Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the
Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode
number 176,
opening up a little bit differently than maybe you are
normally used to from our book today.
In Westphalia, in the castle of my lord, The Baron of
Thunder 10tr, there was a young man whom nature had endowed with the
gentlest of characters. His face bespoke his soul. His
judgment was rather sound in his mind of the simplest. This is the reason, I
think, why he was named Tandeed.
The old servants of the house suspected that he was the son of my lord,
the baron's sister, and of a good and honorable gentleman of the neighborhood, whom
that lady never would marry, because he could prove only
71/4 and the rest of his genealogical tree had been
lost by the injuries of time. My lord,
the baron was one of the most powerful lords in Westphalia, for his castle
had a door and windows. His great hall was even adorned with a
piece of tapestry. All the dogs of his stable yards formed a pack of
hounds when necessary. His grooms were his huntsmen. The village vicar was
his grand almanor. They all called him my lord and they
laughed at the stories he told my lady.
The baroness, who weighed about 350 pounds, attracted very great
consideration by that fact and did the honors of the house with dignity that made
her even more respectable. Her daughter,
Gunde, age 17, was rosy complexioned, fresh
plump, appetizing. The baron's son appeared
in all respects worthy of his father. The tutor Panglos was the
oracle of the house, and little Candide listened to his lessons with all the
candor of his age and character.
Pangloss taught metaphysico, theologio,
cosmologo, nigolology. He proved
admirably that there was no effect without a cause,
and that in this the best of all possible worlds.
My lord, the baron's castle was the finest of castles, and my lady, the best
of all possible baronesses. It is demonstrated, he
said, that things cannot be otherwise. For everything being made for an end, everything is
necessarily for the best end. Note that noses were made to wear
spectacles. So we have spectacles. Legs are visibly instituted to be
breached, and we have breaches. Stones were formed to be cut to
make it into castles. So my lord has a very handsome castle. The greatest baron
in the province should be the best house. And pigs being made to be eaten.
We eat pork all year round. Consequently, those who have
asserted that all is well have said a foolish thing. They should have said that
all is for the best.
Candide listened attentively and believed innocently, for he thought
Mademoiselle Cunegonde extremely beautiful, though he never made
bold to tell her so. He concluded that after the happiness of
being born Baron of Thunder 10 truck, the second degree of happiness was
to be Mademoiselle Tonagande, the third to see her
every day, and the fourth to listen to Dr. Panglos, the greatest
philosopher in the province and consequently in the whole
world. One day, Cunegonde, walking to the castle in
the little wood they called the park, saw in the bushes Dr. Panglos giving a
lesson in experimental physics to her mother's chambermaid, a very pretty and very
docile little brunette. Since Mademoiselle Cunegonde had much
inclination for the sciences, she observed breathlessly the repeated experiments of
which she was a witness. She clearly saw the doctor's sufficient reason, the
effects and the causes, and returned home all agitated, all pensive,
all filled with a desire to be learned. Thinking that she might well
be the sufficient reason of young Candide, who might equally well
be hers, she met Candide on the way back to
the castle and blushed. Candide blushed too. She said good morning to him
in a faltering voice, and Candide spoke to her without knowing what he was saying.
The next day, after dinner, as everyone was leaving the table, Cunegonde and Candide found
themselves behind a screen dropped her handkerchief.
Candide picked it up. She innocently took his hand. The young man innocently
kissed the young lady's hand with a very special vivacity, sensibility
and grace. Their lips met, their eyes glowed,
their knees trembled, their hands wandered. My lord, the Baron of
Thunder Ten Troch passed near the screen, and seeing this cause and this
effect, expelled Candide from the castle with great
kicks. In the behind, Ginogande swooned. She was
slapped in the face by my lady, the Baroness, as soon as she had come
to herself and all was in consternation in the
finest, most agreeable of all
possible castles,
Absurdity and existential dread, and
the vagaries of life in institutional systems, the perils of knowledge.
These are all themes that leap forth from the short
pages of the deeply influential book we
opened Season five with just now,
a book that, despite its lack of length, more
than makes up for in deceptive depth,
proving that writing from the perspective of assuming that your audience is intelligent
enough to get the joke has always been in the wheelhouse of the
satirist, the jokester and the comic,
and, of course, those willing to wear the literary clothes
of those same folks kicking off
the Fifth season of our show, we are going to dissect
ideas and themes and solutions that for leaders that
may lead to the restoration not only of
leadership, but maybe even of, dare I say, the entirety of
Western civilization itself. From a book
listed as one of the 100 most influential books ever
written by the poet Martin Seymour Smith and literary
critic. And he of course
was also a biographer, so he knew a little bit about this fellow.
We are going to be reading
from Candide by Voltaire.
Leaders, we are past being fooled by the
promises of the Enlightenment project. We are weighed
down now in our time with ironic
detachment which is preventing us from leading with
sincerity in this not the best
possible world, but I don't think that.
But it's the only world we've got.
And of course, back for this new season
of chicanery and shenanigans and tomfoolery
along with great books is our co host,
Tom Libby, who is by the way, closing in on
being with us for 50 episodes. I just told him that before we hit record
on this. He was not aware of that. So this is episode number 44 for
Tom where he has joined us as co host. So how you doing, Tom?
How's your new year going? I am living my best life,
as. You mentioned that last year. Yeah,
I, I, I, I always, I gotta come up with a new one, right? Because
I, I used to use, I used to use living the dream. And then I'd
say I also have to remind people that nightmares are dreams too.
And then I changed it to I'm living my best life because I can't live
somebody else's. I've got to find a new one. There's got to be another version
of this somewhere that I can, that I could make up or pick up somewhere
along the lines. But overall I'm doing pretty good. Hey, son. Thank you for asking.
You should tell people that you're living in the best of all possible worlds. I
was just gonna say because that were you. What do you said? The best of
both of all possible worlds. But there's only one. We only have one to
live in. We're. Which kind of made me chuckle when you were reading the excerpt
here because I'm sitting there thinking to myself, experimental
physics in 1750. What was that? Holding up an apple and letting it go
to see what gravity does. Like what exactly
experimental physics are happening in 1750? Like,
anyway, for those of you are who are science
buffs, I'm not making that statement as a true question. I'm
sure there were plenty of actual science things. Science was happening. I'm
not. Science was happening. It just made me funny. It just made me laugh that
somebody like Voltaire would write that in, in the book. Well, and the
thing is, like, experimental physics, even in our own time, in 2026,
some what, what like 300 and some odd years later,
hasn't really advanced. Advanced much beyond that,
except now we just use mathematical models with better computers. That's all
that. Exactly, exactly. I mean, you had, you know, everybody was trying
to. Back at that time, everybody was trying to. To
copy off of. Of Isaac Newton's,
you know, sort of massive influence. And then you also had.
Which people don't understand, and this is not to make this serious, you made a
joke. It's a good one. And people
back in that time in, in the 1750s were just
beginning to sort of figure out, not that the world was round. We already
knew that Columbus had, you know, ran across the New
World, you know, by that point, but. Or what
was called the New World by that point, the North American continent. But,
but they were, they were trying to figure out at a
practical level. So there was practical. There was practical physics, there's practical mathematics, and
then there was everything else that was like, not practical. Right. And that's where
experimental physics sort of, sort of winds up at. So practical mathematics is
like, how do you get around the globe and find like the Northwest Passage, which
they still believed was a thing. Right. You know, or how do you find like
the city of El Dorado, which they talk about actually in, in here.
Right. Which they also still believe was a thing. There was enough of the
unexplored world still around the experimental physics. Sounded really
cool when you said it out loud. Yeah.
And it made girls like Cunegonde, you know, made their
bosoms heave, you know, and all those, you know, 17th century dresses.
I don't know. I don't think about that. But I'm married.
I don't know anything about that. And nor do I need to know anything about
that because I am also spoken for.
In the best of all possible worlds.
So we, we covered a lot
of information about the literary life of Francois Marie
Arouette, AKA Voltaire. In our shorts
episode that precedes this episode, which you should go back and
listen to, has the title of it, I believe,
why do. Why do business leaders read Voltaire?
Or why should they read Voltaire instead of Harvard Business Review? So I would encourage
you to go back and listen to that. And so we covered a lot of
basic information about Him. And so we're not going to go over that right now.
But what I will say is this. And it
was also one of the points that I made in that episode. I'd like to
get some of Tom's thoughts on this. Much has been written and talked about Voltaire,
particularly during his raucous life and through his death and way
past, from misappropriating quotes from his works out of
context, all the way to mangled malproisms in
the popular culture of the 20th century. I'm thinking of. There's a whole
scene in the movie Swingers where
Vince Vaugh and Jon Favro are ordering food at the breakfast
table in the casino. And Jean
Favreau, my buddy actually showed me this because I had forgotten about this. My buddy
actually showed this to me because he saw that I was reading the book.
And the, the Jon Favro orders
something off of the, off of the menu. It's like pancakes of the age of
enlightenment. And he says, he says to the waitress, I'd
like pancakes in the age of enlightenment. And then she's like, okay,
whatever. And then she takes Vince Vaughn's order and then they walk away,
right? And this is Swingers. So, like, Jon Favreau's like, in his 20s, Vince
Vaughn is in his 20s. They're all young and thin and, like, still sexy
looking. You're so money, you don't even know it. And, and,
you know, the waitress walks away. And then John Favreau goes, trying to pick up
this waitress. And like, how's she going to know a
Voltera reference? Why would I assume that a waitress would know a Volter reference? Why
did I say age of enlightenment? That's so stupid. This is also the guy who
later on in the movie has the whole scene with the, with the answering machine
where he's like recalling all the time and trying to fix the answering machine
message because he's nervous or whatever. He
doesn't have his whole thing. And, and,
and I don't know. And, and then of course, Vince Vaughn is there to like,
sort of calm him down. And Vince Vaughn goes, you know, man, don't even worry
about it. It's fine, it's fine, it's fine. Whatever. Like, whatever. And.
And then the waitress walks past and he tries to like, change his order or
whatever to say something different. And she goes, your pancakes will come out in a
minute. Voltaire.
Or something like that, right? Like, Voltaire would love that.
He would have loved that. Yeah, absolutely. And
the way this guy was wired,
his influence over the last, I would say
30 or 40 years has sort of begun to fade from,
fade from the, the, at least the, the dominant conscience of,
of, of the Western public. Maybe, maybe not
like his. So it's the direct link.
Maybe. But I think his work in his
personality and his thought processes were referenced so
frequently that we forget that the reference is his.
I think it's not so much that, that it's not being referenced
anymore. I just think we're forgetting the source of the reference because
as we were joking when, before we, before we hit the record button
and I had mentioned that this particular book candidate.
It's basically a third of the movies ever written. Like. Oh yeah, oh
yeah. If you actually go back and read this and think of it in the
context of today, you could think of at least a dozen movies
right off the top of your head. They'd be like it's the same story as
X or same story as Y or same story as Z. And I think what's
happening is that we're referencing those movie references or the books
rewritten or the books written by today's authors or more recent
authors that are still using his work as, as the focal point
or the thought. So I, to your point, I think we're losing touch with
the fact that, that he is being quoted or referenced or whatever.
Yes, but I don't think we're, I don't think we're losing
his references. If I said that, if I'm saying that right.
Yeah. And that gets to my, my other idea that he was such a rare
world bending historical talent that
you. To your point, and I think this is absolutely valid,
we, we now have reached a point where, because
look, we're going to go into a lot more of this, but
I don't know which. How many posts. We are past modernism at
this point. We're no longer postmodern. I don't know if we're post post modern
or post post post modern. Like, I don't know when that, that clicks in. Can
somebody just come up with another term, please, please, come on now. But we
are way the hell past modernity, which came directly out of the
enlightenment. And the entire. And we'll talk a little bit about this
too, but the entire Enlightenment project was built on the idea that
human reason could figure out the world.
That was a very simple way human reason, free inquiry,
could figure out the world. We actually had the brains to be able to do
that. And of course that came out of the
Reformation, which was a direct rebellion against the power of The Catholic Church
and the way that the medieval. The medieval, and of course the Renaissance,
those two, those two streams combined together to create the
Enlightenment. Right. Well, we've gotten a lot out of the
Enlightenment. And I always admit to this, like, particularly religious people
like myself, who, who, you know, have had to
struggle through the Enlightenment for the last 400 years to justify
the presence of religion.
I have to make this point to them. We've gotten a lot out of the
Enlightenment. The Enlightenment brought you, like, this podcast. That's what the
Enlightenment brought you. Free inquiry and the ability of human
reason to figure out the world. I mean, we were joking about experimental physics, but
really, like, without free inquiry, you don't get the atomic bomb.
Like, you don't get. You don't get the Internet. Without free inquiry, you don't
get the cell phones and this podcast mic and the video that we're shooting on
you. You don't get any of that. Now there are things
that are lost in that. And
Voltaire, interestingly enough, just like Shakespeare or
the Apostle Paul or Socrates or the Founding
Fathers, is a victim of his own. Is
a victim of the Enlightenment. Success. Right? To your point, the copy of the copy
of the copy of the copy. Right? Like, we, we don't even remember the
original source code anymore. We're just, We.
It was just too successful. Like, it just worked too well. And now we're in
this weird position where. And this is part of what I'm going to talk about
this year on the podcast a lot. We're in this weird position where
deconstructionism, which
also you see in movies, where you're able to take apart everything.
Okay, that's cool. But now we're at this weird middle ground where we have to
start putting things back together and we don't know how. We've lost the ability to
figure out how to put things back together that have meaning. And you and I
have talked about this even when we're talking about, you know, sort of the Native
American narratives or we talk about
political ideas or theological ideas on this show. How do we
know how to pull the ideas apart, but we don't know how to restore them
and put them back together? And the Enlightenment was the, was the root
source code of pulling things apart with human reason, but it
wasn't. There was no thing in there because they didn't think they needed
it because there were so many things that were together already. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think also Candide remains popular to your point
because of its, Its, its, its brevity. And
its wit and its satirism. Right. So like the first time I ran
across this book, I was 10 years old, maybe 11. And I banged through it
because I was like, each chapter is only like four pages.
And I remember like I was reading it, you know, over the last
couple of weeks, and I remembered. I, I sort of flashback to when I was
a kid and I remember I laughed through this. I laughed at
certain parts of this. Just the absurdity of, of certain things that were
happening. But now is a. I'm gonna be
50 in like four years now is a, you know,
mid-40s. I know, right? Mid-40s year old man. I'm looking at this
and I'm not laughing like there's humor in it. I can see the humor in
it, but I'm not laughing at it because we're way
past the absurdity. Like illustrating absurdity by being absurd, which we'll
talk about in a little bit. But like, we're on the other side of that.
And I don't know, like, we live in a meme driven world. I don't
know how we do. How we do satire anymore. Maybe that's a good question to
like sort of kick us off with. I was going to ask you, what do
you know about Voltaire and Candy? But you sort of, sort of covered that ground
a little bit. The, the, the
satirical elements of it and the absurdist elements of it are,
I think, what makes it
consistently popular among high school students. Because you first read it in high school,
right? Yeah, I was like, I think the first time I set eyes
on it, I was maybe 15. So for me, that was a long time ago,
people. Libby ain't telling you how old
he is.
Let's, let's just say it was be.
No, never mind. I won't even get. It was a long time ago.
He was, he was there when the deep magic was laid at the beginning. Of
the Internet, folks, actually, I remember the day they
announced the AT sign and what it was supposed to be for. So, you
know, you're put, you know,
h.email.com. yeah, they. They were
telling us that this new symbol was. So you get this new thing called email.
I remember that. That news. That news.
That news episode like very clearly like, like it was
yesterday.
So yeah, my kids laugh. You know, my kids laugh
because they feel at someday I will be the same
joke equivalent to did you know, And
God rest her soul, but Betty White died five years ago. And
But Betty White, at the time of her. When she. Just before she died, the
joke Was that Betty White was older than sliced bread.
So she was born before the mass produced sliced bread was actually.
So my kids joke that that's going to be me about the Internet. So. But
when I'm older, holding gray to my grandkids and great
grandkids, they'll be like, hey, he was alive before the Internet. And they're gonna go,
no way. So anyway, all right, sorry, we can move on. I
apologize. No, it's gonna be great. It's gonna be great again. You'll be able to
tell your kids. You'll be like Gandalf in Lord of the Rings. You could have
like the beard and everything. Like, you know, and you can be like, listen,
I was there when the deep magic was laid all the way. When the kid,
when the grandkids walk in the house and I demand a hug and I'll be
saying, you shall not pass, you shall
not give grandpa a hug.
Okay, so let's, let's bring this back on the rails a little bit.
Do you think? Okay, so thinking about Voltaire, think about who he was
as, as a writer, as a raconteur, as a
man about town. Internationally. He had a
hell of a biography which again, we've covered in our shorts episode.
But do you think he would have been
shocked or disappointed at the long term impact of his words
and of his writing? Because he wrote, he wrote a lot of books. I mean,
he had a big impact in his own time. Do you think he would have
been surprised that it, it lasted? That's a really good question. You know what, I
think he might have been pleasantly surprised, but still
not as surprised as I think. I, I think if I. Again,
you. We were joking a little bit before we hit the record button on the
podcast as well about how I felt this book was essentially an
autobiography. Like if you look at his actual life in the book,
there's a lot of mirroring that happens. So he's, I think one of the reasons
he wrote so well is because he wrote about things he really did know about.
Right. Like things that, you know, that, that really, that
he could speak to from a, from an experimental
experiential perspective. Right. Like he experiment, he experienced
these things. So I, I think from,
if he, if he looked back from his point historically,
were there people to your point, you, you mentioned a couple
Aripostles, Socrates, etc.
I think he would have thought because they wrote similarly
from, from their experiences and their, you know, from the
heart, so to speak. Let's just say it that way, that. And they, they had
Some lasting. Some. Some, you know, some
la. Lasting terms to that. Could he do the same thing?
I think he questioned it for himself. And I think he. I think he thought
about it. I really do. I think he thought about, like, what would I have
to do to be the next Socrates or to be the next whatever, and how
do I need to write? And can I write from that experiential
version that will give me the same stickiness. Right.
Maybe didn't use those words at that time, but I. I do think he thought
about it. And again, I think that's one of the reasons why this book in
particular, I find a lot of mirroring to his biography. If you look about
being stuck in being exiled to
England, like being in Prussia, being in like all these things,
like, where he. He was kind of forced into some of those
things, but once he got there, he made the best of it. He's like, screw
it, I'm. I'm here. I'm gonna go kiss. I'm gonna go kiss the Tsar's daughter
and you can go fry. Like. And then when he wrote the book about the
kissing the Barrett, like getting involved with the baroness's. With the Baron's daughter,
and, And I'm like, it's the same thing he wrote. He knew what he was
writing, like, so anyway. But I think
he thought about it. I think he hoped for it. I don't know if he
believed it was gonna happen. I. Obviously we can't speak to what his. What
his. What was inside is his brain. But based on the
writings and all of the. Right. I think he had an idea that if
I write this volume, if I write the. If I write this in volume
and I write enough, something's gonna stick. Yeah. So I do think.
I do think he had some sort of preconceived notion that. And again,
look at Socrates writing and Aristotle's right.
There's a lot of volume there.
I think he did have the concept, mentally, that
volume equals stickiness, volume
longevity. So we, We. We sort of. Because we're.
We're now in the backwash of. I mean, what are we. How many
years into the Internet are we now? 40, 40,
50 years into the commercial Internet. And the level of social
disruption that the commercial Internet has created in
comparison to what was before is unbelievable to us living now.
Can't. Voltaire was born
in 1694. Yeah,
1694. 1694. So he was born because
the. The printing press officially started churning.
Gutenberg started officially churning out bibles in like
1430 or something. 1450 somewhere in there.
So he was born 200 and some odd years
after the printing press and he started
writing another probably 25 years after that. So
imagine what kind of people we will have
200 years from now on the Internet. Good point.
That's sort of where my brain goes with it because I think I do,
I hold to, and I want to say this on this episode early, I do
hold to the idea that there have been probably
two or three world bending, world
changing human innovations
just in the area of science and technology. And the first one is the
book, it's the printing press. I mean Gutenberg kind
of suspected he had something that revolutionary, but he wasn't quite
sure. But without the printing press, you don't
get the Protestant Reformation, you don't get the Renaissance, you don't get
Vasari's lives of the artists. Like you don't get people knowing about who the hell
Michelangelo is, who aren't, who don't live in Italy.
You don't get for good or ill,
you don't get Columbus coming to North America. You just don't get that
because there's no curiosity then. Yeah, okay,
they wanted to compete with the Chinese, but it would have taken a. But you
could have added another 100 years onto that process which would have pushed back a
whole bunch of other things. Without the printing press, you don't get the French
Revolution for sure. You
also don't get the American Revolution without the printing press,
you don't get the British revolution which was the Industrial Revolution.
The printing press was a world bending technology.
So is the Internet. Not social media, not the
nonsense we build on top of it, not marketing ruining everything.
Which marketing marketers ruined the printing press too. They did. Marketers
ruin everything. This is what we do. I'm talking about
the core technology of being able to connect globally
with everybody if you want to and everyone
having the opportunity to have a voice. And then you could argue the Internet plus
cell phones, but that the core technology of the Internet itself,
that's one of two just like human innovations that cannot be beat.
And so I wonder to your point,
like I think Voltaire did have an idea that things were
going to be sticky. I agree with you about that. But I don't know if
he thought they were going to be sticky across time.
No, that, no, that's, that's the, the argument I'm making. I think he, I think
he at least had the foresight of it. He. It had to
have been, it had to be in, it had to be bouncing in his brain
around there somewhere. Just the sheer volume that he wrote. Yeah. Right.
Because you know when you write at that volume,
something's gonna stick. Right. Like that's the whole like the. Into your point
about like the Internet today. Think about, think about
a guy like Joe Rogan, right? Yeah. How many podcast episodes has that
guy recorded? Right. When, when the Inter. 100 years from
now, when Joe Rogan's long gone, are people still going to be
list going back and listening to Joe Rogan's podcast? Possibly.
Just the sheer volume of it makes people think there's some value
there. Right. Like, so there. That's what I'm getting at. Like, and I, and I
think that today we think about legacy differently because of that,
because we know it's a lot easier in Voltaire's
time. You had to have something published for it to be to
that. To get to what I'm talking about being like, he wrote
so much so often, so the volume that he wrote, someone still had to publish
it. And that, that costs money. Today's world in the Internet, you don't
need that kind of money to get your stuff out on the Internet. You can
own that. You can own some sort of domain. What is
it? Hostling or bleepaddy? Whatever. You can go get a.
For eight bucks a year or whatever, and you own that domain. You can put
whatever you want on it. If you just start pumping it full of content and
catches wind of it 100 years from now, like, oh my God, look at the
volume of this up. And they re. Something's gonna. Something in there will stick to
something. Like you just. It's just inevitable at this point. So it's interesting that
you brought up Joe Rogan as the Voltaire of our time. I didn't
call him that. Hold on, timeout,
timeout. I did not call him that. I was just using
his, his. The, the, the relation
to. The relation to volume, that's all. Yeah, yeah, the relationship.
I understand the, the volume. The person putting on the
volume of our time. Yeah. So I did, I looked up the AI, looked it
up on Google and the Google AI overview says, and I quote,
as of early January 2026, there are over
2,690 episodes of the Joe Rogan experience.
There you go. Then there's a bunch of other gobbledygook after that which we don't
care about. And he's going to be recording it for the next 20 years. So
God only knows where he's going to land. Right. God only knows where he's Going
to land. That's all. That's all I was getting at. He might crack 5,000 episodes.
He may. I
would not be surprised if he did. So again, that's my
point. Right? So 100 years from now, somebody's going to be looking up content,
content creators from the early 20s, you know, the early
2000s. Joe Rogan's name is going to pop up because of the volume.
Like, who's going to beat that volume at this point? It's, it's going to
be insanity. But that's what I was. Okay, but. Oh,
we'll get to that. Okay, so this now, this now gets into like the core
ideas of Candide, which are illustrating absurdity. Sure. Because
this is. It's absurd to think that the guy
who was on Just Shoot. Not Just Shoot me. No. News Radio,
who took shots to the face on news radio and hosted Fear Factor.
Okay, we'll have enough, well produced enough volume of
podcasts on this revolutionary technology called the Internet
to be referenced 150 years from now
as the avatar
of the public voice of people in the
early 21st century. See, and this is again, what
you're talking. Voltaire would love the, the absurdity to this.
I think, I think he would love the conversation right now. Like, he would be
like, yes, I think that this is just. This
is, this might just be absurd enough to happen.
Back to the book, back to Candide
by Voltaire. We're going to pick up with chapter two here. Again. Remember, they're short
chapters, so, like, you can like, they're literally like four pages, maybe even
three. Like, literally, like bang through it in like 10 minutes. This is
an afternoon read, so let's find out what happened to Candide
after he got kicked out of the the best of all possible castles in
the best of all possible worlds. Chapter 2. What became of
Candide among the Bulgarians? Candide, expelled
from the earthly paradise, walked for a long time without knowing where,
weeping, raising his eyes to heaven, turning them often towards
the finest of castles which enclose the beautiful future. Baroness. He
lay down to sleep without supper in the midst of the fields between two furrows.
The snow was falling in fat flakes. The next day, Candide,
frozen, dragged himself toward the neighboring town which was named
Valder Berghoff Trach Nickdorf. With no money,
dying of hunger and fatigue, he stopped sadly at the door of an inn. Two
men dressed in blue noticed him. Comrade. Oh,
said one, there's a very well built young man and he's of the
right height. They advanced toward Candide and very civilly invited him
to dinner. Gentlemen, said Candide, with charming
modesty, you do me great honor, but I haven't the money to pay my bill.
Ah, sir, said one of the men in blue, persons of your figure and merit
never pay for anything. Aren't you 5ft 5? Yes,
gentlemen, that is my height, he said with a bow. Ah, sir, sit down to
the table. Not only will we pay your expenses, but we will never allow a
man like you to lack money. Men are made only to help one another.
You are right, said Candide. That is what Monsieur Panglos always told
me, and I clearly see that all this is for the best.
They urge him to accept a few crowns. He takes them and wants to make
on a promissory note. They want none. They all sit down to his table.
Don't you love tenderly? Oh, yes, he replied, I love
Mademoiselle Cunegonde tenderly. No,
said one of the gentlemen, we are asking you whether you do not tenderly love
the King of the Bulgarians. Not at all, he said,
for I have never seen him what? He is the most charming
of kings. And you must drink to his health. Oh, most gladly,
gentlemen. And he drinks. That is sufficient. They say to him,
you are now the prop, the support, the defender, the hero of the
Bulgarians. Your fortune is made and your glory is assured.
They immediately put irons on his legs, and they take him to the regiment.
They make him turn right. Turn left. Raise the ramrod. Return the ramrod.
Take aim. Fire. March on double. And they
give him 30 strokes with a stick. The next day he drills a little less
badly, and he gets only 20 strokes. The day after they give him only 10.
And he is regarded as a prodigy by his comrades.
Indeed, completely stupefied, could not yet understand too
well how he was a hero. He took it into his head one fine spring
day to go for a stroll, walking straight ahead, believing that it was the privilege
of the race of humans, as of the race of animals, to use their legs
as they please. He had not gone two
leagues when up came four other heroes, six feet tall.
They overtake him, they bind him, and they put him in a dungeon.
He was asked juridictiously, which he liked better,
to be beaten 36 times by the whole regiment, or to receive 12 lead bullets
at once in his brain. In vain he told them that the will is
free and that he wanted neither of these. He had to make a choice.
By virtue of the gift of God, that is called liberty. He decided to run
the gauntlet 36 times. He did it twice.
The regiment was made up of 2,000 men that gave him
4,000 strokes of the ramrod which laid open his muscles and nerves from the nape
of his neck to his rump. As they were about to proceed to the third
run, Candide, at the end of his rope, asked him as a favor to be
kind enough to smash into his head. He obtained this favorite.
They bandage his eyes, they make him kneel. At that moment the king of the
Bulgarians passes, inquires about the victim's crimes. And since this king was a man of
great genius, he understood from all he learned about Candide that this was
a young metaphysician, very ignorant of the ways of this world. And he
granted him his pardon with a clemency that will be praised in all
newspapers and in all ages. A worthy surgeon cured
Candide in three weeks with the emollients prescribed by
disor or disorides. There it is. He already
had a little bit of skin and could walk when the king of the Bulgarians
gave battle to the king of the Albarians,
close quote. So
Candide was in the army now. Not behind a plow.
You dig in a ditch. Son of a. You're in the
army now.
This is, this is a prime example. This is why I picked chapter two
of illustrating Absurdity by being Absurd. So to
Tom's point about Voltaire's biography, Voltaire did run across the
King of Prussia. And at that time in Europe, Prussia was its
own independent nation state. Prussia had not run across.
Well, they hadn't yet gotten to the point
where they were willing to wage wars against everybody
else on the continent in order to unite Germany into one,
into one nation state. Although Frederick the Great was sort of
the precursor to some things that were going to
happen later on in the very
war torn early 19th century.
Voltaire saw all this coming. And of course he was witness
to the marching, the turning, the lifting of the ramrod,
the lowering of the ramrod, and wondered, of course, where all of this would
lead. He understood that the best way to skewer the
present was to demonstrate the massive gap between what was idealized
and what was reality. And all of the characters in
this book, from Candide to Mademoiselle
Cunegonde, there's going to be a blind old maid that you're going to
meet in a minute. Maybe we won't get there today, but all
these characters in the book, even the characters in El
Dorado, lived through absurd situations that Voltaire
saw in real life. They experienced war, social strife,
Natural disasters. This book was published right around the
time when an earthquake occurred in
lisbon, Portugal, in 1750.
And in Lisbon, apparently this was like one of the biggest earthquakes that had
ever occurred on the European continent and killed a whole bunch of people. I think
it's something like. I'm gonna have to check the number, but I think it was
somewhere between like 30 and 50,000 people died in this earthquake. And
Voltaire was, was. Was taken aback by
this, right, because there were many people
talk about philosophy and the Enlightenment. There were many people who were exploring
all kinds of philosophical ideas during the Enlightenment
that were attempting to, of course, get away from the religious wars that were also
ravaging Europe at that point. And. And one of
the ideas was this idea of optimism,
this idea that we are living in the best possible world. And of course, Voltaire
thought that was absurd. He said, if we're living in the best possible world, how
is it that all these people died in this earthquake in Lisbon? Or if we're
living in the best possible world, how is it that people are forced into marching
in regiment to serve a king? That might be crazy. If we're living in
the best possible world, how is it that we
still have social strife and we still have. We still
have rulers who are tyrants, right? And by the way,
Voltaire was a monarchist.
He was a monarchist. So what that means is,
by the way, as a monarchist, he saw the divisions in French
society as being examples of absurdity and then of
themselves. So French society was. Was divided into three
parts. There were folks who supported the monarchy and supported the
aristocracy. Louis the 15th and all those folks and all
of his precursors, Louis XIV, Louis the 13th, you know,
what's her name? With. Let the. Let there. Let there be cake, all that, Right?
Okay. Then you had
the noble class, right? And the noble class
included landowners and included intellectuals
like Voltaire, Rousseau
and Diderot and all those other guys who would wind
up later on. And. And Voltaire did know some of those folks would
later on wind up laying the foundations of the French Revolution. So
you had your. Your nobles and your intellectuals, right, Your landowners. And then the
third area of society that you had was what
was. What was. Well, the third area of society was the church. And so the
church owned property. We often forget in our modern times, because
France is so secular
after being. After having the religion smacked out of it during two world
wars, that France was once a
heavily Catholic country and the
Catholic church owned a lot of property in France.
They fought a forward movement
against the Protestant Reformation that was kind of coming out of
Germany and specifically Prussia, interestingly enough,
Lutheranism, Calvinism, all of that was coming out of Germany and
Switzerland, the area that would later on become Germany and
Switzerland. They were fighting a, a front,
a front robust, you know,
crusade level action against all of that. And of course, this was an era
where popes out of Italy had, well, they had
armies and they used them. So this is the historical
context that Voltaire is in. And he's looking at all this and he's saying, this
is absurd. If this is the best possible world, what the hell are we
doing? And he writes Candide from that perspective.
Voltaire believed that we had to be cynical about the absurdity of the world around
us if we would ever find the moral courage to confront it and change it.
This is why it's worthwhile as a reader,
as a leader to read Voltaire rather than Harvard Business Review,
because think about the world that we are in today. The world that we are
in is equally as absurd,
perhaps more at scale, I think Voltaire would say, than
it was during the, during the time that between
1694 and the publishing of Candeep. And Voltaire was walking around
observing things. And it begs the question. No, not
begs the question, but it opens up the question which we were going to talk
about Tom, about here. How
can leaders, right,
expose and face the absurdity
just of the day to day ways they have to lead? And we've never actually
talked about this on this podcast. I was realizing that when I was reading Candide.
Like we've never actually talked in real terms about the
absurdities of leadership. We've kind of talked about dichotomies,
but there are some literal absurdities that are in leadership. An
easy one to think about is we have these HR policies and procedures that
we've created. Maybe the founder of the company has created them, or maybe the executive
board has come up with them or whatever. And
then there's this thing that happens that's outside of the
boundaries that are set by those policies. But it's
not unethical, it's not immoral, and it's not illegal. Just
outside the boundaries. And if we were in any other
possible circumstance, we would just kind of ignore this and leave it alone.
But we can't because it's in our business and we
haven't. We. I don't think we've ever talked about that, that, that situation, those kinds
of situations. And so how do leaders, what can leaders take from Candide in order
to handle that? I
think So I don't know it, it's so funny that
you, you word it like that because I was, I had, I, as I
was thinking of the excerpt you read and some of the commentary that you had.
And I already had some things in my brain that now don't apply. So I'm
not sure I'm, when I'm gonna say that or if I'm going to say any
of that stuff. But, but, but
I, I think to your point, right, like
I don't think there's anybody when, when leaders are
true leaders, when they are faced with a problem, they try to solve it. So
to your point about you've got all these policies and things that, that you
deem as your HR playbook or your HR
employee handbook or whatever, and if you've come across something that
doesn't get addressed in there, how do you like, to
your point, do you ignore it? Do you just let it go? Leaders are not
going to just let it go. That's just not, it's not in their DNA, right?
So they're going, they're going to try to find
a place in their employee handbook that they can slightly
modify to include it so they can address it, so they can handle it and
so they can move on, or they're just going to add a
chapter in their handbook to address it. Now
that being said, that's the, that's the practicality of it. That's, that's the way,
right? That's the way leaders are, are built, right? They're gonna, they're
problem solvers. They're going to look at a problem, they're going to solve it. This,
this thing is not in our employee handbook, but we need to address
it. And even if somebody says but do we have to address it? It's not
in the employee handbook. And they're going to go, if it, if it, if it
happens in the confines of our company, it needs to be in the employee handbook,
right? Like so the fact that it happened, and I think it goes back
to Voltaire's thinking, which is
think in provability, in fact, in
factualities. Don't think in ideals and ideas,
right? That, like, that's one of the foundations of his writing, which is like
you should be judging something based on what you can see, feel, touch, hear,
smell, whatever, not on ideas. An idea is
not, is not something that you should throw all of your whimsic,
your whim into, right? Like so, same, same
scenario here. So if leaders think like that, that they're thinking
practic from a Practical standpoint. And they want to see provability.
Things that can be, you know, things that can be
touched, smelled, saw, heard. What I like you can
prove that it exists. Right. Then they're going to fix
it. They're gonna. They're gonna. They're gonna. They're gonna inevitably rewrite the
employee handbook. So. So we are. Yes, they are going to rewrite the
employee handbook. And, and you're talking about. So Voltaire.
Voltaire loved divisions and classes in
society. He was a classicist in a way that we can't understand. Right.
So he, he believed in.
Yes. He believed that, like, all human beings were
equal in sort of the John Lockean way of thinking about freedom that the
Founding Fathers would eventually codify and like the Constitution and the
Declaration of it. He believed in all that. He would have. He would have clapped
for all of that. Right? He would have seen America as like the
pinnacle end of the Enlightenment project. That's how he
would have viewed the American founding. If he'd been alive long enough to. To sort
of see. Because he died in 17.
When did he die? He died in
1778. So
he died, what, two years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
And so he didn't get to see the like, the like
fulfillment of that, but he would have clapped for that. Okay,
but he was also a monarchist and he believed in kings
and he believed in classes. He's. He's quoted as saying, I. I
do. Did see this in his Wikipedia biography, and I reconfirmed it in other places,
but he did believe that the masses. Democracy couldn't
work because the masses were idiots, basically.
Our forefathers felt the same way. That's why they invented the electoral college. I'm just
saying. I'm just saying. I'm just saying, like, there's is. This is the thing. Right?
And so. So he believed in a class system. Right.
Now you're talking about
a distinction between, at a class level, between
what is practical and pragmatic
versus what
we see and idealize in business.
Right. And so there's. There's a dis. And by the way, we're on the other
side of, like, existential dread. So we're on the other side of, like, Camus, who
we've covered on this podcast. We're on the other side of deconstructionism. We're just going
to tear everything down. And Durinian deconstructionism. We're on the other
side of moral relativism. Well, you know, if it feels like it's Your truth, Do
it. It's fine. By the way, Voltaire would have rejected all that crap.
He would have said, if it feels good. What does that even mean? I have
no idea. Yeah, he would have yelled it. He would have yelled at Jacques
Derrida in French and told him he was a moron, you know, and then like,
run away. Actually, he might not have run
away. Those old boys, they actually knew how to duel. He would have challenged him
to a duel. Like, he did challenge somebody to a duel. I
believe he did, if I remember correctly. I. I'm trying
to remember who it was now. It was like, it was when he was in
Prussia. It had something to do with the Prussian king's daughter.
Yes. And the way that I can't remember now who he.
It doesn't matter. But to your point, he wasn't backing down for people because
principal met. Your name meant something at that point in history,
Right. You were not going to do anything to muddy your name. And if it
meant to defend yourself against, it didn't matter who.
Didn't matter. So. So we're, we're past all that, right?
Our names don't mean anything. One of the great lines in, like, Pulp Fiction,
when Bruce Willis is getting on the, getting on the bike and the girl is
behind him and she's like. Or not the girl. Like, it's not that scene. There's
one other scene in there where she's like, what's your name? And he's like, my
name is blah, blah, blah, blah, or whatever. And she's like, what does that mean?
He goes, we're Americans, baby. Our names don't mean anything. Yeah, there
you go. It's. Yeah, like Voltaire would be
stunned to the point of disgusted at that, that entire, like,
worldview, right? Because it did mean something.
So my question is, my clarifying question with all that there is.
If we have the pragmatism, which I don't disagree with you, I think, I
think leaders are pragmatic, but I also think leaders are, like,
trapped in this environment of absurdity where.
So for instance, I once had an employee, and this was long
before COVID and George Floyd
and any of that. I once had an employee who shall remain nameless
if he's listening to this, to this podcast, but he'll know who he is. When
I mentioned this, this incident, who wanted to go and protest
in like, some anti racism rally, okay?
And this was way back. This is before anything happened with COVID This is years
ago, like 2017, 2018, back then.
And I sat him down. Because there's nothing in that. In my
employee manual about any of that. Because I couldn't have. I couldn't.
It was only after I developed a relationship with him that I understood where his
political leanings were. And so it made sense
to me that he would go in that direction. Right. And I literally
had to sit him down and I had to say, listen,
there's nothing about this in our handbook.
So I'm going to. This seems very idealistic to me.
And you want to change the world. Actually, I think it was 2016.
That's right. Because he was a Bernie bro. That's right. That's right.
He was a Bernie bro. That's right. And he wanted to go to, like, a
rally that was going to turn into some shenanigans in Portland
at the time. That's what it was. I remember now. And I literally looked at
him and I said, I don't care about your politics.
That has absolutely nothing to do with the work that you do here. I don't
care that you go protest. That's your freedom of speech. That has nothing to do
with what you do here. However, I do care
because it was a small team. I mean, we were under 25 people. I do
care that if you get in trouble and you call me,
I can't come bail you out. Like, I'm
not doing that. That's a step too far. And
when you come here, if you have been in jail,
that's a problem. You. You don't work here. You don't work
here anymore. Yeah,
that's an absurd. To me, that was an absurd situation.
That was a candid level of absurdity because I couldn't
under. Number one, I couldn't understand what he was trying to accomplish. But because I
thought the fix was in already, which it turned out I was right. But.
But. But
because I'm just older and I just seen more. Right. But.
But it illustrated to me
the absurdity of dealing with things that are outside of the
boundaries. Right. That you might be faced with as a leader.
And I literally had to sit there. I couldn't laugh at him because
I really did. I wanted to crack up and be like, this is so obvious.
How can you. How could you not figure this out? And the absurdity
was in that he was idealistically
oriented in this direction so genuinely that he couldn't
see the absurdity himself. And that's what I think leaders struggle with.
Even more so now on the other side of 2020, because there's all kinds of
things that have occurred on the other side of 2020 that I, I couldn't even
imagine in 2016. Oh my God. If you had told me like back in
2016 that we would have like all of
the things we had post George Floyd and post Covet and all of the kinds
of absurdities that have, that have just, we've just sort of like shrugged our shoulders
10 years later and just sort of been like, yeah, okay, that's reality now.
I'd have been like, what? Yeah, I would not have believed you either, honestly.
And that's the absurdity part that I think Voltaire is pointing out with Candy.
That's why I think saturation works. That's why
memes work across the Internet. And what's amazing to me is people can't figure
out why memes work le. And I'm not just talking
about like regular people, like people who, we have titles
and we call them politicians and policymakers are
absolutely flummoxed by meme culture on the Internet.
Well, until the 20 something, until the 20 somethings are running for Congress,
it won't like we will. None of the next generation after the,
the, the, the politicians that are in power, right, the next
generation behind them are still not going to have an idea behind that. They're not
going to have a clue either. It's going to be, it's going to be two
generations, three generations away when we start, when you start seeing
politicians leverage that stuff. Yeah, the absurdity will
disappear, right? Like that's, that's really what it gets to
Voltaire's point, right? The absurdity won't disappear. The absurdity will go to a higher
level because I don't think the absurdity can disappear. Okay,
so it might not, but the absurdity that you and I are thinking of right
now will disappear. It'll be something else is my point. It'll be
more, it'll be less, it'll be different, whatever, but it'll, it'll, it'll morph into something
else is I guess, my point. But
as we have said on this podcast a thousand times at this
point. That the more 44 times, the more. Things change, the more things
stay the same. Right? So this is this what I don't think
Voltaire would think this is anything new. Like everything like what
you're talking about and how he approached the world, the thought about the world, how
he was, he was even, even self contradicting at some points with the,
the way that he viewed the, the world versus his
thoughts on monarchies and, and, and classism and stuff like that.
And some of, some of his writings would, would literally talk about
how that was absurd even as to one. One
human being to rule. Overall, he thought that was absurd, but
yet supported it. So like. So I think, I think he would.
I, I do think they're, they're. If he were alive today, I think there would
be things that he would look at us and go, no duh. Like
that's the five year old Voltaire. No duh.
How do you guys not see that this is normal? Like this is a, this
is exactly what you should have expected. Like so well,
and maybe that's the part of the continuing strength of him because he,
he hits on something that so, so you know, in the list
of notables that I mentioned along with Voltaire, which he would object to
being placed next to the person that I placed him with. But
I'm alive and Voltaire is dead. So,
so, so you know, Voltaire, the apostle Paul,
Shakespeare, Plato,
um, St. Augustine, the people that even people
that we've read on this show, I mean we've read all those guys on this
show. Show, right. They all
touched on or were able to grasp
something about a corner of reality that
to your point, the masses say no duh
or whatever and sort of move past,
but they focused in on that and said no,
you need to pay attention to this. And that's the power of Voltaire.
That's why Voltaire has lasted across time along with all those other folks. And
just like those other folks, he will continue to
either be referenced. I don't know about being read, I'm still not convinced on that.
But he'll be referenced forever and ever. And not forever,
but for a long, long time. I think it's gonna take a long time for
the water to go out on guys like that.
And where that relates to leaders and leadership I think is
in that leaders have to
understand that. I think they're playing on a longer timeline than
just. And we haven't really talked about this either, but maybe
this year we will more. They have to play on a longer timeline than just
the quarterly timeline.
So I go back to my, my, my story with, you
know, my former employee. Like that
person I had, I had a lot
of impact in that person's life. And
that person looked up to me and, and
admired me. Right. And looked at me as a figure to be admired.
Right. How much impact I had across that person's lifetime,
I have no idea. But I do know that for, you know, a very
specific narrow window of about.
Yeah. Five to six years. Like, that person was like, hey,
hey, son. What do you think? You know? And I think it goes back
to that idea of being able to treat his
absurdity as serious rather than as something to be laughed at or something to
be satirized. It's become content now. It's,
congratulations, it's podcast content now. But, like.
That'S how you know you've made it. See, before you had to be
quoted in a book. Now you become podcast fodder, and you've made
it. More absurdity.
So instead of saying the more things change, the more things stay the same, we're
gonna have to come up with another phrase that we can honor Voltaire with. Like,
the more absurd. The more absurd something seems, the more likely it
makes sense. Sense, or the more likely it is more
likely. I don't know. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it
out. Well, this is why. This is why this is the first book we're covering
in the first episode of this year, because this lays the foundation for where we're
gonna go. Exactly. All right. By the way, I did
look up the. The Lisbon earthquake. So
I want to kind of grab this information, and we're going to be doing a
little bit more of this this year also, since I do have my. I do
have my phone attached to the Internet. Wait, we're gonna. We're gonna fact check on.
Right on the podcast. Right on the pod. That's amazing. A little bit more
of that. Joan, eat your heart out. I'm gonna stop being so lazy.
So the Lisbon earthquake occurred in 1755
and occurred on the morning of Saturday, November 1, the Feast of All Saints,
around 9:40 local time. So that was. That's a big Catholic. That's a
big Catholic holiday. And it
was a 8.5 to, um, 9.0
earthquake. So it was a big earthquake,
and it killed 30,000. 30,000 people
and apparently
created a. A tsunami that was
about 20ft high at Lisbon and
65ft high at Cadiz, Spain, which is a little bit more
inland. Modern research indicates that the main
seismic source was faulting of the seafloor along the
tectonic plate boundaries of the mid Atlantic. So, yeah,
and Voltaire said about that. He
lamented the destruction of Lisbon in the earthquake. Again, this is according to
the AI The AI here on. On Google
and criticized the philosophers who thought that, quote, all's well with the world,
and the religious folks who thought that it was, quote, unquote, God's will.
So he, he. He hit to the both his left and his right, which was
typical for Voltaire.
Speaking of the Lisbon earthquake, we're going to go to chapter six in
Candide. Back to the book. This is
going to be real short. It's literally two pair, two paragraphs. It's ridiculous how
short chapter six is. This is why I picked it for my
mid. My mid. My mid. Episode transition here. All right.
After the earthquake. So this is chapter six. How they held
a fine auto defe to prevent earthquake and how Candide was
flogged after the earthquake which had destroyed three quarters of
Lisbon. The country's wise men found no more efficacious means of preventing
total ruin than to give the people a fine auto da fe.
It was decided by the University of Coimbra that the spectacle of a few
persons burned by slow fire in great ceremony is an
infallible secret for keeping the earth from quaking. That's
the absurdity that he was pointing out.
They had consequently seized a Biscayan, convicted of having married his
bleepchild's bleepmother and two
Portuguese who, when eating a chicken, had taken out the bacon.
By the way, there's a note in this. The reason that they picked the two
Portuguese who, when eating a chicken, had taken out the bacon was because the taking
out of the bacon thus showed that they were Jews and still
secretly faithful to Judaism.
After dinner, back to the book. After dinner they came and bound Dr.
Panglos and his disciple Candide, the one for having spoken and the other for
having listened, with an air of approbation. Both were taken
separately into extremely cool apartments in which one was never bothered by the
sun. By the way, those are prison cells.
A week later, they were each clad in a sanbenito and
their heads were adorned with paper miters. Candide's miter and San
Benito were painted with flames upside down, with devils that had neither tails nor
claws. But Panglos devils wore claws and tails, and his flames were right
side up. Thus dressed, they marched in procession and heard a very pathetic
sermon followed by some beautiful music in a droning, plain song.
Candide was flogged in time to the singing. The Biscayan and the two
men who wouldn't eat the bacon were burned and Panglos was hanged, although this
is not the custom. On the same day, the earthquaked again with a
fearful crash. Candide, terrified,
dumbfounded, bewildered, bleeding and quivering all over, said to himself,
if this is the best of all possible worlds, then what are the others? I
could let it pass if I had only been Flogged. If only I had been
flogged. That happened also with the Bulgarians. But, oh, my dear Panglos,
greatest of all philosophers, was it necessary that I see you hanged without knowing
why? Oh, my dear Anabaptist, best of all men,
was it necessary that you be drowned in the port? Oh, Mademoiselle
Cune, pearl of young ladies, was it necessary that your belly be
slit open? By the way, that had happened earlier. He
was going back, barely supporting himself, preached at, flogged, absolved
and blessed, when an old woman accosted him and said, my
son, take courage, follow me.
By the way, there's one other thing you note. Every time there's a new character
introduced, the level of absurdity, the ratchet of absurdity
goes up higher. So the. The old lady.
The old lady proves to have a story that I cannot read on air, by
the way, but it is a story that is quite,
quite shocking to modern ears.
Even I was surprised when I read it. I was like, oh, they actually wrote
this down? Well, I guess all these kinds of things were happening on a regular,
so it wasn't a surprise to anyone. Which
this leads into sort of my. My Act Two
idea here. So,
remember I said earlier in the show that.
That we've become enlightened. Right. And we're at the end. I. I personally believe, and
I'm not the only person to say this, I personally believe that we're at the
end of the Enlightenment project. This doesn't mean that we're not discovering new things
or that we're. We're at the end of, like, human
invention. I don't. I wouldn't be so bold as to take that position,
although Peter Thiel has taken that position. There's been several people to say
that the human race has invented what it will invent at this point. Now it's
just building a better mouth. Mousetrap. Right, right, right. Several. Several people believe that. Several
people believe that. And I think that that's a bunch of
nonsense. And not just a little
nonsense, like a lot of nonsense. Actually, there's a book that we're going to read,
our second book this year. We're going to be reading a book by
Francis Bacon called the Great Installation. And
it's. It's going to be
interesting because Bacon believed, and he was
roughly a. A.
What do you call it? Not a peer, but he was operating at the same
time that Voltaire was operating, except in England. And
Bacon was a person who believed that we actually could
resuscitate, we could renew the world,
we could take actual knowledge and scientific
theory and we could remake the world
into something else. And he believed, as
many do who say, that we've reached the pinnacle of
human enlightenment and that we have no further to
go. He would say to
those folks that what we've reached is the peak
of mediocrity, actually, and that just by building a better
mousetrap, we're just being more and more mediocre. And Peter
Thiel, by the way, believes some of this, but then sometimes you'll get him in
other interviews, he believes other things. Right, so. Or he'll say other things in
answer to the interview's question. So I
personally don't hold to that. But I do think that the project of the
Enlightenment, which was a project that was believed, that was based
on, again, the principles of free inquiry and
free human reason, I do think that project is at a close.
I think we are going to have human innovation, but it's going to be
built on different principles. And I think that's the direction we're going. And we just
don't know what those principles are because no one's laid them out for us yet,
because we're all still trying to go back to the Enlightenment because we're like, oh,
human reason, that's like the best thing for us to use. Well,
you know, at some point, you do have to look around and realize the
limits of human reason. And I think
we have reached that point, particularly in America, where we're starting to look
around and go, what are the limits of human reason here? You know, what are
the limits? Where are the boundaries? And that's a good question to ask because
I think that that ultimately opens. Allows you to find a new door
into a new place that you didn't. You didn't know existed. But it takes a
long time. It's not something that happens at the speed of a tweet.
Yeah, you know,
I think the challenges that are in our era, particularly the challenges for leadership in
this era that's also partially circling, looking for that new door,
are challenges in competence and meaning. But I also think the challenges
of courage. And then, of course, there's the tactical areas
of leadership and succession and mentoring and coaching and
supervision. We for sure, and I've
already said this, we for sure know more about the world materially and
scientifically than even people in Voltaire's time did. However,
we know a hell of a lot less about people and their motivations than people
in Voltaire's time did. And we ignore empirical evidence.
It's right in front of our eyes in favor of scientific theories about
human nature that very often prove to be mere myths. And
then we get mad when people don't live out the myths.
Case in point, every riot you've ever seen
lately about any political act,
and I'll just leave that there.
Technological wizardry has allowed us to hide from facing the hard truths about
leading people and Candide. This is another reason why you should probably read
it. Candide is about facing hard truths presented, of course, in a way that
illustrates the absurdity of those truths, but it cannot tell us how to
solve that absurdity. He cannot tell us how to resolve it.
Voltaire merely shrugs his shoulders sort of rhetorically at the end of
Candide and sort of leaves us to our own devices.
And as a person who is a religious person and also
a philosophical person, but also a practical, pragmatic person,
this will not do for me.
There are hard problems to solve in leadership. Tom and I mentioned some of them
already. Competence, meaning courage. Those are hard problems
to solve because they're so individualized.
How can leaders have the courage to actually face those hard problems and
solve them? Oh, goodness
gracious. So how. How
can they get the courage? My,
my. One of the things that. And I.
I've always had this thing like leaders
aren't born, they're created. Right? So
if you. If you're. If you're not willing
to face the hardest challenges, if you're not willing
to. To make hard decisions, are you really a leader?
Can you. Should you be considered a leader? Are we missing. Are
we missing out on a secondary title or a secondary role of
somebody that we should be calling them instead of the leader, so to speak.
Because I think that's. I think that's where those people fall. Right.
Maybe they're. They're somebody who needs somebody above them to say,
you know, pat them on the head and say, what you did was, okay, I'll
take it from here. Because I really do want to lead people. I really
do want to help people secure, succeed. I really do want to be the person
somebody comes to with their challenges. I want people to come to me with their
problems. You don't seem to be that person. Right. So
when you. So can they build up to it? Sure. Because I do still believe
that leaders are made and not born, so somebody may not be ready for it.
This goes directly to a problem that I was talking to a
colleague of mine last week about. It wasn't on this podcast, believe it or not,
Jeson, what we were talking about. Was the
fact that, like, the question that was handed to me was,
did you ever work for someplace that promoted you with
training behind the promotion? Or were
you just given the promotion and expected to lead people because
you knew how to do a job that you were doing? In the current state
of state of affairs, I think that is the underlying
problem. We take. I'll just take my area of expertise. For
example, we take a salesperson. You'll
say you have a group of 10 salespeople. Your
sales manager leaves, gets fired, quits, whatever. And
the instinct is to say, let's take our number one guy or gal
and make them the sales manager. Because the thought process is they can make
everybody else as good as them. And that is the furthest from the truth I
have ever heard in my entire life. Because what makes a
really good sales leader and what makes a really good salesperson are
two different things. Are we going to promote that person?
First of all, we're going to ask that person. You're going
to half the time in those environments where it's only one team. I'm not talking
about giant corporations. I'm talking about a small company. One sales
team they're going to take. They're basically going to say, hey, son, you're our number
one rep. The sales manager just quit. So you're the manager now. Have a nice
day. There's no conversation or
interview process or whatever because if they went through an
interview process of like, say, the top three salespeople, they
might uncover that the third best salesperson
is number three because they spend 25% of their time
helping everybody else, making everybody else on the team
better, Taking the last, the bottom guy or girl on the sales
team and trying to coach them up, trying to help them, trying to give them
some, like some confidence booster or whatever. Now, whether
they success or fail at that is not their job. But they do it because
they want other people around them to be successful. Now
you take that person at number three, make them the sales
manager. Now guess what happens? Your entire sales team just
uplifts because they're going to take the worst sales team, the worst
salesperson on that team and try to make them better. The number one
person will not do that. The number one person will be like, well, you suck.
I'm just going to replace you, right? So again, I, I go back
to, like, some of the absurdities here are
companies will promote and have expectations
without training, without conversation, without.
They'll just hope and pray that this person is going to do a good job.
You know, by the way, I would say 8 out of 10 times that person
gets fired because they suck as a manager instead of just getting
demoted and put them back where they belong. So there are, there are salespeople out
there that never want to be sales managers. They just want to do their job
and go home because they're really bleepdamn good at it. You know what?
If you own that company, let that person do that.
Why. Why are you going to take your best salesperson out of the field?
That makes no sense anyway. So go back to what the
part of this, the courage part comes from the person who
wants it in the first place. Yeah. Okay. You
can't force courage onto people. That doesn't exist. And you've seen that.
Oh, yeah, sometimes through humanity. But
courage comes from the most unlikely places at the most unlikely
times, which is where we get some of the. Most.
Honorable movies out of World War II, stories out of
Vietnam. That stuff comes from real courage. If you
want that person leading your company then,
or if that person starts a company, they're going to have the courage
to face the hard, the hard questions. You don't have to teach them that. It
comes, it comes from that experience of, I either do this or
I die. Which is why, by the way, there's a lot of companies that will
go out of their way to hire military veterans. A lot of companies I know
will go out of their way for that because they know that they've been in
some situations that they've had to make hard decisions or
follow hard orders, but still follow them well. Okay,
so. But we, we confuse the. We often confuse, I think,
in. To your point about military. Okay. We covered war by
Sebastian Younger last year. Right
in. And, and one of the things that we. That I noted
when I was talking about that book with, with John Hill,
AKA Small Mountain, is that
I always have to put that in. But one of the things I noted with
that was that
we always say courage is not the absence of fear. Right. It's doing what you're
afraid of anyway in spite of it. Right.
Okay, so. But, but we also don't make a
distinction. And by the way, Brene Brown says that courage is a heart.
And I agree. It is in. It is in the emotions, it's in the feelings.
It's not. It's not a reasoning. I can't reason your way into courage. Okay. I
agree with both of those postures. Right.
I think we still don't know. We still merge
together moral courage and physical
courage. So physical courage
is. Physical courage always comes last this is
one of the things that I am an hour and
15, almost hours, 16 minutes in. Now I'm going to mention jiu jitsu. This is
something that comes in. I mean, we, we, we offered
up movies really quick. So we did, you know, it's fine.
That's right. So this is something you learn in jiu jitsu, right? So
I can have the physical courage to step out on the
mat. But that only comes to your point about training.
That only comes with training. During which time in
training I have had to face my lack of moral
courage in going and getting a hard role with
somebody who I may not particularly like or who
I just don't like their posture towards the game. Right. It's not that I
know that they're going to submit me or that I'm afraid that I'm going to
get hit in the face or get choked out. It's not about any of that.
It's about, do I have the moral courage to
confront before the physical courage even shows up.
And we confuse those two things together all the time. And so we hire military
veterans. And I agree, there are certain, I mean, I'm in
Texas. A lot of firms in Texas chase
military veterans. Texas is very military veteran friendly.
Texas employers are very military veteran friendly. They want those
people because they confuse, I think,
the physical courage with the moral courage. You go talk to any military
veteran, man, you know what? They don't talk about the physical courage
part. If you ever go talk to any of those guys one on one, you
know what they talk about? They talk about the moral
complexity, right? Of what it is they did. How do
you live with the emotional courage? How do you live with that
thing that, not only how you live that thing that you did, but how did
you make that emotional decision to get in there and get after it
when XYZ thing was happening to your friend?
That's a moral act. That's not a physical act. The physical thing is last.
And we, we, we, we, we, we reverse the order because we don't understand
causality. We don't understand cause and effect. But I also, but I
also think, going back to the training part of it, I also think that the
moral, like what you're talking about is true, but training helps you prepare
for that. Yes, the more again, back to your
jiu jitsu analogy. You get on that mat because
you have confidence in your training. You are able to face
those moral judgments and that moral compass of yours because you have
training and confidence in your training. The same thing could apply to
Leadership, Right. We expect leaders to just be leaders. How many times have you
heard, well, just go do it, or just go do it. Like, if you don't
have the mental muscle memory to do it, then
how the hell are you supposed to. We just inherently want a sales manager
to know how to hire and fire salespeople without ever having to show them how
to do it. That doesn't make any sense. There's. There's a
lackluster. There's a lackluster attempt at
building leaders, and we don't do that. We
don't build leaders. We, we want leaders to just show
up. Right. So how can leaders get the courage? Well, if
you happen to be the leader of a company, then you need an outside
source. You need to go find somebody who can help you train to be a
better leader. A coach. Coach, a mentor, something like that.
Somebody to bounce ideas off of, somebody to run things through. Because if you don't,
and you just think you're going to do it on your own, if you are
really good at it, God bless you. You are, you're. You're.
You have a gift that most people do not have because most people need to
be shown the way and how to do those things, including the
military. Why do you think we have ranks? You are a private before you're a
sergeant. You're a sergeant before you're a lieutenant. They, There's a reason for that
because we need to train you up to get there. Well, and
we, and we laud the military. But even there, like, they struggle with.
Depending upon which branch you go into or which branch you
advance in. Even there, they struggle with
political
individuals who have more tactical understanding of how to
politically advance in a ranking versus moral courage in
advancing in a rank. Right? Absolutely. So even, even they struggle with
the training gaps there. Right. So,
yeah, and then we, we keep. Using the military as an example. But that, that
example exists in companies too. Like. Oh yeah, think of, think of any big
company you want. I've worked for. I've worked for several, and I shouldn't say several.
I've worked for one Fortune 100 company and, and several Fortune
500 companies. But even in the Fortune 100 company you go
from, they hire you at the entry level. They call it entry level for a
reason. Like you go from here to here to here to here. And then
this one particular company I work for, which I really enjoyed working for,
was one of the rare cases where I was a salesperson, got promoted to
a sales manager. I could not take hold of my Sales team until I went
through their training program. Right, right. So. So this is a thing
that I'm a partisan for. I mean, you know me, I'm a partisan for training.
I believe in training. Sure. We have an entire business
built around training. You know, you can go check out our
advisory group, bjdad advisor group.com. you go check out all that. You go check out
Leadership Toolbox. You can go check out HSCD Publishing. We believe in training.
Yeah.
I don't know. And this is not a question we have to ask now or
something we have to explore because we want to turn our corner here a little
bit because we're getting ready to close. But one of the things that we are
going to focus on. This is why I listed, you know, succession, mentoring, coaching,
supervision. This is why I listed these things. Because at a fundamental level,
if your company isn't set up. No, not even set up. If
the, if the idea of training being a nice to have
is a thing, you will
consistently fail in promotions. Yeah. Of people. And
you will consistently set up situations that are going to be
absurd for ground level managers and
supervisors. Just straight up absurdity.
Voltaire level absurdity. Like it'll be literary, what
you'll be setting up. What you'll be setting up. It'll be literary worthy.
Literary worthy, that's right. You know,
and, and the thing is the, the ground level, the
tactical guys and girls, you know, women and men
in organizations,
don't comment on the absurdity because
it's become part of the culture. Yeah, right, agree.
And that's the, that's the real, one of the real leadership
problems. But I think, I think the other thing too. I think the other thing
too. Some of the areas that you're talking, like if in my
brain, you don't become a Fortune 100 company and have those kinds of problems.
Problems like I don't think you can grow that big and
have that level of gap where your, your ground level
troops, so to speak, have no support mechanism built, have no
training built in. You kind of have to. In order to get there. You kind
of have to. What I'm worried about is the smaller companies that to your point,
they don't. Because they, they, they think that they're gonna, they're very
block and tackle. Right. Meaning, like, right, we're not going to face that problem until
it's actually a problem. We're going to ignore that until it becomes hurtful to our
company. We're doing 20 million, we're doing 50 million and
we're okay. But until that becomes a real like in your face kind of problem.
Which is basically to your question just a few minutes ago, which is how to.
How do leaders get the courage to face the reality? The. One of the problems
is we're talking about those size companies. There's no
hierarchy where the actual owner of the leader of the
company can take a step up, away and say, yeah, I can. Now I can
view my company from this holistic, this holistic approach to vanity.
And I can take these pieces and do, do this like piece by
piece and really judge it. Really take the, Take the bull by the horns and
have the courage to look inward into my. It doesn't happen because
they don't feel like they can do that. There's not enough layers for them to
do that. And you're to your point about how do you get
them to do that? You can't. Like, they have to
want. There has to be a want and a desire to do that on their
part to be better. Or more importantly, from a leadership
perspective, there has to be a desire on their part to want
to make their employees better. And if all they're worried about is their
employees performing a function, it won't work.
You have to want your employees, your employees to be better.
It wasn't, it was, it was one of the major players. Like,
it was like a Richard Branson or somebody like somebody like that basically said
if you treat your employees a certain way, they won't leave. They won't want
to leave. So the idea of continuing to train them should never
be a problem. Finding opportunities to train them
and, and find training that they want to do, find ways to make them better,
find ways to increase their, their value to the company. Because if they
leave, you're not going to be sad by the, by them leaving. You're
going to be proud that when they walk out, they're going to be a particular
kind of employee to the next person. I can't. I, I was
somebody. I, it was somebody famous. Mark Cuban, Richard Branson was one, guys.
But like, the thought behind it makes sense.
The thought behind it makes sense is my point.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I, I think that we are, we're in a.
There's a bunch of different things in there that we're going to explore over the
course of the next, over the course of the season. And I agree.
I think we also have.
Maybe the question isn't how do we get them to get the courage to face
reality. Maybe that isn't the question. Maybe the question is
more like how do we prompt those kinds of leaders in
those 20 to 50 million dollar a year, you know, revenue
businesses who don't feel as though they can step away.
Right. How do we prompt them to step
away? Because we're moving in the direction
and to sort of close around this, this point a little bit before we move
on. But we're moving in the direction of, we're moving
away from instruction
delivery based thinking and we're moving more
in the direction of prompt based thinking. And
partially that's because of AI, but it's also because of the nature
of how we engage with our technological
tools that then, in a virtuous or
unvirtuous circle, depending upon your perspective, changes our
brains in how we react with other human beings. And it
takes the lag time is huge. Right? But it does eventually show
up. So for instance, we didn't have as much social
anxiety in the 1990s when every teenager didn't have a cell
phone. Now we've got social anxiety up the wazoo and we've only
had cell phones at scale for about the last 20 years.
It took 20 years for that feedback loop to get
built. I think we're at the beginning of building a new
feedback loop, but I think that feedback loop has to be around prompting.
Right? How do we prompt leaders? How do we, how do we encourage them? That's
part of what this podcast does, but it's also part of what short form video
does and other other forms of content delivery that are out there because
everybody's trying to experiment with this while they're not using those terms. Well,
I hope, I hope part of what this podcast does is
gives people the ability to think outside the box. Right? Like, think about the, just
the title of this podcast, Leadership Lessons from the Great Books. Who would have thought
taught to go read the Great Gatsby or Voltaire's
Candy and find actual leadership lessons out of a fictional
book that somebody wrote 200 years ago. Right? Like this.
I think you're, I think, I love, I love being a guest on this podcast
for that reason. It gives people the freedom, the ability, the
encouragement to look for these lessons outside of normal
parameters. Look outside the box. Not everything you
learn is going to be in this, right?
Not everything that you, not everything that you want to learn is going to be
in a technology format like. Right? It's okay. And I, I said
the same thing to, I say the same thing to, to small business owners all
the time. There's a reason that every athlete on the planet has a coach.
I Don't care who you are. LeBron James has a coach. Michael Jordan had a
coach. Wayne Gretzky had a coach. Tom Brady had a coach. At every level they
played at, they had a coach. Coach. Yep. If your company
is at 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 million and you want to continue
to grow and you think you have all the answers, you're sadly
mistaken. Yeah, you, you yourself as
a business. Why do we think business owners that are
successful at this level don't need more
coaching? They don't need more people to bounce ideas off. They don't need people
outside of their organization to talk to through problems.
We need to encourage that out like, we need to encourage that. Small
business owners need to know that it's normal. There's, it's not
audacity, it's not a flagrant use of money.
It's normal to go find and hire a coach, go get somebody. You can pay
a few hundred thousand, you know, a few hundred. A few thousand dollars a
month or whatever and, and get some real world experience that's
beyond you. Well, it, it has to be, it has to be perceived as
at a. Unfortunately, because we've monetized everything
out to the nth degree. You know, there has to have an. ROI in the
business. I get it. You know, and I, I roll my eyes there. You
folks can't see that on the audio because I, I do think there are things
that are outside of the roi, and I understand that,
that like, we have to be ruthlessly focused on everything inside of the
roi because if we're not, we might get distracted and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah. But what happens if, what happens if
spending that $3,000 a month on a business coach just made you a better leader?
The ROI is not tangible. Like, it's not. You can't put your hands on a
direct impact like. Right. But I will tell you,
if you're, if your bottom line goes up year over year and you
don't attribute it to having that business coach, there's something wrong with you. Right,
right. Yeah. No, exactly. Yeah. No, but you're, you're, but you're, I'm telling you,
you're going to, you're going to attribute it to. Well, our,
our, our bottom line is up year over year because we
made changes to this process. We increased the budget to this marketing
campaign. We did. You're going to give it a, you're going to give it a
value to something that you physically did, but not remember
that you bounced all those ideas off your business coach and he helped you ideate
through what all the pros and cons and ups and downs and what could happen.
You made your decision based on real world information,
but the physical change in your business is what caused the roi, Right?
It blows my mind that. And that's another absurdity.
Exactly. That's another absurdity. Okay,
let's turn the corner, let's go into, let's round the corner here.
Let's start our close. Part
of one thing that also goes along with absurdity is the idea
of if we can't solve the problem, right, because maybe the
problem's too big. Maybe we don't have
access to the owners of those 20 to 30 to 50 million
dollar a year businesses. Maybe we don't have the interest in coaching them. Maybe we
don't have the skills to coach. Right. Or
maybe we're a person who to Tom's earlier point,
just wants to be a leader who shows up, does their work and goes home
and has a title maybe or the status of leader, but doesn't really have to,
don't really have to put in like any of the, any of the, any of
the, the hard work, any of the elbow grease
alongside those kinds of phenomena or part of that
phenomena. And this comes out of World War II actually is the phenomena
of ironic detachment. And
we started exploring this idea a little bit towards the end of last year
with Ernest Hemingway with A Farewell to Arms. We kind of talked
about this a little bit with Libby Younger, a little bit in War by Sebastian
Younger, which I already referenced. We kind of talked about a little bit with George
Orwell in 1984, the Big Panel show that we had.
I've come to this thesis over the course of
the last couple of years and part of it is a generational
thesis that's initially how I started it, but now I think it's actually something that's
a more broader cultural thing. And I want to
explore a little bit of this with Tom as we close because I think, I
think Voltaire would have told, would have told us to watch out for this.
So Voltaire begins Candide with
hang loss, you know, postulating to Candide the
philosopher that this is the best of all possible worlds. It's a species of
optimism, right? Voltaire never
dismisses, he satirizes
that position of optimism and he lampoons it through
satire, but he doesn't fail to take it
seriously, nor does he commit the other
sin which we have committed in our time. He doesn't separate from it
emotionally and just sort of shrug his shoulders and say, to
paraphrase from the great band of the 1990s, Nirvana. Oh, well, whatever,
nevermind. He doesn't say that either. He
doesn't allow himself to be ironically
detached from critiquing that optimism
because he wants not the optimism to change.
He doesn't care about that. He wants the world to change.
And he actually believes that, that his writing can do something.
His, his satirical observations, his pointing out an
illustrated absurdity by being absurd. He actually believes that that can actually
say, do something. And he believes it
sincerely. Post World
War II in the west, we've been robbed of our ability to be sincere. And
it's become an increasing problem over the course of
multiple generations, from the boomers all the way down through my
generation, Gen X, my generation has sharpened
that sense of ironic detachment to a sharp point. Now,
part of that is because we're the generation that was the first
latchkey kids. We went through divorce, social, social
strife at like an individual level, not a, not an
institutional over their level, but like a actual real
lived level. And ironic detachment is a nice anchor, but it's also,
it's also shield Right, because it protects you. You don't get emotionally involved.
Oh, you don't want to change. Okay, whatever. I'm going to go over here and
do this thing. You don't want to listen to me, you don't want to take
my, you don't want to take my coaching advice at $3,000 a month. Okay, whatever.
I'm going to cash a check and I'm going to go to the next thing,
you know. You, you don't want to, you don't
want to help me, I don't know, build houses in Patagonia.
Okay, whatever. I'm going to go to Patagonia. I'm going to build houses.
As a generation, we have sharpened this to a fine point. This is almost. We
don't even think about it anymore. The
generations behind us, the millennials and the Gen zers
specifically, took that to its logical
conclusion. And now they just want to burn everything down and have chaos.
Because that's where ironic detachment gets you. Because if it's all, well, whatever, then
leadership can be burned down, culture can be burned down,
politics can be burned down. All that exists then is
anarchy and man against man and every man for themselves. Because it
doesn't matter. I, I don't think Gen Z, you know, be careful what you wish
for, because they are not ready for every man for himself. But you know what
I think Gen X is our, We Wouldn't
be like, bring it. Right, Exactly. Because. Because we're the
granddaddies of ironic detachment. Okay, Bring it. Yeah, that's fine. Let's. Let's.
As I sometimes joke with my kids, that line from Tombstone, that great line where
Kurt Russell hits a very fat Billy Bob Thornton in the bar,
right, when he's beating the horse or whatever, he says, go ahead. You go ahead
and you pull that smoke wagon and you watch what happens.
And that's the position of Gen X, See? Like,
yeah. So Gen X, we're the F. We're the F around and find out, right?
Like, bingo. Yes. Like, we were the whole command. You know what?
You want to come at me? I don't. Whatever. Right? And then Gen
Z, they want to do that, but when the *bleep* hits the fan, excuse my
language, they're like, oh, they. They like.
They kind of shrink away and move. Like. Whereas we. We go. If we
make a mistake, we like, okay, here's a good example. And take
the. The fighting out of it. No, no, taking fighting
in back into it. Right? Yeah. Okay. Okay. You're on the street, you're in a
bar. You and your wife are in a bar. Guy says something to her, does
something to her, whatever. You step to him, he punches you in the mouth, you
get knocked out. You're still going home with your wife, by the way. Oh,
yeah. But your wife has a different level of respect for you because
you stood up for her, right? Win or lose, win or lose, win, lose
or draw, your wife is like, I'm. You know, you shouldn't have done that. You're
an idiot. You got knocked out. But I love you because you stood up for
me. It's me. And then we're in the
back of our minds going, *bleep* damn it, I shouldn't have done that. Like, we
always think about it after, right? Like, that guy was twice my size. That guy.
Like, that guy knew his. Whatever. Gen Z.
First of all, they're not stepping to anyone like that. Or if
they do, they back down real fast. Because I notice even, like, even my
own son. Now, just for the record here, I am not
a big dude. My son is 6 foot 3, 300 pounds. He could probably step
on me really fast and not even think twice about it. But
if I really sharply come back at him, he's like, oh,
I'm sorry. I didn't mean that way. Like, he just backs down right away, right?
Yeah. And then. And then even if they don't and they get smacked in the
mouth or they get put down it was, it's, it's still not their fault,
right? Like, oh, well, that guy shouldn't have done that. He still shouldn't.
He's still wrong. No, that's not how that works. You got
punched in the mouth. You just take your licks and go home. You don't just
now, you don't, you don't turn around and say, yeah, but,
yeah, but, yeah, but like, I don't, I don't understand it. So that
thing, that thing that we have as our
generation has aged and this is again, this is part of the thesis that I
came to towards the end of next year and we're going to explore a lot
of this this year. I came to the conclusion that
that was really good when we were young and it was
really useful when we were in our 20s and in our 20s. Yeah, yeah,
it was really useful. But now we've entered
generationally and societally a place where people
who are in our age cohort 45 to
64 or 46 to 65 in that cohort did
classic Gen Z cohort. We are now in leadership positions. An
ironic detachment doesn't work in leadership. Yeah,
I agree. And the thing that we need, and this is going to
be really hard for all of us, and this is why
I kind of stuttered when I said Western civilization. Maybe the podcast could say Western
civilization. Why I get embarrassed about it because you have to be
sincere and sincerity requires
a certain level of emotional connection to the thing.
Can I just say, like, where you. Can be hurt, by the way, that's a
huge thing where you can be hurt. Go ahead. Like, to me, the emotion
that is most missing, like, it's not, it's not even, it's
empathy. Right. The ability to be empathetic,
I think is totally missing in, in a lot of what we're talking about.
Right? Like, and I think to your point, our generation, it's not that
we don't, we want to be empathetic, but if we find it
difficult to be empathetic because it's like, it's, it's
almost like one of those like, scenarios where again, if you think about our
generation dealing with Gen Z, that's like a perfect example because,
because Gen Z has this and they can go research anything they
want. They think they know everything. And our generation is looking at them going, you
haven't lived through anything yet. How do you think you know that?
Right? Like that. So it's hard for us to empathize with a, with
a 20 something these days. Right? Well, and we have. And
we have a huge generation in between Gen Z and us, which
the millennials who shall go nameless for this, for this moment, for the first time
in their entire existence. Yeah. For the first. The first time. The
millennials are not the. We're not vilifying them, leaving them alone. We're leaving them alone
for this game. Go ahead. Sorry. Who are also.
They are what I call. Or what would be called in, if you were looking
at generational. Generational theory.
Generational cycle theory, which is where the idea of the fourth attorney
comes about or the high. Or whatever. Right.
Strauss and how. Right. All that kind of stuff. They are
the generation who is the hero generation. They're the
generation who, for lack of a better term,
are sincere and do want to run off and be a hero
and do want to save the world. Right. These are the people
between, you know, the oldest, the youngest end is
like 34, 35 now, you know,
coming into their mid-40s, who
have had a little life. Right? They have. They have a little life. I gotta.
Gotta give that to them as a. As a. Is it a younger Gen Z
or. I got to give to him. Our younger Gen Xer. Got to give it
to him. They've got a little life. Right. They've had a few knocks around. They're
a little bit. They got the little bitter sort of patina on them a little
bit. Yeah. But they still have hope that the
future will work out. That's because they haven't hit their late 40s yet. Yes,
true. But they. But they also. This ironic
detachment again. But they also have that genuine. That
genuine necessary.
And so we are in a unique position, I think, as leaders. This is something,
again, that we're going to explore the podcast as a theme this season through our
books. We have an opportunity, and I think
this is going to be really hard for us as. So this is my challenge
to all my Gen X leaders out there.
Ironic detachment is an anchor and it's weighing us down.
I think the fact is, if we don't get our crap together, we're not going
to experience a Gen X president. Not going to happen. We're
going to get skipped right over. We're going to
maybe have another boomer, but it's going to be a boomer. A young
boomer like Gavin Newsom is a young boomer. It's going to be like a boomer
like that versus like a J.D. vance, who's a millennial through and through. J.D. vance
is a millennial through and through. And that's that's, that's. Those are two perfect
examples right now in the political zeitgeist in America. Trump is a boomer.
Please. That, that's, that's, that's. That. And there are no
gen Zers right now that are. That are even politically
savvy at this point. They're just too young a generation. So we will,
if we don't get our crap together and cut away this
ironic detachment and actually get sincere about something and actually
care about something. This is where Marco Rubio as a political actor is so
interesting to me, because on the one hand, he plays the boomer game,
which we all did, by the way. We're all. We all did that very well.
But you can see in moments where he's not
thinking the camera is looking at him, where he's like,
okay, yeah, yeah, okay. He chose
the company line. But you can tell every once in a while he's like, what
the f. What the. Right, Right. And this is. And this is a guy who
was called Little Hands. Marco, everybody forgets about this in Trump's
first run to the presidency and got blown off the
stage. I think he genuinely learned. What
the hell? Tulsi Gabbard's another example of a Gen Xer.
Genuinely learned. Like, this is. Okay, okay, fine,
if Gen X, actually. And also, it's a basis of numbers, right?
We're the smallest generation between the two mountains of the boomers and the
millennials. So just on a numbers basis, we won't get one,
but we really won't get one if we don't get our crap
together. We actually. This is the clarion call. I'm putting
it out here at the end of this podcast. We were a generation that
was raised in absurdity, and we've become so inured
to absurdity that through ironic detachment and
through irony and through cynicism, quite frankly, you saw this a little bit in A
Farewell to Arms. We've sort of sharpened that to a point to protect ourselves
so we don't get hurt. In order to be sincere, to your point, we have
to be empathetic, which means we have to unharden our hearts.
And I think that's going to be really hard for us as leaders. But that's
a challenge. And the books, the great books can help us do that.
So. So I know we're going to. We're going to wrap this up in a
second, right? So just for, just for. Just
for hoots and hollers, I did something because you said that
this year you're going to do a little bit more fact checking on the, on
the, you know, because you, you put up a couple times. So just for fun,
I pulled up and I asked Gemini to tell
me what the Leadership Lessons from Candid would be and
summarize it for me. Right. So I'm not going to read the whole summary, but
I want to tell you and you, you tell me how many of these we
actually hit and this will be funny. Okay. One is
leaders should focus on tangible, productive work they can control rather
than worry about global unchangeable
problems, reject blind optimism and dogma,
adaptability over entitlement, value of experience
and knowledge and empathy and humanity in
humanism. So according to Gemini, we hit just about
all of those. I think that's pretty
funny, actually. That's actually, that's actually pretty good. So in other
words, we are the AI Hay, we are. No, I'm just
kidding.
We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna bring our hard. We're gonna crack
our hard Gen X shells and let the light
from our hearts shine out this season.
Season number five on the Leadership Lessons from the Great
Books podcast. But with that,
It.