Leadership Lessons From The Great Books #6 - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera w/David Baumrucker

Show Notes

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera w/David Baumrucker
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• Welcome - 0:30
• The Myth of Eternal Return - 2:00
• The Acidity of Moral Weakness - 3:15
• Milan Kundera and Communism - 6:00
• Background of Dr. David - 9:25
• Infidelity and Betrayal - 14:30
• Leadership and Position - 16:30
• Leaders as Walking Billboards - 18:00
• Family as the World's First Organization - 20:45
• Leaders and Social Negotiation - 24:00
• How do you Bring a Follower Along with No Anchor? - 32:00
• Attachment Theory - 37:00
• Leadership as a Function of a Structure - 41:00
• Compelled Muteness, Compelled Speech, and Compelled Media - 51:00
• Leaders Say "Yes" and Leaders Say "No" - 1:00:00
• Leaders and the 10 Year Overnight Success - 1:10:00
• Leadership, Truth Telling, and Cancel Culture - 1:20:00
• Leadership Theology - 1:35:00
• Staying on the Path - 1:45:00

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David Baumrucker - https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-baumrucker-ma-lpcc-ncc/
Momentum Life Counseling - https://www.momentumlifecounseling.com/
Attachment Theory - http://labs.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm
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Creators and Guests

Host

Jesan Sorrells

CEO of HSCT Publishing, home of Leadership ToolBox and LeadingKeys

DB

Guest

David Baumrucker

Producer

Leadership Toolbox

The home of Leadership ToolBox, LeaderBuzz, and LeadingKeys. Leadership Lessons From The Great Books podcast link here: https://t.co/3VmtjgqTUz

What is Leadership Lessons From The Great Books?

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

Hello.

My name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the leadership lessons from

the Great books podcast, episode number six,

with my guest today, David Baumrucker. Why, hello,

David. Hello. How are you doing today? Good.

The idea of eternal return is

a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed

other philosophers with it to think that

everything recurs as we once experienced it and that the

recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum. What does

this mad myth signify? Putting it negatively,

the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all,

which does not return, is like a shadow without weight,

dead in advance. And whether it was horrible,

beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty

mean nothing. We need take

no more note of it than of a war between two African kingdoms

in the 14th century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world,

even if 100,000 blacks perished in

excruciating torment. Will the war between two

African kingdoms in the 14th century itself be altered if it recurs

again and again in eternal return? It will.

It will become a solid mass, permanently protuberant,

its inanity irreparable.

If the French revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would

be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that

will not return, the bloody years of the revolution have

turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, having

become lighter than feathers, frightening

no one. There is an infinite difference between

a Robespierre who occurs only once in history, and a

Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off

French heads.

Totalitarian times, tyrannical times,

nihilistic, existential, deconstructed times, postmodern

times. All of these times fundamentally

create weak people. Tyrannical

times create weak men. And then weak men lead others weakly.

Chinese writer, translator, linguist and inventor Lin

Yutang was correct when he wrote, when small men

begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is

about to set. This epiphenomenon occurs

not only as a result of weakness in the macro at the apex of

an organization or a culture,

it's also at the micro, individual level of

leadership. Leadership begins inside and

moves inevitably and irrevocably,

relationally, to the outside, with others. Which is

why there is a lead. There's leadership everywhere you look, from from dyadic

coupling to multidimensional, sprawling teaming.

But when the system that one is under and another is under is

tyrannical then there can be no opportunity for truth.

There can be no opportunity for justice. There can be no opportunity for anything other

than the acidity of moral weakness.

In our time, moral weakness is on display everywhere. A human being with eyes to

see, ears to hear, and a mind to discern can possibly look.

So the question in this day, at this

moment, for leaders in these tyrannical times

is, if I am morally weak, how can I effectively lead

others? And if others, if my followers

are weaker than I am, or even worse, if they have the

expectation or assumption of moral weakness,

how can I lead them with moral strength?

We're going to talk about Milan Kundera's

famous book, Part of the triad of the 20th century

that goes along with One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Gulag

Archipelago, and this third book, the Unbearable

Lightness of Being Today with my guest, David

Baumrucker, who has more Alphabet soup behind his name than I do.

And yet we've both come to, I think, similar conclusions

to our 20th century Nietzschean nightmare of moral weakness,

individualized totalitarianism and deeply

personalized revolution. David has worked in the field of

mental health for many years, and of course, when the COVID crisis struck, I

absolutely hate the word pandemic. As you all know who are listening, David's business

exploded. He'll talk more about his knowledge of these areas. But

I wanted him to come on today and join us here on the podcast

for a couple of reasons. One, he's one of the most

unassuming people you'd ever meet, and you'll see that on the video. If you listen

to this on audio, you may hear it come through in his voice, but you'll

definitely get to see it on the. On the video. So I would encourage you

to watch that. And just like myself, number two, he came

out of the wilds of Northern Minnesota. We actually share the same

bachelor's degree in fine arts, playing rugby and learning

many of the same hard lessons that I learned playing that sport

as well. And when you're talking about the

epiphenomenon of weakness in our technologically advanced yet

moribund time, and I do fundamentally believe this after reading

Unbearable Lightness of Being, we have to talk about the mental

and the physical in order to understand and apply the lessons

of the philosophical and even the psychological that we are confronted

with in this novel, which was published in

Czech in 1984, and we have some

interesting things to say, or I have some interesting things to say about Kundera, about

moral weakness and about the curse even of

communism and totalitarianism and why. I do

fundamentally believe that for leaders in our time,

the struggle is how to overcome

individualized totalitarianism and the small T

totalitarians. They're looking to replicate a lot of what the big T

totalitarians replicated to the tune of a hundred million

dead. But don't worry, we've forgotten all

that. It's almost as if Kundera would say it never

really happened. Welcome, Dave. How you doing?

I'm doing fantastic, man. I appreciate the opportunity to come down and

have this conversation with you. There's a lot of

different aspects of this book that transcend both our culture and

the work I do every day. And so it's going to be a

fascinating conversation just as we work our way through this maybe.

And I can, with time permitting, I'll maybe

provide some insights about how this affects us on a personal level as

much as it does on a societal level. Let's talk a little about that before

we kind of jump into kind of a little bit more of the book so

that tell us a little bit about your background, a little bit about kind of

how you're thinking about, not necessarily the book. Talk a little about your background. I'll

start with that. So how did you come to the work

that you do? And why do you think it's important for leaders to

go through this kind of work or be involved in this or engaged with this?

And how do you, after looking over the book, how

do you see those two things maybe sort of. Or three things sort of intersecting?

Okay, yeah, great questions. My background, again,

we started kind of in similar paths, Northern Minnesota. And

from that place I did my degree in psychology as well as

fine arts. And I started kind of dabbling in the. The mental health

arena, doing everything from, you know, upward bond mentoring to high

school outreach to, again, the rugby program and different things like that.

When I moved out west to Missoula, Montana, and my fiance and

I, we lived out there for just, just under eight years. And in that time,

I had the opportunity of landing a job working for a

behaviorist, a team that we're working with autistic

adults that were severely emotionally disturbed adults. So there

was a severe significant amount of clinical lens that we had to apply to

certain things. But again, just how life has this kind of

happenstance way, I found myself having some chance encounters with some people that

led me to the path of doing my master's program. And so

while I, while I did that at the University of Montana and Missoula, Montana,

I both did kind of an interesting thing. I dabbled in career counseling,

held an office at the university for a while, held an office as a clinical

counseling Internet. After I graduated, I worked at the Western Montana Mental

Health center for about two and a half years. And that's I guess the equivalent

in Minnesota would be like the Mayo Clinic, a multidisciplinary campus that has

teams of professionals that work kind of interlaced with each other.

One of my primary functions of that was not only working

with homeless people and working with kind of the homeless outreach, but

working with individuals that

were, I guess, for lack of better terms, banking on entitlement,

banking on someone else to solve the problem. It was an incredible

insight to a part of this country and a part of our culture

that doesn't really show up as much in the Midwest, at least

for the lower income people. But

that really influenced me and I was able to get cross trained by a tremendous

amount of different professionals which again kept on evolving who I was and who I

was becoming. I made my way back to Minnesota in

the summer of 2018 where I ended up essentially working at

a joint private practice in Minneapolis for a while before I

decided to make the choice and step out into private practice with

Brandy fiance. We've been doing that since

September of 2019. And so we were fortunate enough to open our practice

before the, I guess the,

my Sharon Osiris type of situation happened. You could, it's

okay, you can call it a pandemic. It's like other people use that word. It's

fine. I personally have a problem with it for just variety of reasons that are

my own. But you wouldn't use your word. Well, you know. And

I guess it's, you know, with that, you know, we,

I, I was really shielded from quite a bit of it and I, and I,

I guess I had. I count my blessings because of that. I know there's some.

So many people were not. But being at

the helm of my own ship, I was able to navigate those waters that were

presented in 2020 and in for the first, I guess for the majority of

2021 where I didn't have to bend the knee as

much and I was able to kind of continue doing what I was doing which

going to what you. How you introduced me in the beginning which led to kind

of a cascading effect with my practice growing. I took a

very just no nonsense approach and we got down to brass tacks with

helping people and working on their life and you know,

consequently with what's going on with the world. We ended up talking about meaning. And

we ended up talking about how do we make meaning and how do I live

a life that I'm actually proud of? Because that

became a very, very sharp knife. They started to

cut through every single conversation I had with people. That next thing you know,

people are living lives that they don't respect. People are doing things, people are having

affairs. But that kind of tailors its way with the book.

And then we find people very disconnected with the

idea of themselves. We find people very disconnected with the idea of America.

And it became a very, very interesting conversation where this

rolling depression that showed up with everyone wasn't so much on.

It was on a personal level, but the origins of what the focus of that

depression was was on such a macro level, such a. Such

a discontinuity with the world that people found themselves in, that I

found it to be kind of staggering, at least when we got into

the first part of 2021. And to see that it didn't actually alleviate

itself, it actually compounded on itself. And I think that when we.

More recently, when I've paid attention to these different things and you were asking, like,

where I was going and how this applies to the book,

my focus now is I'm pursuing opportunities potentially

to get into doing different collaborations with other clinicians and also

possibly looking into the world of psychedelics and working into psychedelic research

and doing those things. When it comes down to,

I guess, how this applies to maybe what's presented

in the book, I think. Is that the question you asked me? What's a follow

up? Yeah, you know, when we say you mentioned infidelity, you

mentioned betrayal. These are aspects of the first part

of the book that really lay out, I would say, in the first.

And the book is divided up. Let me kind of talk about that a little

bit for those of us who haven't read it. Right. So

the book is divided up into. I think it's five to six. Five to six

mini books. Let me go ahead and look at my physical copy. Right. So, yeah,

it's divided up into. Let's see. Yeah, seven. There we

go. Seven. Seven, you know, mini books. Right. And

each one of these mini books focuses on an aspect of the

relationship between these four characters. Right.

And we'll talk a little bit about that relationship in a little bit. So, you

know, Tomas and Teresa and then Sabina

and Franz, and then there's a Marie Claire and there's some other folks, you know,

kind of thrown in there. There's even the dog Karenin,

named after Anna Karenina.

You know, Tolstoy's great. Well, second greatest novel anyway,

in my humble opinion. But, but, you know, it's divided into these seven

parts. And the, the thing the book

really pinwheels around, at least the first, I would say maybe three

books really pinwheels around. That's kind of what I want to focus on today.

And there's a lot of the book. Go buy it. If you're listening to this

podcast right now, go buy it. It is, it is part of the trilogy, considered

to be the trilogy of the 20th century that really critiqued

communism for the West. And

so this book, along with, like I said, the

Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which we'll be reading

on a Future podcast, and 100 Years of Solitude, which, if you haven't listened to

that episode, go back and listen to that one by Gabriel Garcia

Marquez, really are considered to be the three books, at least

I've read, are considered to be the three books that critiqued communism

and sort of broke it down into its component

parts. And the Gulag Archipelago is, of course, considered to be the book that

brought down an empire. But at the core

of Kandera's conception of communism is this idea of

infidelity and betrayal, which ties into what you're saying about,

and what I was saying in the opening there about the epiphenomenon of this weakness

and how that kind of cuts through from the individual all the way

upward to the state. And I'm

going to bring this up later on, but the East German Stasi, you know,

at the height of communism, claimed that, you know, one out,

was it one out of every three people or something like that was a, was

a, was an informer. Which means if you looked around in your house

and you had five people in your family, at least two of them were listening

to you all the time, and they assumed that at least three of them were

listening to them all the time. You can't build trust. Then everything, everything

fractures, right? And so for leaders, because

this is a leadership podcast, not a political science one, but for leaders,

I guess the question is,

particularly in our time and with what you're seeing, how do

leaders bind folks

together? You know, because that, that ability to

go along with the crowd, and we're going to see this in, we're going to

see this in the sections that we're going to read in, in the book, that

ability to just sort of waft, just sort of waft along with. The

crowd,

I mean, it is a. Sign of weakness, right? I mean, like it's a sign

of. Yeah. You know, and maybe not psychological weakness, maybe not a mental health issue.

Right. Maybe more of. Maybe something at a deeper level. Dare

I say a spiritual. I mean, you mentioned psychedelics. Dare I say a spiritual weakness.

I think so. I think that it's kind of all consuming. And

the fact that when you ask me about how do leaders bring this together

and how do they unify people, I think fundamentally,

looking at this book, but also looking at what happens in different people's lives and

even a microcosm of what we see in our politics, we get

fractured when people are unwilling to be wrong.

And when we get fractured when people are unwilling to show their humanity.

And by humanity, I mean we all have moments of vulnerability. We all have

moments of unsuredness. And I think when people move

forward with this blatant haste,

this blatant almost like arrogance, almost hubris, that.

Well, I've read one book, I know what I'm doing. I'm a senator. I must

do what I'm doing. I run this multifaceted team. I make the six

figures and so why aren't you paying me? I think. Or why aren't you

listening to me? I think that we have.

I think we've made the grave mistake, the thinking, the mistaking

position equals value or position

equals

leadership. Because I think position itself is not. Is. Is a. Is

nothing more than that. You just hold a position within a superstructure.

I think it's what you do within that position that actually is what a leader

is or how a leader is found or maybe born. If you want to use

this language. It requires when people, when we're talking

to people, that you meet people at their level, that you also

stop becoming the keeper of sacred knowledge. And I think when leaders

make this fundamental error of coming down and talking down

or talking at people opposed to talking with people, they

don't join the conversation, but rather they interject themselves

over and above the conversation. That does not bring people together.

In fact, that breeds resentment. And much. Whether it's people, you know,

leaders bringing people together, or, you know, mothers and fathers and families

trying to bring their families together. The rules are the same.

It's just one level higher. If you're talking about leaders, we're talking

on a communal level. We're talking of potentially a systemic

level for talking about, you know, the people. That's the family level.

That's where we get back into this idea of the spiritual covenant. We need to.

That will come up, I'm sure, later in this conversation. But I

think that, you know, how do people bring people together? I think we have to

demonstrate what leadership is. And I think that leaders are

essentially a walking billboard for essentially what they value.

And if we don't, if we have this,

I guess if we make the error as a leader of kind of

casting this whole old school way of thinking, do as I say, not as I

do mentality, I don't see how that would ever bring people

together. And interestingly enough, when you see the most successful leaders

and you see the people that are kind of the thought leaders or the people

that are the tip of the spear in this, in this arena, what are they

doing? They're being incredibly transparent.

They're being human, not transparent for the sake of just being, you know, reckless.

But they're showing people how they think. They're showing people how they approach it. They're

showing people why it's important that I have this community

communication with you. More importantly, that I'm still able to be

humbled, I'm still able to be taught something

and I'm still able to learn something. I think that these are the fundamental things.

And if we weave this back into what I was reading out of this book

and maybe some of the criticisms of communism or totality

with a capital T that we see in our world today, there is an

absolute, not just a rejection of these things, but it's a

denial that these things have any value in this place. And

I think it comes out of weakness, I think it comes out of insecurity. And

I think it also comes out of a fundamental lack of depth

that exists in this way of thinking. And I think that if we

think about the fundamental lack of depth that exists within, I think socialism and,

socialism and communism, I think that's the same thing. When you get these

very authoritarian leaders, whether it be in business, whether it be in

higher education, whether it's going to be within a corporate

space, I mean, a corporate, almost B2B or B2C kind of level, it doesn't matter.

I think when people, if they don't leave room for

themselves to be imperfect or in progress or at least

in the world of therapy, we never say we are, we're competent. We're always

in the pursuit of competence. And I think that that's a genius way of

making sure that it grounds ourselves to say no matter how good you get,

you're still, it's like you're still trending in a direction. You still

need to be continuing to sharpen the blade and make it sharper because we can.

Interesting. You brought a family back to the book. We're going

to start there. This is fundamentally, you know, in our consultancy,

what we do and the ways which we begin to focus in

on the leader is we, you know, we bring leaders into a

room, we kind of psychologically

strip them naked and then build them back up. Right.

And the first kind of way to do that is to really impress

upon leaders that you learned leadership in the crib.

You learned it from your family. Family is the first

organization and it's the core organization. And,

well, Candera critiques that a little bit here. So back to the

book. If the Pharaoh's Daughter from Unbearable Lightness of

Being. The Harper Perennial classics edition from 1999. By the way, this book was published

in 1984. Go out and get the Harper Perennial Classics edition. It's the easiest one

to read. Don't get the one online. That's nonsense.

Get the one. Get the. Get the physical copy if you're going to go out

and get this book. Quote. If the Pharaoh's daughter

hadn't snatched the basket carrying little Moses from the waves, there would have been no

Old Testament, no civilization as we now know it. How many ancient

myths began or begin with the rescue of an abandoned child? If

Polybus hadn't taken in young Oedipus, Sophocles wouldn't have written his most beautiful

tragedy. Tomas did not realize at the

time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to

be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

He lived a scant two years with his wife, and they had a son. At

the divorce proceedings, the judge awarded the infant to its mother and

ordered Tomas to pay a third of his salary for its support. He

also granted him the right to visit the boy every week. But

each time Tomas was supposed to see him, the boy's mother found an excuse to

keep him away. He soon realized that bringing them expensive gifts would make things a

good deal easier. Then he was expected to bribe the mother for

the son's love. He saw a future of quixotic attempts to

inculcate his views in the boy, views opposed in every way to the mother's.

The very thought of it exhausted him. When one

Sunday, the boy's mother again cancelled a scheduled visit, Tomas

decided, on the spur of the moment, never to see him

again. Why should he feel more for

the child, to whom he was bound by nothing but a single impression, provident

knight, than for any other? He would be scrupulous about

paying support. He just didn't want anybody making him fight for his son in the

name of paternal sentiments.

Needless to say, he found no sympathizers. His own parents

condemned him roundly. If Tomas refused to take an interest in his son, then

they, Tomas's parents would no longer take an interest in theirs.

They made a great show of maintaining good relations with their daughter in law and

trumpeted their exemplary stance and sense of

justice. Thus, in practically no time,

he managed to rid himself of wife, son, mother and father.

The only thing they bequeathed to him was a fear of women.

Tomas desired, but feared them. Needing to create a

compromise between fear and desire, he devised what he called

erotic friendship. He would tell his mistresses

the only relationship that can make both partners happy.

One in which sentimentality has no place, and neither partner makes any

claim on the life and freedom of the other.

This entire section in the middle of

the second book, or the beginning of the second book. Middle of the beginning of

second book, where we start to unwind Tomas, one of the main characters here,

Tomas, who's kind of drives the narrative, right?

Tomas and Teresa's relationship drives the narrative. And it is a relationship of infidelity.

Tomas cheated on his wife and. And. And was

driven by. Driven by that. And then Teresa comes alongside of him, and

Teresa is. And Kandera never says this out loud, but

she's as weak, if not weaker, than Tomas. And

Kadera is making a point that by standing next to somebody

who's weak, if you are weak yourself, you can mitigate your own

weakness. And then the person can look, can appear to you to be strong

and can in essence grow in strength, but will never be any stronger

than their strongest weakness. Okay, I agree with

Kadira actually on that point, but you read this

and

the first thing I thought of was like the story of Peter

Pan or Johnny Appleseed. Right?

And I think one of the. One of the critiques of our time,

and you said it in a different kind of way, but one of the critiques

in our time is that we live in sort of an unserious era,

right? And you know, this book was written

in 19 or published in 1984, was probably written, though, in the 60s and

70s. It's kind of a little bit unclear. And

yes, you people will email me and it's fine. Email me about Kandera if you

know that it's clear. Go ahead and, go ahead and tell me. Hey,

son, it's clear, you know, when the authorship

was of the book. Someone will email me with his papers and it's fine. Go

ahead and send me that information. I couldn't find it online. But it's

clear from the way that this was written. This was written in

the. The backwash. Like we all live right now. We

all live in the backwash of the birth control pill. You know, we all live

in the backwash of feminism. We all live in the backwash of

various civil social movements that occurred in the United States and

revolutions, communist and otherwise, that occurred globally in the 60s,

70s, and 80s.

Decisions have consequences all the way down to the individual level, and

ideas have consequences. The great Paul Johnson, a

great British historian, wrote a book called Intellectuals about

basically the personal history of people who have promulgated

ideas from. From Rousseau all

the way to Marx and from Marx all the way to Sartre, and from Sartre

all the way to Derrida and down to our own time. Because he says,

if we are taking the ideas of these people

as if they are ways that we should structure a culture. So, for

instance, the word existential has come down to

mean everything that Sartre and Camus did not intend,

but it's come down to mean all kinds of different things. And it's not Sartre

or Camus fault. But Johnson makes the point that

if we're going to take these ideas from these people, we should go back and

look at how they lived and then measure their idea

against the reality of their own lives. Okay?

Kandera is doing this exact same thing. He's measuring the ideal.

He's critiquing, in essence, Christian

moralism. He's critiquing the.

The civil strife that has come about that came about because of.

In the west anyway, because of easy divorce and. And the

birth control pill, both of which were, as I said before,

or as I just said, you know, were just cataclysmic to the American

family and quite frankly, to the global family.

And we can argue whether or not that cataclysm was negative or positive. But it

did create in men the ability to be Peter Pan.

Because when freedom is disconnected from responsibility, as in

the case of this clip, I just read this piece. I just read this quote,

I just read from the book, then you don't have to negotiate with the

community anymore. And the community that Tomas is

negotiating with was, as it says in here, thus, in practically no time, he

managed to rid himself of wife, son, mother, and father.

And so he eliminated the negotiation. Negotiation.

He unhooked himself from all of that.

And now he's floating with sort of

no value system. And the only thing he has to

anchor himself to is the state now it's Czechoslovakia

in 1968. The Russians invade Czechoslovakia in

1968 in an attempt to. Well, I don't really. I'm not

really clear what the Russians were attempting to do. And Kandera isn't really clear either.

He does cover it, but he's not really clear on what the Russians were trying

to do there either. But then

because he's anchoring himself to a state

that is. I'm gonna let

the plane go. I don't know why it's flying so low. I can hear

it. You all will be able to hear it on the podcast.

Yes, I do live near an airfield. Yes. This, it's. It's just, it's strange. They're

all over this place. Okay, but

he's anchoring himself to this, this,

this Russian, well, Soviet, actual communist ideal, right?

Because he doesn't have anywhere else to go. But then he's

also engaged in this interpersonal tyranny. And this is, this is, this is in the

line of. The only thing that bequeathed to him was a fear of women.

Tomas desired, but feared them needing to create a compromise.

That's a negotiation, by the way, folks. Needing to create a compromise between fear and

desire, he devised what he called erotic friendship. And by the way, those of you

who are going to read this book, just like with 100 Years of Solitude, no,

it is not for kids. There are some things in there that are salacious.

I would not give it to my 16 year old. You know, when you read

it, it's definitely written, you know, for an adult to read.

You know, there are things that are going on that are adult oriented in this,

in this book. Don't let your kids read it.

But this, this is about real adults making real decisions, right?

And untethered from that negotiation.

And his job wasn't tethering him either. Like he was a surgeon. His job

wasn't tethering him either. So I guess my question, or maybe my thought here that

I'm building up to is you see families

untethered. I had a background in divorce and family

mediation for many, many years. You know,

soft families untethered from that as well.

And then, you know, they go out and they make four or five other families,

you know, and then there's just confusion. There's just confusion and chaos

everywhere. Wives, sons, mothers, fathers, daughters,

and then the community, parents in laws. I mean, I was in

mediations where in laws got involved because the in laws had an opinion

in a divorce mediation. And you can argue, well, they

shouldn't have an opinion, but they do because they're part of the community.

They're trying to. They're trying to give Peter Pan

responsibility. And Peter Pan doesn't want responsibility.

And it doesn't matter what genitals Peter Pan comes with. Peter Pan doesn't want responsibility.

How do we relink those

two together? I do, I do know that I'm going to bring up will to

power in a minute here because I know where Nietzsche would go with this, But

I don't think a human being can create their own value system out of their

own. Out of just their own will.

Nietzsche did, but he died too early to like really work through that idea

all the way to its logical end. And then the people who came after him

didn't have the courage to do it either. Kandera being one of them. But then

also Sartre and Derrida and Foucault, they didn't have the courage

to take that idea all the way to the end. They just sort of took

the idea and went, yes, this is right, and just sort of jumped and ran

with it.

How do leaders negotiate with the community? How do you.

How do you bring somebody along who has no anchor?

Fantastic question, I think.

How do you bring someone along that doesn't have an anchor? Or how do you

bring someone along that only has their anchor in the ground? I mean,

either one. Either one. Either one will do. Go. Go with. Go with either one.

Because I asked a bunch of complicated stuff there. I layered a bunch of complicated

things together. I think, you know, going. I mean, just

this. A point blank reflection would be

this is that I think you cannot. We have to always know. We

cannot force people to do anything. And I think we have to be mindful of

the fact that forcing people to do things is what gets us into

the hot water to begin with. You know, I think,

I think if we go back to this idea of the erotic friendship

from Tomas, I think that he makes the, I think

the fatal mistake of he said, trying to separate the heart and soul from the

body and the mind. And I think that that is a luxury of the 20th

century. And I think it's a luxury.

That kind of what you're saying too, that we went through this

elevation of our culture, we went through this elevation of who

we claim to be. And I think as a result of that, I

think our hubris got the best of us. And you're talking about

how do we communicate, how the leaders communicate with

the community. I think it has to be on an individual

level or it has to. At least the message has to be of one. Of

an individual talking to an individual. It can be group setting. But

I think that people need. When we can

empathize and when we can see each other and we can rationalize the decisions

made, we can walk in someone's steps or someone can at least paint a picture

with their words that we can understand that context. You

mentioned just that. The importance of understanding these

philosophers in the context of their time, in the context of

their life, I think that's fundamentally a requirement. And I think anybody who

tries to sidestep that or usurp that process is not only

fallacious and what they're talking about, but I think that they are. They're

dubious and they're. There's a disingenuousness

to it. We don't talk about anything without having a context

applied. I don't talk to any client about understanding the context

that's been going on. And I say, well, walk me back two years. And I

think going back to this idea of the community, it's not just what's going on

in the community today. What transpired a year ago, what

transpired two years ago,

what has been happening in the background that led to this.

This weird. This weird kind of crucible moment we find ourselves in. And

I think when we were talking about how, you know, how

do you bring someone along, how do you do that? I think fundamentally, maybe a

better question needs to be asked. It's not, well, how do we bring them along?

It's going, where do we fail earlier? What did we miss?

Way in the beginning of this whole process, you know,

an interesting juxtaposition that I like to do that I think fits well with our

conversation is just the research work that's come out about attachment

theory. Attachment theory has broken the mold on what we understand about

people, meaning that what happens to us in our childhood

cast shadows for the rest of our life. We can mitigate against those things,

we can change those things. But the power of the

influence of those childhood experiences, positive and negative, have

a huge impetus on what we become, what we pursue. And more

importantly, going back to the core of this whole conversation, how do we.

How do we honor that weird tether between I want

freedom, I want autonomy? So do you understand the

responsibility involved in what that. Like what that is?

Right? And I think that when people don't. When we.

In understanding what happens to our past and understanding that and how it

casts shadows, people want quick fixes, People don't want

responsibility, people don't Want any of that. And I think going.

The overlay with Thomas and our society is we've

made the mistake of creating an ethos of convenience. Not an

ethos of virtue, an ethos of righteousness, not an ethos of

anything of truth. It's nothing more than simply saying, I want

what I want when I want it. Okay, cool. I'm going to reward the behavior

that gives me that the most. I'm going to reward the people that give me

that the most. I'm going to do that. And like you said, you mentioned

backwash. That's a fantastic way of thinking about this because

it's never one little thing that's the devil. Right. It's just that the

devil's in the detail. Right. There's a lot of snakes in the garden.

And I think that when we. When we're talking about how do we,

you know, how do we communicate? How do we do that? I think first and

foremost, we have to make sure that we understand that they're

willing to listen and their ears are open. And if they're not, well, then I

think that's a very different conversation. And I think we have to talk about, well,

how do we open their ears? And I think this goes back to what we

were talking about before about leadership. Well, how do leaders

become leaders? How do leaders gain the respect of the community? And

how do they get elevated by the community? I think that's a fundamental.

It's kind of a sidebar tangent conversation. But I think

if we're going to try to communicate with people who we might find

unreasonable, we might find completely lost or adrift, or maybe

propagating things that they don't fully understand. Just use. Choosing my

words as carefully as I can with. I think.

I think it first goes back to going, do they even want to listen? Do

they even want to hear? Or they cemented in their position.

Go ahead. Yeah, yeah. No, no. A couple things there for those of us who

are listening. What is attachment theory? Because some of us may not know.

I'm familiar with a little bit of that. But what is attachment theory?

In a very brief, Attachment theory comes out of a study called the ACEs

study. I highly recommend people looking into it. It's phenomenal, and it's been a

game changer in understanding as an adult. Why do I do the

behaviors I do? Especially if we have problems with relationships, we have problems with our

children, we have problems with authority, with touch, with

closeness, intimacy. The ACEs study that came out

of, I believe, Seattle back in the beginning of the 90s it's a longitudinal study

that's been tracking things for 20 plus years. It's opened

the door to realize that this has a cascading effect

about potentials, meaning that if you have, say

in this research, more than four or five ACEs, acute childhood

experiences, the risk factor you

have for going to jail, being incarcerated, drug

abuse, substance abuse, domestic violence,

the list goes on and on and on. Your risk factor for these things

goes up exponentially to a point where it goes straight,

vertical. And oftentimes when people.

And so this goes back to this interesting thing. This is not deterministic

in the sense that if you have these things, you will end out like that.

But what it's saying is that we are born into a world with

moderating variables, things that we cannot change. We cannot choose our parents,

we cannot choose our city, we cannot choose our school, we cannot choose the politics

of the day that impact our daily lives. But what we also have is

mediating variables. Mediating variables are those powerful

conversations, those powerful relationships with not only our parents,

but other parental figures as a child, friendships we make. And

these things help essentially mediate against the potential

consequences that have been laid out for you. Like, well, you have all these. You

have a divorce in the family, that's an ace. You have substance abuse in the

family, that's another ace. You have a parent that's incarcerated, that's another ace.

You have parents that are doing domestic

violence and the violence on you, that's an ace. And that, that list goes on

and on and on. But the, the attachment theory has led to things

under identifying things as secure attachment, you know,

unsecure attachment, this ambivalent attachment, and this disorganized

attachment. There's a lot more, a lot more to that. But I would say

that if people want to look into it, it can be an incredible insight

about who they are. And if you happen to be doing psychopathic therapy, it's an

incredible conversation to have a therapist. Interesting. And

then. No, that is interesting. We're gonna, I'm gonna get back to them. And

I kind of let that percolate in the, in my own head there a little

bit. There's a couple things that pop up to me from that

in talking about therapy. Okay.

There's an idea in the organizational behavior literature,

and it's been around for quite some time, that the best leaders are

ones that actively listen.

Being a divorce and family mediator, and coming out of that background and you coming

out of your therapeutic background and your psychotherapy background, you know that

listening is an Emotionally laborious act.

It requires energy from you, but it

doesn't look like you're doing, quote, unquote, anything.

The humanist and therapist and researcher Carl

Rogers postulated the idea

that when you're doing therapy,

you should listen to others with unconditional positive regard.

Okay, but leaders are impatient and very

often leaders will only do what they are paid for or paid to do.

Right. And if I'm not paid to listen to you with unconditional positive regard.

And let's take the positive out. Unconditional regard. And let's take the unconditional part out.

Just regard. If that's not what I'm being paid for by the structure of the

high hierarchy, and we're going to talk about structures in just a second here. When

we talk about the Russians and the 1968 invasion that is covered in

unbearable lanes of being. If the structure doesn't care about

that, why should I bother?

Fantastic question. Why should I bother if

the leaders or the superstructure that I'm a part of doesn't, I

guess, doesn't matter if. The hierarchy is ambivalent at

best or hostile at worst. At worst.

To,

to me doing the fundamental tasks of leadership. Now, I can tell you the process,

the position we take in our consultancy, which is do it anyway. Shut up.

That's. That's, quite frankly, our, our posture is and, and not shut up, but like

we want. I'm not dismissing your objections. I've seen your

objections and none of those are, Are relevant. They're

interesting to you. But your team doesn't care

about your objections. Your team cares about the things

that your team cares about. And of course, individuals on your team are just as

selfish as you are. We had,

we covered the prince, right? We covered Machiavelli in a previous

podcast. Go back and listen to that one, because that one ties into this one

too. And our guest on that podcast

talked about the dark triad, right? Machiavellianism,

corporate psychopathy, and of course, narcissism. Right.

And got our thoughts straight on several of those areas and

clarified our thinking in several of those areas.

Her approach and her idea. And I'm not trying to set up an argument between

you and her. You're both in the same field. I'm not trying to set that

up. What I'm saying is her postulation is

that we're all. We all got touch of narcissism, We've all

got a touch of Machiavellianism. We've all got a touch of, you know,

psychopathy. Well, maybe not that she Wouldn't go that far. She would say a touch

of narcissism because she wanted to be specific in her words as well.

We all have a touch of these, some of these traits. And the environment

is structured to support these traits. And thus we are going to do them. And

we shouldn't really. I mean, we should be concerned maybe if they're not working, but

if they are working, keep going.

My thought on that and our thought on that and my consultancy's thought on that

is. And it comes from a core of

how I think about, honestly myself in the world and then who I hire to

work with us and clients we choose to work with. I think we have a

responsibility going back to freedom. We have the freedom to be who we

are. Absolutely everybody has that freedom. But we have the responsibility to overcome

that. And if that's too hard,

that's the path of humanity. That's being a human being. It's about. That's

the hard parts. The hard parts is checking yourself

as a leader, being patient when you would rather be impatient.

Listening to people with unconditional positive regard who may annoy you.

You know, understanding, maybe not necessarily understanding all the aspects of attachment

theory, but. And our previous guests would agree with you on this too.

Leadership does require a context and placing leadership inside of a

context, a contextual relationship between myself and the followers and honestly

evaluating that. And then where we come from in our consultancy is

being intentional about that being on purpose.

One of our mottos here is no more accidents for leaders.

Stop being accidental. Stop. Accidental conversation,

accidental listening, accidental paying attention. Stop

it, because it's not getting you anywhere. I don't care if the structure supports

that. Human beings made structures and they can be unmade.

Cultures are made and they can be unmade. I don't go. I

don't really cotton too much to it. Some social scientists will say,

who sort of ignore culture because they don't understand where it comes from.

Just because you don't understand where it comes from doesn't mean it's not there.

Like, if I could try to go back to like the 12th century and explain

air to people, they're not going to understand that either. Doesn't negate the fact that

the error is there. So.

If the structure doesn't value the thing you

are doing, and again, this is the pushback we constantly get. If the

structure doesn't value the thing that are doing, why would I as a leader expend

energy on doing it? Why would I expend energy on listening to folks if the

structure doesn't care. Why would I spend energy trying to understand the context? If the

structure doesn't care, why bother?

I mean, just point blank, I would say that leaders

require structure to be leaders at all. And if you don't have a

structure, and if you don't have. Even if. Yes, what's the

alternative? If the structure doesn't agree with what you have and then

you, you remove the structure, well, then you're not a leader of anything, right? You

have no structure to lead through. And I think that that's also maybe a

fundamental principle of leadership is that leadership is.

It's a function of the structure in which someone can navigate. Like

you need to have some kind of superstructure to it.

And so if the superstructure doesn't agree with what you are doing,

I think we're left with maybe two ideas. One is you

have to move forward within that and taking, I guess, wrestle with

your own ethics and morality as you kind of step through that process.

Step two would be, is amplify yourself as a leader

to thus create a new superstructure. Amplify yourself in a way to

create something that hopefully other people

see what you see, hopefully other people feel what you feel. And

thus a unification can happen of other people sharing that same concern.

But I think off the, just as a point,

I think that there's. I don't think there's a right or wrong answer

to this question. I don't think that there's. And I don't think anybody listening to

this that happens to be a leader of a team or leader of any kind

of maybe movement or group should hold, rake themselves against the

coal. You know, if, if what is the structure that they're in doesn't

abide by all the ethical or moral ethos that they hold. I

don't think that that should be the path that they take, but rather just

reflections. Make sure that you are taking time to

honor and acknowledge the fact that there is some weird cognitive

dissonance happening between me moving forward with this

and the convenient willful, willful blindness that I apply

to the different things that are in front of me. I think that as long

as we are doing that, I think that unfortunately, or

fortunately, I guess how you frame it, sometimes that's all we are left with.

Sometimes we have to reconcile with ourselves as being human, that we are not

bigger than the machine.

Lord, cure me of my willful blindness.

Back to the book. But even with

Kareninen's help, Tomas failed to make her happy. By the way, the her is

Theresa. He became aware of his Failure. Some years later,

on approximately the 10th day after his country was occupied by Russian

tanks, it was August 1968, and Tomas was

receiving daily phone calls from a hospital in Zurich. The

director there, a physician who had struck up a friendship with Tomas at an

international conference, was worried about him and kept offering him a job.

If Tomas rejected the Swiss doctor's offer without a second thought,

it was for Therese's sake. He assumed she would not want to leave.

She had spent the whole first week of the occupation in a kind of trance,

almost resembling happiness. After

roaming the streets with her camera, she would hand the rolls of film to foreign

journalists who actually fought over them. Once, when she

went too far to a close up of an officer pointing his revolver at a

group of people, she was arrested and kept overnight at a Russian military

headquarters. There they threatened to shoot her,

but no sooner did they let her go than she was back in the streets

with her camera. It was true. The

general euphoria lasted no longer than the first

week. The representatives of the country had been hauled

away like criminals by the Russian army. No one knew where they were. Everyone feared

for the men's lives and hatred for the Russians drugged people like

alcohol. It was a drunken carnival of hate.

Czech towns were decorated with thousands of hand painted posters bearing ironic

texts, epigrams, poems and cartoons of Brezhnev and his

soldiers, jeered at by one and all as a circus of illiterates.

But no carnival can go on forever.

In the meantime, the Russians had forced the Czech representatives to sign a

compromise agreement in Moscow. When Dubchak returned with

them to Prague, he gave a speech over the radio.

He was so devastated after his six day detention, he could hardly talk. He kept

stuttering and gasping for breath, making long pauses between

sentences, pauses lasting nearly 30

seconds. The compromise

saved the country from the worst, the executions and mass deportations

to Siberia that had terrified everyone.

But one thing was clear. The country would have to bow to the

conqueror forever and ever. It will

stutter, stammer, gasp for air, like Alexander Dubcek.

The carnival is over. Work a day. Humiliation

had begun.

The carnival was over.

A drunken carnival of hate.

Kandara draws a parallel here

between the invasion of the

Russians in 1968 in Czechoslovakia. He

draws a parallel between that and this idea

of muteness, this

idea of illiteracy, this idea of not having

a voice. Forget listening, just not being able to talk.

One of the more relentless kinds of things that

you see, and this is in a different section of the book, when we talk

about a guy named Franz and Music is noise.

One of the things that you see in most

totalitarian schemes, whether it's a capital T or small T, it doesn't

matter, is the idea of compelled speech.

Now, we haven't gone down this road too often on the

podcast just because, again, we're not a political

podcast, even though this may have political shades to it.

But the book is political in and of itself. Like, you can't really get away

from that. It's a great book that is political. You just can't get away from

that. And so the conversation is going to be political at least

a little bit. But Kandera draws this idea to

muteness and to a lack of being able to speak. And then later on, with

another character named Franz that we'll talk a little bit about, he draws a comparison

to noise and words. That very much struck me, I wrote in the margins

as kind of a Derridian dilemma from Jacques Derrida. This

idea that the text has no meaning and all meaning is noise.

From compelled speech to muteness,

to the text has no meaning. We now wind up

in an era of social media. So we move out of the world

of fiction into the world of the now. And

most social media is a drunken carnival of hate, let's be honest.

And there seems to be no negotiation that can save folks. I just, I just

saw something the other day about Instagram's hate speech problem,

right? And you know, Facebook.

Jack Dorsey just. This will kind of timestamp this, this, this thing a little

bit. Jack Dorsey is announced that he's leaving Twitter.

Okay, great.

We seem to live in a world where there's more and more speech, but less

and less meaning. And

the humiliation of Twitter and I tweet. The humiliation of Instagram

and I Instagram. The humiliation of Facebook and

I use Facebook. The humiliation of these drunken

carnivals of hate, which is where it can only end up, which is in a

space of humiliation. Kind of flummoxes people these days. It

flummoxes leaders and, and it is a soft form of

tyranny when you're compelled to say whatever it is

that the platform says, you must say in order to stay on the platform.

That's soft. That's a soft form of tyranny. It just is. There's really just

no other way around it. I do fundamentally believe

that, that this is beginning to leak after 20 years of this

is beginning to leak into people's day to day interactions and into the

interactions between leaders and teams at a fundamental level. And I believe

that that fundamental leakage is

beginning to cause problems. It is beginning to cause the kinds of

problems that I talked about right at the beginning, the acidity of moral weakness.

Because it's a very simple thing to go from censoring yourself because you're

engaging in the soft tyranny of needing to be on a platform where you get

likes and claps. It's an easy thing to go from there to censoring yourself in

real life because what the heck, why not? Now people may

say, well, you've always censored yourself in real life. Yeah, okay,

maybe. But the relentless

nature of this beast concerns me greatly.

And I think the real cause, not the real cause, the real path of

leadership forward is not to destroy the platforms. It's not even to

reform them. It's to ignore them and move past them to something else.

I don't think they can be ignored, and I also don't think they can be

destroyed, nor do I think it's our responsibility to do so.

And eventually they will become no more valuable than. Than the speeches that Duke

Check is giving over the radio. Why don't we.

Why don't we deprive them of.

Why don't we put them into muteness and silence?

My question or my thought or my idea, I guess here, Dave, that I want

to bounce off you, because I said a lot there. My idea that I want

to bounce off you is this one.

Speaking things into existence creates reality, whether we like it or not.

It just does. It creates perceptions of reality or creates reality itself.

How do leaders move

past systems? And we just talked about, like, how, you know, you got to work

inside of the system, or maybe, maybe the human thing is you can't overcome the

system. Maybe.

How do you build another one then, within your own team?

What's the first step? Right. If you're in a space of compelled speech, what's the

first step? Or compelled muteness? What's the first

step? Several

ways you can approach that. I think going back just to the social

media lens for a second, I think that

if leaders want to

make moves, if leaders want to actually do something that actually ignites

the passion behind the followers of those leaders, I think

that leaders have to be brave enough and are willing to see themselves be brave

or be courageous enough to welcome the scrutiny.

And I think that we have, in a certain sense with social media, I

think one of the weird invisible walls, I don't want to call it a ceiling,

but an invisible wall that exists on social media is either speak

the truth and you're cast into the fire, or you hold your tongue and you

move on as if nothing's going on. Right. And there's like this weird

membrane that separates these two things.

I know for me, I'm very. I just take a very calculated approach with social

media, and that is, I try to avoid it whenever possible, at least with terms

to professional lens, because I think that profession.

I don't think it. I don't think it's additive. I think it's what we have,

and I think that we have sequestered ourselves to using it. But I think that

they're. I think that there's some strict limitations on this. When you're talking

about totality and the idea that they can censor what you say and what you

do, and there's a squared compelled speech.

Compelled according to who? And I think that maybe leaders have to start asking,

compelled according to who? And I also think that maybe with this whole

notion of you say, well, how do I move forward? What is this first step

with trying to. I guess if I'm. If

I'm in the system of where I cannot speak.

Well, I think we first have to survey the landscape. What can I step

into? What can I use? Second step is,

you know, am I willing to bear the cross? And we'll have that conversation maybe

later with different things. Am I willing to bear the cross that comes with

me forging ahead on this platform, this new path, I

become a martyr for my virtue. I become a martyr for

something greater than myself. Say I'm willing to take on the

lashings, the beatings, and potentially the dip in both my

visibility, my audience, my trajectory as a professional,

because I believe in this. And I think that that's

begun. And I think that there are some arenas that are more. It's more

suited for some arenas than others. But I do think

that as a starting point, I think that the leader has to first make a

decision within themselves. Am I going to work within the system

I find myself in, or am I going to have my exodus?

I think it begins with the word no,

but in a different kind of way than most people think of the word no.

And maybe this is just a reframing for what you just said,

but it's saying no to one thing, one set of structures or one set

of assumptions. And I really think it's a lot about assumptions and expectations

saying no to one set of assumptions and expectations and saying yes to another,

or if we're going to frame it in a positive way, the

Heideggerian sense of being in the world or if you want to,

you know, put it in a Christian context, God, say yes to

the call. And

I think there are so many leaders that don't say yes to the call. And

by the way, people haven't been saying yes for years. So let's put it in

a historical. Let's put it in a historical context. There were plenty of

pastors who were more morally

upright, ethical, and probably better speakers than Martin Luther

King Jr. In the south in the

40s, 50s, and 60s. Actually, I'll go back to the 30s, 30s,

40s, 50s, and sixties. Who could have done what

he did. They could have said no to

the system and written a letter from Birmingham jail

and started the Montgomery bus boycott. That

eventually turned to the civil rights movement that led to

Martin Luther King being assassinated. Because when you pick up your cross and

walk up the mountain, there is the possibility that you may be. May be assassinated

professionally, emotionally, psychologically,

spiritually, and yes, maybe even potentially phys.

How many people said no? That's too hard for me.

People who are better than him said no.

Like, I'm constantly. And you can't play out a counterfactual because we have to

live in history as it is. And this is why.

This is why. Removing statues is not wisdom. That's not leadership. That's just

reactivity and misguided robot

evolution. You have to negotiate with the past as it was.

And so you can't live out a counterfactual. You know, if you're trying to live

out a counterfactual, then you know better than the Russians who erased, like, Trotsky

from, like, pictures and then, like, killed 100 million people after that.

Because it's easy to go from erasing a picture or erasing or knocking down statue

to killing a bunch of people. That's a very short line there. And

that's what the entire course of the 20th century has showed us.

But it begins with saying no. Or again, in the positive frame, I think it

begins with saying, yes, yes, I will pick up this thing up.

Yes, I will grab hold of this

moment. I will recognize what it is. Yes, I will

bend all of my talents and skills and efforts to this thing.

Even if. And Martin Luther King Jr. You know, made this. Made this

speech one time, said, you know, be the greatest street sweeper you. You can possibly

be. So that when the angels of heaven come down and they are looking at

clean streets, they go, who cleaned these streets? And you can say it was

me. Like, do your work to the highest possible level you

can. Even if your Work is something as lowly as sweeping

a street.

But people need to hear that from somebody's mouth.

I don't think people are going to know it just in their, in their gut.

I mean, some people will, but I don't think everybody's gonna just know that.

And what terrifies me, and I use that word very,

very carefully, I don't, because I don't operate in a space of fear.

What concerns me greatly is

that with a relentless nature of nihilism and existentialism and

deconstructionism and postmodernism, I think there's been 120

years of people saying that they want to be

inspired, but without that core

anchor. Remember I asked you the question about anchoring? Right. Without that core anchoring,

even in their individual selves, they're floating.

Now if you look at people's actual behavior, that's a different thing altogether. And

there's this gap between what people say and what they actually do. Right?

So people will say, oh, yeah, nothing matters, it's fine, I can do whatever I

want. And then they run out and go get married.

Relationships, right? Or.

Oh, yeah, the text has no meaning. Except for the text that I like. That

text has meaning. And I'm going to imbue that thing with meaning all day long.

And if you try to tell me that it has no meaning, then you're just

power hungry and socially unjust and blah, blah,

blah. Okay, but I thought the text had no meaning. Yeah, but you can't hold

me to my own words. Okay, that's fine.

Which is where you get into like cancel culture and nonsense like that. Like that.

Just, just, just stuff,

I guess. It's not, it's not an unanswerable thought. It's just, just another thought that's

bouncing around in my head as you're, as you're speaking. Right. Because you

know, that first step, I think, has to be. It has to be a no

or yes. It has to be a definitive statement. You know, maybe not necessarily a

black or white one, but just something definitive, something that, that stakes

the places, the psychic stake

in the metaphysical ground. And then you can move forward from that.

No, I like how you said that. And I think going back to what I

was saying about maybe sometimes we can't overcome the machine. I

think that again, that's just a function of us saying yes or no

in the lens that that happens. And I think, so

what does it take for us to say yes or no? I think we have

to, like, as Jordan Peterson made a point in One of his lectures, he said,

authentic being. We have to stop participating in the lie. We have to

stop. We have to stop even participating in the

deceptions within the lie. We have to, we have

to be mindful of the fact that if I, if I

start, if I continue to do those things or if I do them just

blindly, then what I've essentially I'm. I'm on a

fast track denial on a fast track to this very dystopian

future because again, opposed to facing, opposed

to facing the inconvenient truths of our past composed to

facing the, I guess this whole notion that life

is suffering, right, we want, opposed to dealing with it,

opposed to having some kind of evolution within the soul and of the person

to say, how do I going to change my relationship with the things, right?

You know, this, this idea that there are, there are only maybe a handful of

things that are on your plate plan, but there's maybe 25

times, 400 times that amount of things that are going against your

plan. We need to become friends of the things that go against our plan

so that we, we forge ourselves of steel and not out of just paper

mache. And I think that so much of what people do

with, you know, and I think that, I think that there's a lot more people

than maybe we think. And I think at least talking with, you know,

I guess thousands of people over the last couple years, I think that

it's been fascinating to me to see how many people are standing in the doorway

of either saying yes or no, whether or whatever

semantics decided which way we're casting that. Sure, so many people

are in the doorway, but they still have their

heads turned around and they're not looking forward. They're still looking at what they're potentially

going to leave behind. And I feel like that I find that in

so many people. And I think that when we go back to this

idea of authentic being, when we. Again, when we say I'm not

going to participate in this, there's something higher than, there's something bigger than me

that I'm going to essentially hold myself to. I'm not even going

to, I'm not even going to sugarcoat this lie when you're talking about like,

well, the text doesn't matter except for my text. Well, how convenient,

right? How convenient of you to be able to, to

kind of write in and pen in all of these

different little side notes, these side tangents, things that

fortify your position but devalue mine. Right?

But I think with that context, I think that you know,

I'll give you this. Maybe it's a great way of saying it. I say this

comment, this little passage to clients from time to time, when it's

fitting, I say that, you know, life is suffering, and most people know that context,

at least within a Buddhist lens, that life is suffering. But then I think people

forget that there's more to it and that life is suffering. And through

my suffering, I gain knowledge. And when I apply my knowledge, I become

wise. And when I teach my wisdom, I become enlightened. And I think people

forget that there are these four phases that we go through

as people, especially if we're going to become leaders. And going back to how

leaders communicate with, you know, the community. I think this.

This process is fundamental. I think that any leader of any value

has to suffer. I think they have to know what it means to be in

the trench. And I think more importantly, they have to take the wisdom that they

found they experienced in that trench and apply it to their own lives to elevate

themselves. And when they now elevate themselves to that knowledge,

whether it be spiritual, whether it be systemic, whether it be some other kind

of knowledge that they've gained or application within their

profession, I think that when they begin to teach that knowledge

to other people, they themselves tap

into this next. This hidden dimension of this leadership

modality. Now, I'm teaching this knowledge. I'm not teaching it so that you

avoid suffering. I'm teaching it so you understand that there's a process

involved for you, right? That you. This is the path I had.

How did I have this revelation? Well, this is how I. This is the path.

I had to walk to it. Yeah. And then finally, when you now are applying

that wisdom and you're teaching that wisdom of how. How you

teach this to other people, I think that that's where enlightenment comes. And I think

that we have a handful of leaders in the world stage that have reached

this kind of. This top of the mountain. And it's fantastic to listen to them

speak. It's fantastic. It's almost captivating in a sense. It's almost

religious in a sense, when you're in their presence. And it's not that they

are better than anybody else, it's just that they have

taken a very direct, not accidental, as

you were saying earlier, a very intentional. A very intentional path

into the suffering. They put on their chest waders and say, I have to go

chest deep into the shit, because if I don't go into the shit,

I won't know what it is. And I won't know how to navigate it. And

I think that as we. I think that that's a

weird. There's a palpability to it. I think that if you're around

anybody who has been

on both sides, both the top of the pyramid and on the base, and

they understand every single level in between, I think, you know, it. I think there's

a weird sense of knowing that is not. It's just a weird

presence. It's almost like your body can know that someone is being truthful with you.

They're being sincere, they're being honest. And I think that there are so

many quasi leaders that

entertain themselves in this space. And I think because, again,

people love to hear their thoughts regurgitated. They don't like the

challenge. They don't like the suffering of having someone challenge them.

I think we get maybe, as an off branch, for future, a different

lens of this conversation. We get all of these little

weird schools of thought popping up. We get all of these pseudo leaders

waving their own little pseudo leader flags. And I think it causes a lot of

problems, especially because

what happens on that personal and that intellectual level and

that spiritual level for the individual undoubtedly translates

to your business undoubtedly translates to your family undoubtedly

translates to. Well, it's. I love

what you said there because it's, it's the,

There's a certain. No, it's not even that. I'll frame it this way.

I think I said this before on the podcast when we first started

our business years ago, you know, I met with

somebody and, you know, it was right at the beginning

when everything was talking about being at the bottom of the pyramid when everything was

sucking. And,

you know, she gave me some wisdom, which was hard. One

wisdom. And I realized that I didn't. I mean, I realized it intellectually at

the time, which is why I was open to accepting it,

because it was. She framed it in such a way that I would be open

to accepting it. And now, even. And even now, many years later,

as I think back on it, kind of like in One Hundred Years of Solitude,

Colonel Arcadio Buendia reflecting all the way

back on, you know, when his father

showed him the discovery of ice, as I reflect back on

it many years later, oh, and by the way, our cardiopendia

was facing the firing squad, by the way, anyway,

but, but as I think back on it many, many years later,

the thing she told me was, it's going to take you 10 years to be

an overnight success.

And I made videos about this. I've Written a couple blog posts about it. Because

it's an idea that really strikes at the heart

of this sort of get rich quick,

we're going to have it happen tomorrow kind

of idea. Which

again, just like all ideas has probably always been in the world. Yes,

okay, I'll grant you that. But the speed with which that idea is

delivered to you is faster now than it has ever been before. I don't think

anybody can argue with that.

And anything that is worthwhile that you are going to set your path

on or set on the path to, or try to

walk to the clearing at the end of the path is going to take you

a long time. It just is. So case in point, like you

and I played rugby. Talk a little about rugby for just a minute. I was

terrible at rugby. Just terrible. I was terrible. I mean, you know, I was always

on, you know, the other end of the field. I wasn't where I needed to

be, blah, blah, blah. Was horrible. Okay? And I got a little bit better, a

little bit better over time. But eventually, you know, I hit a point where I

was like, eh, you know, I'm done. I don't want to go down

that next piece of the path, right? To do the next thing.

My body was beaten. Physically exhausted, mentally

exhausted, emotionally exhausted. I had reached my

ceiling, right? That wasn't the fault of

rugby. That wasn't the fault. Even

of the teams that I played on or the coaches who coached me or the

systems that I was in, that was my fault.

I decided I was done. The system didn't spit me out.

I said, nope, you know what, I'm done. I'm done playing your game. Same thing

in higher education. You know, I was an adjunct

instructor for many years. I was on the administrative end of higher education for many

years. I think my wife and I did the

numbers like dang near 20 years now. In 20

years in higher education, in one form or another, on any end of that system,

you should have advanced. Right now we can say, oh, it's the system that held

you down or you didn't have the correct mentors.

You make up all these ideas. But no, I decided, I'm out,

I'm finished. I've gotten what I need to get out of this thing.

And it took me 20 years to figure out what that thing was that I

needed to get because I'm hard headed when it comes to certain things. And

I just keep going. And that's just it. That's the

element of self awareness there. Rugby, higher education.

Now I'm starting down the road on. I just, just started rolling in Jiu Jitsu.

So all those of you who are listening to the podcast, you know, mark this

moment. Yes. I just started rolling in Jiu Jitsu. I've been to like four or

five classes. You know, I've got a background in the martial arts anyway.

Okay. And I've never, I didn't wrestle. I'm not that guy. But I decided I

was gonna go do Jiu Jitsu. I'm beginning to realize four or five classes in.

Oh, this is gonna be one of those things. This is gonna be one of

those 10 years doing overnight success thing. And it's fine.

The more of those experiences you have, the more of your ego gets stripped away.

This is why fundamentally, leadership, I think,

is typically an old person's game, man or woman

doesn't matter. An old person's game rather than a young person's

game. So young people can have. And you mentioned earlier in your,

in your comments, you mentioned position. Leadership is not position.

You're correct, it's not. But many young leaders believe that leadership

is position because that's all they got. They don't have the 10 years

of overnight success yet. They don't have that path

yet. They don't have that enlightenment. They haven't been through the suffering

from the base to the top yet.

My concern for the moment is, and again, I don't use the word terrify, my

concern for the moment is I don't see enough

young leaders committing to that path

for 10 years now. Maybe they're doing it in a different way. I'll grant you

that. Maybe they are. Maybe they're. Maybe in all the, the job

hopping and great resignation and I don't want to

work for a boss for more than two minutes. Maybe in all of that, they're

going to compile together a bunch of experiences that fundamentally,

In, I mean, 30 years, you know,

we will reveal an entirely new leadership culture that will be great, you know,

in, in the world. It will lead us to a glorious nirvana.

I got to admit, I doubt that. But, but maybe, maybe, maybe I would like

to be wrong. I really would. I know it sounds like in my voice right

now, like, oh, he's always going to be. No, I would like to be wrong.

To your point, though, why you don't see enough young people

wanting to take on, maybe the more visible path, the more

visible or the more maybe. Or maybe they are taking it on, but they're just

not. They're not showing it on all the places where everybody else is Showing the

easy path. Sure. I think that

there's a definite schism that's happened. I think that there are

two actual factions. I think that there is a tremendous

amount of depth and quality and

potential in one half of this schism. Meaning that I think

that there are. I get very excited and very optimistic for some

of the young leaders that are coming up, at least the ones that I've seen

speak or the ones I've listened to their work or I listened to read their

material, because there is a subset, I would say

maybe 35, 40% of this mob of new leaders

that are coming out that are actually doing their due diligence. And I praise them

heavily for that. And I think that we should never, we have to be careful

we don't disregard the youth. Because I think

that there is an intelligence of youth, there's a freshness of youth. And I think

if, again, if their parents, if the

systems that they grow into are, cultivate a process

within them, I think there's a tremendous potential that comes out of this

next generation. That being said, I think the vast

majority is not doing that. And I think it's very evident in that because again,

perception is reality, reality is not reality. And if

I am perceived to make money, think about how much this

happens with. It seems like there's no end

to young men and women on YouTube or on some other platform

that have a podcast about being the expert or being a,

some, some kind of dating expert, some kind

of thought leader, some kind of wanting to give their, their take,

their review. Okay, that's fine. The 25 year old life coach.

Those folks drive my wife crazy. Well, right.

And I think, I mean, and it should drive you crazy

because again, it's. And I don't, I don't

blame them, but I just think that there's an ignorance, a certain level of

ignorance that I don't hold it against them

fundamentally. But I do think I still, I criticize them

because they're not doing their due diligence. How can you.

Why I think the older people get, I think

the less that they want to be in charge because I think that they know

what, actually, what the depth of that well is. And I think that

young people have a certain, I guess

just an ignorance of experience. And I look at some of the

senators in our Congress and I look at some of the leaders we have and

I'm like, it's not a personal attack against them. It's just saying

you have far too much gusto in your sails

and not enough boat Right. To handle this push,

you're going to tip over, you're going to get. You're going to get capitalized. And

I see it all the time. And it's amazing to me that due to that

whole notion of perception being reality, if I have position, well,

shit, the perception is there. I am a senator. I am this leader. I

have a million followers. I have whatever. Doesn't matter if I'm

proclaiming nonsense. It doesn't matter if I'm the propagator of just

complete and utter shit. Doesn't matter.

Look, the proof's in the pudding. And I think that when we. Because the vast

majority of the mob plays in that arena,

and it's this very Pokemon mentality of I gotta get. Gotta catch them

all, gotta get all the subscribers, gotta get everyone there, I think it

drowns out the real depth and the beauty of this other

population of young people and just goes

back to what we were talking about before, about just this authentic being.

I think the role of the more maybe enlightened or the

maybe more experienced person in there, 30s through 60s

through 70s, that wants to participate in this arena. I think

this is where the authentic being really needs to show up. I think

this should not be something that we leverage against the youth of

tomorrow. I think this is something that is a fundamental call to arms for

the wisdom of yesterday and the wisdom of today. We

know better. We've already seen it. Right.

Even if you're only in your mid-30s, you've already lived through enough

experiences to go, ooh, why would I want to

do more of that? Right, Right. And I think if you get.

Talk to people in their 40s, they're like, absolutely no more of that. Right? Talk

to people in their 50s and 60s are like, not careful.

Right? You're gonna be reliving my life story, and why

did I work so hard to get us to a place where you didn't have

to do that? Just for you to spit in the face of wisdom, just for

you to spit in the face of this lesson and so you can go back

and relearn it, maybe. But I also think that there is also.

I think that there's also. I don't know if it's. If it's

appropriate for this. This podcast, but I think that there's

certain. A certain level of esoterism and a certain level of hiddenness and a

certain level of dubiousness that is also in this space. And I think

that. I mean, I'm gonna let you be the governor of

how you want to handle that level of conversation.

But I think that might be something we may have to hold for,

we may have to hold that for Augustine and City of God. We may have

to hold on, hold on, hold on to that because that may be the spot

or maybe Confessions from Augustine when we read that, or maybe,

maybe my favorite Julius Caesar might hold it for

Shakespeare. But yeah, no, keep going. Yeah, Dubiousness and esoteric.

Yeah, there's a little bit of that. You know, and I just

think, you know, we, goes back to,

I guess, goes back to values. Right. I think that this whole, what

I'm, what I really am referencing by this esoteric and this dubious kind of nature

of things, this, this lens is that they've convinced people that money

usurps God and they've convinced people that money is God

and, and they fundamentally shifted it away from what it originally was, which is

money is something more than a tool. And if you understand how to leverage that

tool, you can make a mattress. Myriad of different things happen. And

I think again, this is where that schism's divided. I think that there are people

who, not just with youth, but I think our society

together has divided into two camps. I don't think it's political.

There's correlations with political, but I don't think it's fundamentally political. I

think that there are some people that are saying, I would rather have

the inconvenient truth to know what the truth is and to move forward

from a position of authenticity, just authenticity, I

need to know where we stand. If we need to have some level of

just, you know, sincerity with one another and authenticness with each other

so we can move forward stronger regardless of what that, what the

truth is. And I think that there's other people that says, well, this

sounds like a lot of work. This sounds like it makes it so

it's not so much fun. And I don't know if I want to subscribe to

that. Why don't we, why don't we just go back to sex, money and drugs?

I like sex, money and drugs. Let's go to sex, money and drugs and let's

just push that agenda as far as we can. And I do think that that

lens, as simplistic as that might seem, is what we have. Because again,

who gets the most hits on essentially on YouTube?

It's nothing of note. It's not life changing information.

It's just, it's about money, it's about entertainment, it's about convenience.

Fine. But again, no, yeah, no, no, I,

I, there's so Truth telling. Right.

And this idea of memory. Right. Truth telling and forgetting and.

And the generations. I love what you said that the generations having to relearn or

not, I mean the generations, individuals in their own life cycle having to relearn

the same old lessons. So there's a writer named Ewan

Morrison, wrote an article called Milan

Kundera, warned us about historical amnesia. Now it's happening

again in March of 2019. You can go

find it online. I want to quote extensively from this because it actually supports

what David's saying here. Quote, after the fall of the

ussr, there was a vast outpouring of truth telling about the fallen

communist regimes in Russia, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Albania,

Romania and Poland. All that were

behind the Iron Curtain, by the way. The stagnant debt and corruption, the human rights

abuses in political prisons and orphanages, the hidden mass graves, the illegal human experiments,

the secret surveillance systems, the assassinations, the mass starvations and the

overwhelming evidence of the failure in each country of the quote, unquote,

planned economy. The structures too, of government

misinformation, the eradication of free speech and the rewriting of history. Things

we've talked about just now on the this podcast. Erasing your

opponents by murdering them and then wiping all traces of their existence from the history

books. Cancel culture, folks. In the 90s, the hidden

data from Stalin's famine genocide in the Ukraine,

1923-1933, called the

Holo Mador, by the way, if you want to go Google, that was

exposed later. The scale of Chairman Mao's

genocide staggered the world. Even the methods that communist regimes used to produce

historical amnesia were exposed. By the way, that's his first

paragraph. Next. For a brief period,

the consensus was that the communist experiment had failed. For a brief

period, the consensus was that the communist experience had failed. Never again

said the postmodernists and the historians. Never

again said the economists and the political parties. Never again, said the people of

former communist countries. Never again.

Fast forward 20 plus years and never again has been forgotten. The Wall street

journal in 2016 asks, Is communism cool? Ask a

millennial. Last year MIT Press published communism for Kids

and Teen Vogue ran an excited Apologia for Communism

Tablet, which is an online magazine announced with some concern

a quote, cool kid communist comeback unquote on Twitter.

There is a new trend of people giving themselves communist themes names. Gotha

communist, trans communist, commie bitch,

eco communist. The hammer and sickle flag has been reappearing

on campuses, at protests and on social media. By the way, this is written

in 2019. If you go look at some of the protests from 2020, particularly

the protests around Black Lives Matters.

Lot of hammer and sickle flags of those protests. Just going to point that

out. How could we have forgotten

A poll in the UK by the New Culture Forum for 2015 showed that

70% of British people under the age of 24 had never heard of

Communist Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong, while out of

the 30% who had heard of him, 10% did not associate with him with crimes

against humanity. Chairman Mao's communist regime was responsible for the

deaths of between 30 to 70 million Chinese, making him the biggest genocidal

killer of the the 20th century above Stalin and Hitler. One of

the reasons Mao's genocides are not widely known about is because they are complex and

cover two periods over a total of seven years. Information on the Internet tends to

be reduced into fast read simplified narratives.

If any facts are under dispute, we have a tendency to shrug

and dismiss the entire issue. So it is precisely

the ambiguity over whether Mao's Communist Party was responsible for 30, 50 or

70 million deaths that leads to Internet users giving up on the

subject. This is why we're going to cover the Gulag Archipelago. As a side note,

this is why we're going to cover Social Eatson's great book.

This is why the rational way of dealing with

clashing estimates would be to look at the two poles. To say, at the

bare minimum, even according to pro communist sources, Mao is

responsible for 30 million deaths and at the other extreme, for the the most anti

communist sources the number is 70 million. So it would be

reasonable to conclude that the truth lies somewhere in between and that even if we

were to take the lowest number, it is still greater than the deaths caused by

Stalin and Hitler. However, this reasoning does

not occur. This is the this is the

money quote, as the marketing boys say. From Ewan Morrison writing

for quillet in March 2019 this is the money. This is the money quote.

Our reaction when faced with a disputed piece of data like this is similar to

our response when faced with a Wikipedia page that carries the warning.

The neutrality of this article is disputed, unquote. Fatigue

and lack of trust kicks in. And so

without an argument needing to be made by Mao's apologists, the number he

killed is not zero but of zero importance.

As a side note, rage against the machine back in the day said, you

don't God, you don't have to burn the books, just remove them.

Conflict induced apathy can be manipulated for political ends. That's

the second money quote we see this in the way that neo communists set out

their stall. They don't challenge the data about the number of 20th century deaths their

ideology is linked to. Rather, they claim that there are conflicting data. And anyone

claiming one data set is definitive has a vested interest in saying that,

ergo no data are reliable. And so they Managed to

airbrush 30 to 7 million death. 30 to 70 million deaths

from history.

Kundera warned us about all of this.

Somebody a little more ancient than that warned us of this too.

Fellow about 20, 21 years ago warned us of all this.

You know, he said to the Jews who had believed in him, if you continue

in my word, you are my true disciples, then you will know the truth and

the truth will set you free. We are Abraham's

descendants, they answered. We have never been slaves to anyone. How can you say we

will be set free? Jesus replied, truly, truly. I tell you,

everyone who sins is a slave to sin. A slave is not a permanent member

of the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the son

sets you free, you will be free indeed. Look, the truth of

anything will make you depressed. And sin means missing the mark.

If you're forgetting that you're part of that crowd

David was just talking about and you're on purpose forgetting

because you're too confused by the data, or you have conflict induced apathy, or

you just can't hold two poles in your head. And by the way, you've been

given a position of leadership. You need to go back and

do some work. You need to go back to doing the work of remember because

you're sinning, you're missing the mark.

You're missing the core thing.

Kandera warned us about historical amnesia. And

when you. When you have historical amnesia, you are doomed to maybe

not necessarily repeat the past exactly in the same fashion,

but you're doomed to echo it. And an echo is always

worse.

Back to the book. So

Teresa was therefore. And Teresa is Tomas's

mistress. Teresa was therefore born of a situation which brutally reveals the

irreconcilable duality of body and soul, that fundamental human experience.

A long time ago, man would listen in amazement to the sound of regular beats

in his chest. Never suspecting what they were. He was unable to

identify himself with so alien and unfamiliar an object as the

body. The body was a cage. And inside that cage was something

which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled that something that remained or

left over after the body had been accounted for was the soul.

Today, of course, the body is no longer unfamiliar. We know that the Beating in

our chest is the heart. Heart. And that the nose is the nozzle of a

hose sticking out of the body to take oxygen to the lungs. The face is

nothing but an instrument panel registering all the body mechanisms. Digestion, sight, hearing,

respiration, thought. Ever since man has learned to give

each part of the body a name, the body has given him less trouble.

He has also learned that the soul is nothing more than the gray matter of

the brain in action. The old duality of

body and soul. Soul has become shrouded in scientific

terminology. We can laugh at it as merely

an obsolete prejudice.

I think maybe with that my comment

I've made on the record with other people is I think that one of the

greatest transgressions against humanity is making a very complicated subject

simple. And I think when we talk about

our existence and we talk about what it means to be us, we talk about,

I guess, modern science. I think that there's. I don't squelches with

modern science. Science is a process and that's. I think that

we have to remind ourselves of that, that it's a process. It's not true.

It's the process to pursue the truth. And sometimes that process

gets distorted with certain things. I think that we also

as people like our information nice and

tidy. We like our realities nice and tidy. We like everything very,

very digestible. We like the individually wrapped fruit snack

kind of way of having life. We want our own individual versions of

this. The shark reward of truth

lunchables for adults, as my wife would call it. You

know, I mean, and that's really what it is. And I think that,

I just think that, you know, you know, as much as the past is our

future and the future is our past, I think we're relearning the wisdom of yesterday.

And I think that as much as science has moved us forward, I do think

that there's limitations if we don't circle back. I think that we, you know, we

have to entertain that there's a cyclical nature to everything in life, but yet we

obfuscate that reality when it comes to science. I find that

fascinating. And I find it fascinating too that when within,

within, under the guise of science. But I

don't think scientists believe this at all. But I think under the guise of science,

I think people have made the argument to

discredit God and to discredit spirituality and to discredit the

soul from the mind, which I think is a grave injustice

to just who we are as a species. Because I think that there's something Unique

and undeniable. I think it's as simple as taking a, A walk alone

in the woods. Do that and tell me that you

don't have something that's more intrinsically binding you to this space.

Right. I'm not going to get in the weeds, whether it's God with the capital

G or lower G or if you even believe in that. But what I would

say is that there's a spiritual nature to us. And I think that there,

I think that, you know, if we think about the word magic, I think magic

is just science, science we haven't discovered yet. And I think that there is a

certain magic to us as a species. I think that there's a certain magic to

us as, as just within each, I think

with each country has its own version of that. Each

culture has its own version of that uniqueness to

ourselves. Well, when you see this with 100

Years of Solitude, right. I mean, Garcia

Marquez is writing about,

you know, the Macondo.

Macondo, sorry. As a city

born in myth, born out of magic, in

essence. And he writes in the genre of magical realism, you know, which is a

very specific genre to Latin America, where,

as one person put it to me, you know, things are going along, things

going along and then like, bam, like rain falls upside down from the sky and

it makes no sense, but he's, he's,

he's, he set up in 100 years of solitude

that way to. And you, you framed it before as a membrane and that way

to permeate that membrane. And when rationality and science,

scientism, which is what I call it, when rationality and scientism

and all of the atheist

stuff fails

because there's only two atheists I've known whoever died with the current of their convictions,

David Hume and Christopher Hitchens. Everybody else who

knows what they said at the end, it's not recorded. But when everything

goes to the end and fails, something's got to push you through that

membrane. And there is that membrane. And we talk about it in terms of leaders

becoming self aware, taking, you know, reflection and journaling and

engaging in those types of practices on a daily basis to

reconnect with that thing that's through the membrane.

It was interesting you talked about in terms of magic because that's exactly how myth

is framed. Young would say that we can go jog

down that road in another podcast, but Young would say that

for sure. So would, well, so would a couple of

other folks. But Carl Jung would be probably the biggest, you know, head on that

mountain.

Yeah, I don't leaders have a responsibility

to penetrate that and have a responsibility to get. Get through that? And you're right,

like the. I think you're correct in your assertion. The, the.

We anthropomorphize our, our objects. So we have phones and

we have computers. Soon we're going to have

AI and robotics at scale, you know,

and we're going to anthropomorphize these technologies. We're going to give them. Them human

traits. I think of the movie AI that was made 20 years ago,

which is basically just the Pinocchio myth redone with a boy robot

and a sad ending, which

is what you get when Steven Spielberg tries to do a movie that he probably

really shouldn't have done and should have left alone. But anyway,

because Steven Spielberg likes happy endings. He's from the happy ending director

kind of mode. But like, you're gonna

get that. You're gonna get Jude Law and a bunch of dead

robots in a, in a, you know, junkyard somewhere,

and we'll anthropomorphize those objects,

but they won't be human.

They just won't. Now, I'm not going to get into

consciousness and all of that because that's another area that links into this idea

of magic and myth and then can reconnecting and all that. I'm not gonna get

into that. But leaders have to know what's real and what's not. And we talked

about this in 100 Years of Solitude. Leaders have to know about the difference between

what's real and what's not.

And leadership genuinely requires that. Yeah, go ahead.

I would agree. I think that, you know, and I think

I'm just on that same bind of consciousness. I think it's conversation. I

think that there's an argument to be made that consciousness can exist

without a soul. And. But again, different

conversation. If you go back to what you're saying too about leaders need to

know what's true or what's real and what's not.

Fundamentally, if you don't, then you're not leading anything. You're simply

just treading water. And it's like.

And I think that this is where we could go back to that kind of

the critique of our society at the moment here and now. And we, and we

talk about what's actually transpiring and what are some of these

agendas that are in place with totality and different things. The thing that we

haven't really talked about yet about the book is the book is

referencing how totality destroys the

opportunity to pursue my true self. And

when we, when we, when we. We have to make sure

that we understand that that is true not only in this book,

but that's true as a leader. That is true as your team. That

is true in the communities you find yourself in. Anyone who is

regulating our speech in a free society, obviously with, with the limitations

that I think are reasonable, we'd all agree about reasonable hate speech and all other

things, not this misconstrued version that

language can be violence. I'm not a big fan of that notion

because again, where does, who's, who's judging that? Who's

rating that? Who is the arbiter of that line? I don't want to get in

that conversation. I don't think anybody should get in that conversation because I think

that it's fundamentally kind of just

a pitfall. No matter how you talk about it, you get to the same place.

But what I do think is that we have to be careful

and we have to be willing to find our voices as a community

and as people, not just on an individual level, but in a community level.

But especially, especially if you're in a position of note. If you're

in a position of note, any society, in any, in any, any

superstructure, it becomes almost like an

ethical obligation that you do not participate in

the lie, you do not participate in the nonsense.

You know, you mentioned in the very beginning of our conversation, we talked about how,

you know, how things work before social media.

And I think, just as interestingly as, let's go back to just the

dawning of social media, why was certain

things okay then, but they're not okay now? And I think

that that simple juxtaposition of, well, our society wasn't burning then.

So wait, how do we designate what is or is

not necessary? What is or is not needs to be

censored. Again, I'm not the expert who adjudicates

that. You just said you don't want to get into the art, being the arbitrator

of that. Well, that's socially constructed. That is a

social negotiation, and that is socially constructed, which the

social constructivists understand that

part of the game, and that's why they're playing that that way.

The rest of us who are just sort of walking around

and don't have time to worry about, or maybe don't have time to worry about,

always start off with family, who learned in a. Who learned in family

how negotiation works and doesn't,

but don't really understand our own motives or know how to ask for what we

want. Are going to struggle inside of a social constructivist model

where we're going to arbitrate language, we're going to arbitrate speech,

because they don't know the rules. They don't know what the rules of the game

are. They're not even playing the same game on the same board. Well, they don't

play well with each other. And, you know, and

I mean, the social constructivist lens, at least. And this is

just maybe more my opinion. I do think that there is

some. There are some academic points that they make there.

There are definitely some. Some intellectual points that are to be made there. That

being said, I think, like many good academic points,

they don't really find their way. They don't find a good

foothold in the real world. I can think of maybe more than two dozen

ideas that are academically profound and academically present,

and people can argue until they're blue in the face and their points are

justified academically. But I think when we apply these things, where

the rubber meets the road in reality, I think that there are. I think

we have yet to. We have yet to be brave enough

to say that this is a fantastic idea. This is a very

utopian idea, that if we could pull this off,

wow, this. That's something spectacular.

And I think if we, you know, if you look at, like, even the writings

of Marx, Marx in a vacuum, it's a beautiful idea.

Marx in reality, doesn't work. He fundamentally

denied the. One of the most key components of his whole. The. The biggest flaw

in Marx's notion, at least in my opinion, is he denied humans being

dynamic. He denied people

wanting to move up, wanting to pick themselves up,

wanting to essentially ascend. And I think that the lack

of even considering that makes his whole proposition,

makes the idea of communism, in my opinion, nothing more than

a fleeting idea. Nothing more than like a fart in the wind, as you'd say.

It's like, it was good for a moment, but that's about it, you know, I'm

saying it was. It's as good as, you know, it's like the idea of Segways.

Right, Good for a moment. But they're not. We're not gonna use Segways. Going everywhere.

That's what I compare it to. It's like, wow, great,

fantastic. We're gonna really change the world with this. No, you're not.

Because, again, practical application, there's no point to it.

There's just. There's no one's gonna buy in.

Staying on the path. This is typically how we

end our podcast. We talk about how to stay

on the path. I think what David has just said there is

how you stay on the path. You

fundamentally get into practicality.

Unbearable Lightness of Being is a deeply

philosophical and deeply difficult

book. And it's difficult not because of

the content. It's difficult because of

the doors to ideas that it opens

that then the reader has to wrestle with.

The biggest idea is communism. That's why

we've been talking about it for the last hour or

so. Communism, not

just in a political context, but communism

all the way down to a dyadic context between

two people and the kind of

tyranny that creates what we

opened our podcast episode today with, that

creates moral weakness,

which then in turn leads to collapse. It leads to.

To disillusionment. It leads to

destruction of relationships.

It leads to human nakedness

utilized as humiliation. So I'm going to close with this line from Kandera once

again, the unbearable lightness of being. Marching naked information

with a group of naked women was for Teresa, the quintessential image of

horror. By the way, she has a recurring nightmare. Nightmare.

A dream. In this book,

when she lived at home, her mother forbade her to lock the bathroom door. What

she meant by her injunction was, your body is just like all other bodies.

You have no right to shame. You have no reason to hide something that exists

in millions of identical copies. In her mother's world, all

bodies were the same and marched behind one another in formation.

Since childhood, Teresa had seen nudity as a sign

of concentration camp uniformity, a

sign of humiliation. If

you go back and look at pictures from the concentration camps, from Pol

Pot going all the way back to Adolf Hitler, or

if you want to update it, rwanda

in the 1990s, anytime there has been

mass killing or mass graves, the bodies

are stripped naked.

We may not believe fundamentally anymore in the big

G conception of God. I may not be at the center of

our public discourse or the center of our public square,

and God may be dead, according to Nietzsche, and

we may be able to self create our own values, although

Nietzsche struggled with that idea. We may be

existentially weak and we may live in a place where

there's nothing but grabs of power

between disparate, socially constructed groups

that shift and change all the time, okay, I'll give you

the modern world and I'll double down and stake you.

And then I will say this. I will assert,

God still lurks around the edges.

He or she. And let's not gender. An entity

still floats around. And the

trouble with Nietzsche and other original thinkers like

Freud and Picasso and others is not

the original thinker or doer or even the living leader of the original

thinkers, but their acolytes, their followers, their disciples.

And it turns out that for the last 120 years or so, human intellectuals in

the west haven't come up with a solution to the Nietzschean dilemma that then morphed

into an existential, deconstructed and postmodern

dilemma of how an individual can create

a solid, impeccable,

replicable value system across time. We haven't figured this

out. Tyranny, coercion, compelled

speech, whether on an on campus, in a syllabus or on Twitter is an irrelevancy.

And bureaucratic hand holding can never create the values that human beings need

to live and flourish in a complicated, messy and morally ambiguous environment.

People of belief are often mocked and dismissed, but that

mocking doesn't eliminate the power of their first principles.

Remember I said God still lurks at the edges. Leaders need to

remember that knowing at your core what your value system is from where it

comes and the challenges to it, makes you a better leader,

not a weaker one. There's nothing more

demoralizing and less worth of negotiating than conflict induced

apathy. Love that line. And leaders would do well at this time to attach

themselves to belief systems that repudiate the last 120 years

and reach towards something deeper and more eternal.

And by the way, when we talk about on this podcast, the

theology of leadership, this is really genuinely what we're talking about

and we've gotten into the theology and philosophy of leadership today.

If leaders don't do this, and if they fail at

this challenge, if they fail to say yes or say no,

the best that leaders can do is cast long shadows as the sun

continues to set in the west.

Well, that's it for me. I think that's it for here today.

David, do you have anything for us today? And by the way, thank you for

coming on. Thank you for providing a foil to me today or

support or challenging me and pushing me and giving, just bringing up

some ideas. I had a great conversation.

Do you have anything for us today for staying on the path, for getting where

we need to go? Yeah,

I think that fundamentally, I think maybe as a parting thing following this conversation, I

think that people need to remind themselves that it's our duty.

And I'm going to underline that five times duty

to step into the fire of life. Because it's not.

We're not stepping into the fire because we're playing with something

we want to get burned by. We're stepping into the fire because we have to

know how much heat we can handle. It's fundamentally a requirement.

And I think that we have to get to a place as individuals if

we want to see ourselves ascend. We want to see ourselves kind of

transcend our past and become a bigger, better, and more powerful

version of ourselves. I think we have to start inviting

ourselves, or maybe reminding ourselves to be brave.

We have to step up. We have to be the ones to take action, and

we have to stop going to authority figures to clean

up our mess. Right. I think that that's all I would. I mean,

I think that's a fundamental way of just encapsulating this because

it's when we pass the buck forward that it all.

Everything, if everyone's doing that, then somebody,

usually our family members, usually the people on our team,

usually our friends, are the ones that get caught in the crosshairs of

that because we failed to make some. We failed to act. We

failed to take that stand. We failed to,

I guess, again, find the courage to step into

the fire. I think maybe the last thing I would say is that

in terms of, of how we strengthen

ourselves as people and as individuals, both psychically, spiritually, and

just physically, it's exposure.

We have to become exposed to things. Any clinician worth

their weight in salt will tell you that there's only one thing that

cures essentially, fear, anxiety, worry,

apprehension. It's exposure. The research on this is

clear. It's not up for debate. You need to become

exposed to adverse ideas, adverse people, adverse

words, adverse circumstances. Otherwise you

will be crushed under the weight of the first challenge that you come across.

And if we don't do this, this idea of safe spaces.

I spoke out about this when it came up. This is not a good idea.

This is bred out of pseudo intellectualism. This is bred out of

this whole idea that if I just cancel these

people or block these people from my world, then, hey, my problem is solved.

Unfortunately, that's not the case. That's putting a bandaid on a bullet hole wound,

and eventually we're going to run out of blood. We're eventually going to bleed out

from this. And I think at least maybe as a parting

piece too, just on the terms of psychotherapy is

for anyone that's listening and anyone who wants to get involved in that. Do your

homework, shop around. It's important that you find

someone that challenges you, not someone that aligns with you as

a psychotherapist. And I think that the more people demystify

going to see a therapist. But more importantly, again, take on the

responsibility, take on the accountability, do some research,

find people that are going to both be there for you

as a therapist, but at the same time are not just going to nod their

head and agree with everything you say. You don't get anything out of that. That's

not therapy. That's just a conversation. And I think that

I guess that's maybe a great way to kind of, I guess my piece on

this, my lens on this is this book is an interesting reflection on

society and an interesting reflection on how all things

roll downhill. And we have to be very, very accountable, not only to

our own world, but to the leaders we elect and to holding them accountable.

And I think also too, we have to be very accountable to ourselves.

I do not deserve love if I'm not prepared to give love. I do

not deserve to lead if I'm not willing to follow someone else before I

lead. I think that these are these fundamental concepts, these fundamental

qualities that somehow, some way we have just

been maybe distracted away from is maybe the best way of

saying it. And I think the faster and the

sooner we can get back in line with connecting with these core

ideas, these core principles that strengthen us, engage in

behaviors that make us stronger, stop telling ourselves things that make us

weak, stop engaging in behaviors to deny yourself the opportunity

to see yourself be brave. I think that that is the path forward,

not just for leaders, but for people all around us. Because in a

weird sense, we all are leaders. We just have failed to

recognize it yet. And I think that the more we understand that there is

there's a very obvious lens on those people in positions of power, positions

of note, as leaders. It's fantastic. That's fine. But I think we have

to not we have to be careful. We don't forget that we are also leaders

within our household. We are leaders within our friends group. We are

leaders within the covenant of our church. If we go to church, we're leaders in

the covenant of our community. And a denial of

that responsibility on an individual level does just as much

damage as totality from the top down.

Words to Live by if you like

to get practical in staying on the path and walking

into the fire and learning how to sew up the bullet hole

so you can stop bleeding out.

We've got some products and services for you. So.

So head on over to the hsct publishing site

hsctpublishing.com for a list of

all of our training and webinar products, products that are designed and

services and experiences that are designed for you

remotely or in person to stay on the path, to

figure out what the path is, and to figure out how to walk

through the fire. Our leading key solution,

which is initially designed for long term care while we open up to a much

broader audience in January of 2022, is available

at LeadingKeys.com featuring forums,

featuring asynchronous content, featuring a platform where you can ask

us questions and live chat where you can talk to us about your leadership

problems and get practical, not theological, but

practical leadership solutions to your problems.

Our remote training services can also be offered live. In January

2022 we will be expanding to live events. Okay,

we'll be hosting four live events across the country. More information

to come. Stay here and figure that out and learn more about that in this

space. You can also check out our leadership toolbox solution

at LeaderShipToolbox us one

whole program designed to make your managers and supervisors better

leaders. I've also written a couple of books,

but probably the most interesting book is my boss doesn't care

100 essays on disrupting your workplace by disrupting your boss.

Check that out on Amazon.com or anywhere else where you pick up books.

A book designed to help you overcome the hierarchy

if you're particularly if you're in the middle of it and you actually want to

change it. And my upcoming book, 12 Rules for

a Foundation for Intentional Leadership.

We're wrapping up the end of the first draft on that book and we'll

beginning to work on the second draft. We're going to pull together

illustrations for the book. We're releasing that in hardcover, we'll be

releasing that in paperback and we will be releasing that as a digital

download via Kindle in April 2022.

Please join our pre order list list now by sending me an email

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be doing private podcasts, events and other

interesting things that will help you again stay on the path.

If you'd like to book me for speaking engagement or to have me come to

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of them next year. You can go to hasansrells.com for speaking and booking.

You can also check out obviously this podcast Leadership Lessons from

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Sans Sorrell's audio experience. And you can check out the video

version of this podcast and a number of our other

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resulting in training, Jason Sorrell's experience, and

a number of other YouTube channels that we have floating around out there. But those

are the two big ones. So stay on the path,

walk into and walk through the fire and

be the kind of leader that you need to be. I'm

out.