing
narrative style. You get to the last two chapters, and you're
like, how is he gonna. How's he gonna bring it home? How is he going
to. He has to bring it home somehow. How is he going to turn this
corner? And then he turns the corner, and you wind up in this weird.
This is a psychedelic part. You wind up in this weird, psychedelic
cul-de-sac with. With robes and dudes sitting in chairs. It's
very much Lord of the Rings. Like, it's very Lord of the Rings or
that hideous strength by C.S. Lewis where they're all
sitting in robes at St. Anne's at the end. You know, the
victory has come. And they're sort of. You know, they're just
kind of reflecting on what their role in the entire saga has
been. I was completely channeling Lewis when I was reading
that. Yeah. And it's. And there's no
preparation for any of that. It just sort of dumps into it, and you're like,
oh, I. Okay. I didn't realize it was going to be this
kind of game. Right. The other thing about the book
is it continues to confound readers. Like, it was. So
this is 2026. When we're recording this episode, it
is 118 years since this book was published, which
is weird for me to think about, but
in the 118 years, I don't think anybody's gotten their arms around the man who
was Thursday. That's fair.
You know, someday you're talking to me, but I would love to introduce
you to my friend Bill, who's a profound. He's. I'm pointing in that direction
because he lives over there, you know, so your viewers can see.
Yeah, yeah, he's right off screen. He's over there. Right. And Bill and
I, first of all, we belong to a C.S. Lewis Book
Club together. But he is one of the best read
people that I know, and he's a huge Chesterton
fan. And maybe we could do a follow up to this at
some point where he comes on and he's just. I
think you'll find him just an interesting,
profound kind of guy. Very committed
Catholic, very, very, you know, serious
religious fellow and a deep thinker.
So I'm gonna ask him that very question,
like, basically. And I should have done this in preparation for the show, but of
course I didn't, which is. Bill's hard to
get hold of, by the way, because in keeping with Chesterton and Tolkien,
he. He doesn't have a cell phone. There you go. He is hard. I actually
have to physically walk over to his house, which is like, you know, two
and a half blocks. That's a lot. That's a lot of commitment.
I mean, I can't just text him. What? Yeah.
What is this, 1908? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are we doing? This is
100. This is 118 years ago. He's talked a lot
about G.K. Chesterton, and he would enjoy this. This
conversation. So at some point, putting the two of you
together will be my. I will enjoy that conversation
from. From my. From my chair to the side. But so to me, I
can't separate because I have such a Lord of the Rings
thing. Lord of the Rings was a massive influence
on me growing up. So is C.S. Lewis. It colored a lot
of my worldview, both of them together, both as a
kid, where I kind of sort of thought Middle Earth
was real or that I knew it wasn't quite real, but it
should be real, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It should be a place like
that. Right. Seems like a better place than the one I was
actually at to, you know, much later as an adult, where I started
to realize the profound philosophy that. That, you know, that
that was. Was underneath it all. And you know, certainly
there's some. To me, the most obvious. First of all, there's a
lot of literature mechanisms in here where I go, Tolkien,
Tolkien, Tolkien. Or literally throughout, like here in your, in your
poem. I don't know if you can see this on the screen, but over here
in your poem I wrote very J.R.R., right? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it is,
right, because it is, it's. It's the, the first of all the fact that there's
a poem like that, you know, in Tolkien, every once
in a while the hobbits would just start, you know, reciting. They're just like
running around reciting poetry and eating second breakfast. Can you imagine like a
modern literary work where suddenly someone just read a poem for three pages?
No, no, no, no. The reader would be
gone at verse two. I have to, I have to give you that. I
did do a little wiki search or a little R and D before
this. And here's an interesting thing. The person to
whom he dedicated that poem is Edmund Clerihew
Bentley. Yes. Do you know what a clerihew is? I
have no idea what a clerihew is. Neither did I. But wiki, boom.
Nailed it. Clerihew apparently is named after this
guy. A four line poem. That's autobiographical. And
so it's like there's some. I was actually looking a
few of these up. Unfortunately I don't have them like
right here. But you can, you can look them up. Some of them
are cute. So of course this clerihew. Poetry examples.
Right. And Albert Einstein, though he was divine. He made
the world spin with a theory of time. You know, things like that. Right. Kind
of, you know. Yeah. Quick,
I'm just seeing these right now. Discovered radium, you
see. She glowed with pride. Oh dear. In her lap she would
have. She also died of radium poisoning, so she did. That's a
little dark, but you get the idea.
Anyway, who knew those poems had a name? And someone invented them.
Apparently it was this friend of Chesterton's. So. That's amazing.
Yeah, that's amazing. I. And they're called clerihews. Yeah,
that's amazing. I know. I did not. I did not know that at all.
And that's why we. This is my gift to you, my
friend. You impart knowledge to me. I give
these little bon mots trivia. Well, someday
you'll be at a dinner conversation and you'll
say, Someone will say, does anyone. Does
anyone know what a clerihew is? Like. Like you're like you're on an airplane,
someone's there. A Doctor, on this plane. Is there anyone on this plane that knows
what a clerihew is? Turns out like we have a poet. This will save his
life. Weirdly enough, I do.
Strangely enough, ma'am, I. With the clerihew.
It's a musical instrument, I think. Yeah. Play with
clerihew along with the harpsichord. And I failed at it. Now I'm switching to the
piano and I'm totally better. Isn't there a
clerihew and Jethro Tull or something? The
clerihew. Some guy off to the side like some
bizarre. Oh, more like in the Grateful Dead.
Oh, my Lord. Anyway, they. They would have had a Clair
Huxtable for sure. Oh my gosh. I'm not going to tell you a funny Grateful
Dead's not on this show, but not on the show that is Grateful Dead story.
But, but okay, so back to Chesterton, who never encountered
the. Although it's interesting to speculate, what would he have thought of the Dead? You
know, I don't know.
You know, so, so here's a follow up question for this. So
I asked you this question when we were talking about All Quiet on the
Western Front and Lord of the Rings in our mashup episode. And you, you gave
me a very interesting answer that has stuck with me
for a long time now. And, and this is why I have fascinating folks
like yourself on the show, because I get to ask you good questions that you
give me stuff and it sticks with me and it incorporates into other things that
I think. And the question that I asked you was, at the end of this,
towards the end of that episode, will there ever be another
writer like Tolkien? Will. Will the English, Will English
literature ever be able to produce another writer like Tolkien? And you said
probably not, because Tolkien was sort of the, the
pinnacle of the mountain of all of English culture and
society and thought it all sort of concentrated at
a tip of the spear into that man and his, his output.
Okay, but when we look not, but.
And when we look at the History of 19th century
Literature in England, you have Lewis Carroll,
you have Charles Dickens, you have GK Chesterton,
you have George Bernard Shaw, you have Robert
Louis Stevenson, you have C.S. Lewis on the tail
end of this. And of course you have Tolkien, you
have these lions, these literary lines. Rudyard
Kipling, who, by the way, we haven't covered any of
Kipling's work on this show yet. We sort of working
our way around to it. We will cover. We will cover
Rudyard Kipling coming up here fairly soon. I'm
trying to find the right text to Bring to folks.
But the, the, the. A. The 19th century literary tradition
in England was so rich, it's almost
stunning. It's like the height. It's the height of a, of a
literary.
The man who was Thursday comes along in a weird time
when the Boer wars have occurred,
right? England is having a little bit of trouble
holding onto its colonies, but it's always had trouble because it's England. So they don't
really think that it's anything really interesting that's happening there.
But what is happening that's more so interesting is the
continent is getting ready to roil literally 12
years later with World War. World War I. 10. 10 years later with World War
I. Like you're going to get into World War I. Going to be off to
the races, right? I mean, this is the, this is the beginnings of. Or the,
the foundation is being laid for the death of the British
Empire, but nobody knows it at that point. Nobody
realizes it at that point, right? So I
say all this to say. Or I asked, I lay. That's the
content I laid for this question. The man who was
Thursday. The reason is the reason we can't get our
arms around it and pigeonhole into some space. Is it
because it is truly the heir to that entire English
tradition. Was Chesterton trying to bring
everything into this one book and say sort of. And sort
of make a final statement?
Well, I'm not sure I'm the, the right person
to ask to answer that question, but I'll give it Where's Bill? Where's that guy?
Yeah, where's Bill? Ask that same question to Bill when he comes along.
So. But I think that
the, the, the, the reason
we have our. One of the reasons we have
difficulty getting our arms around Chesterton
is that I think we in 2026
have difficulty. You know, there used to be
saying there's no second act in American life, right? Which once they know you as
an actor, that's it, you're an actor forever. Once you're a playwright, you're a playwright
forever. You can't do. You can't do different things or it's very difficult.
I think that that kind of is broadly true
where particularly in the world of the Internet, we pinhole people
as you're this. And once someone is known as a Christian
apologist, well, they can't also be funny, right?
They can't also be indulged in, you know,
what we would call almost psychedelic
literature because that's just not things that go together,
right? So I'm saying that's Kind of
the. The shallow view, right? Yeah,
that. So I think one of the reasons, and I think one of the reasons
Tolkien actually slips by that is because
his books are theoretically written for children.
They're not, of course, they're profoundly deep works for adults.
But he slips it in there. Right? That's. CS Lewis does that
with Narnia. Right. Because it's. In some ways, we read Narnia to
our kids because we think of them as kids stories, but of course, they're not.
They're much more than that. But that was, I think, some of the
additional genius of. Of Tolkien
where I don't think he sat down and said, well, here's a way to get
a Christian message across in a way that, you know, people will not, you
know, object to immediately in this world of, you know, material anarchy that I see
all around me. I don't. I don't think he sat down and thought that, but
it was part of his genius to kind of
develop the delivery mechanism in such a. You know,
I've read the Lord. I. I know I have a Lord of the Rings shaped
head, so I talk about it a lot, but I read it as a kid.
I read it as a young adult. I've read it as an adult. I've read
it very recently. I've read it to my kids,
with my kids. So the.
I. So I think that that's part of it. I think he doesn't. It's
difficult to put him in a pigeonhole, and he's not famous
enough in the way that Tolkien is. Just so, you know, they're
not going to make a movie out of the man who called, you know, the
man who was Thursday. Yeah, yeah. Right.
Whereas, you know, the Tolkien works are so famous that they kind
of blow away a lot of those sort of. Well, I'm not sure I.
What pigeonhole do I put this in? Kind of. Kind of. Objection. So
that's one reason. I think the other reason is something that you touched
on, which is he's so very British. Right. To me. So I was
telling you earlier I had this characterization of
Chesterton. I want to save it for the show. Here it is. I
think if you took CS Lewis and Winston Churchill and put
them together, you'd get G.K. Chesterton. Right.
I think that's my image of G.K. Chesterton. And by
the way, I didn't realize until actually after I
read the book, he was a big guy. He was almost £300.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. He was a big boy. Oh, yeah. He was A big boy.
Which makes me wonder about Sunday, because, correct me if I'm wrong, but Sunday's a
big. Sunday's a big. Yes, yes, yes. That's how he's.
That's how he's described as sort of this. This sort of all encompassing.
Yeah, like. Like at the end, he's almost like. Right.
It's. It's like the. The kid in again, in Roald Dahl. Who's
the kid who. Who, like. Or somebody takes the bubble down
and they end up blowing up to Violet Beauregarde or
something. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like three times
her size or something like that. So.
So I think also, though, we're just.
That is a vanished archetype, the Winston
Churchill, you know, the guy who. Who first
of all was grounded in certain
moral certitudes, but also could get along with just about
anyone. Right. Always had the
right thing to say at the right time, you know. You know, like, Churchill's
famous, you know, the. The woman who says, you know,
Mr. Churchill, if you were my husband, I would poison you. And he said,
madame, if you were my wife, I would drink it. I would drink it.
Well, it's like that. Yeah. Who could pull a line like that off today? I'm.
Come on. You know. You know, I don't see Tom Cruise nailing a line
like that in a movie. No, no, no. The problem is. The problem is all
those guys are on Twitter. That's the problem. They're all on Twitter.
Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Maybe that's what. Yeah, for the. For the. For the
great. The zap. So. But.
So I think that's. It's partly that he's just. I mean, he's almost
like, you know, like a Roman senator. He's so far back and
so archetypal that you can't. He's almost
not like. Not a real person. You know, we don't see people like that
anymore. Well, and it's interesting that you talk about his weight and
sort of the rumpledness that Chesterton had, and then we'll. We'll
go. We'll head back to the book here because I want to turn the corner,
sort of talk about some other themes that I want to talk about today. But
it's interesting you talk about his weight, his rumpledness.
You know, he struggled with gout and gluttony and those kinds of things.
And we live in a post television era, like one of the.
One of the. I would love to write a substack essay on this
because I've been thinking about this off and on for the last four or five
years, how no one really is
appreciating how much that box in your house
called a television has gotten pulled apart in the last 15
years. It's got pulled apart by streaming, it's been
pulled apart by different distribution channels. It's
been pulled apart by the death of attention, it's been
pulled apart by the transition of advertising and
marketing technology, and it's primarily been pulled
apart by the creation of the Internet. The second you could
have an infinite number of channels, and the second that
infinite number of channels was attached to what in the
future will be an AI template in your pocket, which is
currently a template in your pocket. Once that was
attached, once those two things came together from thank
you, Steve Jobs. The explosion that was going to happen was,
was, was, was for the television, a thermonuclear
explosion. Now, don't get me wrong, the physical object
still exists on your wall, sure. But what it meant when jfk.
This is where I mentioned Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves
to Death. Right. Postman didn't want to talk about digital. He didn't,
he didn't care about any of that. His, his whole focus was on what TV
meant for reality. That's why Amusing Ourselves to Death is such an amazing book written
back in 1985. But Postman noted that,
and I'm going to tie the suggestion in a minute, but noted that what TV
meant was images mattered more
than the medium. Right. So the medium
is the message, for sure. Marshall McLuhan, he backed that up.
But both of those things were intricately,
intricately tied together. And so you couldn't
have a sweaty Richard Nixon on TV in 1960. You know,
you had to have JFK pack on the pancake makeup. Sure.
Fast forward to our era. One of the most
notorious changes I've seen in the last two
years is how we have gone from as a culture, at
least on Internet culture, the online culture,
from being very, very positive about
everybody's body to now Ozempic-face.
Right. And we've done that in two years. All of a sudden, body positivity
went out the door because Ozempic is here.
Right, right. And so body positivity wasn't really body positivity.
It was, I don't have a get rich or get
weight loss quick over system so that I can show up as
an image, which is what we have primarily made our mode of
messaging since the rise of television.
I don't have that tool to go to that mode and so I'm going to
be positive and I'm going to shape what the tool says about. Right.
Chesterton, to your point, this is why that
archetype no longer exists. Because of tv, because of the Internet,
and because of Ozempic. That, that, that, that. I don't care
how quippy he is. If he's £300, right. You can't put
that guy, you know, he'll. He won't make it. Yep, he won't make
it. Yeah. And that's a real,
That's a real shame. It's.
In some, in some ways, you know, Hassan, I feel like we're
describing the modern Tower of Babel that is just
building itself higher and higher and eventually is going to come crashing
down. The, The. Because the. I
mean, you know, I guess
your viewers will, Will get, Get the, the idea. I'm not a huge
fan of a lot of modern culture. I just, I
find it horrific, most of it.
And the. To me, what I mourn most is the
death of books. But behind the books has to be the writer,
and behind the writer has to be the culture that produces
the novelist. The idea that the writer was rewarded.
Chesterton was probably rewarded from a young age for
being quippy and for being sharp and for having the bon mot
and for, you know, or however you pronounce it. But I don't
speak French. Amongst my many defects, that's one of
them. And the. But there was a time where that was, you
know, sort of lauded because. But, you know, you mentioned Twitter, so would.
Would the Chesterton of today have been on Twitter? The problem is I
can't distinguish the Chesterton on Twitter from the bot on
Twitter. Right. I could be talking to, To a, you
know, to nothing. And the, the. That just leads to
chaos. I, I don't know. You know, was it, Was it
Chesterton, it just made that witty observation
about Marco Rubio or was it, you know, an AI whose
server is somewhere in Tierra del Fuego? I mean, I
have no idea. So it's, It's. There's a lot about
modern culture that I, you know, it's hard to see.
And maybe this will let me. If you want to lead us back to the
book. It's hard to see the way out
where we go from here to you. Oh, okay. We got to
a, you know, a kind of better place. Um, one last thing.
And I, we do want to get back to the book, but, you know, I
sort of dabble in the side with some writing and,
And I wrote a.
I'M writing a screenplay, a movie screenplay
that is in the 80s. I traveled around a bit. I'm just
going to make this super quick, I promise. But it does tie back. And I
started my travels in Amsterdam, literally landing 1986, no idea
where I was, very little money, one way ticket to speak the language,
you know, and I'm setting the, the opening movie. I'm writing this
actually for my daughter who said, gee, you should write something
because I've been telling her stories of these travels forever.
Yeah. So I'm doing it in the form of a fictionalized movie script. And it
starts off with the fictional me in the travel bureau, which, which was a true.
Actually happened standing there in the travel bureau. And I
won't take you through it except to say, you know, there's a voiceover saying,
okay, I have no money or very little money. I don't, I don't speak the
language. I don't know where I am, I don't know where I'm sleeping that night.
And it was better.
And it was. And, and the, the point of the story is me bumbling
through Europe for eight months, which actually happened.
Right. But nothing bad, you know, Nothing bad. Yeah, it's all
fun. I saw, I met some really interesting people, had some great
times, and that's what I was trying to convey to, to my daughter,
which is, I think it might have been better and I think we may have
created something in the Internet and social media. Parts of it
are great. Like I can look up G.K. Chesterton on Wiki and in five
seconds, you know, learn more about, learn what a clerihew is.
You know, I had no idea 24 hours ago.
And, But
I kind of think the negatives maybe outweigh the positives. I don't, I
don't think you're, I don't think you're alone in thinking that.
Yeah. And, well, I think Chesterton might
have something for us. So back to the book, back to them.
The man who Was Thursday. So we're gonna go into chapter two.
Okay. The Secret of Gabriel Syme in, in
my edition. It's on page 10. I'm gonna go down to
the bottom of it here, and I'm going to go into an
argument that Chesterton was having with,
with a couple of people. And this is where I sort
of began to understand a little, or at least I
thought I began to understand what it is that,
that Chesterton was trying to pull off with,
with this book. So Gabriel Syme is a, is a
detective. I'm going to sort of lay the lay the
groundwork here. He's a detective and he's on
an investigation of an anarchist, an
anarchist named at this point named Gregory,
right? And Gregory presents himself as being
erudite, as being polite, as being formal. You
know, all the things that I said about, you
know, 19th century British culture come
together right in, in, in, in, in Gregory.
And Gregory's trying to explain to Syme after they have a
poetry battle in the first chapter what exactly it is that
this idea of anarchism is about. So I'm going to read a
couple of different sections from here as Gregory's
answers to to Syme on page 10, and I quote, it does seem to
have a moral underneath all its gaiety, assented Sime.
But may I ask you two questions? You need not fear to give me
information, because as you remember, you very wisely
extorted from me a promise not to tell the police. A
promise I shall certainly keep. So is it in mere curiosity
that I make my queries? First of all, what is it really all
about? What is it you object to? You want to abolish
government? To abolish God, said Gregory, opening the
eyes of a fanatic. We do not only we not only want to upset a
few despotisms and police regulations, that sort of
anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the non
conformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish
to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and
virtue, honor and treachery upon which mere rebels base
themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French
Revolution talked of the rights of man. We hate rights as we hate
wrongs. We have abolished right and wrong and right and left, added
Sime with simple eagerness. I hope you will abolish them too. They are
much more troublesome to me. You spoke of a second question, snapped
Gregory. With pleasure, resumed Sime. In your all your present acts
and surroundings there is a scientific attempted secrecy. I have an
aunt lived over a shop, but this is the first time I have found people
living from preference under a public house. You have a heavy
iron door. You cannot pass it without submitting to the humiliation of calling yourself Mr.
Chamberlain. You surround yourself with steel instruments
which make the place, if I may say so, more impressive than homelike. May I
ask why, after taking all this trouble to barricade yourselves in the bowels of the
earth, you then parade your whole secret by talking about anarchism to every
silly woman in Saffron Park? Gregory
smiled. The answer is simple, he said. I told you I
was a serious anarchist. And you do not believe me. Nor do they believe me.
Unless I took them into this infernal room, they would not believe me.
Sime smoked thoughtfully and looked at him with interest. Gregory
went on, Now pause. This is the key piece right here. This is when I
thought, Chesterton, you're onto something. The history of the
thing might amuse you. He said, when I first. When first I became one of
the new anarchists, I tried all kinds of respectable disguises. I
dressed up as a bishop. I read up all about bishops in our anarchist
pamphlets and superstition and a vampire and priests of prey. I
certainly understood from them that bishops are strange and terrible
old men keeping a cruel secret from mankind. I was misinformed when, on
my first appearing in an episcopal gaiters in a drawing room, I cried out
in a voice of thunder, down, down, presumptuous human reason. They
found out in some way that I was not a bishop at all. I was
nabbed at once. Then I made up as a millionaire. But I defended
capital with so much intelligence that a fool could see I was quite poor.
Then I tried being a major. Now I am a humanitarian myself. But
I have, I hope, enough intellectual breadth to understand the position of those who,
like Nietzsche, admire violence,
the proud, mad war of nature and all that, you know.
I threw myself into the major. I drew my sword and waved it about constantly.
I called out blood abstractedly, like a man calling for wine. I often said, let
the weak perish. It is the law. Well, well, it seems
majors don't do this. I was nabbed again. At last I went in despair
to the president of the Central Anarchist Council, who is the greatest man in Europe.
What is his name? Asked Sime. You would not know it said, answered Gregory. That
is his greatness. Caesar and Napoleon put all their genius into being heard
of, and they were heard of. He puts all his genius into not being
heard of, and he is not heard of. But you cannot be for five
minutes in the room with him without feeling that Caesar and Napoleon would have been
children in his hands. He was silent and even pale for a moment and
then resumed. But whenever he gives advice, there's always
something as startling as an epigram and yet as practical as the bank of England.
I said to him, what disguise will hide me from the world? What can I
find more respectable than bishops and majors? He looked at me with his
large but indecipherable face. You want a safe disguise, do
you? You want a dress which will guarantee you harmless. A dress in which no
one would ever look for a bomb. I nodded.
He suddenly lifted his lion's voice. Why
then dress up as an anarchist? You fool. He roared, so that the
room shook. Nobody will ever expect you to do anything
dangerous then. And he turned his broad back on me
without another word. I took his advice and have never
regretted it. I preached blood and murder to those women day and
night. And by God, they would let me wheel
their perambulators.
This hide in plain sight is the. Yes.
This is the crux of the man who was Thursday.
Let's talk about anarchists. Okay. In
the year of our Lord 2026, we proclaim that we have no
anarchists. And yet. And yet, anarchists were a real
problem in the late 19th century and well into the
middle quarter of the 20th century. Their actions
inspired politicians, activists, feminists,
artists, poets, philosophers, the crazy and of
course, the power hungry. The assassination of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand kicked off the first World
War. And the trials of the murderers Leopold and
Loeb. The crime of the century in 1924 further
cemented the ideas, the ideas of burning everything
down, of anarchists into popular culture. The
analogy that we have to draw here is a very simple one.
And anarchists back in the day were what terrorists are to the
postmodern mind now.
Men who have no other desire but to deconstruct or
burn down the world around them. And when I was reading
this book, quote came to me, very famous quote, actually,
from the 2008 film the Dark Knight. And
it's rather instructive here, so I'm going to read the whole quote. This is
where Alfred Pennyworth, played by the great Michael
Caine, and Bruce Wayne, played. Played by
Christian Bale, are watching a video of
this new villain that has shown up in Gotham
City. A man who.
Chesterton would like this. A man who laughs as he burns everything down.
And I quote from Bruce Wayne. Targeting me won't get their money
back. He's talking about mobsters. I knew the mob wouldn't go down
without a fight. But this is different.. They crossed the line,
Alfred Pennyworth. You crossed the line first, sir. You
squeezed them, you hammered them to the point of
desperation. And in their desperation, they turned to a man
they didn't fully understand, Bruce Wayne. Criminals
aren't complicated, Alfred. You just have to figure out
what he's after. Mr. Pennyworth. With all due respect, Mr.
Wayne, perhaps this is a man you don't fully understand either.
A long time ago, I was in Burma. My friends and I were working for
the local government. They were trying to Buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing
them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in
a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So we went
looking for the stones. But in six months, we
never met anybody who traded with him. One day I
saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine.
The bandit had been throwing them away.
Bruce Wayne. So why steal them,
Alfred? And this is the killer line here.
Well, because he thought it was good sport. Because
some men aren't looking for anything logical.
Because some men aren't looking for anything
logical like money. They can't be
bought or bullied, reasoned or
negotiated with some men.
Some men just want to watch the world burn.
Let me ask you a question. Go ahead. Do you think Osama bin Laden
really thought he was going to destroy America
by killing 3,000 people on 9 11?
Or he just wanted to watch those towers burn? I
think Osama bin Laden thought two things and that's a great question.
I think he thought two things just like the Joker or the Dark Knight thought
two things. And I think they are twin tracks upon which the
train of anarchy or terrorism or chaos runs.
The first thing he thought was that the United States was a weak
horse. He actually said this. They always think that.
Always. And, and he didn't care that
history has consistently proven that we
are not. He didn't care about GDP. He didn't
care about military prowess. He didn't
care about any of the on paper reasons why
we're not. He didn't care. He said the
lesson that Osama Bin Laden was seeking to
deliver on one rail of that track was the
same lesson that the Viet Cong taught
everybody back in the 60s and 70s that if you
just culturally outlast the Americans,
they will go home. And that makes them weak.
That's the first thing Osama bin Laden thought. The second
thing Osama Bin Laden thought was that.
And again, because he's a fanatic. This is the fanaticism
he thought. Islam has been around
for 1400 years.
By this point the Americans have only been
around 200 and some odd years. Right?
We're eternal, they're not.
We win at the end of the day. So all we have to do is
play an eternity game with weak willed and cowardly
people and we'll win. And
that's the mistake that the anarchists and the terrorists and the people who
want to watch the world burn always make. Because fanatics
can never understand. They don't have a theory of mind of
other people. They only have a Theory of mind of themselves.
And they project that. Narcissism. Oh, God, yes.
Extreme narcissism. Oh God, yes. And I think it is also often
wrapped up in the artist's personality as well. I mean, everyone knows that
Hitler was a failed artist and that was part of the thing that,
that drove him. You know, Stalin was a failed
theologian. He was, he was in the seminary for a while. The, the,
I guess when you start shooting people, they, they move you out. That's the. They
kind of, they kind of let you go. Maybe this isn't for you. Yeah, the.
But. So the idea that there. But,
but, but I think that that that culture clash or that
that misunderstanding goes both ways and that's, that's what makes that line from that movie
so compelling because I think the civilized person has a great deal
of difficulty understanding someone who
really just wants to rip everything down. The civilization,
fun of it, sometimes the civilized person. And this is what I.
So I turned 21
three weeks after September 11th. And
a lot of guys from my generation, 20 years ago
went to Afghanistan and went to Iraq. I know a
lot of those guys. A lot of those guys are my friends. They went and
they came back and they've told me what they saw when they went.
And on the one hand, we can do the hand wringing thing that we always
do in America about war. Like we're doing it right now as we go around
and around with Iran, we're doing the hand wringing thing again. And
by the way, that's one of the negative lessons that we learned about Vietnam. From
Vietnam, we can always hand wring and scream about a quagmire. I got into an
argument the other day about a guy who's like, this is just going to be
a quagmire. I'm like, we're three days in or we're three weeks in.
I know that's the astonishing thing to me where you
say, well, we're winning in every single way you can win a war.
And it's three weeks and you're already declaring it a
quagmire. And you're already declaring it a quagmire. Number one, there's no boots on the
ground. Ground. Number two, like, even if there are boots, if we do put
boots on the ground, you can't. The conditions for a quagmire don't.
What are you talking about? Because. And we're wandering far from Chesterton here,
I realize, and we will get back. But I think at the back of that
is the. Wouldn't it Be great if it was a quagmire. We
want it to be a quagmire. Boy, that. Or the, or
the, or the fanciful desire that exists on both the political
right and the political left in our country for everything to be
clean and effortless. Yes. And, and, and add to
that also what we were talking about earlier, this bizarre
world we find ourselves in 2024, where we want everything
wrapped up in like an hour long TV show. Well, it's been an
hour, so I think the war should be over. Jack,
Jack Ryan should have gotten the bad guys. He should have all been shot. Didn't.
Yeah, didn't they get the bad guy yet? Yeah, didn't, didn't the black. Yeah, didn't
the black widow like beat up on all the 6 foot 5, 250 pound
dudes with her legs and like, aren't we all done by this point? Like it's,
this is all part and parcel of the ongoing cultural
discussion you and I have been having. And we do want to
get back to Chesterton. But I think, I guess to loop this
back to Chesterton, it's important, I think if people
read this book to realize anarchists in 1908, they were
a real thing. They weren't just people with handlebar
mustaches, sort of, you know, you know, Keystone
Copping their way around the world. They would, you
know, they. By the way, two, two American presidents
were shot by anarchists. One died, one died right away,
McKinley. And who was the other one was Cleveland.
Was it Taft or Cleveland? I think it was Cleveland. It was Cleveland. Cleveland.
And you know, whether was he an anarchist? Like he had an A on his
forehead. I don't know about that. But he, you know, he didn't have a, he
was one of these people who just wanted to rip down.
He didn't have a coherent political
philosophy that said I shoot the president and then good things happen.
Right? No, it was just rip down the world
around you. And there was
a real thing to that. And
I think Chesterton was.
It's easy to see these people as buffoonish today, but you
know, they were really dangerous. They did really dangerous things.
They were, they were, they were dangerous men in those times.
And the spirit of anarchy, which
you'll appreciate this in some, in some form or another, which is the
spirit of Cain, right? From Genesis, you know,
Genesis 5. Right. It's that same spirit. It's a spirit of
envy, it's the spirit of jealousy, it's a spirit of resentment, it's a spirit
of, of Entitlement. Osama bin Laden, to go back to this
example for just a minute, believed he was entitled to the
Islamic empire that he thought he deserved. And if he
didn't have it, he was going to kick down every toy around him. There you
go. Just like the Joker in the Dark Knight believes he's entitled to the
chaos that he foments. He's entitled to that. Another great moment in
movie is when the convicts are on the boat and the Joker, like, gives him
a bomb to, like, blow up the boat with the civilians, or they could blow
up their own boat. And the one convict. And this is sort of the. And
this is where now you get into, like, progressive ideas of humanity
versus actual humanity. You know, the convict on the boat gets up and
takes the, the, you know, the, the explosive device away from the, the
warden or whatever the trigger away from the warden on the boat who's
getting ready to do the thing, right? Blow up the other. Blow up the other
boat. And he's like, I'm gonna do what you should have done 10 minutes ago,
right? And he sits down and he does nothing, right? He gets to be the
hero in that moment, but because he recognizes that
even though I'm a violent criminal, there's certain places I can't even go
to, which is very much a progressive post
20th century. Post, post 20th century. A progressive post
World War II way of looking at the world, it's the.
It's the outcome of the Nuremberg trials. We're the good guys. We put the
bad guys on trial. We don't appeal to God because why would we do that?
Instead, we appeal to a secular morality. Secular morality will
judge you, but it won't provide any
meaning because secular morality is based off of this
reductionist mindset, this materialist, reductionist mindset. And
Chesterton, in talking about Nietzsche, and this is
what I hooked on in that section where he puts the words of
Nietzsche into Gregory's
mouth, the anarchist's mouth. He was drawing
a philosophical line between. Drawing a philosophical line
from nihilism directly to anarchy. If you believe in
nothing, if you believe the Nietzschean lie, then
the only clearing at the end of the path for you is burning
the world down. That's the only clearing. Here's a interesting bit of
trivia I want to lay on you. You might find this
so in the. You mentioned Cain and this made me
think of the Bible. Do you know the, the Bible story? Of course
you do. The Noah Bible story where God comes to Noah and
says the world is filled with lawless Violence, basically think
of it as another term for anarchy and I'm going to send another flood and,
you know, these are the things going to happen. Do you know what the word
in Hebrew is for lawless violence? No,
I don't. Hamas.
The same term that the.
Hamas, the, the Islamic movement. Now, that doesn't mean that
in. That's not why they picked the term. It's an. They're. They,
they came in there in Arabic, it's an acronym that stands for
Islamic Liberation Movement, but it happens to be the exact same
word. Now, if you don't see a little bit of a wow
moment in that, because that word's been around
for three, 500 years.
So there's, there is something going on in the, there's something
we're missing as modern Western folks, but I also think there's
something. Oh, no, no, no. I, I'm going to look that up, but I'm going
to go on this premise. So there's something we're missing as modern
Western folks. And I think guys like Jordan Peterson, Jonathan
Peugeot, there's a certain, there's a certain line of folks that
are trying to draw us back to it. And I think Chesterton was early on
this Jung was kind of in the middle. And now we've got other, other
folks. I already mentioned Peugeot, I mentioned Jordan Peterson
and others even to a certain degree, Lex Fridman, although he's
kind of shaky, but who are trying to bring us back to this thread. And
it's the thread that we keep missing. And the thread is the
thread of the logos, the thread of the word. Right. And so
the word can be used to, obviously to create, but the word can also
be used to, to your point about Hamas, interestingly enough, to
destroy. Words have meaning.
Words have meaning. Yes. And I think that, and
I think this does loop back to, to The Man Who
Was Thursday, I think, ultimately without
God, you know, as you say, you know, the
Nuremberg trials, we're going to punish you
because you violated some secular, you know,
morality that we're kind of inventing in real
time here, you know, as opposed to, you know,
you know, you have broken the, the law of God.
You know, as you point out, you know, the Nazis
could legitimately say, well, you made these
law, our laws said it was fine. Right.
So that's, and that's what Hannah Arendt. So we covered
Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt's reporting on the trial of Adolf
Eichmann in 1965, I believe it was
in, in Jerusalem, right, Where the Mossad Went. They
snatched him from some South American somewhere, Argentina, I think it
was. Yeah, they did snatch a grab, the Mossad did, which is, you know,
what they're notorious for, and. And put him on trial in the
dock in. In Jerusalem. And she
documented exactly what you're talking about. And one of the
points she made, which got her into a lot of trouble with
Holocaust survivors in America. And they. And actually, it's
interesting that the grandsons and granddaughters of Holocaust
survivors still have a problem with Hannah Arendt for bringing this up, but she's not
wrong. There was no appeal made to a
religious violation
or even a moral violation. The only
reason, not the only reason, but the reason why the Eichmann trial was
so interesting is because there was. There was a lot of tap dancing in Jerusalem,
of all places around that moral
violation. And instead we're merely going to punish this man
for the precedent or under the precedent set
at the Nuremberg trials, which is. Oh, you were just following
orders. Well, the orders were immoral. So we're going to punish
you for following immoral orders. You should have known better. And Adolf
Eichmann, and she writes about his psychology in Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Go listen to the episode we did last year. Go read the book. I would
encourage every leader here to read it, but she writes about how when you
look at Eichmann, if you do a psychological profile at Eichmann, he was
just a civil service bureaucrat. Yeah. He came across like a. Like a
mid-level marketing manager. Not. No, no, knock on marketing
managers. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's be very, very, very clear.
Right. Listening to this. Let's be very, very clear. Like,
you know, when I look at Tom Libby, though, you know,
and the light catches him just so. Okay, all right.
I am so kidding. Stop, stop,
stop. Tom. Tom's a good man. Tom doesn't deserve that.
Tom's a great guy. The. The thing with
Eichmann is. And the thing. And by the way, I think this is going to
be a real problem with AI is
you will have orders from nowhere. Right. Orders with
nobody behind them. Right. Because no appeal can be made.
And thus decisions were made, but not by me. That's its
own form of. And I'm going to draw a parallel here.
Bureaucratized anarchy. Sure. And
how do you put AI in jail? How do
you fire AI? How do you solve
AI? How do you. How do you. We're very much consumed
with. How do we prevent AI from getting control of. Name your weapon
here or name your military system here. I'M less concerned about
that. I'm more concerned about how do you.
How do you prevent the human in the loop
from consciously abandoning accountability and responsibility?
Because it's just easier. Because we've
proven it over the last eight years. It's just easier
to sort of say, I was following orders, shrug my
shoulders, and be a mini anarchist myself. And we, by
the way, we have evidence of mini anarchism. We have
mini anarchism in our, in our families, we have mini
anarchism in our communities. We have many
anarchists in our workplaces. You know, we, we have
people who. Without a, a, a, a, a Chesterton's fence
of morality, right. Based on God, which is what
Chesterton would say you need to base it on whether
it's your Catholic conception, your Jewish
conception. He probably wouldn't be in favor of the Islamic
conception, but he would be probably begrudgingly be like, okay, at least it's something. You
have to have a conception of a higher transcendent power that puts a fence around
you. Otherwise, so,
you know, let it go. It's not what I do for a living. Right. I
work on a lot of grants for a lot of different projects. And I'm gonna,
I'm not gonna go into any detail because I
like to say I'm under so many NDAs, I can't even talk in my sleep.
But the. I can tell you that there
are a lot of projects that are currently trying to find their way
through the
how to use AI in a medical context in such a
way that it's not making, say, the ultimate
medical decision, but it kind of is.
Right? So. And you can see it.
You can see it eroding. In the time that I've been doing this, I'm watching
it eroding. There used to be a very fixed line, like it had to come
down to, essentially, is the AI giving you advice
like, gee, that sounds like a cough. Right? So
there's a lot of people have wearables, right? I don't happen to have
them. I have nothing against it. I just don't happen to wear one.
And that wearable is continually transmitting information about
the wearer. And sometimes it will say the, the
information will be, wow, your heart rate seems to be
like 260. That's really high. You might want to go to an
ER, you know, to see what's going. That's unusually
high. Yeah, yeah, that, that's for, for those
listening at home, that's high. Yeah. Yeah. All
right. So if your heart rate is 260 and you're listening to this,
go to the emergency room, turn this off and go directly. Turn
this off and go directly to the er. Right. But so the,
the, in that. And that sort of advice giving, which is generally
okay, and goes down a certain track through the fda, which is a
relatively easy track to get down. And then
there are ones where the, you might say, well, your heart rate
is 260, you should take this pill.
It's a little closer to telling you, giving you
something. And then finally it's not too far from that to
your heart rate is 260. And I can inject this
medication into you and I'm going to do it without you
saying yes or no, or a doctor saying yes or no.
That's doable today. It's not out there to my knowledge anyway,
but it's, you gotta wonder when we'll
cross that line. So
I am watching with trepidation
the development of
the casual acceptance of euthanasia.
Sure, yeah. With growing horror.
And it's one of those areas where
both the Jewish rabbi
and the Christian evangelists should make a common cause.
Because when the
AI is infused
with that sort of ability
to pattern, recognize
ruthlessly to an end
and can then advise humans in what to
do, humans with no
guardrails
are going to follow what the AI
says. And we talk a lot as Christians,
particularly in the last 50 years. We talked a lot
in the bookends of Roe v. Wade. We talked a lot about
abortion and beginning of life issues in this country.
And I believe it is becoming more critical. I
think it will become more critical over the next 25 years to begin
to talk about end of life issues.
What if this person doesn't even realize they're talking to an AI? Right.
And this is going to go directly to suffering. This is going to go
directly to meaning, this is going to go directly to
autonomy and agency. All of these areas
that make us really uncomfortable.
And we don't want to think about it, we don't want to talk publicly about.
And yet we have governments. I'm looking at you, Canada.
I'm looking at you. State of New York. I'm looking at you. Soon to
be Oregon and California. I'm looking directly at you all. Now
we have lawmakers who are saying, well, we'll just
sort of set the guard, set up the rails here and you all can do
it. I'm sure it will be fine. I'm sure it will be fine. And, and
that's just another example of, in my mind, it's just another Example of
anarchy. It's just another example of.
Chesterton opposed anarchy because, yes, anarchy comes
directly from nihilism at a social level. I
think he would also approach or oppose anarchy because
anarchy at a personal level leads
to the deception of autonomy, the deceptive idea that
you are an autonomous being that can make their own choices even out to death.
And it removes at the
smallest level the Tolkien level or even the CS
Lewis level. It removes from individuals the ability to behave
heroically. Why would I behave heroically if I can just
like on Futurama, that great cartoon from Matt Groening, I could just go
into a suicide booth on the street corner and just be gone. I don't think
we're far away from it. I've never watched. Is that term, Is that a thing
in it? Oh, yeah, that was a thing in the cartoon. Yeah. Gray and called
it like, like 15, 20 years ago now. Yeah, that's one of the jokes in
the. That's one of the jokes in that cartoon. You can just. There's suicide booths
on every corner and if you want, you just. You just go, oh, my gosh.
Yeah, oh, dear. Yeah, oh dear. Well, but I mean, we're not
that far away from. We're not that far away from that conception
and being advised and nudged by AI. Right.
Isn't there a booth that you could. I'm not making this up.
That will basically fill with nitrogen gas and kill you.
I think that's. I think someone in suicide, someone in Switzerland died
from that matter. Well, and I'm seeing.
I don't want to go too far down this road, but I'm seeing that it's
just, It's a. It's a concern that I have. It's a growing concern. And when
I read books like the man who Was Thursday,
and then I look at how little we have sort of updated our moral code
in the last 120some odd years,
but we've updated our technology to make us. To help us
do immoral things faster and better. Right,
and where is that morality going to come from? And who is going to speak
up for it? And that, of course, is the role of the apologist. That's. That's
the role of Chesterton is speak up for that morality and,
and, and to. Well, again, I'm going
to bring up William F. Buckley here to stand to thwart history and yell stop.
As loudly as you possibly can.
All right, back to the book. Back to. Back to the book. The man who
Was Thursday. So I'm going to go to chapter five The
Feast of Fear. The Feast of Fear is an interesting little
Bond Mott where Sime goes
to a breakfast, a breakfast of anarchists
that is being held in a restaurant on
a balcony overlooking Leicester Leicester
Square. I'm probably mispronouncing that terribly. And
he sees several archetypes
while he's at this breakfast. And
I want to run through a few of them to
sort of draw a. Draw a parallel.
At one corner of the square they're projected a kind of angle of a prosperous
but quiet hotel, the bulk of which belonged to a street. Behind in the wall
there was one large French window, probably the window of a large coff room. And
outside this window, almost literally overhanging the square, was a formidably buttressed
balcony big enough to contain a dining table. In fact, it did contain a
dining table, or more strictly, a breakfast table. And round the breakfast table,
glowing in the sunlight at evidence to the street, were a group of noisy and
talkative men, all dressed in the insolence of fashion, with
white waistcoats and expensive buttonholes. Some of their jokes can almost
be heard across the square. Then the grave secretary gave his
unnatural smile and saim knew that this boisterous breakfast party was
the secret conclave of the European
dynamiters. Then, as time continued
to stare at them, he saw something that he had not seen before. He had
not seen it literally because it was too large to see.
At the nearest end of the balcony, blocking up a great part of the perspective,
was the back of a great mountain of a man. When Sime had seen him,
his first thought was that the weight of him must break down the balcony of
stone. His vastness did not lie only in the fact that he was abnormally tall
and quite incredibly fat. This man was
planned enormously in his original proportions, like a statue carved
deliberately, as colossal. His head, crowned with white hair, as
seen from behind, looked bigger than a head ought to be.
The ears that stood out from look larger than human ears.
He was enlarged terribly to scale, and the sense of size
was so staggering that when Symes saw him, all the other figures seemed
quite suddenly to dwindle and become dwarfish. They were still
sitting there as before, with their flowers and frock coats. But now it looked as
if the big man was entertaining five children to tea.
Simon never thought of asking whether the monstrous man who almost filled and broke the
balcony was the great president of whom the others stood in awe. He knew it
was so with an unaccountable measure, with an unaccountable but
instantaneous certainty. Simon Dean was one of those men who were open to all
the more nameless psychological influences In a degree a little dangerous to mental
health. Utterly devoid of fear and physical dangers, he was a great
deal too sensitive to the smell of spiritual evil.
Twice already that night, little unmeaning things had peeped out at him almost
pruriently and given him a sense of drawing nearer and nearer to the headquarters of
hell. And this sense became overpowering as
he drew nearer to the great president.
Then I'm going to skip down here for just a second. In the presence of
the president, the whole company looked sufficiently commonplace. Nothing about them caught the eye
at first, except that by the President's caprice they had been dressed up with a
festive respectability which gave the meal the look of a wedding breakfast.
One man indeed stood out at even a superficial glance. He, at least,
was the common or garden dynamiter. He wore indeed the
high white collar and satin tie that were the uniform of the occasion. But out
of this collar there sprang a head quite unmanageable and quite unmistakable,
a bewildering bush of brown hair and a beard
that almost obscured the eyes like those of a sky terrier. But the eyes
did look out of the tangle, and they were the sad eyes of some Russian
serf. The effect of this figure was not terribly like that of the president, but
it had every diableri that can come from the utterly grotesque.
If out of that stiff tie and collar there had come abruptly the head of
a cat or dog, it could not have been a
more idiotic contrast.
And he goes through every single one of the dynamiters
and describes their physicality. And there's a. There's a link
that Chesterton is making here from physicality and physical
structure all the way into respectability.
And this is an interesting point because
Chesterton was a classicist, just like every great Englishman was
of his era. And we as Americans in the 21st
century claim that we do not see class, claim
that we do not acknowledge class, and yet we are all classicists
to one level or another. Yeah, sure,
Bill Gates runs around wearing a grandpa sweater and, you know,
chino slacks, right? But no one's going to mistake
him for being your grandpa wearing chino slacks.
And with that being said, the great thing of
America, the great thing that we can construct on, I think, is that
everybody here wants to be middle class, but no one in
Chesterton time wanted to be. Everyone wanted to be upper
class. And that is where anarchists hid. They
hid in the upper classes, which, of
course, Chesterton's making. Did they hide there or did the upper classes produce them?
Well, I think Chesterton's offering the question. I think
he's, he's, he's, he's asserting a problem with
class and money. And that's the chicken or the
egg question that he doesn't know the answer to. I mean, you look
at the Bolsheviks, right? A lot of them were intellectual
bourgeoisie types. They were not the proletariat. Correct.
Yeah. There's. Do you know the Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll? Did you ever read
that? Yeah, they made it into a movie. There's a great line in that somewhere
where Jim Carroll, for like five seconds thinks he's a
communist. And he comes to his father and he says, I'm a proletariat. And the
father says, I'm the proletariat. And he goes, and I think those guys
are crazy. He goes, let me tell you who the
proletariat is. This guy right here. This guy right here.
So I think that partially what produces your anarchists
and to a certain extent your terrorists, you know, I'm thinking maybe a little bit
about like Patty Hearst here is privilege in a way, because
material stuff is boring. In the end, you get bored. You
know, it's. There's only so much TV you can watch. There's only so many,
you know, I guess, you know,
great, you know, cars you can drive and
so on and so forth. And there's a hollowness at the
center of it. And I think people seek to
fill that hollowness. I think this is one of the. I know we keep getting
dragged back to the modern world. We're trying to go back to 1908, but one
of the horrible things about the modern world is people are filled with
entertainment all the time and they're bored silly, you know, and
they're looking, they almost don't know anymore what it is
to feel anything. And so they go to these ridiculous
extremes, like, I'm going to blow something up just because it
sort of, you know, I'm gonna feel something when I do it. And.
But even back in the beginning of the 20th century, you
tended to find, you know, your anarchists and
your revolutionaries and your bomb throwers kind of among
the upper classes and.
But you're bang on about America today. I mean, I don't think anybody
really wants to be, except for a very few
wants to be. No. You know, I like to say the, the, the goal is
rich, not famous. Right. You don't want to be known. Right. The edge of the
Internet. I think Fame is a curse. So,
yeah, yeah, I think you're onto something there.
And, you know, said on a podcast, everyone. Everyone. Yeah,
that's right. Yeah. Well, so, well,
there's fame and then there's. There's influence, right? That's, that's,
that's the distinction with the difference, right? So I'm not
podcasting to be an influencer. I'm not even podcasting to be famous. I'm
podcasting because I like having interesting conversations with people and
having other people listen in on those and get some insights and move on with
the rest of their lives. That's why we're here.
I think that. And it's interesting when you talk about anything
that's an ism or an ist, a theory or an idea
that always captures people with enough
wealth to be comfortable. So the example that proves the
rule is Virginia Woolf, right? Virginia Woolf was wealthy enough
to be a feminist and to complain
and to deconstruct and all of that.
And of course, she was wealthy enough to resist attempts to improve
her talent and resist critiques of her talent.
And, and you can see sort of
not really an archetype, but the beginning of the archetype of the Virginia
Woolf feminist in Ford Maddox Ford's
parades end, right? And he ran
into a lot of those folks. So did Hemingway, by the way. A
lot of those people, right. And so that
specific type that you're talking about, even today in our era,
resists critique, resists correction, and
has enough money to be able to. Rob Henderson talks about this. The
great blogger and good writer talks about
luxury beliefs. They have enough money to be able to
adopt these beliefs of how the world. You can believe
crazy things, Right? Because you never experience the consequences of the crazy
things. The problem is, and this is what Chesterton objects to
in the anarchists, is that the average
people don't have the protections that you have based on your
wealth. And so what happens when you throw a bomb is an
average person gets blown up. So going back to just one more time,
Osama bin Laden came from wealth, right?
Not a surprise. Not a surprise. Crazy wealth.
Yeah, crazy wealth, right? Most of
the folks. And of course, wealth is, Is, Is proximal, right? Most
of the folks who are, quite frankly, the true believers in
Hamas or any other anarchist movement,
those people have enough money to survive. And
they're not living in Gaza, by the way. They're living in Qatar.
Yeah. So there was, There was something about this,
and I can't go searching through the book right now, but he was talking about
exactly that, that Chesterton was where essentially,
you know, the, the people that pay the price for these. He didn't call them
luxury beliefs, but is the average. Is the. The average
person. Right. I'll find it. Maybe if I don't find it here
while we're talking, I'll find it later and I'll send it to you. But
I, you know, you also see this quite a bit in, in, you
know, the terrorist groups of the. The 60s and 70s, which were
before your time. But, but, you know, I was scared of every time I got
on an airplane, even as a kid. Right. They were.
The interesting things is they all started off as sort of some kind of
national or some, what they would say social justice or national
justice movement. And they all ended up being criminal gangs in the end.
Chesterton talks about this at some point that it just becomes. It just
becomes mere criminality in the end. You know, the
IRA started on what. I'm not versed enough in
the politics of England and Ireland to say whether they were just or
not just. I'm not, I'm not the person to, To. To get
into all that. But I think by the end it was more like,
well, we need money, so let's go rob a bank, you know, as opposed to,
you know, that bank is. We're robbing that bank because it's, you
know, the bank of England or, you know, something. Something like that.
It's in here somewhere. I saw it and I meant to mark it, and of
course I didn't. That's okay. You'll search the book. As I bring up
an additional sort of example to back this up. Frank Miller,
who was the comic book writer back in the 1980s and artist,
he did a bunch of work on Daredevil. He also resurrected Batman
in the 80s, which eventually became the Batman that we now know as
Batman, the grim, gritty Batman. That was Frank Miller's
contribution to the mythos. But. Oh, yeah,
but in the Dark Knight Returns,
Frank Miller talks about, or he sets up a scene right, in that.
In that graphic novel where Superman is
reflecting, by the way, Superman is a government agent fully, completely
co opted by the US Government. But, but Superman
is reflecting. Clark Kent is reflecting on the.
The subcommittee hearings that were held about superheroes, right, that
eventually stripped all the superheroes of their identity, right? And they
called up Bruce Wayne, right? And as
Superman thinks in, in retrospect, you know, Bruce
sat up there, as Bruce Wayne would do, and the
senators asked him, you know, what's the difference between you and a
criminal? And I'M paraphrasing this. You can go find it. The Dark Knight Returns. It's
a great little sequence. And Superman thinks Bruce laughed his
scary laugh like he always does. And Bruce said, senator,
we've always been criminals. Like we're never
not. And then he walked out of that Senate subcommittee. And he could
have made all the moms and the kids happy, but that Bruce wasn't going to
do that. And then he got into his race car. The right thing to say,
or the. Or what they wanted to hear. Right? That's right. And Bruce got into
his race car and drove away. Right.
And that's the fundamental difference between. And this is what we.
In the Dark Knight quote that I brought forward. Right. If
you're going to go battle with anarchists, if you're going to go
battle with demons. Right. If you're going. To. Let's
go on Nietzsche for just a minute. If you're going to stare into the abyss
and allow the abyss to stare back through you, if you're going to actually do
that, not philosophically, but practically, well,
you have to get down in the dirt with these people. And again,
this is where, as when I'm thinking about the dark side of leadership,
and I guess maybe that's the sub. The subtext of this episode today,
Chesterton understood what the dark side of that was and what that
actually meant, as anybody does who understands what good
is. So in order to understand good, you have to understand
evil and you have to be willing to accept what evil is. And I think
a lot of people in our time play footsie with evil,
just like the Germans played footsie with the Russians about oil and natural gas for
years and years. And they were somehow magically shocked that Vladimir Putin invaded
Ukraine and their. Their natural gas supply got cut off. You were playing
footsie with him for 15 years. What did you. Who did you think you were
dealing with? Like, what are we talking about? But average people
don't. They're unwilling to accept
that there's that level of depravity
inside of people. And then here's the other thing they are
unwilling to accept. And maybe they should be unwilling to accept. I'm not saying
average people have to go this far, but you have to
be. You have to be willing to accept what it is that
it takes to actually root out that depravity. Right. And
we're under this, our impression in the west that good will win because
it's so easy on tv. The good guys always win. Yeah. That
it's really costless and Bloodless and doesn't involve actual
sacrifice. And that, you know, it's. It's.
It's quite astonishing. And in some ways, you could almost argue that that is
the way that we are being attacked
is essentially our own values used
to just do Jiu Jitsu us on us in a way.
Right. And it's. Yeah,
it's. It's the. The. I. I have. I have one.
One political maxim that, that, that I, I kind of
keep to, you know, in the back of my mind at all times. And it
goes like this. If someone says they want to kill you, believe them.
Right? Yeah. Right. It's very simple. They do want to kill you. They do
want to kill you. Yeah. Let me kill you. That's right. Yeah, they do. They're
not just expressing some cultural difference. No.
They want you dead. They want you dead. They want you dead. Yeah. And
actually, I, I have a very. I agree with that political
maxim and. And not only. And I go a step further.
Okay, well, I'll accommodate you, but I'm not gonna. Gonna
just. And it's interesting that you brought up Jiu Jitsu. I do Jiu Jitsu, Right.
We're doing Jiu Jitsu for many years. And one of the two
principles that's sort of involved in that hobby, such as it
was, were because I don't compete professionally. I have zero interest in doing that.
I like. I like challenging the professionals and giving them fits,
but I don't feel like it needs to go compete myself.
But what you find out in. I
learned a lot of lessons in Jiu Jitsu, and I always talk about at least
once on the show every episode because it's so. Been so impactful
and here we are. But you have to get
in close, and the enemy gets a vote.
And if you're afraid to. If you're afraid to get in close, and if you're
afraid that if you want it to all work out optimally
for yourself, you're foolish. Yeah. You're just
foolish. Right. So, like, I'll see.
This drives my wife crazy, but people will talk about.
And we talk about this in my Jiu Jitsu gym, but, like, my wife will
be like, oh, well, you know, this person over here, da, da, da, da, or
whatever, that person over there not. Could you take them? She doesn't ask you that
kind of way, but she's like, well, if things happen, like, what are you going
to do? Like, it doesn't. It doesn't matter. I'm not. I'm not worried
about what they are going to do. I'm not worried about the 250 pound guy
who's like 2% body fat. I'm not worried about what he's going to do. I'm
worried about what I'm going to do in that situation because he's going to get
a vote. That, by the way, in, in one of the things I love
about. I mean, you and I both love basketball, right? Yeah. In the NBA, I
think when an NBA player is playing at the top of his game, I don't
think he even sees the defense. Oh, I don't think he
doesn't matter what they're doing. No, it doesn't matter. It's. It's almost
part of the. And this is kind of like a less, you know, it's not,
you're not, you know, try to kill the other person. You're just trying to beat
them. But the. I think that's one of the most amazing
things when you see players get into that zone where I
don't think they're even seeing the other, other team. I don't even care,
you know. Right. It's called the. Right. It's called the.
I heard this term used. I think I'm using it correctly. Or it's called the
zone of proximal development. Right. Where, where.
Or, or I call it, I call it the flow zone. Right,
Right. So if I'm going with somebody and I'm not thinking and things are just
going,
Yeah. Oh, he just like made this thing suck for me on this joint. Well,
it doesn't matter because I'm going to do this thing over to here. Like I'm
thinking of. I was just in a role a few days ago. It is a
small anecdote. Just enrolled a few days ago with somebody who's significantly smaller than
me and female, but she's of a higher rank, so she's a real problem to
deal with. And so all of the natural things that I
would do, the natural advantages that I would have of size, of weight,
of speed or whatever, I have to put all those, I have to put all
those. I do have to put all those aside because otherwise it's not going to
be competitive for her. Right. And so we're going. And she did. She put this,
like, she put this. It doesn't matter what it's called. It's called a baseball choke.
But she put this choke on me and I'm watching this happen in real
time. Like I watched her put the hand in. I watched her sink it and
she's like trying to sink it and trying to sink it and try to sink
it. I'm thinking, well, this currently
sucks, but I could go over there
on that side of her. Right. So all I have to do is just survive
this amount of suck here to get to the other
side over there. Let me work my way over there.
I know. We're ripping all over the place. Yeah, we are ripping all over the
place. Do you want. Do you ever watch Seinfeld? Do you ever see the one?
Oh, my gosh. I am the biggest fan of Seinfeld ever. And yes,
I know. During the karate with the little children.
Children. He goes, jerry,
you. Jerry, fight the belt. You fight the belts.
I know. I love that episode. Oh, my gosh. It was so good. Oh, my
gosh. Yeah. And it's interesting. So, like, when he was doing that, when.
When that episode came on, I was actually involved in
taekwondo at the time. So I was. I was. I was. And oh, my God,
that got passed around. Oh, my God, that episode got passed around our gym. It
was ridiculous. It's a classic. Absolute classic.
I'm going to pull this back to Chesterton, because I know that's where you want
to go. What do you think Chesterton would have thought of the Batman
Chronicles?
I think Chesterton would have been disappointed because
for as much as the
conceptual ideas that we've weighed on Batman
put on Batman, the ways in which they work to defeat
nihilism, they aren't Christian. At the end of the
day. They're not. They don't. They don't uphold a Christian
ethic. They uphold strength. They uphold brutality.
Christian superhero. I think the closest that
you get. And you're asking, I'm a comic book guy. I've been a comic
book guy for a long, long time. Yeah, yeah, me too. I mean. Yeah,
yeah. Way back. I think the closest you get is Superman. And
the joke about Superman is it's. It's a Jesus archetype made by two Jewish
kids from Cleveland. That's right. Yeah. So.
But does. Does. Has there ever been a superhero that, like, professed
a belief in God? What about the. So
this was a little after my time, but wasn't there the watch.
Wasn't there, the Watcher? Wasn't he sort of godlike in his sort of, like, ability
to. Yes. So you're talking about Iwatu and the Watchers in.
In Marvel Comics. Yeah,
kind of. But comics have always been partially
because of the Jewish influence in comics. Partially. But also
partially because you're attracting artists and
creatives who tend to Be more anarchic. Not
religious types. Not religious types. Right. So they tend to shy away
from that. Also,
I think that if you have
a character and again, the closest that you get is truth, justice in the
American way with Superman, that's the closest you're going to get in
our denater time. That's the closest you're going to get. I feel like there's a
hole there that could be filled by someone who
wanted to create a character. Well, the challenges
in our time at the business level,
comic books don't make any money now. They just don't. They're. They're.
They're. What do you call it? They're either side things or they're part of a
side business or if you have them as an independent. And there are tons of
independent creators that are still making comics and digital, but digital
distribution, sort of. Not sort of digital distribution,
destroyed the comic book model basically. Then
you have the dynamic of bad artists. So we went
through in the mid 2000s when I jumped out of comics,
you could see art changing. So Marvel Comics,
once they got acquired by Disney, actually even before that, they
stopped accepting submissions from independent artists. So there was a
time in the 90s and I submitted to Marvel where if you were a good
enough artist, you could submit to Marvel and get picked up off the street. You
didn't have to go to a convention. You just sent in your samples.
I think was. Tom Brute was the editor in chief at the time of that.
Of that outfit. And you. You would have somebody look at your
samples, they would call back. They would just like if you submitted a
manuscript in writing. So they had gatekeepers, you could submit. And I
knew guys who submitted. There was a guy who worked at a printing company across
the street from me who I went and did some. Some art classes with him
and he taught me some stuff about drawing. He submitted to Marvel Comics, I don't
remember if he ever got accepted or not, but Marvel dc, then you had Image
came along, you know, Jim Lee, Mark Silvestri, Todd to Todd
McFarlane and Rob Liefeld, all those boys all came along and blew up
sort of the. The big two idea. But those guys
were all genuine artists. They had genuine chops. Even
Rob Liefeld, who I didn't particularly care for. I did not particularly care for his
art style compared to what happened in the mid-2000s with art
in comics. He was a frickin. He was a stud
that all collapsed, which allowed manga and
other influences to come into Western comic art.
And that just is totally manga. And the collapse of the
distribution system have totally ruined American comics. And then you have
a third factor in there, which is the Disney vacation of everything. So the second
Marvel sold to Disney,
all of their properties fell underneath the
mouse house. And no one in the mouse house. No
one is talking about God. No one.
Because why would they. They can, they could, they could do a theme park
without God, which is the whole point, by the way. Everything supports the theme parks,
which is what people don't really realize. Yeah. You do a billion dollar Avengers movies,
but you sell far more tickets to the, to the theme parks. The theme parks
are what drive that business. It's
amazing. Yeah. Still, I wonder if there's not
a. Not a niche there for someone. But the.
Because the
struggle of the religious
man seems. Or woman. I didn't mean to make it just
about men seems
really. Well, it seems like
fertile ground for a superhero. Right. Who struggle with,
you know, their. The morality of. First
of all, there's the, the struggle. You know, one of the things I always liked
about like X Men, for example, is, you know, just being different. Right. You're
just. It's sort of like you're the. You're the. Well, it went back to
every kid in high school who was like different. Right. And you
know, and then you say, well, what if you took that kid which is. Gave
him superpowers? I'm sure he would be fine.
I know what I would have done. Yeah. And that's. And that's
the Peter Parker Spider man. Much ass would have been kicked.
Absolutely. Absolutely. That's right. Well,
that's the, that's the Peter Parker Spider man archetype that Steve Ditko
and. And Jack Kirby and Stan Lee came up with
actually where Steve Ditko the Jack Kirby. But I mean,
I think you're right. I think there is a hole in the market there.
I don't know how you fill it. I don't know if comic books are the
correct plug for that hole.
Partially because to your point.
Well, not even to your point. I don't know if it's the correct plug
to fit that hole because I'm not quite sure sure that
there's a market there anymore among
individuals who are, who are in the, in the.
In the formative years where comics work.
So the formative years were like. My father gave me my first comic book when
I was. I never talked about this on the show before. You seen enough? Huh?
Or some odd episodes. I never talked about this before. Might as well talk about
it now. But. But my father Gave me my first comic when
I was eight years old.
Seven. Eight years old. It was a. It was a Spider man. I can't remember
which number. I'm sure it was illustrated by Todd McFarlane. I'm sure it was.
Or one of the guys that came in pre Todd McFarlane into the marvel. I
wish I had a copy of that freaking comic book. It'd be worth tons now.
But that was the first comic book that I ever got,
and I can tell you, I'm a Gen
Xer. So we were the last
generation that really experienced comic book culture as a
subculture of nerds and geeks and people
who, like, were doing something that was way off. Right,
exactly. Doing things that was way off. Those who are listening, I'm holding up my
hand as a proud member of the. The nerd and geek club. The Nerd and
Geek club, exactly. And what we saw in our generation,
in our 20s, our late teens and 20s, was the switchover over
and more women started coming in. Popular culture started coming in.
You know, I, I don't go to conventions, but
you see the cosplaying at conventions and more
and more normal people are showing up. And then of course, again, Marvel
gets Disney and starts putting out good movies. And
by good, I mean not the kind of trash you would have seen in the
80s. You actually started to put together movies that can actually be released. Like
the first time I saw Captain America and the first time I
watched Iron man, that first, like Marvel phase one movies, I thought,
holy hell, they're actually going to pull it off. They're actually going to do it.
Now the challenge is they actually did do it. And then of course, they drained
all the water out of the pool, because that's what you do with your Disney.
Sure, but, but with all of that,
I thought, I thought comics would at least run parallel to that. Nope,
it's all dead. So. So the formative years now of folks
are formed by the myths in the movies. Not the myths in
a 32 page or 16 page or 22 page flimsy
magazine. Plus, if you don't have distribution, how
are you going to get them into people's hands? Because part of the joy of
comics is you could go to the grocery and you experience this. You could go
to the drugstore, you could go to the grocery store. They were in the back
of the magazine rack. You didn't have dedicated shops. Like when I was a kid,
I had dedicated shops. I was part of that revolution. The shops are almost
all gone. Like, there's no dedicated Comic book. There's none. But there's
very few dedicated comic book shops still around that are actually
doing business and surviving. So it's like record
shops. I mean, there's a few around, and you hear people going
back to vinyl, but it's. It's a. It's a. It's. It's. It's
the crazy few. It's not. Yeah, well, vinyl sales crossed
a billion dollars a couple of weeks ago. Are you kidding me? I'm
kidding. That is good news, man. I love the idea of vinyl
coming up, because the commonality between those things was this. There was a
culture of it, right? You and I, if we had known each other as kids,
would have been sitting over comic books going, oh, man, look, you know, look at
this. Right? And the same thing with. With. With records, you would
listen to the records as with your friends,
you know, and, you know, for example, in this room
I'm sitting in, you don't do that anymore. In this room I'm sitting in are
three sets of headphones. You have headphones on your head. Right? Okay. I
will listen to music later by myself, you know,
and. But it used to be a very communal experience,
and you all sat. And the record itself, the
vinyl record and the sleeve that it came in was part of that
really cool experience. You know, I think you and I have talked about this before,
so we don't have to go too deeply into it. But, I mean, you know,
I remember sitting around the Sgt. Peppers album and going,
why is George's hand pointing to that particular piece
of text on the back where they printed the lyrics? You know, why is Paul
the one turned around? You know? You know, you debated all these things
endlessly, and there was. There was. There was a lot of. Lot of
friendship, and
I want to avoid the word culture, but it keeps coming. That came out of
it, and now it's all been sort of swept away.
But I'm really. I wonder maybe if some of it is
coming back. When you say that vinyl sales passed a billion dollars, maybe that's
a harbinger of good things to come. So
let's wrap up this episode. This is. Okay. All right, man. It was Thursday.
GK Chesterton, I'm going to ask you a couple questions here, Neil.
I think that. But I will say that. No, but I will say this. I'll
start my closing comments with this idea. I want to piggyback off of what you
just said. Sure. So one of the
very reason. One of the reasons I do this podcast for many reasons,
but a Big reason is I believe in the subversive
power of books. And
comic books are subversive. Don't get me wrong. So are kids, cartoons.
Oh, my God, the suppressiveness. And Looney Tunes is unbelievable. But.
But books at the end of the day travel across
time to people, right? So I read a book now
at. In my late 40s. That book travels across
time on my shelf with an idea in it. And
my kid, who's my youngest kid, who's now nine, 30 years from now, picks up
that book and he gets a totally different set of ideas, but it's still there.
The book is the most subversive document we've got.
And you talk about culture. Books, vinyl records,
and then the digital and podcasts, they become this
thing that connects people. Because at the end of the day,
we need mediums
to get across messages of restoration and
messages of rebuilding. And these subversive mediums
can do that, particularly if the dominant culture. To our point, on our show today,
this has been a running theme, particularly if our dominant culture is denatured
or has been deconstructed by people who
followed the logic of anarchism and now are done with it.
I think anarchism is a spent force. That doesn't mean that I don't think the
spirit is still there. That'll always be there. It's part of the human condition.
But I think the. I think the support
for it and the ideas of it are beginning a downward. A
downward spiral. And what is coming up, what is
ascending is rebuilding and restoration because we've
deconstructed enough. And that's one of the other reasons why I do this show. Because
we've deconstructed enough, we have to know how to build now. We have to figure
it out. Right. I love that
concept of ideas traveling through time. Oh,
and the book is. The book is the best technology we've ever created to have
that happen, it's genius.
So in the spirit of that, if my grandchild
20 years from now is listening to this podcast.
Go to sleep. Go to sleep. Go to sleep. And read the
Lord of the Rings. And read the Lord of the Rings. That's right. Yes, that's
right. Not in that order.
Not in that order. What
should leaders, business leaders, civic leaders,
leaders who have managed to get to the end of the podcast with us, this
part here, you know, our wanderings.
What should they take from the man who was Thursday? What's the big lesson
to take from that? What can they apply to their leadership lives?
Oh, dear. I have to Answer this. Oh, yes. So this is, this is your,
this is, this is the penultimate question for the guest.
So I think you asked me this last time and I did never, never despair.
Right. Yeah, was my answer. That's, that's the message of, of the Lord of
the Rings. The message to me. And
I don't know if this will help a, you know,
a business leader deciding, you know, what to invest in next week or anything like
that, but generally is without God
there is only anarchy. And the, I think
Chesterton presented that in
a fun, I think he was having
fun in the man who Was Thursday. I
don't think he meant it to be taken all completely seriously,
but that things fall apart
quickly once you get away from, from God.
And you know, I'm not trying to offer that up
as business advice. I think that that's, but
you know, a good business is, is like a,
it's like a well lived life. You know, you, you want to
have a purpose and you want it to adhere to certain
rules. And I think ultimately
if you look for what
rules, you know, you're trying to make your business or
your life adhere to, I think.
Whatever your conception of God might be, I think looking there is your best, first
place to start, to start looking. I think as we were saying earlier,
you know, I said this to my daughter the other day and I realized it's
a long answer to your short question. But you know, if
you look to the Internet to find your morality
or your, your sense of right and wrong or even whether you should
invest in Tesla or not invest in Tesla, heaven
help you, man, because there is only anarchy out
there. You're not going to get your answer because it's,
because there's, that's the howling winds of chaos.
So you have to have that internal sense of,
you know, again, I'm trying to, I'm answering your question
in real time, so forgive me if I'm going on a bit, but you know,
one of the things that we have in business, for example, you and I have
this, my wife and I talk about this a lot, which is you're always,
you're hiring people, you're firing people, you're, you're, you're constantly, of course, it's,
it's really all about people in the end. And ultimately
usually when you're making a decision about a person, you're basing that
on kind of, I mean, yes, you can have the resume in
front of you and yes, you can say, oh, they went to 15 Ivy League
schools and they did this and they did that. But
ultimately it's really a gut decision really with people. And
there's, you know, there's something, what I, what I call basically your
spider sense, right, which basically says,
do I want to be in business with this person? And
most of. There's a few instances where I did not follow
that advice and I came to regret it. And off camera sometime
I will tell you that that's true from many years ago. So it's
nothing recent, nothing recent at all, decades back.
But there are many times where I did follow that advice and I found
generally it always, it always worked. But you know,
what we call spider sense or I
just had a feeling about someone I think is another way of
expressing something about their
really that there was something you had in common with them
that resonated. And
if you want to put a religious interpretation
on that, I don't think that's so
excellent. There you go, my friend. That's the best I can come up with.
That's. No, that's actually, that's actually very, very good. No, that's. That's
actually very, very good. I usually let the guest the have
the last word on that. So I want to thank Neil for
coming on our show today and talking with us about the man who Was Thursday
by GK Chesterton. Go out and pick up that book and come to your
own conclusions. And with that, well, we're
out.