My name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the Leadership Lessons from
the Great Books podcast, episode number one
forty nine.
Mental illness, shame, alcoholism, and the
utility or the lack of utility of psychiatry and the endless
self-loathing that wealth creates were all themes we
addressed with Libby Unger in the last episode of the
podcast that also focused on the book that we're going to be talking about
today. However, in this episode, we're going to be
going in a little bit of a different direction. We're going to
explore more this idea of a generation that is lost, which is
now so much a part of the background of our understanding of the post
World War one, pre Great Depression world that we don't really critically
examine the undercurrents that led to such a
loss. Sure. There was a war, and we talked a
lot about that with Libby. We talked about World War one and PTSD.
But there was even more so a move in the
zeitgeist, a move in the cultural landscape
from a concentration on the development of moral character
to a cynicism fully born and mature in our own era, one
hundred years later, about the nature of institutions and the level of
their trustworthiness in the West overall and in America
in particular. Today, on this episode of the podcast, we
will be recommending that we will come into what it is that leaders can
do in times of cynical change, fatalistic opportunism,
and endless cultural slop, through insights
provided us via Tinder is the Night
by F Scott Fitzgerald.
Leaders, we have looked at the society that has messed up and are found ourselves
wanting. So what do we do
now? And, of course, joining us
on our journey today through this book, we had
Libby Unger on in the last episode. And, of course, this is part of our
new format where we do the same book but with a different,
different, guest cohost or a different cohost, for at least
a couple of episodes. And so today, we will be joined by our usual partner
in crime, Tom Libby. How are you doing, Tom?
You know, the sun popped up this morning. My eyes
opened. It's It's a good day. That's that's about the that's about the gist
of it, these last couple of weeks. This is the low bar to jump over.
Right? Exactly. Exactly. No. No. I I'm I'm doing
I'm doing very well. Doing very well. We were we were just talking about this
before I hit the record button, and,
it's been an invigorating last couple of months in 2025.
So For sure. Yeah.
So we're gonna take a look at, Tender is the Night. The I'm
going to pick up from the book, of course. We're gonna kinda go a
little bit into it, just to start off. And
today, what I'm going to do rather than sort of reading straight through is I'm
going to pick out certain selections and, have,
Tom comment on them. And we're gonna talk around them and
some of the themes that are that are, buried in,
in these in these sections. And one of the big ones is this idea
of a party, right, particularly in a lost generation context. And
so gonna pick up a chapter 18 of Tender is the Ninth.
And, and I quote, all the divers
were honestly apathetic to organized fashion. They were
nevertheless too acute to abandon its contemporary contemporaneous
rhythm and beat. Diggs' parties were all concerned
with excitement, and a chance breath of fresh night air was the
more precious for being experienced in the intervals of the excitement.
The party that night moved at the speed of a slapstick comedy. They
were 12. They were 16. They were quartets in separate motors bound on a
quick odyssey over Paris. Everything had been foreseen. People
joined them as if by magic, accompanied them as specialists, almost
guides through a phase of the evening, dropped out, and were
succeeded by other people so that it appeared as if the freshness of each one
had been husbanded for them all day. Rosemary
appreciated how different it was from any party in Hollywood no matter how splendid in
scale. There was, among many diversions, the car of the Shah of
Persia, where Dick had commandeered this vehicle, what
bribery was employed. These were facts of irrelevance.
Rosemary accepted it as merely a new facet of the fabulous, which for two years
had filled her life. The car had been built on a special chassis in America.
Its wheels were silver, so was the radiator. The inside of the body was
inlaid with innumerable brilliance, which would be replaced with true
gems by the court jeweler when the car arrived in Tehran the following
week. There was only one real seat in the back because
the Shah must ride alone, so they took turns riding in it and
sitting on the Marten fir that covered the floor. By the way,
just a side note, the Shah rode alone and so does
the Ayatollah, who's currently running
Iran. He rides alone too.
Back to the book. But always there was dick. Rosemary
assured the image of her mother ever carried with her that never, never had she
known anyone so nice, so thoroughly nice as Dick was that
night. She compared it with the two Englishmen whom Abe or
Abe addressed conscientiously as major Hengset and mister
Horsa, And with the heir to a Scandinavian throne and the novelist just back from
Russia and with Abe who was desperate and witty and with,
Colias Clay who joined them somewhere and stayed along and felt there was no
comparison, the enthusiasm, the selflessness behind the whole performance
ravished her. The technique of moving many varied types, each as
immobile, as dependent on supplies of attention as an infantry battalion, as
dependent on rations appeared so effortless that he still had pieces
of his own most personal self for everyone.
Then we go into the we go into the, the party, and, I
wanna pick up this piece here. Then Dick
came up to Rosemary. Nicole and I are going home, and we thought you'd wanna
go with us. Her face was pale with fatigue and the false dawn,
two one dark spots on her cheek marked where the color was by day.
I can't, she said. I promise Mary North to stay along with them or Abe
will never go to bed. Maybe you could do something. Don't you know
anything about people? Or don't you know you can't do anything
about people? He advised her. If a was my roommate in college,
tight for the first time, it'd be different. Now there's nothing to do.
Well, I've got to stay. He says he'll go to bed if we only come
to the Hales with him, she said almost defiantly.
He kissed the inside of her elbow quickly. Don't let Rosemary go home
alone. Nicole called to Mary as they left. We feel responsible
to her mother. Now there's a couple of
different things that are enveloped in that little piece
there about the party that, Nicole and Dick
Divers, the titular characters of Tender is the Night, are
holding in order to impress Rosemary, the
ingenue Hollywood Starlet, starring in
Daddy's Little Girl in 1920 and just going to Europe for
the first time. And it kind of opens up the door to talking about some
of the things that we're going to talk about today, starting with, which we have
not really focused on with this book, F. Scott Fitzgerald's
experiences as a Hollywood
Screenwriter. So I mentioned this
in the episode with Libby, but it bears repeating again. Hollywood in the
nineteen twenties and in the nineteen thirties was,
a business that could properly probably be compared in our time to
the streaming services of Netflix, Hulu, Disney
plus at that time in in history. Right? Hollywood was
where fast paced writing
and, new forms and new modes of entertainment
were going in order to be developed. Things were moving away from
the seriousness of the theater and, quite frankly, of Vaudeville
in the late nineteenth century and had moved through the silent
era, which was still considered to be an era that was relatively recent
even though we think of it as far away and ancient now, because so
much has happened in film since then. And by the time
the twenties and thirties showed up, Hollywood, though not a fully mature
industry quite just yet, it wouldn't quite get there till the fifties and sixties,
and reach its apotheosis, I think, in the nineteen seventies,
before it began its long and ignominious decline
into our own time. But Hollywood there
was was considered in in a play as a
place in the twenties and thirties where
serious writing and I wanna be very clear on this. Serious
writing went to die. Not that
serious writers went to die. Many serious writers worked in
Hollywood, not just f Scott Fitzgerald, but also Ogden Nash, who
we've covered on this podcast. John Steinbeck
wrote, a couple of of screens, screenplays,
during that time and many other writers. But
it was a place that was William Faulkner even wrote, wrote
a couple of screenplays, in Hollywood. So it was a place that was
starting to come into its own, but it was still also a place that was
considered by serious artistes to be a place where,
well, you're kinda doing slum work. And, F. Scott
Fitzgerald sort of fell into that mindset around Hollywood.
Now he did write screenplays and treatments off and on, for
various Hollywood productions and various Hollywood Producers, in
1927 and in 1931, and then more consistently between
1939 and 1941. There's a
whole article that I read about this, and Tom and I could talk about this
today because I actually sent him the article that was in The New Yorker. It
was actually pretty good, from 02/2016, I
believe. And, it talks about how Fitzgerald
wasn't cut out for writing in Hollywood because, quite frankly, he
demanded too much from the screenplay process. But he
also demanded too much, interestingly enough, from the business
of Hollywood. He was
so unable to take what he
wanted to do in his novels and translate that to the screen and
became frustrated when other people were able to do it in a way that he
did not respect, which is a real problem for Fitzgerald.
So that underscores some of the conversation we will have today with
Tom around Tender is the Night. But even before we jump into
that, I'd like to start off with this. I don't even know if Tom's read
this book. So let's start with that. Tom, have you read Tender is the Night?
I know you've heard of Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, who hasn't? But, like,
Tender is the Night, have you read this book or any of anything outside of
Gatsby from, from Fitzgerald? No. I think Gatsby was the only
one. There we go. Look at that. But but here
I did read the article, though. How's that? I did actually read the article you
sent me. So There you go. Alright.
Yeah. The research has occurred. Yeah. Exactly. At least some
semblance of research has occurred. But, but I no. I have not
I have not read, this particular book.
Okay. So one of the
things that's interesting about this book is that it was not a bestseller in,
in Fitzgerald's time. And as a matter of fact, he
actually tried to there's a couple different versions of Tender is the Night
because he tried to rewrite it, in order to make it appeal
to more of a mass market. And that was one of the challenges
with, with Fitzgerald as a writer coming
off of The Great Gatsby. Right? So even The Gatsby The Great
Gatsby during its time was not nearly as popular as it
became later. Matter of fact, I think if I remember
correctly, and, these numbers are
probably incorrect, But, I
think Gatsby only sold something like
five to 8,000 copies or something like that. It was 20 I
thought it was 23. It was like it was like he sold 23,000 in the
first twenty three thousand. The first. Okay. But then Alright. Like, then the book, for
some reason, after his death, all of a sudden exploded.
Mhmm. After his death in 1940, it ended up
becoming the the American novel. Right? Like, it was the
the one that everybody basically, refers to as the great American
novel. So but it wasn't until after his death that it became
really popular. Well, and part of that, I think, was because
and I I might have read this somewhere, but it was distributed to GIs,
in, in World War two when they were wandering around Europe. Right?
Sort of a
a primer from the last war to help you with this new
with this new one. Right? Right. And a distraction. Right?
Reminder of what it is you're missing you're missing at home. And many of those
many of those GIs would have
been kids during the jazz age. So they
wouldn't have had any direct
experience, right, with any of the things that were going on in Gatsby in The
Great Gatsby. That would have been probably, their
either fathers or uncles or even, in some cases, older brothers.
And so there was a certain amount of,
for lack of a better term, sentimentalism attached to Gatsby,
from those, from those GIs. But But Tender is the Night is a little bit
of a different thing. It was not a popular book
when it was when it was first, written. When it
was first published, it sold almost no copies.
Fitzgerald and this is part of what drove Fitzgerald back to Hollywood. He
I think the royalties on it were only, like, $81 or something like that.
Like, he wouldn't make it no money, you know, off of Tinder is the
Night. And in general, it was
perceived by critics, during the
time as being, for lack of a better
term, claptrap, you know, not not good
writing. And
he thought it was because he did a flashback in the second book that's in
the middle. So the book is divided up into three parts. Right? You got book
one, which, sort of where you meet Nicole
and you meet Dick and you meet Rosemary. You meet all these characters. Right? Abe,
who we're gonna talk Abe, who we're gonna talk about today. Not Abe, Abe, who
we're gonna talk about today. Much of the cast of characters. Right? And he sort
of sets the the dynamic. Then in book two, you get a flashback
on, Dick and Nicole's relationship and setting
up how Dick was her doctor and fell in love with her,
because she had a background that was, where there was, some,
some sexual abuse from her father, and, you know, they were
wealthy enough. The Warrens were. Nicole Warren, her her father was
was was wealthy enough to send her and her sister,
the, the the socialite
baby Warren. Loving how they nicknamed women baby back
then. It's kind of amazing. Anyway, baby Warren. You would not get away with that
today, by the way. So baby Warren.
What's up? Was I mean, could you imagine Jeff
Bezos's girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, her sister
being referred to as babying? No.
Oh my god. No. I cannot. I I can,
like, I can actually hear the the the feminists,
like, yelling at me. Screaming? The screaming? Oh, you're
They're, like, yelling. I can hear them. There's an entire sidebar story
that I wanna tell, which I I will tell it right now. So one of
the guys with whom I work at the
coworking space that I work at told us a story
about how his grandfather, who was born in 1920
and served in World War two, one of those aforementioned vets
that I was, that I was talking about, who probably read The Great Gatsby when
he was in Europe, interestingly enough, when he came back from the
war in the seventies
when this guy was a teenager and a kid. Right? And he's now
this man who was telling me this story the other day is now in his
early to mid sixties. Right? So that's how the math lines up
there. Anyway, he said that his grandfather would sit outside
underneath the tree with a radio, one of those old AM radios, and listen to
the baseball game. And I won't tell you what baseball team was because I'll tell
you a bunch of different details you don't need to know. But he would listen
to the baseball game. And about 20 yards away
from where he would sit underneath the tree was the,
the house that he lived in. Right? And the kitchen window was
facing the tree. And so so the kitchen window, every time you go out to
listen to baseball games under the tree on the AM radio, the,
the, the window would be would be
open. The kitchen window would be open because the grandfather,
would drink some would drink interesting. Left Pabst Blue Ribbon,
PBR. Right? And he drink a PBR listening to the AM radio
baseball game. And when he wanted a new PBR, talk
about feminists, he would whistle, and the
grandmother would come out with a freshly opened PBR and give it to him
and take the old one back into the house. And so when when this guy
told us this story right out the window. Sorry.
Go ahead. Sorry. No. No. No. No. It don't. No. It's good because I asked
him a question. I asked him a question about this after we so so myself,
who I was born long after all of that era
was over, and so myself and and the other guy who sits in the
other gentleman who sits next to me is also in his early forties. We started
cracking up laughing. We did. We started cracking up laughing. And the other guy who
works kind of in the office behind us, he's also in his early sixties,
and he, of course, quit when he when we heard they when he
heard this story. He said, that dude was a man. That's how you know he
was a man. I was like, okay. That's
that's fine. No. And this is not me saying these things, gentlemen, ladies and
gentlemen. I'm merely relating to you the story. And so
I asked the guy who told me this about his grandfather
if he would whistle for his wife currently, and he
didn't even let me get the sentence out of my mouth before he said, no.
She'd kill me.
Then when I told my wife this story later on during the day,
in the evening when we were preparing to go out for our date night, my
wife goes, that kind of woman, they don't make that kind of
woman anymore. That kind of woman ain't around. She's
she's long gone. She ain't coming back. Well, I I hope your
wife actually never meets mine because my wife my wife
would tell you she was born in the wrong era, that she wishes that she
was born in the fifties because that would she would prefer just to stay home
and clean the house and take care like, if she had her druthers, she wouldn't
work a day in her life. She'd just stay at home and do all the
things that women were supposed to do Supposed to do. At that
point. She she kinda she kinda feels like she was a
she's a misplaced in a misplaced error. Well, I tell you what. You
tell her the story about the whistling and, see how she responds to that.
I was gonna say and part of the problem is because I treat her the
way that your wife probably expects to be treated. Right? Like, that's Yeah. That
that's what we do today. Right. That's what I try to share in all the
Mhmm. Movies around the house. I try to share it, like and she's constantly telling
me to stop. And I just it's not in
me to not help. Like, I can't I can't help it.
Anyway, we are so off track right now. We're so off track right now. It's
fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. The reason why I brought the reason why
I brought up all that is because in Tender is the Night, back to the
book. In the book, in book two,
Nicole Warren and Baby Warren and Dick Divers all
meet. Right? And that's a flashback sequence. And so
and then in book three, you get into more of the results, and we'll
talk about some stuff that happens in book three. But more of the results of
everything that happens in the flashbacks, and then it sort of brings everything to the
current day and then the book ends. Okay. That's the setup for Tender is the
Night with my sidebar digression.
Just a little color for the folks.
The main knock that Fitzgerald thought
was the problem with the book was that book
too. He thought the flashbacks were a problem. And so he
rewrote the book to put everything in chronological
order. And so there's two different versions of Tender is a Night. There's a
version, which is the version that I have, where
everything is in his original original written direction.
And then there's another version that I've heard that floats around somewhere,
and I don't even think it's been reprinted. I mean, you may be able to
find it in a used bookshop somewhere where he wrote everything in a chronological
in chronological order. However, over the course of time, as
audiences became more sophisticated, and this is as a result, I think, of Hollywood, this
is where the tie in is here, audiences became able
to or at least more willing to understand the
digression or the sidebar of a flashback or of a story inside of
a story and be able to follow that narrative that narrative thread.
And thus, Tinder is the Night in its original form became more
popular over the course of time. And it is now, along with
The Beautiful and the Damned, the Side of Paradise, and, The Last Tycoon,
now it is mentioned as part of his overall,
oeuvre, such as it were or canon,
around, around Fitzgerald. But it doesn't surprise
me that you haven't read it because, again So so an F. Scott dominates so
much. You know? Yeah. Because every time anybody says anything about F. Scott Fitzgerald, I
mean, they're almost always talking about Gatsby. Even even amongst his, what,
400 short stories that he wrote. And, like, there's Yep. He wrote he was
basically writing his entire life, and but Gatsby
is the only thing that anybody ever really talks about. But I I just again,
back to the cinema kinda component to his life. And and
do you feel like do you feel like he was way ahead of his time
in this? Like, I I actually am one of those people that
gets sort of annoyed at these
prequel style movies. Like, you know, you make you make,
you know, three movies in a series, and all of a sudden you go, oh,
but we need to tell you how the whole thing started, so we bring back
this prequel. It drives me bananas, but
but he it seems like he already saw that coming. He was like,
oh, let me write this the prequel in the middle of it so that people
can kinda and then we'll go back to the finish of the story. Like, it
just seems like and that's an interesting dynamic to me. I never really thought of
it that way is that if if because I I equate that to a
more recent trend in in the movies, in the movie cinema.
And even in writing, if you look at authors and the way that they're writing
their series of books at this point, there's a lot of authors that
will go back and write a prequel, three books in, five books in to their
series. So Yeah. I find it fascinating that you're telling
me that this is a major component and the fact that he felt like he
had to rewrite it because he thought it was a problem, and now everyone's doing
it. Like, it's kinda interesting to me. So
the the the there's
always been flashbacks inside of films or stories
inside of stories in film. Right. Right? Flashbacks are different. Right? It's like a scene
that kinda pops in and it's gone. But this this whole idea or concept of
prequels is is Right. He thought it was relatively new, but apparently, he,
he kinda threw it in there in that book. So Well, you know, I think
I think that for Fitzgerald
well, okay. Couple of different things. Number one, Fitzgerald wrote during
a time when we had a switch in the culture, and we'll
talk about this a little bit with his friend, Abe a little bit. But we
had a switch in the in the in the culture from being
a culture of character to a culture of personality.
Right? And so he was he was he was in that in that
switch. Right? That shift over. Right? And so you have Fitzgerald,
the author, who's the the public celebrity,
and then you have Fitzgerald, the writer. I'm sort of backing into the answer to
this question, because it's a good one. And so
Fitzgerald, the writer, and you saw this in the article about him, and this is
why he struggled in Hollywood, I think. Fitzgerald, the writer,
wanted to have all of the acclaim and the fame
that went along with Fitzgerald, the celebrity, But he also wanted to keep his
artistic druthers and be true to his creative self. Right?
The reason we have prequels in films, I think, these
days I was actually just talking with somebody about this today.
But the reason we have prequels in film today is
because the writers that we have
aren't nearly as good as Fitzgerald at being an artist
around writing. Even, dare I
say and we don't read a whole lot of contemporary writers on
this podcast, and so people can come for me, that's fine. But when I look
at my Goodreads book list, or when I look
at the recommended books on Amazon, or when I go into Barnes and Noble
and look at what's splayed in the front. Right?
With the exception of folks that are legacy authors like,
Jack Carr is becoming a legacy author. John Gersham
John Grisham. I'm sorry. Stephen King, of course. With the
exception of legacy authors, you gotta take them out because they're outliers. Well, that A
lot of started writing thirty forty years ago. It's it's not Bingo.
These are not new writers. Even though they're not new writers. New books, they're not
new writers. But That's right. Exactly. Yeah. Take out the legacy writers. Take
them out. The new writers that you have, if you go and actually look at
their books,
they're garbage. Not to put you find a point on it. They're trash.
And the reason why is because and this goes
to that whole conception of, like, a streaming service being
parallel to Hollywood. And, actually, the parallel is probably closer to
movies, but we're gonna go with Hollywood for the time being. Streaming services
increasingly not increasingly, for the last ten
years have looked
at the thing that we view. And we talked about this with Havoc, interestingly
enough, a couple of episodes ago. But they've looked at
stories being something that goes on in the background while you're doing other
things that never distracts you from the
primary screen, which means we're not getting into complicated
characters. It's something that you could just dip in and dip out of. And when
you have that, then, of course, you need prequels because no one's
fully explained or fleshed out the story. Of course, you need a
prequel. Yes. Versus the old days, quote, unquote.
So let's go back to Godfather two for just a minute. I have a more
cynical I have a more cynical thought thought of it. Because I so well, first
of all, let me just say, I I do agree with you on the on
the quality of the writing. Yeah. Hands down, I agree with you. I mean, just
think of, like, you're just gonna go to The Godfather. I mean, that movie was
made in 1972 or '74 or something like that. And Yep.
It's still, to this day, considered one of the best movies of all
time. So, I mean, you know, anyway but the I it to
me, we have so we have so systematized
the the the process of writing in
general that it's very
like like, my daughter my daughter doesn't like watching movies with me very often
because within the first fifteen minutes of the movie, I can tell you how it
ends. Like Oh, yeah. Because because we've so systematized this,
and there's a formula to everything. So now people are starting to write in that
style because, eventually, they're thinking their book might be a movie.
So it's it's it's like this it's like this trickle effect, and
I think the the the prequel thing is flat out money
grab. I I I I don't think that there's a artistic
creativity to it. I don't think the writing is good or it's it's
money. It's all about money. If the series does really well, let's do a
prequel because we know we can make a certain amount of money with it. Like,
it's not really I don't think they're thinking of it ahead of time. Meaning, like,
I don't think Oh, no. Think they went, you know, like, I don't think they're
going, okay. We're gonna make six Harry Potter movies, and now we're gonna do a
prequel because we've we missed out on on some creative liberties on the
character development. So we we should do this prequel to let everybody know what's going
on. No. No. No. It's we we built we made these six movies of Harry
Potter, and I'm not suggesting that a prequel of Harry Potter people. I'm just using
it as an example. But, like, we're made these six movies. We made billions and
billions and billions of dollars. We have no idea for the next movie, so let's
just do a prequel. Like, it's like they have no more idea
left in the next in the next set, so let's just do
and I'm more I'm so that's my my my problem with prequels today is I
think they're money grabs. I don't think that was F. Scott Fitzgerald's
thought process when he No. Put one in the middle of his book. I think
for him, it was creative. I think he was thinking of it from a very
I think he was trying to be different. Right? He was trying to look at
the way books were being written. He said, I think I can do this a
little differently. And to your point a few minutes ago, because I think
that's the way he was thinking of society in
general at that point, that he had to be something different in order to stand
out. Right? Like, he was just trying to figure it out. Again, we just said,
he wrote four major books, and most of them were not
major hits until after his death. He wrote hundreds of short stories.
He wrote for other people. He ghost wrote for other people, never got the credit
he deserved, and spent years in Hollywood with only one movie credit to
his name. Like, just one beeps. One movie
credit. So I think I think he was just I think he
was trying to look at what the the formula of that
time was and just disrupt it. And I don't think that we
do that enough today in writing. So here's another
thing that jumped out to me about Fitzgerald, and and we'll go back to the
book here in just a moment. But here's here's another theme that jumps out to
me in this whole Hollywood idea in the article that I that we, that we're
referencing. By the way, we'll have a link to that article, in the,
in the show notes. It's from the New Yorker magazine, and, I said it
was 02/2016. It was actually 02/2009, called Slow
Fade by Arthur Crystal. So go ahead and check out that
article. I have a link to that in the show notes, below the player
of this episode. So one of the things about Fitzgerald that jumped out to me
in that in that, in that
article was this. And it is something I think that is critical.
And the parallel that I'll make is this. I have
sometimes worked with people who are very artistic,
who and and I'm saying this
is a person who has a bachelor of fine arts degree, and I did my
I did my my
my digging in the wells of art. I still handwrite our
the scripts, like, for this show. AI doesn't touch anything that has to do with
this show, like, at all. I mean well, not I wouldn't say like
at all. There might be some AI in the editing, you know, of the
audio maybe. But, but in the writing of this,
this show and of the production of this show, my hand touches the script.
My brain reads the, reads the books.
The conversation that you're having is between two two real live people. And the video
that you're seeing of this is is two live people,
Ache, Google, Vero three, which is freaking everybody out right now.
Oh, by the way, I don't think we have anything to worry about those Google
videos that are being produced because number one, that,
they're usually being used for marketing and advertising slop. That's number one.
Number two, you could still tell if they're AI because the fingers and the eyes
are still wrong. But number three, here's the biggest one, the
writing is trash underneath.
This is why I'm not worried about the AIs. This is one of them. One
of the one of the other reasons out of the myriad of reason we talk
about AI on this show a lot, but one of the reasons of the myriad
of reasons I'm not worried about about this. When the writing gets better, when they
start hiring the F. Scott Fitzgerald's of our time, then I'll start being worried.
One of the things that Nook that that jumps out to me about Fitzgerald, just
like any other artists that I've worked with, whether it's in the visual, in the
dance, theater, television, wherever, anything creative.
Sometimes, certain creative people are, for lack of a better term,
precious about their
art. Kind of like Gollum in Lord of the Rings.
It's my own, my precious. And they're sitting down there
in the cave, they're stroking the manuscript,
or they're stroking the the the,
the the film, or they're polishing the sculpture.
And they don't wanna let it go out into the world
for a couple of different reasons. But the big one is the
second other people start having an opinion about your art, your
art stops being yours. And now all these other
people's opinions begin to,
gather on it like crustaceans on the bottom of a boat. Right?
And the original meaning, the original thing that was this art
now transforms into something that's out of your control. And artists hate
this. They hate this, particularly an
artist artists with strong vision like an f Scott
Fitzgerald, or a John Steinbeck, or an Ernest
Hemingway, or any of these mid twentieth century modernist writers that
we've read and even more so on this podcast, the eighteenth and
nineteenth century writers enlightenment writers that we've read on this podcast.
Right? This idea that and I think this is what
driving Fitzgerald. The idea that other people would touch his work and have an
opinion about it drove him absolutely crazy,
particularly people he did not respect. And
you see this in his relationship to other writers he worked with who polished
his material in Hollywood versus how he took the
feedback from Ernest Hemingway, particularly in Movable Feast. Hemingway
talks about this, where they were young writers, you know,
in Paris, part of the lost generation, running around drinking and
writing and all that. And Hemingway was always, like, just get back to work.
Just do the work. Like, I'll help you, but just do the work.
And Fitzgerald always kinda took that critique from him and was able to roll
with it. Whereas in Hollywood, if
David O'Selznick had an opinion about,
about Fitzgerald's writing. Fitzgerald probably struggled to
take those notes.
And I don't know if you've run into this in entrepreneurship or
in sales. These this concept of preciousness. This
concept that I can't let this thing out to, like, have it
other people touch it. But because we're a leadership podcast, we'll tie this into
leadership. Leaders can't be precious. Like, if you're not if you're
if you're not out there with your thing, then you don't have a
thing. True. But there, you know,
I there are some I guess it depends. Right? Like, I again,
I I think there's there's a lot of factors to consider when you're
making that kind of statement because if you have something that is
not necessarily protectable
by law so, like, you have an IP that's that
anybody can replicate, but you have a secret sauce to it. You just
gotta be careful how you go out and you put it out there.
So you there are certain things you have to keep close to the vest when
it comes to things like that. But to your point, as
long as you can get beyond that part of it, then yes. Then I I
agree a %. Once you get beyond the you know?
Again, you know, you developed a new way to
microwave popcorn. I don't know. Whatever. Like Whatever. Yeah. You know? So I'm just use
I don't know where the hell mic maybe I'm hungry. But, anyway,
like, like, you know, right now, we basically have, like, one
way to microwave popcorn. We put it in a bag, and we put it no.
Not well, there are some other Tupperware things and whatever. But,
anyway, you come up with a new one and but it's not
patentable. Right? Like, you can't get a patent on it, so you can't protect it
by law. So you basically have this secret version of how you
fold the bag or whatever. I don't know. So but to your
point, you still need to shout from the rooftops that you have a new way
to microwave popcorn. I have a new way. I have a new way. I got
my microwave popcorn never microwave popcorn the same way ever again. And then
just start tell just don't tell them how the bag's folded.
Look at it. But to your to your point, and I that's a terrible example,
people. I know. I get it. But it's but it to your point, though, it
is I do agree that, you know, you're
there's always going to be listen. Your your your point
about if I hear ever hear this in sales, I I
heard a phrase when I was very young as a kid and as a kid
in sales, and I tell everybody who's ever decided to go into sales,
listen. Some do, some don't, some will, some won't. Who cares who's
next? Right? If you don't have that mentality, then you shouldn't
be in sales. Right? You just shouldn't be. You you just gotta be
able to take those harsh criticisms, take those those
noes, so to speak, and move on. They didn't ruin your
life. They didn't put you in the ground. They they just gave you a
note. So to your to your point, yeah, I do agree with you that you'd
and I agree with Hemingway's philosophy. Just do it. Like,
just get out there and do it. Just get out there and do the work.
Just do the work, and just get out there and and tell everybody what you're
doing and try to get support. And and believe it or not, in
my opinion, you want the criticism. If you don't get the criticism, how the hell
are you gonna make yourself better? You can't get better
by everybody telling you how great you are. Right. Which I also think
but to your point too about Fitzgerald, I think as much
of a student of the game as he was in the literary sense, he
didn't want the same thing in Hollywood. He walked he wanted the
Hollywood to look at him as the expert because look at how good of a
writer he was. Mhmm. He just didn't. They just kinda chewed him up and
spit him out. Yeah. They didn't they didn't they didn't care. Much much like today,
they don't care about writers. Right. Yeah. They don't care about writers. Unless you are
one of those legacy people, like, I mean, you you know, you're gonna make a
Stephen King movie. You better damn well have Stephen King on the set and make
sure that he he's okay with everything that's going on. But you're not getting that
with everybody. You're not getting that with every writer. No. No.
You're not. Well and and and he couldn't well, so
let's talk about let's talk about Abe North. This is this is a good way
to sort of come into this. So one of
the things that was a knock against him and, again, you can see this in
the in the New Yorker article or read this in the New Yorker article.
He didn't understand how the medium
of film was different than the medium of the novel
of the book. Right? So in our time,
we we smoosh together all of this into the phone. Right?
So we say the book, the, the book,
the paper, the the TikTok video,
the social media post, Martin Scorsese's latest
film, and the billboard I just saw.
Okay. We put all of that
underneath a rubric called content. And by the
way, Scorsese hates this. He hates it that we do this. And
underneath the rubric of content, everything becomes mushed down.
And for lack of a term, and to paraphrase from Ted Goya, who
writes a great substat called the, The Honest Broker, you should go read it.
It becomes slop. Right? And it becomes all mixed together and
sloppy, and then we just spit it out on onto social media
platforms, generate clicks, do things that the algorithm
likes, and maybe people buy our stuff, maybe they don't. We
don't care because we've we've condensed all of these things that used to be
disparate and separate, even music, and we
we we compress it down and it becomes sloppy. And by the way,
we could do this even faster with AI because now we could dump it directly
into an algorithm machine or an LLM, and it'll just regurgitate out
some garbage. Right? Okay. By the way, when
you regurgitate out garbage, you compress everything down together. And by the way, this process
started back in the nineteen nineties. When you when you compress everything down together,
then distinctiveness, voice,
taste, flavors, these things all go away
because you're trying to create some form of globalized
post war,
liberal order, new world, you know,
whatever. Because there's always a political element to it because that's the only spice we
could think of. That's the only salt we could think of to put on and
Tom's laughing for those of you who are listening on the audio. Tom's laughing at
me right now when I said post war liberal order. Because this is what you
always this is a critique you always see. It's all part of it. Right? Because
everything is just content now from what Justin Trudeau is
saying to what Trump is tweeting, and then I can go watch something on
Netflix. It's just running in the background. It's all content. Right? And
so content becomes this thing, this, for lack of a better term,
slop, and we all know what animal,
eats slop out of a trough.
And we're we're gonna cover animal farm on this podcast,
in a few episodes. So we're gonna talk about pigs and donkeys and
allegories. Y'all stay tuned for that. So this is a
massive critique of our time. Right? Massive critique.
And we don't seem to have a way out of it nor do, for
lack of a better term, the normies, normal people who are not people
who tend to listen to this podcast. But if they do work across it,
great. I am glad you're here. You're gonna get educated,
and you're gonna have some interesting conversation. But normal people
who aren't obsessed with the distinctions between these kinds of things
seem to not care. Right? And and so the massive frustration with our time is
how do you wake these people up? Okay. One of the ways you wake these
people up, and I think this is what Fitzgerald would say, is you build great
characters. But that doesn't work from a
writer's perspective exclusively in the Hollywood machine, which
you also saw reflected in the New York article. And so we get to
a character in Tender is the Night, we don't wanna talk about today,
Abe North. So I'm gonna kinda jump around, bop around in here. I'm gonna
build a character study of this guy, and then we're gonna talk about Abe
North. Alright. Back to the book. Back to
Tender is the Night. Gonna pick up
here with a duel.
Okay. So Rosemary is talking,
and, she's talking to a gentleman who was drunk,
on the steps, outside of a, outside of a
hotel, a man named Louis Campion. And,
he says this, his face is repulsive in the
quickening light, not by a flicker of her personality, a movement of
the smallest muscle that she betrayed her sudden disgust with whatever it was. This is
Rosemary. But Campion's sensitivity realized it, and he changed the
subject rather suddenly. Abe North is around here somewhere. Why is
he staying? Why? He's staying at the divers? Yes. But he's up. Don't
you know what happened? A shutter opened suddenly in a room two stories above,
and an English voice spat distinctly. Would you kindly
stop talking? Rosemary
and Louise Campion went humbly down the steps into a bench beside the road to
the beach. Then you have no idea what happened. My dear, the
most extraordinary thing. He was warming up now. Hang on to his revelation.
I've never think seen a thing come so suddenly. I've always avoided violent people.
They upset me so I sometimes have to go to bed for days. He looked
at her triumphantly. She had no idea what he was talking about. My dear, he
burst forth, leaning toward her with his whole body as he touched her
on the upper leg to show it was no mere irresponsible venture of his
hand. He was so sure of himself. There's going to be
a duel. A what?
A duel with we don't know what yet. Who's going to duel?
I'll tell you from the beginning. He drew a long breath and then said as
if it were rather to her discredit, but he wouldn't hold it against her. Of
course, you were in the other automobile. Well, on the way, you were well, in
a way, you were lucky. I lost at least two years of my life. It
came on so suddenly. What came? She demanded. I don't
know what it what began it. First, she began to talk. Who?
Violet McKisco. He lowered his voice as if they were people under the bench.
But don't mention the divers because he made threats against anybody who mentioned it.
Who did? Tommy Barbin. So don't you say that I so much has mentioned
them. So Louise Campin starts telling Rosemary about
the, the elements that led up to the duel.
And then, Abe North pops up, and he says this.
Abe North, is looking somewhat distracted, came out of the
hotel, perceived them against the sky white over the sea. Rosemary shook her head
warningly before he could speak as they moved to another bench further down the road.
Rosemary saw that Abe was a little tight. By the way, the
term tight is, what they use back in the nineteen twenties to
describe drunk, not hungover. Hungover is what happens
when you were drunk yesterday, to paraphrase from school of rock.
What are you doing what are you doing up? She demanded. I just got up.
She started to laugh, but remembering the voice above, she restrained herself. Plagued
by the nightingale, Abe suggested and repeated, probably plagued by the
nightingale. Has this Sewing Circle member told you what happened? And then Abe jumps
in and starts talking about the duel as well. So this is the duel.
Now we're gonna move forward a little bit. And,
Abe, starts talking about Tabby Barban and miss
Kisco, and the divers. And,
they kinda come to the conclusion, at least Abe does, that
the, there was a wonderful duel in a novel of Pushkin's Recollected
Abe. Each man stood on the edge of a precipice, so if he was hit,
he was all done for. So she he starts talking about his war experience. He
starts talking about his experience with duels. And this sets the
table for who Abe North and Mary North are, a
couple that revolve around the divers. And Abe North is
a man who, suffers from,
rather acute bouts of and sharp dealings
with, PTSD. And so we follow
Abe through the book as a veteran. And, at a certain point,
he gets called back up to to military service. And,
he has to go to a, go on a train, but he
never makes his train. He never actually goes back into the military
service. He deserts. Right? And, eventually,
he winds up back in Paris, and
Nicole picks him up in chapter 22 long after the
duel, and a few other events have occurred, with this. A
sergeant Deville confronted her courteously and stepped inside the door. Mister
Afghan North, is he he is here? What? No. He's
gone to America. When did he leave, madame? Yesterday morning.
He shook his head and waved his forefinger at her in a quicker rhythm. He
was in Perique last night. He is registered here, but his room is not occupied.
They told me I had better ask at this room. Sounds
very peculiar to me. We saw him off yesterday morning on the boat train. Be
that as it may, he has been seen here this morning. Even his
has been seen. And there you are. We know nothing about it, she proclaimed
in amazement. He considered. He was an ill smelling,
handsome man. You were not with him all last night? But
no. We have arrested a Negro. We are convinced we have at
last arrested the correct Negro. I assure you I haven't any idea what you're
talking about. If it's the mister Abraham North, the one we know well, if he
was in Paris last night, we weren't aware of it. The man nodded, sucked his
upper lip, convinced but disappointed. What happened? Nicole
demanded. He showed his palms, puffed out his closed mouth. He had
begun to find her attractive, and his eyes flickered at her. What do you wish,
madame? A summer affair. Mister Afghan North was robbed, and he made a
complaint. We have arrested the miscreant. Mister Afghan should come to
identify him and make the proper charges. So they
eventually do find, Abe, who is, of course, drinking in a
bar, with several other I'm gonna use this
word again. Several other Negroes. Turns out that the French police arrested the
wrong Negro, not the first time in the history of the world.
And, so, and so
they, they eventually have to get Abe back to the jail.
Abe does wind up getting locked up. The correct Negro winds up going
off with a bunch of other Negroes or, sorry, the incorrect Negro winds up going
off with a bunch of other Negroes in the book, and he winds up getting
stabbed for all of his trouble and dying. Again, not the first time this
happens to a Negro in the history of the world and,
and or literature. And, that is the end of of our
intersection with Abe and North in book two. Then we
skip directly over to sort of the end or closer to the end of
the book, and, we find out this about Abe,
from Dick's recollection of him and a message that he
gets. It
was the first indication. So he's talking to a person in a, in a
restaurant. Oh, a guy named McKibben.
Oh, McKibben's face fell. Well, I'll say goodbye. He unscrewed
two blooded wire hairs from a nearby table and departed. Dick
pictured the jammed Packard pounding towards Innsbruck with the McKibbons and their children
and their baggage and yapping dogs and the governess.
The paper says they know the man who killed him, said Tommy, but his cousins
do not want him to the papers because it happened in his speakeasy. What do
you think of that? It's what's known as family pride.
Hanan played a loud chord on the piano to attract attention to himself. I don't
believe that his first stuff holds up, he said. Every even barring the Europeans,
there are a dozen Americans that could do what North did. It was the first
indication that they were talking about Abe North.
The only difference is that Abe did it first, said Tommy. I don't agree, persisted
Hanon. He got the reputation for being a good musician because he drank so much
that his friends had to explain him away somehow. What's this about Abe North? What
about him? Is he in a jam? Didn't you read The Herald this morning?
No. He's dead. He was beaten to death in a speakeasy
in New York. He just managed to crawl home to the racket club to die.
Abe North? Yeah. Sure. They Abe
North? Dick stood up. Did Dick stood up. Are you sure he's
dead? Panon turned to McKibben. It wasn't at the racket club he
crawled to. It was the Harvard club. I'm sure he didn't belong to the
racket. The paper said so, McKibben insisted. It
must have been a mistake, I'm quite sure. Beaten to death in a
speakeasy? But I happen to know most of the
members of the racket clubs in Henan. It must have been at the Harvard Club.
Dick got up, Tommy too. Prince Shilashev started out of a one
study of nothing, perhaps, of his chances of ever getting out of Russia, a study
that had occupied him so long that it was doubtfully given up immediately and joined
them in leaving. Abe North beaten to death.
On the way to the hotel, a journey of which Dick was scarcely aware, Tommy
said, we're waiting for a tailor to finish some suits so we can get to
Paris. I'm going into stockbroking, and they wouldn't take me if I showed up like
this. Everybody in your country is making millions. Are you really leaving tomorrow?
We can't even have dinner with you. It seems the prince had an old girl
in Munich. He called her up, but she'd been dead five years, and we're having
dinner with the two daughters. The prince nodded. Perhaps I
could have arranged for doctor Diver. No. No. Dick said hastily.
He slept deep and awoke to a slow mournful march
passing his window. It was a long column of men in uniform
wearing the familiar helmet of 1914, thick men in frock coats
and silk hats, burgers, aristocrats, plain men. It was a
society of veterans going to lay wreaths on the tombs of the dead.
The column marched slowly with a sort of swagger for a lost magnificence, a past
effort, a forgotten sorrow. The faces were only formally
sad, but Dix Lungs burst for a moment with regret for Abe's
death and his own youth of ten
years ago.
Abe North in the book and the way that he's written is as
a character who sort of jumps in and jumps out, jumps in and jumps out.
That's why I kinda bounced around a little bit in my selections and in my
reading. Because you don't really get a good handle
on who Abe North was. When
we are introduced to him on the beach, he is
married to Mary North, and he's part of the
circle of people that hang around Nicole and
Dick Divers. He's drunk all the
time and called up to
service again. He can't really make that
leap forward to go back into a
place of warfare. Eventually, he gets involved
with
eventually, he gets involved with crime and,
petty issues one way or another, somehow makes
it back to America. And, of course, as I said there at the end, gets
beaten to death out of a speakeasy, which, by the way, on the outside of
a speakeasy, which everyone knew back in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties,
meant there's a bunch of a cultural and ethnic things underneath that, but it
basically means that he was in a place that was illegal. He
was in a place that probably had a lot of minorities in it,
and he was in a place where if he had been doing his duty this
is the subtle message that Fitzgerald was giving. If he had been doing his
duty as was desired by society and culture, he would not have
been in that place.
Abe North is a stand in for every veteran that Fitzgerald
knew who couldn't hack it in a peacetime
world. This is
one of those ideas that runs through Tender is the Night and also
runs through Gatsby. Okay?
Beautiful and the Damned, This Side of Paradise. And I've never read The
Last Tycoon, but I read enough reviews around it. It also runs through that.
Everybody who was in Fitzgerald's generation was impacted by World War one, but
they didn't have a term for PTSD. They just called it shell shock. And even
then, yeah, even then they didn't call it shell shock until long after the
war. They didn't know how to identify it, which is why
Dick is in psychiatry because psychiatry was, as we talked about on the
Libby Younger episode, psychiatry was a relatively new tool to
solve some very old problems.
Abe self medicated with alcohol and finally imploded with violence
and criminality. And so I guess the question that we have to
discuss here in some at some length is, Tom,
what are the complications of working with people with PTSD? Because now, a hundred
years later, for and I hate to
frame it this way, but PTSD has almost become a punchline,
right, in certain ways. Even though there are people who are genuinely
traumatized and genuinely have problems. I don't know if you've worked with
someone with PTSD or people with PTSD I have, but what are your thoughts
on this? Well, I'd take it one step
further to what you're talking, like, with the punchline situation. I think I think
the other we're talking about a very
real scenario. Right? People come back from war,
and for them to have PTSD,
we need we need to normalize it a little bit so that we can treat
it better. Right? But to say that you have PTSD because,
you know, three weeks ago, you were in a somebody rear ended you in your
car, it's not to me that's apples and
oranges to me. I'm sorry. Yeah. You know, walking down the street,
like, we use PTSD, and I'm not suggesting that it doesn't exist. I'm not
gonna put a a, you know, a I'm not
down downplaying psychology and the roles of
psychology in in in in the world. And I'm sure
I'm sure I'm sure there are people that are impacted by a car accident
like that, and they never wanna drive again, I guess. But
I think I think that to your point about the punchline, I think we,
the term PTSD gets used so frequently about
so many different things that I that I do think
that we don't pay close enough attention to our
veterans that actually have it, like and and have a real
crippling problem because of it. Right? Mhmm. I just recently saw,
I don't I don't remember. It was some some pharmaceutical
commercial. Right? But it was a gentleman walking through a park
with his dog. It's a service dog, and he starts getting disoriented
because something's happening with a car, like, backfire in the car. Like, you hear noises
in the background. He starts getting disoriented, and the dog stops him
and Mhmm. Gets his focus. And the
guy kinda comes back down to us. Like, you could see this whole thing play
out with the in the way that the commercial depicted it. And then he
continues walking and his family sitting there at the playground, and he just walks in.
And you hear the little kid's voice saying thank you to whatever drug
company this is for helping my dad with his PTSD.
And I was sitting there thinking to myself, this whole
commercial is about a drug, but yet the dog the
dog actually in the commercial was the solution to that
problem. Right? Like, anyway but the the the point I made Yeah. Yeah.
That none none of that is relevant to what we're talking. I guess none of
it's relevant. But I guess but the point to my relevancy here is, like,
this the the idea behind PTSD, how the severity
of PTSD when it comes to people who have been through what Abe
was through in the war and all that stuff. Like, that's very real.
And I think as an employer and and being able to
kinda work with people that yeah. And to answer your
question, yes yes, I I have worked with people with PTSD. So
I think I think the most important one of
the most important things that we can have as an employer
is empathy. Right? You can't sympathize with them.
You have no idea what they're going through. But to be
to give them some leeway, to give them some
accommodations that don't hurt your business, like, that's that's
meaningful statement there, people. Like, you're not gonna give somebody an accommodation
that ends up putting you or your company at risk. But if you if
there are accommodations that you can give that put that that is that
is, that are that are helpful to them but doesn't hurt the company,
the product, the service, the the co you
know, other employees, of course, too, then I think we should do that. We
should look for ways to do that and be helpful in that sense. I think
it behooves us as a leader to make them feel like that they are going
to be able to contribute at every level
without risk of being judged or fired for something they have
no control over. Now that being said, again, I do think there are sir there
there's always mitigating circumstances. There's always situations where, you
know, I I I'll give you a better a
better example. If you're a waiter and you have Tourette's,
don't go work at a five star restaurant. But
there are restaurants out there that the theme of the
restaurant is that we treat our patrons poorly. I don't know if you've ever
heard of these, but, I mean, I mean, there are restaurants out there that, like,
they're medieval restaurants where the waitress Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Tell you a name, whatever. Go work for them. It would be an
accommodation for you that you wouldn't even have to make. Right? Like so,
again, setting people up
for success is important. If we can identify the
things that are going to be roadblocks for them and help them either
walk over them or remove them, then we should be doing that as leaders because
it's only gonna make us and our company better. But I do recognize
that there are times where that's just not feasible, have to
make hard decisions. And and I've done that too where, you know,
it was a it was a mutually agreed upon,
a mutually agreed upon,
disconnect from the company. Like, I like this person. I
did not want to fire them. I had no choice. There's a certain thing. Again,
you you mentioned earlier, I'm in sales. If you're not hitting sales quotas,
PTSD can't protect you. Right? Like, there's no Right. So you you have a job
to do. But as a person, as a human being, I
still to this day consider that person a friend. Like, I like that person.
I I and I encourage them to go into something other than sales.
And because he just it just wasn't it wasn't a good fit for
him. But So there's there's an idea that we we we operate on
that is so unquestioned
in our culture that if you even
remotely talk about it out loud, you're some kind
of you're you're a
set you're you're you're a parody of a communist. You're not a real communist. You're
just a parody of a communist. And here's the idea. I'm gonna talk about it
out loud because I'm not a communist, and I don't mind being called a
parody of a communist. That's fine. Whatever.
And the idea is this. I know who you are. I'm I'm full of it.
Go for it. We we we have
we are free to place our labor. This is the idea. We
are free to pace our labor wherever it is that
we want in the market. So if I have zero sales skills, but I desperately
wanna be a salesperson, I can come work for your
sales organization. Right? I can come work for you in sales.
Right? We we
we have this idea, the sacrosanct idea that my labor is
the most valuable thing that I bring to an employer, and this is why I'm
getting paid. What we don't have
is we don't have an idea that if I have Tourette's,
sales might not be the best thing for me, and so maybe I should avoid
that area. We instead we don't wanna say that
to people at a societal level because that would be communistic
and telling people what they have to do. That would be abrogating their freedom
somehow. And it also and it also it would also discredit every parent
in the world telling their kid they can be whatever they wanna be and they
can do whatever they wanna do. It's just not yeah. But yes. Go ahead.
Right. Right. And so because we don't wanna discredit, to your point, parents who are
also voters, but we also don't wanna question that assumption that you could
do whatever it is you wanna do outside of the limitations that you have,
we place people in in between, sort
of a a Sharbatus and Scylla, two
monsters balanced on the head of a, balanced on the head of a
knife to walk through life. And if they're a person like
Abe North, they have one of two options. And by the way, a generation
later yes. Almost a full generation. Actually, no. Full two generations
later. A guy like Abe North would have been getting high with the hippies
at, like, Woodstock or something right after Vietnam. Right?
So it doesn't change. And then four generations after that, he would have been
in the Iraq war running around. I just remember the movie Three Kings with George
Clooney. Remember that movie back in the day in Ice Cube? Right. He would have
been running around looking for Saddam's gold, you know, from
a butt map. Right? Okay. So, like, the guys like
Aiden North have existed throughout warfare because that's what warfare creates.
But as a society, we when we ask people like that to
walk that fine line and they can't, then
the the only option for us to do, and this is why Abe North
as a character winds up beaten to death outside of a speakeasy, is to kill
them. Whether it's metaphorical,
psychological, emotional, spiritual,
which is usually the way we we go because we don't actually wanna physically kill
anybody. But sometimes they do wind up physically dead. I mean, look, the number of
people that we have who are veterans, who are on fentanyl and living
out on the street, who are homeless in our own time, coming out of the
last twenty year romp that we went through in the in The Middle East
is staggering. Yeah. The ways in which we treat our
vets is staggering. We don't treat our vets the way the old Roman Empire
did. We're not giving these people you know, when you came back from Gaul, you
got, like, something like 20 acres and a wife wherever the hell you wanted to
live. Like, we're not giving people we're not giving veterans that. We're not giving them
20 acres and a wife. Maybe we're not doing that for our veterans. Right?
Instead, we're asking them to walk this impossible line with no
other option other than death, either death on the battlefield or death outside of a
speakeasy, but those are your only two options.
Why aren't we setting up people better for success? Like, this is
maybe one of the core core things. It's not only intended as a night, but
is in all of the novels that we've read, of all of the books that
we've read. How can leaders and
it's a lot of weight to put on leaders, and it's a lot of weight
to put on the workplace. I'll give you that. And maybe it's not a weight
the workplace can handle. Maybe this is a weight that family or community or tradition
have to handle. And maybe it's time we start questioning those things in
our society and culture. And maybe it's not communistic to start questioning
those things. Maybe it's just good sense. At a certain point,
we're going to have to set up people for success to your point. And
a a workplace accommodation is probably the last way that we should set
them up for success, not the first one. How do we set up people for
success? No. I'll do you one
better. How do we talk to people when
they are children about military service and the potential outcomes for
that? Because I have some ideas. I come out of a military family. I have
some ideas about that. My father was in the military. My stepfather was in the
military. I grew up around military people. My mother was in the medical branch
of the military for many years. I'm the
first male in my family on either side of my family. I'm
the first generation male on any side of my family to not serve in one
of the major branches of the military or in some military capacity.
I have broken the chain that great chain of being that went all the way
back to, quite frankly, the civil war, in my in
my family. And so there's a lot of,
not that I've struggled with. Well, maybe I did. I struggle with a lot of
guilt and thinking about that and and
doing all that. And I am people who know me deeply will tell
you, Hae san would have been
Haysan would have been really, really good in the marines. He would have been really,
really good. He'd have been a really smart grunt, and then he'd work his way
up the up the up the ladder. So so we we are
similar in that sense where a very high majority of my family was in
military as well. Right? Same same scenario. Dad, uncles,
brothers, whatever. Yeah. Even, like so even generationally, I didn't break the
chain. I just skipped the link because my brother's all in military.
Nephews, so on and so forth. But
I'm the opposite of you. So I didn't go in the military because I knew
they would have killed me. I would not have made it through boot
camp because I was I was that guy. I was that guy.
Like Yeah. Drop and give me 20. I only have a 10. Like, I
you know what I mean? Like, I don't have a $20 bill on me. What
are you I like, I'd have been I'd have been dead. They were You were
the joker. You were joker in, in full metal jacket with, with board to
kill on the helmet, and then the the laughing's good on the inside. Yeah. There's
a lot of there's a lot of people that go into the military like that,
but they break them. And they break them down into their basic fundamentals, and they
rebuild them into soldiers. Right? That's the whole point of basic training. Basic
training Right. From what I'm told is basically to strip you of
all of what makes you an individual and turn you into what makes you a
team. Right? And Right. Like, a cog in the wheel. Yeah. And I
would never have allowed that to happen. I'm not that person. I'm not that person
that's just gonna sit there and take it and allow you to break me down
and rip rip apart my my being. I am it just wouldn't
have happened. I'm telling you it wouldn't happen. Jokes aside, because jokes would have
jokes would have come out, and you know me. Jokes would have come out, and
that would have been, but the principle of me would have been what would what
they wouldn't have been able to break, and they would not have liked that. They
would have pushed me out. Even if they didn't kill me, they would have pushed
me out. They were like Yeah. You're not fit for you're not fit for the
military because you're not you're not a team player. And people who know me really
well is I really am a team player, but I want my
I want my I want my
commitment to the team to be mine. I want my I want my skill
set and what I bring to the team to be mine. I don't want it
to be the, you know, next man up syndrome like everybody like everything
in the military. You know, like, storm storm storm storm
troopers. They just killed the corporal. Well, you're the corporal now.
Let's go. Like, I can't handle that. That that would not be that would not
be okay with me. Anyway, but to answer your other questions, so so
I I I actually think about this quite often. And I
think and I think it really the pinnacle of it for me
was a couple of weeks ago, I I was invited to a community meeting
with one of the local universities here, one of the local colleges here in in
where I live. And they were getting they were gathering a lot of community,
leaders from different organizations. And one of the organizations I belong to
outside of work was part of that community building thing. So I went
in representation of them. And what I heard
there kinda irked me a little bit. I gotta be honest with
you. What they were talking about was this new method of
teaching, and I'm paraphrasing here people. So this is a this was a three
hour meeting that I'm gonna give you in one sentence. That
everybody learns differently, so we should accommodate the way they learn. So if
somebody if we give somebody a deadline and they can't and they don't hit it,
we're not gonna grade them on that. We're we're gonna grade them on the actual
work that they submit. So, again, if I have to write a paper,
the deadline is, the deadline is June
1. I hand it in on June 3. There's no
repercussions or ramifications for that two days late. I'm gonna be
judged on the merit of the work that gets handed in. And
or here's and here's the the the secondary part of this is, or I
hand it in on the deadline because I'm that kind of person. I have a
I have a I have a a compass like that. But
I think about it three days later and realize I didn't really like what I
handed in, so I'm gonna rewrite it and then rehand it in. And they're okay
with that. The the so, again, three hour
meeting people. I'm just paraphrasing here. I'm just giving you the the idea. So I
I looked at that and I said, you are not preparing
our students for the real world workforce. You
cannot put your boss if your boss gives you a deadline and say,
I don't feel like like, I I just I didn't get it done, so I'll
give it to you tomorrow. It doesn't work like that in the real world. But
yet they're saying that employer should. Now here here's here's to go back to
your point now, here's where I think the flaw is. I
feel like our education system, whether it's from
pre k all the way up to postgraduate degrees,
their entire function is to get you to learn
how to be a student, not to live your life.
And I think that's a fundamental problem where we're not solving at home
anymore. Right? Like, so if you want schools to you
cannot, hey. So how many people have you seen graduate with an
MBA, cannot run a business? Oh, please. All of them.
So what use is the MBA? Why are you going to school to get an
MBA? I don't understand why we're putting so much emphasis on this when they
can't run a damn company when they come out of school. Like, you just
anyway. Because and and I think this meeting that I went to was a
was a was a real rude awakening for me because I realized
that school and education is teaching people
how to learn. They're teaching people how to be a student, how
to gain knowledge. They're not teaching people how to take that knowledge and
put it into the workforce. So to your point about
how how do we as leaders,
I think it goes back to what I was saying a little while ago as
I think it starts at home. I think parents have to stop
telling their kids they can do anything they wanna do and they can be anything
they wanna be and start pushing them toward their own aptitude
or their own love. Like, so to your point about this the salesperson that
probably shouldn't be in sales, but if they really love it and
they don't see themselves doing anything else,
fine. Let's figure out a way to make it work for them. But
I I I have a 25 year old at home right now, and he has
no idea what he wants to do when he grows up. Like, he he still
he still has no idea. He he decided he didn't wanna go to college because
it wasn't for him. He thought it would be a waste of money. He thought
he was he said, I I'm going to be a blue collar guy, dad. I
don't need a degree to be a blue collar guy. I said, okay. Great. Go
find a blue collar job. So he did. Bounced around a few of
those blue collar jobs. I feel like now he's finally
got his feet in a place where he's gonna be happy. He's only been there,
like, a month, but this is the best month he's had at any job
he's ever been at. Put it that way. So he's finding his own way,
but that's because I'm not sitting here telling him you can do anything you want.
You should be whatever you want. No. I said, you're right. School probably
isn't for you because you're gonna waste a lot of money. You're probably gonna flunk
out. Why bother wasting that? Like, don't go to school. Find something you're gonna be
happy with and you can do you like working with your hands? Fine. Let's go
find your blue let's go auto mechanics, HVAC, whatever. So him
and I worked through all of these things about what his aptitude was versus
what he loves, and he ended up finding something that he
thinks is going to be a career for him. But it took a lot of
trial and error. Now I, as a parent, was willing to go through that trial
and error with him. That's where I think a lot of the fault is, where
parents are like, but you can do it. You can do it. There's they just
wanna be encouraging to be encouraging. No. Encourage them to do what they're supposed to
do. Don't encourage them to no. I'm sorry.
Nobody you can't be anything you wanna be. I can't be
a six foot four forward in the NBA as much as I love basketball. I'm
five foot nothing. Okay? I cannot play in the NBA.
Let's face it. Like like, you can't be anything you wanna be. Let's be
realistic people. And I think it does start at home. I think I think that's
where we start that that shift. Now that as employers,
that starts with the interviewing process. If you're interviewing people, you
should be able to vet out some of that stuff. Why hire somebody if you
don't think they're gonna be a rock star for you? Stop hiring for the
masses and hire for the actual job you want. Then you can be a real
leader to that person. So if you're in the middle of the interviewing process
and you recognize that somebody has Tourette's, I mean, you don't have to flat out
tell them, listen. We're not hiring you because Tourette's just isn't welcome here.
No. You're just saying you don't have the skill set required to do the job
we need you to do. Sorry. We're gonna go with another candidate. Like, it's
and I know, again, the HR departments of the world are gonna hate
me right now because you can't you can't dis you can't you can't
discriminate based on a medical disability, blah blah blah. I get that.
I understand that. But there are certain things. Let's be real. You have to be
realistic for your business. Let me just be real. Not
not only do you have to be realistic from your business,
and I'm gonna let that whole, like, community meeting idea just sort of sit there
and base for a while, let the listeners come to whatever conclusions they're gonna come
to about that. I do have some thoughts. Oh, I was not happy. But I
anyway, go ahead. But, anyway, I'm gonna let that I'm gonna let that sit
for a minute because we have limited time here.
Families and communities and traditions,
which are the things that we have abandoned for a long time in
America because we thought that commercialism
or mass education, mass employment, mass is
mass, that was gonna take care of the problems. Mhmm. Mass has broken down
over the last twenty five years, and the consequences of mass
have now all washed up, to use the metaphor, washed up on our
shores. And now we have to build something
different. And I think we have to build something different by going back
to what was before mass. And the idea that Tom
is talking about where a parent guides
their child is an idea that is as old as
time and worked for every single century
globally and in the West up until,
arguably, the, mid nineteenth beginning of
industrialization all the way through and was abandoned all for the mid
nineteenth all the way through to currently the early twenty
first century. And historians, I think five hundred years from
now, will write very interesting histories about what happened in the last hundred and fifty
years, particularly in America, because it makes
no sense why an entire culture would abandon that
in favor of something else, particularly when
that something else does not stand up against the evidence of
98 to 99% of the rest of human history.
I also think that what Tom is talking about and
ladies probably not going to like this. But this
is an example of what a patriarchy actually
does. This is a healthy patriarchy. Because unless
you are not paying attention, Tom and I are both men.
Men who are the heads of, for lack of a better term,
heads of their household. Heck, that's how the IRS taxes me.
It taxes me as head of household. So, okay, there we go.
And what that means is more than just I'm an ATM
where money comes out, work goes in to our conversation that we're
having before we press record on the show today. Work goes
in and money comes out. It's more than just that. Right? It's
looking at even my 25 year old, because I have a 27 year
old, looking at my 25 year old and saying,
you're 25. Let me help you with
this. That's the example of a healthy patriarchy. So there's a bunch of different things
that are going on with what Tom was talking about that I think are worth
thinking about and exploring for leaders, but we have
to wrap up and bring it home. So back to the book, back
to Tender is the Night. We're gonna wrap up with
the end of Tender is the Night. We wanna talk about how things end
here as we close the podcast today. So a lot of things
happened between Nicole and Dick. Nicole
eventually winds up engaged in an affair with remember Tommy Barbin?
Remember the, the, the dueler? Yeah. She
winds up in an affair with him, breaks up her marriage on purpose
with Dick. They have two children together,
a governess, and a life in Europe, and all of that gets
thrown over because of Nicole's actions.
Again, example of a patriarchy, but in this case, a weak patriarch.
That would be dick, by the way, weak patriarch. And a
rebellious patriarch.
There's another term I would use, but I'm gonna use patriarch, a rebellious patriarch in
the form of, the boxer Tommy Barbin.
And the book ends on this note. This is the end of Tender is the
Night, chapter 13. I'm gonna read the whole
chapter here because it's one page. And
I quote, Nicole kept in touch with Dick after her new
marriage. There were letters on business matters and about the children.
What she said as she often did, I loved Dick, and I'll never forget him.
Tommy answered, of course not. Why should you?
Dick opened an office in Buffalo, but evidently without success. Nicole did not
find out what the trouble was, but she heard a few months later that he
was in a little town named Batavia, New York practicing general
medicine and later that he was in Lockport doing the same thing.
By accident, she heard more about his life there than anywhere, that he
bicycled a lot, was much admired by the ladies, and always had a big stack
of papers on his desk known to be an important treatise on some medical
subject almost in process of completion.
He was considered to have fine manners and once made a good speech at a
public health meeting on the subject of drugs. But he became entangled with a
girl who worked in a grocery store, and he was also involved in a lawsuit
about some medical question. So he left Lockport.
After that, he didn't ask for the children to be sent to America and didn't
answer when Nicole wrote him asking if he needed money. In the last letter she
had from him, she told her he in the last letter she
had from him, he told her that he was practicing in Geneva, New
York. And she got the impression that he had settled down with someone to
keep house for him. She looked up Geneva in an atlas and
found it was at the heart of the Finger Lakes section and considered a
pleasant place. Perhaps, so she liked to think, his
career was biding its time, again, like Grant's in
Galena. His latest note was postmarked from
Cornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva in a very
small town. In any case, he is almost certainly in that
section of the country, in one town or
another. By the way,
just personally, that entire last chapter jumped out to
me massively because back in the day, a
long time ago, I used to work at Ithaca College on the
other Finger Lake in
also had friends and
associates around Cayuga Lake,
number of others of those Finger Lakes areas. And I'm extremely familiar with that area,
including Geneva, interestingly enough. So I had to read that. I had to
literally read that chapter twice. I was like, what? Wait. What? And by the way,
it's never mentioned again. Like, as many Buffalo is mentioned as Dick being you know,
his parents being from Buffalo, his father, who was a, a pastor
or no. I'm sorry. A priest in, in that area or pat no.
Pastor in that area, as mentioned earlier in the book, but in Buffalo.
But, like, you're like, figure figure legs. Literally, Fitzgerald
just drops that on you at the end, and then you're just like, or at
least for me, I was like,
oh, okay, F. Scott. Wait. Wait.
Wait to get out of the book.
This is one of those areas where Dick descends back into history. It's
weird. So Tender is the Night is very much a book that's
written kind of as an elegy,
to the World War one generation and the lost
generation. But then at the end, they all fall back into history.
They all become regular people again.
Nicole gets a divorce, initiates a divorce,
because of the affair. Dick loses Rosemary who
goes off and becomes not a Hollywood ingenue, but she becomes a starlet and
probably becomes famous, although she drops out of the narrative
about three quarters of the way through and no more is said about
her. Dick becomes not a serious man and loses
his business in Switzerland. And we talked about a lot about
seriousness with Libby Unger and this idea of unserious
people, which, by the way, to to Tom's
previous point about family and preparation and accommodation, I
think a lot of this is driven by families being led by unserious
people, which then cascades upward into other areas of
our society and culture. And you probably saw a lot of that that community
meeting. I bet people who should be
serious who just aren't,
which is which is a plague on our own time.
But in the book, when Dick falls back into
history and slides back into the verge like Homer in that
meme in New York, in Upstate New York, he falls back into
history. The relationship just ends. There's no
denouement, there's no conclusion, and there's no catharsis.
Nothing is learned. There's no great, moral
to the end of this story. There's no great moral to the end of Tender
is the Night. It's just these things happen to these people, and then they
and then it's like you stop watching the movie, and the movie just
closes, and you're done. And it's probably the
strangest ending I've ever experienced in a book.
I didn't really know what to do with it, and I didn't really know how
to place it, and I didn't really know how to talk about it. Other than
maybe this way, if you're a leader,
how do you end things? Because we read a lot of books on
this podcast, and we have read a lot of books. And
those books end in a whole variety of different ways. Some authors can
close narratives really tightly, and other authors tend to leave
narratives wide open. But this one with Tender is the Night with F.
Scott Fitzgerald, he is an author who leaves an ending that
is, for lack of a better term,
like I said, sort of cinematic. It's sort of just
just just fades to black and bring up the credits, and we're done. And you're
just sort of left there sitting in the theater sort of
wondering what you just saw. So
how does a leader end things? We've never talked about that here.
That's a good that's a good question. I I'm I'm I'm trying to figure out
in in what the perspective is. Right? Like, so how do you
end up with what? Like, a termination of an employee or
wrapping up the whole business because you don't wanna do it anymore or,
somewhere in between? I I I don't know. Like, because I guess All good all
good all good stories have a beginning of you're a movie guy. All good store
I'm a movie guy. All good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Like, Tender is the Night ended very much like a French film. Like, if you
watch French films, you watch the French films.
And French films upset Americans for a whole variety of reasons.
But the biggest one is French films are full of
cynicism and nihilism and a sense of a deep sense
of, to paraphrase from Edith Piaf, a deep sense
of regret. There's always a sense of regret at the end of a French
film. The French will call it malaise,
but I call it regret.
Melancholy, such as it were, if you use an older term. So I guess
it's everything. How do you because the way you terminate somebody is the way you're
going to wrap up a business. One thing follows from another, beginning, middle,
and end. Like, whenever I end go oh, go ahead. Exit
strategies and things like that that you have to take into consideration. Again, like, you
know, are you going to just close the business up? Are you gonna sell it?
Are you going to, pass it on to a,
you know, a an heir, a a a a
son or a daughter? Like, are you gonna pass it off off to a child,
or are you gonna transfer ownership to an, a current employee? Like,
there's a lot of there's a lot of, like but I
I guess I guess no matter what
pathway you choose, there's still a certain
still a still a certain way
that you have to hold yourself through it. Right? I guess is the the idea
that that you're looking for or that we're we're thinking of, like Yeah. That we're
we're sort of yeah. I think I think for
me, in in in
I I about just just around around the time of COVID, I
had exited a business. And I think one of for me in
while exiting that business, it was really important for
me to leave no bridge burned.
Right? So I was I was exiting the business, but it was still going to
function. I had a partner that, that I wanted to be bought
out from because we just decided to go in different directions.
But that partner and I are still very good friends. There was no
ill feeling, no bad nothing bad
happened from it. But to your question about that
was very purposeful on my part because
I that that that split could have been very bad. Right?
Go f this. Go f yourself. Whatever. I don't care. You know? And
just the business goes in the toilet. The way that I looked at it
was I still have plenty of years to work in this
town. Like, I didn't want a bad reputation. I didn't
want a bad bad taste in client's mouths. I wanted to be able
to go back to the well for a multitude of reasons. So the way I
looked at it was I could not leave a single bridge
burnt. Every bridge had to be unburned. So my
my current partnership had to be, dissolved with
all the best of intentions. All the clients that we were
handling, jointly, I had to inform them in a
way that didn't burn a bridge that I was going to not be involved in
their account anymore. All the employees that we had had to know that I was
still going to be a resource, but not a decision maker. Like, they could always
lean on me for referrals, for references, for any of that stuff, but anything to
do with the business, had to go through the partner. Like, there was a lot
there was a lot to do, but I felt like it was my
obligation, not my partners, that wanted to keep the business running. It
was my obligation to exit that business with no
burnt bridges. So I think I think there's and I think to
your point, even terminating an employee, termination
doesn't have to be adversarial. It could be you know, when you're
you're downsizing, so you're laying off x number of people.
When you're going through that layoff process, if you are honest about
it and you're making sure that the layoffs are being done in the right way,
nobody has a right to be mad at you personally for it. They can be
mad in general. Sure. Of course. They have emotions, their feelings. We're gonna validate their
feelings. Sorry. I'm sorry.
But, but but in the same sense,
you also want them to know that you are you're there for them. You wanna
be a resource for them. You can help them get another job with a with
a referral. Let them know that if they do get an interview, that this job
that you are not being terminated from this job because of performance issues or
whatever. Right? Like, making sure that somebody walks out the
door knowing that you still have their best
interest at heart, and it's not it's a business decision, not a
personal decision. Now that being said, there are occasions where you
wanna fire somebody just for the hell of it because you don't like them. That
you it's it's your business. It's your company. You don't have to work with people
that you don't like. So in those cases, I still
say you have to handle that in a particular way. You can't just go, listen.
Hey, son. I don't like you. I don't want you working here anymore. Have a
nice life. It doesn't work that way. You should Get your crap. Eat. Get out
of here. Yeah. You should come. Never mind that. You will be
escorted out. Your crap will be shipped. You know what I mean? Like but,
like, you shouldn't have you you still shouldn't it it doesn't need
to be adversarial in any of those cases. You should be able to be at
least a little bit, I I'm gonna
use the word again. You you can be a little bit empathetic with the situation
that's going on even though you have a job to do and you have to
do it. I I I fired I've terminated I don't
even know how many people at this point. I don't think I've ever had
anybody yell at me, get so mad at me that they wanted to throw something
at me. Nothing. If anything, when I
say, let me walk you out, they're thinking it's
because I like them, not because I'm like, not because I don't trust them to
steal shit on the way out the door. Like, it's it's because they
they I they feel like I'm doing it because
I I have put myself on their level. I've put myself in their shoes. I
know I I I don't wanna feel what they're feeling,
but I I know that they're feeling something different than I am right now. And
I I I can just be empathetic about it and walk, you know, walk them
out. So I think that's I don't know how else to answer that that question
other than that. No. No. I think that's good. I think that that is
I mean, this is a leadership podcast along with being a book podcast. So we
talk a lot about more and more lately, we talk about the art behind the
book and the art that's in bay engaged in the book. We talk about
the impact the culture has had on this on this book. We talk about the
writer and how the writer thought, how the writer engaged with culture.
And I think Fitzgerald himself as a writer struggled with endings. I mean, look at
his Hollywood career. It sort of blew up in an alcoholic, you
know, explosion. Right? Because he couldn't complete the work. Right? I also
wonder if he didn't expect to die at 40, and he might have had something
else in his in his brain for the a follow-up to that book. That's that's
kinda what I was thinking too. Yeah. Exactly. And
so whenever I think of endings, they can either be amicable to your
point or they can be adversarial. Right? We can choose which kind
of ending we're going to have. That's our, for lack of a better term,
autonomy, both as leaders and as followers.
And weirdly enough, because a bunch of things could be true all at the same
time, I always think of
the end of Star Trek, The Next Generation when that series ended,
and the the the the name of the last episode of that of
that, series. And it was
called All Good Things. Right? And and Captain Picard in
there, you know, once infamously or maybe not infamously,
but notoriously said, all good things must come to
an end at some point. Right? And this is the
thing we struggle with. And I think
I think it's the responsibility of a generation that lost its ability to
have closure in endings. I think, of course,
that generation was going to struggle later on when those
endings were going to happen. Fitzgerald wasn't the only writer of
his generation that that wound up blowing up his career. I mean,
Ernest Hemingway is at the top of the mountain. I mean, he committed suicide in
Montana. You know?
But none of the people that Fitzgerald engaged
with wound up right side up,
with the eve eve even even guys who who who who
avoided all of the the dysfunctions and the
nonsense of the drug use like a John Dos Passos. Right? Or even a
William Faulkner. Right? Well, Faulkner was a generation older. But, even
John Dos Passos, he's a better example. They still wound up in
unsatisfactory endings.
The lost generation of World War one was, in
essence, the nomad generation in a in their generational
cycle. Right? Generation x,
the generation that I'm at the bottom end of, I am not a millennial,
but the generation that I'm at the bottom of, we're
the thirteenth generation in in America.
And the thirteenth generation is always a nomad generation, period, full stop. It
just it just is. There'll be another 13 generations before we get to another
one. And, we're always the people that struggle with
endings. We just we just are. Like, we just this is kind of how it
goes. And I think of the people who
are struggling
in one form or another, whether it's, at a personal level with
divorce or relationships ending, or at a more public
level with businesses to to Tom's point or leadership
opportunities ending. And, I think we have a
responsibility to show the generations that are coming after us, the millennial
generation, in particular Gen z,
how to do these endings
well. How do you end
well? The boomers didn't really show us. They're still
clutching on to the bottom of relevancy all the way into the grave.
They they don't wanna let go. I think I think Gen z Gen z has
got their own version. They just ghost people now. They don't like, they don't even
they they don't even know end. What what do you mean end? I just I
don't have to I don't have to deal with it. I just It's just just
delete it. It's just like it's just Yeah. I just don't have to answer it.
It's good. I'm good. I just I I deleted you off my app. It's fine.
You don't exist anymore. If I block you on, TikTok or if I block
you on Instagram, then I don't have to worry about you anymore. You're done. You're
just you're done. Yeah. That's done. The end. Goodbye. Bye.
But I think we have to be, I think we have an
opportunity to show people that it doesn't have to blow up in nonsense,
and it doesn't have to be adversarial. But it can
be amicable. It can be a space where we don't,
I love your point, burn bridges. Right? And where we can preserve. And
I think you said a keyword there, which we actually don't
value nearly enough in our culture these days, but which which Fitzgerald's
generation did value, but they were the last generation, I
think, that valued this. And this was they valued
reputation. Mhmm. They valued their reputation
very much. But they were the first post Victorian generation. Right? So they still
had all of that wash of, like, Victorian moral and Victorian
Victorian principles or Edwardian if you're thinking about America.
And I think reputation is very important. Reputation is what other people say about
you when you're not in the room. And, you know,
I think that matters. The two things that I think that matter most to me
the two things that matter most to me that I don't think people put enough
emphasis on are exactly so reputation, what people say
about you when you're not in the room, and integrity. You do the right thing
when you're when nobody else is watching. You just do the right thing because it's
the right thing to do. So your integrity and your and your reputation are probably
the only two things. I shouldn't say they're the only two things that matter,
but they should really be the foundation of who you are as a person. Mhmm.
And and if it's if it's not, then that that could potentially be a problem
for you.
With that, I would like to thank Tom Libby for coming on the podcast today
and talking about Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
This is a part two to go along with the part one that we just
recorded with Libby Younger. And go back and listen to the introduction where we talked
about the literary life of Escoff Fitzgerald. Next
up, we'll be talking about I'm gonna show the book
here. Next up, our next episode, we will begin
to introduce and to cover you probably can't see it because it's got a nice
white cover on the video. But George Orwell's
infinite dystopia
that has ruled the fever
dreams and imaginations,
particularly the totalitarian nightmares of
people from the time of its publication all the way till
now,
1984. So we will begin to dive into
that as we cross into June, our anti totalitarianism
month, where we will talk about not only 1984, but
we'll also cover Orwell's Animal Farm, his animal allegory
children's fairy tale, as well as Hannah Arendt. And we're
gonna talk about Eichmann in Jerusalem and what it means
to actually stare into the face and actually
contemplate the banality of evil.
We'll do that during this month on the podcast. And so I
encourage you to stay tuned to listen for that. But with
that, well, Tom and I are out.