Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut with Jesan Sorrells and Libby Unger
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Diving into Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House, Jesan Sorrells and Libby Unger examine the prophetic warnings about conformity, institutional control, and the battle over language and individual agency. The conversation connects the stories “Harrison Bergeron,” “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” and “Where I Live” to today’s challenges for leaders navigating a culture of safetyism, linguistic manipulation, and technological disruption. Practical takeaways center around preserving individual responsibility, resisting institutional overreach, and regrounding leadership in local, real-world community.
  • Book title: Welcome to the Monkey House
  • Author: Kurt Vonnegut
  • Host: Jesan Sorrells, Guest: Libby Unger
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Time-Stamped Overview:
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00:00 Discussing 20th-century sci-fi authors
08:46 Kurt Vonnegut's literary journey
12:12 High school memories and Vonnegut
18:13 Publication dates and context of stories
26:07 Lindsay Clancy's controversial trial
27:31 Jury deadlock in Lindsey Clancy case
34:20 Reflecting on Gloria Steinem's Impact
42:31 Authors and technology of books
47:38 Vonnegut's views on language usage
52:27 Technology, communication, and culture overlap
58:36 Hourglass analogy and chaotic transitions
01:01:24 Impact of 2020 lockdowns
01:05:56 Barnhouse effect report analysis
01:16:06 Discussing global conflict and climate agendas
01:19:58 American culture and equality debate
01:27:48 Reflecting on personal growth
01:32:19 Exploring an abandoned harbor clubhouse
01:34:09 Wendell Berry and localism themes
01:43:28 Local community and cultural shift
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Creators and Guests

Host
Jesan M. Sorrells
Host of the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast!
Producer
Leadership Toolbox
The home of Leadership ToolBox, LeaderBuzz, and LeadingKeys. Leadership Lessons From The Great Books podcast link here: https://t.co/3VmtjgqTUz
Guest
Libby Unger
Chief Transformation Officer | Chief Operating Officer |

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

201.

Hmm. From our book today,

from our collection today, I start

off with this. The year

was 2081, and everybody was finally

equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law.

They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else.

Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than

anybody else. All this equality was due to the

211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to

the Constitution. and to the unceasing vigilance of

agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April, for

instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it

was in that clammy month that the HG men

took George and Hazel Bergeron's 14-year-old son Harrison

away. It was a tragic— it was tragic,

all right. But George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a

perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think of about anything

except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was

way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was

required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a

government transmitter. Every 20 seconds or so, the transmitter would send out

some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their

brains. George and Hazel were watching television.

There were, there were tears on Hazel's cheeks, which she'd forgotten For the

moment, what they were about on the

television screen were ballerinas. A buzzer

sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic like

bandits from a burglar alarm.

And this is how we open our

201st episode of our

podcast today. It sets the stage for

where we are going to be going, not only for the remainder of this year,

but maybe even for the remainder of this podcast. But we'll see.

Certain books and certain authors walk with you through various

stages of your life. Now, in my life,

I constantly revisit Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, and even older

works such as the Bible and the myths of Greece. And I've talked about

that extensively on this show. But authors of the 20th

century were writing during the height of collective literacy, when the

Reader's Digest Condensed Books had annual printings approaching 10

million copies. At even the

lowest level possible, what this means is that most people were reading

authors, great authors in the 20th century across all

genres. And the genre of science

fiction was the one that got the least institutional and cultural respect and yet had

the deepest penetration. There There were authors who,

however, who sought to raise the profile of science fiction, including

Isaac Asimov, who we've covered on this show, Robert Heinlein,

Arthur C. Clarke, who we haven't, and our author

today. He was once quoted as saying,

quote, I love this quote from him, no one can simultaneously be a

respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works,

close quote. Our author today, I

guarantee you, didn't understand how a refrigerator worked even during his

long lifetime. But he understood the tragedies, the

absurdities, and the surrealistic circumstances that surround the

people who open the door of that refrigerator every day to

assuage their anxieties and their

concerns. Today on the show, we're going to

discuss themes from a collection of short stories of an author who

whom I have been around the block at least 3 times in my life.

Once at the age of 15, once again at the age of 30, and

now as I knock on the door to 50.

And each time the trip has become less and less amusing

and more and more dismaying, almost at a

Stanley Kubrick, a Kubrickian level of dismay.

Kicking off our month-long journey, our month-long jog through the science fiction

genre, We will today begin to extract

lessons from a selection of short stories featured in

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt

Vonnegut Jr.

Leaders, our innovations might kill us

all, but only if we fail to understand with

sincerity in this not the best

possible world, but the only one we've got, how to actually

lead the people who are beneath, around, and walking

beside those innovations. And I

would add, whether they're in software or in hardware.

And joining me on the

201st episode of the Leadership Lessons from the Great

Book podcast, she did not join us on our 200th episode conversation. She

couldn't join us, but that's okay. She's joining us on the first, you know,

iteration going back around the sun yet again. Uh, and

back from our truncated conversation on Les Misérables, don't worry, we'll be,

we'll be picking that back up. Victor Hugo in, uh, in episode number 194

is our advocate for building for the good in public, Libby

Hunger. How you doing, Libby? Great. I am

thrilled to be here. I didn't make it to 200. I did make it to

the 100. You did. Yeah, you did. That's okay. Maybe

to be here for 201. Maybe, maybe we'll do— maybe

you'll do it on every, you know, on the, on the odd ones, like 100,

300, 500, you know. And then I don't know what we're gonna do for the

1,000th episode. I have no idea. I haven't planned ahead that far. I'm

fine for the 300. Yeah, yeah, I'll book you. I'll book you for

300. All right, um, so let's start off as we

always do, looking at our author, Livvy. I

have a few notes here on Kurt Vonnegut. So Kurt

Vonnegut, I believe, was a prophet of the unraveling American

culture during the 20th century. He was born in

1922 and died in 2007. That means

he saw everything or experienced everything from the

vagaries of the Great Depression and the height of radio, and then

all the way through the TV revolution. And knocked right on the door

of seeing social media, although didn't live long enough

to really see that go to scale. I think that would have scared him poopless,

actually, if he'd lived on that. It would have confirmed every,

every negative thought he had about human beings during the course of the 20th

century. He was a child of Silent Generation

parents who experienced economic and cultural insecurity during

the post-World War I years due to their German background. and

their successes and failures in the brewery business in Indianapolis

before and after Prohibition and the Great Depression. So Prohibition and the

Great Depression really destroyed, really were the twin poles

that pushed Vonnegut's parents into a

state of— Huh. Ennui and

depression isn't really the easiest way to say this. I

did find out from my research that apparently his father consistently

just chase, was trying to rechase, getting back to that, that area of

entrepreneurship and ownership in the remainder of his life. And his mother became,

according to Vonnegut, um, a bitter woman who tried to sell short

stories. And eventually when he was in the army, and actually he was recalled from

the army during World War II to come back home because she committed suicide,

um, by, uh, by swallowing, uh, some sleeping pills.

Um, and she was just, I think she was just bitter and angry about the

loss of social status that occurred during the Great Depression and couldn't really

adapt or adjust. to, to the New World.

Most notoriously, Vonnegut was enlisted in the Army in

1943 and was captured by the Germans

and sent to an internment camp in the city of Dresden, where he experienced the

firebombing of the city on February 13th through the

15th in 1945. He survived that firebombing

by taking refuge in a meat locker 3 stories

underground. That's kind of amazing. And he said later on

when he emerged, he was, he was dismayed that they had destroyed this

beautiful city, and he couldn't figure out why.

He didn't publish his first novel until he was 30 in

1952, and that was Player Piano.

He wrote, obviously, I mean, he wrote for all of his life,

achieving, scratching out minimal success at best,

just enough to keep going, and very often Not enough to really

keep him, keep him going. I think he was probably a person who,

if he had been a writer nowadays, would have been put on SSRIs immediately because

he was full of anxiety and depression. But that was what drove him

to write the things that he wrote and created inside of him, the innovations and

the creativity, and allowed him to see the absurdity and the surrealism around

him. And it wasn't until his penultimate novel,

Slaughterhouse-Five, about the firebombing of Dresden, was

published, and that was published in 1969, that he became a household name

for the baby boomer generation and the anti-war protest movement.

And that was when his popularity began to skyrocket.

So, you know, he was writing from '52 to '69

consistently and publishing and getting no traction. And then Slaughterhouse-Five

hit, and then that was it. It was a J-curve up and to the right

for Vonnegut. So that's sort of

the background of him as a writer. We always kind of do that, just kind

of sort of place him a little bit. Libby, I don't know how

much interaction you have with Vonnegut. As I said in my opening, I

first stumbled upon him when I was 15 years old. I read a bunch of

his stuff from Cat's Cradle all the way to Player Piano, and of course

Slaughterhouse-Five. I thought he was funny and amusing,

and it was sort of that teenage, like, hahaha, things are absurd. Oh, this adult

gets it. And then in my

30s, I ran across him again. I read Slaughterhouse-Five

again, and I thought, Okay,

life's absurd. So what? Like, what are we getting to here?

I don't get it. And I still chuckled,

you know, with the absurdities and the, and the surrealism that he brought to

Slaughterhouse-Five. And then I sort of dipped back into Player Piano and Cat's

Cradle a little bit. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. I love the title of

that, that book. Oh my God. That was another one.

Um, but it was less sort of haha teenage impactful for me.

And now reading Welcome to the Monkey House, and I got a book, um, I

was just telling you, um, for our benefit of our listeners, I just got a

book that he wrote with, uh, Susan Campbell, or Susan Campbell compiled a bunch of,

a bunch of stuff that Vonnegut wrote about writing. So I'm going to read

that. As a person approaching 50, um,

I have different thoughts on Vonnegut now, and it's less funny and

amusing and more weighty and

tragic. Um, so Libby,

go ahead. What have you got? I yield the floor

to the right representative from Oregon. Go

ahead. I had no idea where you were gonna go with where, you

know, with how you interpret it now

approaching 50. Um, you're a bit

tragic.

Is, you know, is a good interpretation. I actually, uh,

I was like, we're on that track is how I read.

Yes. Yeah, I read— I was reading especially the Harrison Bergeron.

Um, so my, my

experience with Kurt Vonnegut is

I went to a super crunchy high school in

Portland, Oregon. Very small, only

45 kids in my graduating class. And as you can

imagine, all the guys, you

know, brooded and intellectualized over

Kurt Vonnegut. And as a result,

because I was new to Oregon, I was allergic to

it. But we were

the school that tried to get Ken Kesey to speak at our

graduation, and I think we almost did.

And so for me, it always represented, yeah,

counterculture. And when I

saw it on your reading list for this year, I was like, you

know, I never read that. And I want to— like, what was

Kurt Vonnegut about? And when I read Harrison Bergeron,

I'm like, why have I never read Kurt Vonnegut?

Right? Like, um, and

then I was thinking, why, uh,

why don't people bring him up like they bring up 1984

or they bring up Atlas Shrugged? And what's really

interesting is, you know, the

counterculture of the anti-war movement was not

bringing up, you know, Atlas Shrugged or

1984. Mm-hmm. But they latched on to Ken

Kesey and Kurt Vonnegut. And

I still am struggling with what

the intersection of those 2 movements, because

I would really be expecting more like

Ken Kesey and, you know, One Who Flew Over the

Cuckoo's Nest. Yep. And, you know, one of the

takes on that is that institutions know better. Right.

Than the individual. And Nurse Ratched

is the queen of, you know, knowing better,

you know, and protecting one from themself. Yeah.

And so then you move into Harrison Bergeron, and we're

on, you know, the 210th, 12th, 13th,

14th Amendment, all designed to protect

ourselves from your day-to-day life.

And lo and behold, who is the

enforcer of, you

know, um, uh, what's the term that they use for

keeping you at average intellect? Oh, handicapper.

The handicapper. The handicapper. Right, right.

Nurse Ratched, I know better, protect you from yourself.

The handicapper, Female, I— we know better. You

can't— you know, we know better. But it's dangerous for people to be

prettier than average, to have more than average

intellect. And just—

I was

like, all that comes to mind is the image of, you know,

there was an image of equity that was

hitting the meme world a couple of years ago. With the

size of the fence. And— Oh,

yeah. Right. And everyone—

people were having trouble seeing over the fence. There was

one who could, one who barely could, the other who couldn't. And the

answer for equity was to dig a hole so that they were all the same

height versus giving someone steps

up to see over the fence. And you're seeing

this averaging down in school in Oregon,

for instance. If you know, if you're a

person of color, you no longer have to get grades in high school.

And this was a law that just recently passed within the last

month. And so you want to talk

about— Yeah. You want to talk about

the bigotry of low expectations. Yeah,

we're, we're seeing that. Another thing that's really interesting about Oregon

is it used to be like— people used to mock Oregon as the People's

Republic of Oregon. Mm-hmm. People haven't talked about that from

an absurdity perspective in a very long time.

And you're seeing this kind of averaging down, you know, like California

and their school districts, you know, they're in the bottom 40,

you know, 45 to 50%. Right.

But this need to not have people feel

bad about being less than

is, you know, is pretty pervasive through a lot of

institutions. And when I was reading The Harrison

Bertrand, I'm like, oh my God, how did we

get here? Why are people talking about

this book? So I think, I think Harrison

Bergeron— so Harrison Bergeron was written and published in

1961. Right. And, and

Slaughterhouse-Five, as I said, you know, in our opening before, didn't come about

till '69. So he was probably working on Slaughterhouse-Five. I know that he had

had— he'd been trying to figure out a way, Vonnegut had been trying to figure

out a way to like talk about what happened in Dresden and work through his

emotions about it. And so I know that he had,

um, from my research, I know that he had started on Slaughterhouse-Five and he'd abandoned

it and started on it again and abandoned it and started on it again and

abandoned it. And then he finally had to go back to

Dresden. I think he traveled there, if I remember correctly,

or traveled back to Germany and was like looking around in the '60s and like,

oh, okay, this isn't— kind of getting some catharsis there, right?

Yeah. But Harris and Bergeron and all the other stories in Welcome to the Monkey

House, I mean, if you look at the publication dates, you've got

1961. You've got another story in here

that was published in 1951.

You've got another one which we're going to talk about, Report on the Barnhouse Effect,

which is a fascinating little tale,

which was published in 1950, right on the, right on the, the tail

end of, or not the tail end, but the beginning of Sputnik and Stalin setting

off, setting off his own, his own nukes, testing his own nukes.

Or one that we're not going to talk about, but which I found to be

particularly interesting, Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son. Which was published in

1962. So these stories were

collected together and they represent, I think, a, a,

a pantheon of his thoughts, right? A way of him kind of working

through, like we have blogging today. Well, we had blogging,

right? And I've always used, yeah, Substack now,

newsletters, email newsletters, where you're working out ideas

in public. Right. And, and, you know, obviously you didn't

have blogging or Substack or email newsletters in the '50s. So the

easiest way to do this as a writer was just to write your short story,

put it out there, get it published in some sci-fi magazine

somewhere that maybe some kid would see, or maybe some adult

would see, and then move on to the next. And I think Vonnegut, I think

this is how Vonnegut used the short story genre primarily.

Yeah. I think you get to miss Harrison Bergeron

if you're using it in that way, because

And this is now, this is the power of place and time now. In

1961, historically speaking,

people, the baby boomers were just sort of starting to

hit the counterculture. Right. JFK had just been elected

president. You know, he

hadn't said not quite just, or he had said, bear any burden,

pay any price to ensure the survival and the success of liberty.

He was the, the, the promise of Camelot to protect

institutions and to bring them up to this heroic level was

still there. And they didn't know what we know living on the other

side of that. They didn't know that 60— November, in November of

'63, he was going to be driving an open car in Dallas and that was

going to be the end of it. They didn't know any of that. They were

on the cusp of, I mean, Sputnik had just happened.

Kennedy had just announced that we were going to go to space or was going

to announce that we were going to go to space. Um, the, uh, the

Bay of Pigs hadn't happened yet. You know, Cuba hadn't happened

yet. Um, the weed, mass use of

weed, college protests, the society hadn't blown apart

quite just yet. Like, I think we think of the '50s as like this thing

that only happened between like 1949 and 1959.

No. Yeah. The '50s happened from 1949 all the way up to November

of 1963. And that's when the '50s ended. And they ended with that

gunshot in Dallas. Yeah. And the

parallel that I draw to this is, I think our

fourth turning ended with the attempted assassination

attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania in

2024. I think we're done with the fourth turning. We're now in this weird transitional

moment to the spring, like in all, but I think it ended there.

Like that slammed the door shut. And I'm saying this, by the way, You

know, we're recording this 4 days before September

11th, 4 days before the 25th anniversary of September 11th.

You know, so I think

historicity and context matter for Vonnegut. I think

he's looking around. I think he had an absurdist mind anyway, but I think the

counterculture hooked onto him after '63

because absurdism and surrealism was the only way the baby boomers

who are going from being 13 years old, 12 years old, 10 years

old in '61, '62, '63. If you were a teenager in the '60s,

can you imagine like the whiplash you went through? Right. It must have been

insane. And then you went to college and the '70s haven't

even happened yet. So get ready for that. Get ready for sequined pants and disco.

You're gonna love that. Well, but it, um,

I still see him being

a prophet in the same way that Ayn Rand was.

He just wasn't as aware of it, maybe. Yeah, I would

agree. Right? Like, I agree that he was working through the ideas.

Yeah. But, um, in the same way, and maybe use

absurd— absurdity to make it more

relatable, or Yeah, so that people could digest

it, you know, and just say, you know, have it something in the future, you

know, versus like fiction. Yep. But if you just

look at, you know, the weight of,

you know, um, the weight of

compliance and the weight of, um, the

institution and dumbing you down, it's only once,

like Harrison, you know, Harrison you just couldn't

stay jailed underneath the weight of— Right. Yeah,

the weight of the shields and all of that. And the ballerina

took her mask off, and in their last moments, they were

actually happy and free.

You know, this need to be averaged

and like everyone else, to be

safe actually kills the soul and the

spirit. And then, you know, in their, in their last moments,

they're dancing and kissing. And I think of this as the

difference between, uh, China

and Beijing and India and Delhi.

You know, I'll tell you, I felt a lot safer, like, walking

in Beijing. Mm-hmm. Because

everyone was extremely orderly and stopped and there was no

individuality. It was, you know,

it was gray and dark, but you knew you were safe

with respect to the crowd. But I would much

rather live in India. Right. Where, you know,

everyone, you know, it's talk, talk, talk, and there's color everywhere.

And You know, it's— there's a vibrancy to

living in these areas. You know, it's, you know, they're religious and they're

family-oriented and community-oriented and they're living their full

life, you know, and the expression of humanity

versus like Beijing. You've got all the

rules and you don't have family and there's no religion and

you can't— you know, safe, sure, you know, but

there's no life. There's no life. Yeah, it's sterile safety. It's

so sterile versus the beauty and all that colors and

self-expression in India where it— there's

self-expression, but you've also got a sense of family and institution

and vibrancy. And when I was reading the Harrison Bergeron,

it was kind of like the Beijing and then free

into the Delhi. Yeah. Well, and

it's interesting that you pointed out, and I want to go— I want

to focus a little bit on this for just a second. It's interesting that you

pointed out that the Handicapper General In Harrison Bergeron is a woman.

And in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Nurse Ratched is a woman.

Um, so protectionism. Well, and

I do not want to ground this conversation so much in our present time because

I want it to be timeless. Yeah. And

the trial of Lindsay Clancy is going on right now. Right. And for

those of you who will listen to this in the future, Lindsay Clancy is a

woman who has Whose trial has taken social media by

storm, particularly among females of a certain

age and demographic. And she is accused—

or no, she is on trial for— I want to be very careful in my

language here— she is on trial for allegedly

killing her 3 children, and by the way, all under 10,

allegedly sending her husband out of the house, allegedly

killing her children, and the The defense for this case

that her lawyers, her attorneys have mounted is

that she was suffering from postpartum depression,

was put on SSRIs. The SSRIs and the

depression combined to make her, to

make her not responsible for the

murders of her, the alleged murders of her children.

And thus she should be acquitted of the charges. The

prosecution has taken the tact that, uh,

well, people have agency and no matter how

many, no matter how depressed you are, no matter, there are plenty of people who

are depressed. There are plenty of people who take SSRIs. There are plenty of people

with postpartum depression and there are plenty of women who are

frustrated by their children and they never murder them. Exactly.

So we should hold this woman Accountable for and

responsible for her actions. And the last I heard,

again, not grounding this in anything recent, just giving an overview

for those of those folks who are listening. The most recent

thing that I heard from my wife, because I really wasn't focusing on this until

about, you know, a week ago in any kind of meaningful way. But the last

thing I heard from my wife who has been following this is that the jury

deadlocked and there might be a mistrial. Apparently, one

gentleman on the jury was, was holding out for a guilty

verdict and everybody else was sort of aligned out of those 12 folks.

This is where we're at with that. So we have— and I'm using this to

make a point. So we have Lindsey Clancy. We have, as an example, we

have, we have, you know, Nurse Ratched

and we have the handicapper general in Hermiston Bergeron. Yep.

There's a critique here about agency and responsibility.

Yep. I, I,

I'm gonna get in trouble, but what the hell, it's my show. Is this a

gendered critique, or is Vonnegut just making a much

larger point and using irony and subversive

surrealism to just sort of make this point? I don't know that he was thinking

about it that deeply, but is there a gendered critique here?

I just, uh, wearing the lens of today.

Yeah. I, I could easily see it back then.

You know, nurses were women, right? Right. Yeah. Um, but

it was interesting that the handicapper general,

you know, was a woman, and it was about dumbing down so

everyone feels, you know, comfortable and safe.

Right. You combine it, and that's just matriarchy. Right.

Yeah. So that's not a hard—

my sense is Vonnegut was probably not that deliberative,

but intuitively, there's a message there.

Yeah. I think, you know, the safetyism, you know,

200 and some odd amendments, you know,

because we can't feel, you know, it

gets me into the whole like microaggression world too, right?

It's just like, Just say, like, so they make you uncomfortable?

Move on. You know, usually it's a sign that something's new and

different. It doesn't mean, you know, that it's scary and bad.

Right. But there's no kind of personal, yeah, as you

said, acceptance and personal responsibility and we, you

know, and for owning your

reactions and, you know, and taking care of your

situations. As individuals. So

it's— it is interesting. And we have gone to the extreme, you

know, in a society right now where victims are—

where criminals are victims and victims are criminals. It's that same kind of

concept that I

think was so— in the

10 pages of that short story, I was like, it's a prophet.

Mm-hmm. I'm trying to go back to thinking

what would have gotten him to the handicapper general

concept based off of his experience from

the 1920s to 1960s, through the

end of the '50s. Wearing your history

hat, which is a lot more— or brain,

which is a lot more robust in this than mine, what is your

thought on the— So I think that

you have always had, and this is why I asked about a gender

critique. It's babysitters, right? Yes.

Yeah. But even more so than that. So

the '50s were the Eisenhower years. Uh-huh. And

Eisenhower was sort of the, you know, the World War II

general, you know, led D-Day.

Became Republican president, you know,

led the way on enforcing Brown versus the Board of

Education, led the way

on setting the table for integration of— or

not integration, but

followed up with Harry Truman's efforts to

integrate the armed forces.

Eisenhower was a heck of a president. And then he closes the door

by, by arguing about the— by arguing, by warning

people about the military-industrial— warning the American public about the military-industrial complex, which of

course proved to be true. Right. He was probably, huh,

he was probably the last genuinely, other than maybe Ronald Reagan, even Ronald Reagan sort

of shaded the truth sometimes a little bit, I think, because he had to.

Eisenhower was probably the last honest Republican we've had in the White House.

Now, Trump is a different thing. Trump is just bombastic and whatever.

He's not, he's taking whatever party will take him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah,

yeah. He ain't, he ain't that kind of deliberate, sort of honest

Eisenhower kind of guy. Okay. So Eisenhower's in the '50s, right? Yeah.

But the, but that's the government. The culture

underneath Eisenhower though, I think is very

much in the 1950s. Just as it is

now, because culture comes from the home.

And the man in the gray flannel suit leaves the home and goes to the

office, but who stays at home? Mm-hmm. The woman

stays at home. Women in neighborhoods,

women in homes, women in communities. Um,

Vonnegut was married for 20 years, I

think, if I remember correctly, and had 4 kids with, with one woman. Right?

So he was, he was not trapped, but he was

engaged in domesticity. He wasn't living, leaving his house and then

coming back. He was there all day, every day, and could

see with, huh, two, two eyes,

right? What's happening inside of not just his household, but also all the other households

on the block. Oh, you're, you're so right. And this is because I,

you know, woman's lib child, you know. Which happened all

after that. Right, right, right. I'm a woman's lib child. I'm very

independent. I want my financial freedom, you know,

opportunities, yada, yada, yada. I forget that

the world, you know, I used to say that women did rule the world, you

know, um, you know, through the family, right? And

the strength of, you know, you know, the mom or his wife or whatever.

I absolutely, God, what a blind spot. Thank

you. Well, it's okay. It's all right. I mean, I mean, it's, it's so

Gloria Steinem just died a couple of Like last week, right? She was 92.

Betty Friedan, who was the queen of first wave feminism,

Betty Friedan once said about Gloria Steinem, she's too pretty

to basically be up there. She's going to ruin us. And she

was right. I mean, Gloria Steinem brought you reproductive rights,

quote unquote, which is a, which is a, you know, a mask for what abortion

is. Yeah, exactly. And she Right.

And Betty Friedan, or not Betty Friedan, but Gloria Steinem brought you

the beginnings of the, the

feminism that now winds up or washes up at the shores

in our time of transgenderism, where now we've done the

full circle. A man can become a woman and no one can say boo

about it. Okay. But Betty Friedan, at the

beginning of feminism in the late '50s, early '60s, when she was writing,

Betty Friedan cared about 2 things. Number one, breaking stifling

domesticity, breaking it. Mm-hmm.

And getting men

to not, not fulfill their responsibilities. That wasn't it because that was

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and all those folks back in the, back in the early

20th century, right? That with the passage of the 19th Amendment. So it was

about breaking domesticity for Betty Friedan. It was also about

Taking that power that she saw, to your point, that women had in their

communities and in their neighborhoods and in their family,

taking that power because she saw the possibility, taking that power and scaling it up.

Yeah. And I don't think Betty Friedan fully understood.

She couldn't have fully understood where that was going to end up at.

She was just looking around, to your point about a blind spot. She was just

looking around at the kinds of things that she was seeing. And by the way,

I think Vonnegut Jr. was seeing the exact same things. Plus, he

had come out of his own family where his mother had ground down his father.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. I mean, we all know.

Yes, we've all watched that.

And so he didn't know, I don't think, I don't think he genuinely knew what

to do with any of that. Yeah, I agree. Because how do you work through

that? And he, the only tool he had was writing. That was— he wasn't gonna

go see a therapist. He wasn't gonna do psychedelics. I mean, I love it that

you mentioned Orwell and Ayn Rand. You didn't mention

Huxley, but, you know, Kesey, Huxley, all these guys.

He had to work through that somehow, and writing was the only, the

only drug he had. Had to work through it.

Yeah. I'm so glad. I'm so

glad we read this. I now, you know,

I was doing a bunch of research, you know, in preparation.

I was like, I need to read Slaughterhouse-Five. And, you know,

I have the rest of The Monkey House, and I started going through

different of the short stories. I'm like, these are just fabulous.

I'm— this is fabulous. It's really interesting.

But also just the band,

the comparison of Kesey and Kurt Vonnegut, and only because—

You know, I went to such a super crunchy Portland, Oregon high

school where all of that was, you know, just

everyone bowed down to the Ken Kesey, Vonnegut gods,

you know, as they were doing LSD on a, you know, yeah,

on a Friday night. On a Friday night. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

yeah. Yep. I think they refer to it as acid though. Yes, they

did refer to it as acid. That's right. Tripping like you

would not believe. Anyway, let's get back to the book for just a second. So

we're gonna pick up another story here that we have, because this is not just

Harris and Bergeron we're going to be focused on. I wanna pick up another story

in the collection, Welcome to the Monkey House. New Dictionary.

This one I picked because I think the battle of our time that we've been

having is over who owns exactly the dictionary,

who owns definitions and meanings of words.

Yep. And I quote from Kurt Vonnegut. I wonder now what

Ernest Hemingway's dictionary looked like since he got along so well with dinky words that

everybody can spell and truly understand. Mr. Hotchner,

was it a frazzled wreck? My own is a tossed salad of instant coffee and

tobacco crumbs and India paper, and anybody seeing it might fairly conclude that I

ransack it hourly for a vocabulary like Arnold J. Toynbee's.

The truth is that I have broken its spine looking up the difference between principal

and principal and how to spell Kashmir. It is a

dear Leviathan left to me by my father, Webster's New International

Dictionary of the English Language, based on the International Dictionary of

1890 and 1900. It doesn't have radar in

it or Wernher von Braun or sulfathiazole,

but I know what they are. One time I actually took

Self-entitled. And now I have this enormous and beautiful new

bomb from Random House. I don't mean bomb in a pejorative sense,

or any dictionary sense for that matter. I mean that the book is heavy and

pregnant and makes you think. One of the things that makes you think is that

any gang of bright people with scads of money behind them can become appalling

competitors in the American unabridged dictionary industry.

They can make certain that they have all the words the other dictionaries have. then

add words which have joined the language since the others were published, and then avoid

mistakes that the others have caught particular hell for.

Random House has thrown in a color atlas of the world as well, and

concise dictionaries of French, Spanish, German, and Italian.

And would you look at the price? And lausy me, Christmas is

coming. When Mario Peh reviewed the savagely

bopped 3rd revised edition of the Merriam-Webster for the Times in 1961, He

complained of the, quote, residual prudishness, unquote, which still excludes certain

4-letter words, quote, despite their copious appearance in numerous works of

contemporary literature, as well as on restroom walls,

close quote. Random House has satisfied this complaint somewhat. They

haven't included enough of the words to allow a Pakistani to decode Last Exit to

Brooklyn or Ulysses either, but they have made brave beginnings dealing

wisely, I think, with the elementary canal. I

found only one abrupt verb for sexually congressing a woman, and we

sure have Edward Albee to thank for its currency, though he gets no

credit for it. The verb is hump, as

in hump the hostess.

This was, this was another really good one.

Who controls the language? Who controls the

dictionary? Yeah, well, by also the

language, by virtue of controlling the dictionary, right? And yeah, I

would have— 5 years ago, I thought that was like really absurd.

It's just like, yeah, you're just trying to maintain

decorum in, you know, informal writing. And now I'm like,

no, they're trying to control the language.

What's not— we got the, you know,

and this is— There are 3 overlapping circles in here, right? So

like, it's technology, it's communication, and it's the lived

reality of the failure to work through lived reality,

right? So like Edward Albee, and I know who he's talking about,

the playwright, right? You know, writing about

Pardon my use of the— well, my use of the word, my use of the

term here, folks, but writing about humping the hostess.

Okay. Like everybody knows what that

means. And he's writing— he wrote the story in 1967. This

is amazing. And it's not even really a story. It's more like a dictionary

review, which is why I picked it. Like, it's amazing.

But it also reveals, to your point, sort of

how he was part of the group of

folks, some, many of whom were born in the 1920s. Philip K.

Dick was born in the '20s. Frank Herbert, who wrote Dune, was born in the

'20s. James Baldwin was born in the '20s, right? Like,

these guys were trying to square the circle of all those Venn diagrams

from like what they see in the dictionary, which is the technology of the

book, as we consistently talk about on this podcast, the greatest technology we've created.

That technology, plus how that actually works and walks out in

communication. And we are still doing this today. That's the thing that

struck me about this entire sort of book review, even

the tongue-in-cheek way it was sort of written. But it's

deadly serious at the bottom because,

I mean, that's why words go in and out of our tech. Words go in

and out of our, in and out of our culture all the time. This is

why I'm fascinated by linguistics. Like John McWhorter's work.

Words go in and out of the language all of the time,

and we make decisions, and then we fight

brutally about who gets to own those words.

So absolutely. Yeah, to think

that we would own dictionaries for our entire life is

just like laughable, right? You'd be so proud of your

your well-worn paperback dictionary. And

yeah, it wouldn't withstand 24, you know, 24 months

nowadays. But back then it was like, oh yeah, these are the

words for our life. Well, I think, I think

Merriam-Webster still publishes a physical dictionary. I think they still

do. I think they still print off one. I bought, I bought some,

I bought a couple of dictionaries over the past few years just to

see how to, just to track how words change.

Yep. Even the definitions of words that were

defined one way in 1967

are defined a totally different way in damn near 2027.

Right. And it's the same word.

It's just culture has shifted on the meaning. So,

um, I mentioned James Baldwin. Yep. The term

Black, nobody of James Baldwin's generation

would have used that term to describe themselves racially.

They would have used the term, now this is going to make everybody uncomfortable, but

this is the term they would have used. They would have used the term Negro.

Sorry, folks. Like, that's the term they would have used. That was an okay

term to use, even in the midst of Jim Crow, even

pre-civil rights. Negro was the appropriate term to use.

Black didn't enter the lexicon as a substitute for Negro

until the 1970s and fully into the

1980s. There were still African-Americans. And by the way, that's another term that

hadn't entered into the lexicon either until after the civil rights

movement. But there were African-Americans and quite frankly,

Negroes. Yeah. Who were still calling them, using those terms to

refer to themselves. themselves in the '90s,

not but 30 years ago. You can

still find those words, though, in the dictionary. You could find Negro in

the word— in the dictionary, but the definition is totally different now than it was

in 1967. And that's just one. You

know, some of the research talked about Vonnegut as

being somewhat conspiratorial. And

I can see that in my 2026, '27

lens as well with the dictionary and the use of word

changes, right? Like, so Negro to

African American to Black, right? And then you have like Caucasian.

I'm like, why don't— why isn't Caucasian a choice anymore? Like,

why white? You know? And if you look at Black versus

white, just it, you know, the contrast, it's used for

division. It's a, you know, if you think about how— Mm-hmm. Persuasion is done,

it's through storytelling, it's through imagery, and you make a

clear black versus white just looking at the colors. It's a

lot easier divide to create. Oh yeah, need to keep the masses,

you know, divided, right? So it is just kind of

interesting. Why did we

move to black when, you know, blacks aren't

black, you know? Right. And whites aren't white. And whites aren't

white. different range.

And so you do— it does get into

why, you know, why are specific words

entering a new lexicon and who's making those

changes. And I wouldn't have thought about it, you know,

until, you know, except for the last 6 years. And it's like it always

starts in the elite intellectual schools. And why do

they need to change the words? Like, what

I do. I love John McWhorter too. And, um, it's,

it is interesting, you know, to, to watch it

because it is a control mechanism whether you know it or not. Like

you said, degraded technology. How do you persuade

through, you know, through reading and storytelling and

imagery? You know, well, and a published dictionary

also binds words to a time. Right. So

one of the, one of the things that Vonnegut writes about in this,

in this review, the new dictionary, is,

um, the difference between ain't and,

um, what is it? Ain't and— Ain't and isn't.

Ain't and isn't. That was one. Um, and then the use of— I

love this one— the use of like as a conjunction, meaning

Do at meaning as, as do like I do, though

occasionally found in good writers, is a provincialism and contrary to good

usage. And I came up at a time,

Mr. Vonnegut, may I call you Mr. Vonnegut? I'll call you Kurt. I think you

would appreciate that. Kurt, I came up at a time when like

became a substitute for a pause in a sentence. Exactly.

So it's not do as I like to do

or do as I would do. It's not, that's not how like

is used as a synonym anymore. Like is now used as

a pause, you know, like right here. Yeah. Like, and

everybody just sort of accepts that. Well, my grandmother didn't, who was of Kurt

Vonnegut's time when she was alive. She would always hit me in the back of

the head, either metaphorically when she could no longer

reach the top of my head or literally when she could. And she would

always say, there'll be no— I loved it how my grandmother put this— there will

be no dis here or dat there in this house. Like, that ain't gonna

happen. And she would say, ain't gonna happen. I'm like, what are you talking about,

Grandma? You know? And

my grandmother was right. Vonnegut was right. Yeah. And so these,

even the colloquialisms that we use, whether they're provincial or

not, become

something different if they're permanently established

through the publication of a book. Versus the malleability you

see on social media and the malleability you see of words in the

internet. And I think this is what has

flummoxed, to use another old school word, flummoxed all of

us is it used to take

6 months to a year for a word to sort of travel from California to

New York and for it to shift its meaning

on the way. Now it doesn't take 6 months to a year.

Now it can happen and it does happen in the space

of, in the space of a Google sweep or space of a Google search.

Like, that's it. It's done. Right. And I

don't think as humans, we know how to deal with that.

I don't think we have any— Clearly not.

Like, you just have to look at the Lindsey

Clancy Trying to see where the

sanity in the world is right now. Right. Well,

and we also, we also live in a space

where we're highly individualistic and we're also in

various ways that are sometimes socially normed or not. We're in

various ways in rebellion against hierarchy. Like we've, we've, we've

landed at the— Yes and no. I'm really in conflict with

this because— Really? Okay. The,

the control culture does not feel

individualistic at all. It feels like they think they're

individualistic. Right. Right. But they're

not at all. And those who are trying to fight for

individualism are being, you know, the live and let

live is being, you know, pushed to the side and the

individualistic and empathetic crew is saying, no,

you must act like this. Yeah. So that's why I

think that I, I didn't, I didn't

come to terms with this yet, but that's why I

think the counterculture, um,

who isn't counterculture now, right, still likes the

Kesey and the Vonnegut, right? Um, is

because they can see Uh, what they

wanna see about themselves, right, in these books about

individualism, right? Like, uh,

like Howard Stern is no longer individualistic, but he sure thinks he is. Yeah,

right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the, the

pink-haired trannies think they're individualistic, but

they're not. They're trying to get everyone to, to

abide you know, by their, by their worldview,

you know, so, you know, I'm still,

I'm still struggling kind of with that, like, interplay.

Well, and I think, I think the interplay exists, as I said, at the,

at the intersection of all 3 of those Venn diagrams, or those circles in

that Venn diagram, right? So in one circle, you have the technology, which now

includes not just the book, but it also includes the internet and the

phones and everything else, the physical manifestations, right? Then in one,

another circle, you have communication, which is all of the different ways we

culturally communicate, both verbally and nonverbally,

Eastern, Western, because, you know, the internet allows us to be global now, whether

we want to be or not. Um, all of that. And then the third circle

is culture, right? And culture, of course, is always

downstream from a worldview. And our worldviews are driven right

now by postmodernism. Right. Um, and, and

then a touch of, you know, other things like naturalism.

theism, you know, occasionally nihilism.

And so, you know, culture lives downstream from all that. And inside of culture is

government and politics and policy and entertainment and those kinds of things. So

we have all these 3 overlapping Venn diagrams, right? And depending

upon where we're at in that overlap, I think that

determines to what degree as

individuals we think we are in rebellion. But also to what

degree institutions, which are built by individuals, by the way,

collecting together, institutions determine where

they decide to place their— now I'm going to use

a Foucault reference here— where they place their

power. Yeah. Not authority, but

power. Power. Right. And so I think it's, it's,

it's You know, we're not

going to submit to the hierarchical structures of the 1950s anymore. And

that's part of what's driving us crazy is we have this fantasy of the

1950s, like you were talking about. I'm a feminist and I'm independent and I want

to be that. If we somehow went back

to— forget going back to like the 1900s, the

early 1900s, forget like 1918, 1920, forget that. Just to the

1950s in culturally, not governmentally, not

policy. but in culturally how we treated women, if we tried to go back to

that, it can't be done. I'm

sorry. It just, it can't be done. The level of, the level of,

of, of control you'd have to engage in at a scale

level, institutionally, culturally, it can't be

done. But, but at a family level, at an

individualistic level, I yell at my kids about this sometimes. And sometimes

I'm joking. Sometimes I'm not. Just depends on what we're talking about. Out there, it

might be 2026. In here, it's 1950.

Uh, but you're talking about the

counterculture, right? The counterculture is the family,

right? Right. The, but the hierarchy

is embedded in the consolidation of all these institutions,

right? Right. Like, so the ability to work

and create a small business is extremely difficult right now. Because

of all the rules and regulations that the

hierarchy is stipulating, is putting on businesses to

control and protect workers. So there

is— I think this is where the hourglass is flipping now.

They talk about how the parties actually

flip. Yeah. And I think what we're seeing is the

flipping of society in the hourglass right now.

Okay. But they articulate— still working on the articulation of

it. But there is something about this, the institutionalism,

and there is a fight for conformity and—

not conformity, but control via institutions,

big business, politics or

government, media, trying to control it

all. The counterculture is what you're talking about,

which is the family structure, the,

you know, the value system, the moral system

is really the counterculture. And, you know,

it's shocking to say that. But I—

will we go back to the 1950s?

Not necessarily, but I think there'll be a balancing act

of Yeah, people recognizing that

gender is hormone-based and not— In

your brain. Yeah, right. And that there are going to be

certain balances that we have to create in family units where

it's not maybe the wife only at home

acting a certain way. She has opportunities to still

work and make a living and own property and have her own bank account, but

she's opting for the family unit. because

she's deriving more meaning from that. Mm-hmm.

And fathers are going

back to doing what, you know,

instinctually they're designed to do, which is protect and

feed and, you know, care for the family,

you know, out in the real world.

So I don't, you know, I think that what

we're seeing and why the Fourth Turning in this transition feels

messy is because we are— the hourglass is

turning over. And what has been working,

you know, the hourglass peaked

with Howard Stern getting to the top of it and all these

elite institutions and globalists

and— Yeah.

Microaggressions, yo, leading

conversations and safetyism. I think the safetyism and

that whole counterculture

has got to the top of the hourglass in the

hierarchy, and now the countervailing forces

are coming back, and family and community and

all that's going to start taking over. I like the

visual that you're painting there with your words

of a flipping of the hourglass, right? Because if you think about how an

hourglass, how the sands come down through an hourglass, at first it's

messy and chaotic, to your point about it being a chaotic transition, with each

individual grain of sand

hitting at a different spot at the bottom of the hourglass and landing. And then

everything else sort of compiles on top of it and compiles on top of it

until it creates another, another, you know, triangle at the bottom of the, in

the bottom of the hourglass. And being a visual guy and being an

arts, you know, undergraduate major, you know, I

gotta, I gotta visualize that in my, in my brain.

No one grain of sand, just like no one drop of

rain, just like no, no one

flake of snow blames itself for

You know, the avalanche or the flood

or the sand on the beach in the hourglass.

Yeah. No one grain of sand. And one of the

insights that I think leaders can take from reading not

just, um, Welcome to the Monkey House, but also The New Dictionary

and really taking these short stories seriously is that, um,

We, we have to, I think,

figure out what works for individuals

and at scale homes, maybe to communities.

But then after that, I think we have to, and this is why I

paused before I said it, I think we have to stop trying

to scale up

individual desires and

appetites and perspectives to a

larger space. And I think the internet as a piece of

technology tempts us greatly to do that

because it used to be— Yeah. It used to be that

I didn't know how weird I was.

Really, I didn't know how weird I was. And I don't know how weird you

are. I have no idea. We're inside of our own houses. Yeah. When we go

outside at, you know, the farmer's market or walking down the

street or in our cars or at work, we're not talking about how

weird we are. We're doing the whole like third

level social norm thing. We're all hiding from everyone, right? And

it's fine. That's that conformity, that stifling conformity, you know, that I think

Vonnegut was opposed to. And I think that you're talking about as well, but we

all get to be weird inside of our own houses. And what the

internet does, because now I have this technological device that allows

me to connect with other weird people. Yeah. And this is where

the transgender contagion, uh, the social contagion around Lindsay

Clancy, the social contagions around race, George Floyd,

COVID, like COVID was really interesting, right? Because we went

from sort of the peak of

being able to connect with everybody, being able to connect individually with how weird we

are. We went from that to the institution saying,

nope, slapping the game shut and saying, you're all going to be shoved in your

houses. And one of the things that I've noted repeatedly that

nobody seems to be able to pick up on and go anywhere with is

when the lockdowns occurred in—

what was it? Started in March and April of 2020.

Everybody collectively lasted about a month.

Whether you were out rioting after that or not, it didn't matter. But we had

about a month in us collectively in the United States. And

the level of what the

government would have had to do with the next level, which is what they did

in Australia and China, where they would have had to,

they would have had to weld our doors shut or put us in prison camps.

Yeah. I say this with absolutely no, this is

not irony. This is an absolute sincere statement. I think that

proves the fact that the American government didn't do

that and state governments didn't do that

is a testament to the remaining strains of Christianity in

our culture that we sometimes take for granted

because we're always worried. And we should be, by the

way. We're always worried when oppression is going to show up. We are

constantly monitoring the government because of our free speech

and because of what we can do and what we can't do. That's why it

only worked for a month with us. That's why the lockdowns only worked for about

a month. We got to the end of Netflix at the end of a month.

Like, you can only combine with weird people in your house for so long before

you want to, like, before, like, the furry forum that I'm in, I

have to go meet the other furries. I know. And I just picked that one

because it's whatever, but you could pick anything. Like, I want to go riot about

George Floyd because guess what? Like, I want to be with other people.

We got to it at the end of the month and we realized

that, okay, as individuals, we are atomized, whatever units,

but we have to come together. Now that's an inversion of the thing you're talking

about, but it doesn't make it less true. No,

but it, what it's actually the balancing

act, you know, the, the 2 different sides of this,

um, are structure. And rules and,

you know, and complete freedom, right? And chaos. And we've gotten

to, you know, when there's too much structure, the

rebellion happens, right? You know, and the live and

let live folks are kind of okay with it until they're

not. And that's the thing, you just never know. I'm a Taurus, you

know, Tauruses, we're okay with things until we're not.

Until you're not. Never really know when that's gonna happen, you know.

But I think that's a good expression of what Americans are,

are like as well. And where we are is right now we have way

too much weight coming down. Mm-hmm. And, you know, and the

rebellion is, is starting back to say, hey, oh no, no, no, no, no, we

want our freedom, our freedom back. And so it's

always going to be this tension, you know, too much freedom is

chaos and uncontrolled, you know,

lawlessness and too much control is the lack

of individuality in the sense of, you know, of,

of being a human. Right. Um, yet like you lose your, you

lose your soul, you become Beijing, right, where you're

moving and you're operating, but you're just an ant in the ant farm,

right? Um, you know, so I think that's what is

kind of what is happening right now. And the family unit, that's just a

decent decentralization of, you know, of control,

right? Power. And that's where it should be, as this balance between centralization and

decentralization. That opens the door to our next story.

I love it. Yes. So our next short story, Report on the

Barnhouse Effect. This is something— this was probably out of all the

stories other than Harris and Bergeron in this collection, Welcome

to the Monkey House from Kurt Vonnegut, this story struck me the deepest and was

the least amusing. to me.

That's great. Yeah, it

starts as a report or a letter written by

somebody talking about somebody else.

It sort of reminded me a little bit of Fahrenheit

451, a little bit, in sort of how that

story is structured, where it's somebody writing about

the society in which they see themselves and trying to figure out a A door,

trying to figure out where the door on the floor is, right?

Anyway, report on the Barnhouse effect. I'm gonna read a couple of

things out of this. Let me begin by saying that I don't know any more

about where Professor Arthur Barnhouse is hiding than anyone else does.

Save for one short enigmatic message left in my mailbox on

Christmas Eve, I have not heard from him since his disappearance a year

and a half ago. What's more, readers of this article will be

disappointed if they expect to learn how they could bring about the so-called

Barnhouse effect. If I were able and willing to give away that secret,

I would certainly be something more important than a psychology instructor.

I've been urged to write this report because I did research under the professor's direction

and because I was the first to learn of his astonishing discovery. But while I

was his student, I was never entrusted with knowledge of how the mental forces could

be released and directed. He was unwilling to trust anyone with that information.

Hmm. I would like to point out that the term Barnhouse effect is a creation

of the popular press and was never used by Professor Barnhouse. The name he

chose for the phenomenon was dynamo-psychism,

or force of the mind. I cannot believe that there is a

civilized person yet to be convinced that such a force exists, what with its destructive

effects on display in every national capital. I think humanity has always had an inkling

that this sort of force does exist. It has been common knowledge that some people

are luckier than others with inanimate objects like dice. What Professor Barnhouse did

was to show that such luck was a measurable force,

which in his case could be enormous.

By my calculations, the professor was about 55 times more powerful than a

Nagasaki-type atomic bomb at the time he went into hiding. He was not

bluffing when, on the eve of Operation Brainstorm, he told General Honus

Barker, quote, sitting here at the dinner table, I'm pretty sure

I can flatten anything on Earth from Joe Louis to the Great

Wall of China. Close quote.

With that, the report on the Barnhouse Effect begins. And

what you find out is that Professor Barnhouse was

developing a way to move into

manipulate inanimate objects from

inkwells to entire cities. And of

course, this

power was

desired to be harnessed by— and I already mentioned Eisenhower

in this— the military-industrial complex.

However, Mr. Barnhouse. Mr. Barnhouse

decided he didn't want to be— he didn't

want to be handcuffed. He didn't want to be wrangled. He didn't

want to be controlled by the military-industrial complex,

whose stand-in was General Honus Barker. And the professor—

spoiler alert— decides he's going to leave

and that he's not going to be found.

This story is interesting in that it

combines a bunch of different ideas together that we've

sort of been exploring in our own show, going all the way

from The Trial of Adolf Eichmann by Hannah

Arendt to our conversations about AI on this show.

We've been worried about our innovations killing us, as I said at the opening.

Since the H-bomb. I mean, that just— that blew us away,

right? We even talked about this in my review of the movie Oppenheimer that I

did with Tom Libby, right? Love that movie. And

yeah, it was Oscar-bait. And yeah, no one could have done better. But still,

it's— it's— It is— it is a

testament to the power of the bomb

that it still scares the hell out of us. Damn near

90 years later. Matter of fact, I will point out

something. It's very interesting that we all stopped yelling about,

culturally and collectively, yelling about thermonuclear destruction

right when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. But the second

the Russians decided they were going to reenter the chat with the invasion of the

Ukraine in, what was it, 2014, 2015, all of a

sudden talking about nukes was back on the table.

Nuclear weapons don't just drop themselves out of planes. And

drones don't just launch themselves over a city. And

cars, even the self-driving ones, don't

just drive themselves into a group of people.

Just like behind Professor Barnhouse. So this is the thing that Vonnegut

got to that we are missing even with AI, I think.

There's a brain from somewhere back there, and it's a

human brain. And very often it's a corrupted brain.

The report on Barnhouse Effect Libby is about a man who avoids being used by

other humans to become a weapon by just deciding to not play the

game. What happens to leaders? I'll make

our turn here when they decide they are going to play another game.

Rather than the one placed before them?

Well, you know my obvious answer. I know my— I know your

obvious answer. I know what you're gonna say.

Yeah, I mean, you have to go out and build it up, build it yourself,

right? Right. You know, you don't settle for less, um, or

play a game that isn't aligned with your values, right?

Um, just because you've— you're scared to do it on

your own, right? Um, you need to demonstrate the

courage. You know, courage is not the absence of fear, but it's acting,

you know, in spite of fear. In spite of it. Yeah. Um, because

it's aligned with your— you know, what you're creating is aligned with your values.

Um, but yeah, this was, you know, AGI came up,

you know, as I was thinking about this. the, um,

the whole nuclear, uh, thing.

I, I— it was interesting when you were saying that it had kind

of fallen from the wayside, uh, from the

vernacular discussion up until the, uh,

you, uh, you know, the color revolution in

Ukraine. But I actually, I actually think the last time I actually

Yeah. Of a public policy person, not a politician, but a public policy

person talking about the potential use of nuclear weapons was when,

was during the Serbo-Croatian War in the mid-1990s.

And everybody sort of clapped a hand

on top of that conversation. And I remember a headline and

it might've been from one of, talk about conspiracy theory. It might've been from one

of those wonderful full

Davos-invited conspiracy organizations like the

Trilateral Commission or the CFR, the Council on Foreign

Relations, some schmuck there. And yes, I do use that term on

purpose, putting it out there to see what was going to happen. I remember the

headline being, should we use nukes

in Europe? And it got clamped down

like that. 20 years later, the

Russians now come in. And all of a sudden

I'm seeing not just in one place, but it's blooming like 10,000 poppies

everywhere, to paraphrase from Pol Pot or Chairman Mao.

Should we use nukes? Is Russia going to use nukes? We're afraid

about using nukes. What are the results of nuclear warfare? What is—

what would a thermonuclear exchange look like? And the question, of course, I always

ask is, Who the hell is seeding this?

Like, what is the— to what? I'm— I come from a

family of lawyers. I hang around a lot of

lawyers. You learn some things.

Explains a lot. You learn, you learn some things after a while, right?

I was, I was even, I was even supposed to go to law school and

I didn't. I was like, the world doesn't need more barristers.

The question is, qui bono? Who benefits from this?

And there's no conceivable benefit from having this conversation

unless, unless it's the moving of the Overton

window. If that's what we're doing,

I would assert that Vladimir Putin successfully moved the Overton window with the

color revolution. But I don't know to what end. I don't

know who benefits from moving the Overton window on that conversation. conversation

unless it's to open the door to talking about, to your point, generative

AI in terms of world-ending consequences?

Well, so one, I was thinking about when was the last time that it was

a big issue before like 2014, and it was

Chernobyl, right? Yeah.

Fukushima came and went,

but it wasn't one of those, oh, we're scared. Yeah. And,

you know, in my eyes, when I was just focused on work and not

watching the news at all, I probably would have just thought, well, that's because all

the nuclear reactors have been disabled, yada, yada, yada. So

we're not really afraid of it. But it did show up in

2014. It's been— I

was trying to think back to, was it part of the Obama-Iran

Uh, did it come up during that? No, that caught— that's modern-day Iran.

Yeah, well, 2014, when he— at the end of his,

um, administration. But wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, no, yeah,

go ahead. I do think— I think there's 2 agendas that are— are—

the conspiracy conspirator in me thinks there's 2 agendas

that are being pushed by it. One is we need to find a reason to

fight in the Middle East. preserve access to oil.

And so nuclear war was always

one of those go-tos, just like race wars are a go-to,

Russia is a go-to. Those are easy playbooks to really

spin up to create

reasons for fighting and division.

The other one is The whole climate agenda really

picked up around 2014. And if nuclear— if

nuclear energy is an option, then all of those

rare earths that we need to mine from those third world countries are no longer

needed for, you know, for batteries and

solar and, you know, and windmills

and all of the money that was going to be made off of,

you know, clean energy. that's stupid.

And, you know, that, you know, if

you just think about value per mega— you know, cost per

megawatt and reliability and all that kind of fun stuff,

nuclear would have been the option that you would pursue. For sure. But there

weren't a lot of beneficiaries in the world of— as many

beneficiaries in the world of nuclear as there are in, you

know, solar batteries that need to be replaced every 20 years. And you've got a

great recurring revenue model. You've got all these, you know, rare earth

metals that, you know, a lot of people are going to make a lot of

money off of, yada, yada, yada. Mm-hmm. The

second that nuclear became popular with these SMRs

is when AI needed the power

and these unreliable or inefficient

mechanisms for power, um, weren't going to meet the, you

know, AI needs. Like, data centers can't be powered

off of solar. Um, yeah, that's when you got the nuclear

SMRs. But, um, the whole reason that I bring—

yeah. Oh no, did I freeze? Nope.

Did. Can you still hear me? Yes. Okay. Um,

Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on,

hold

on.

All right. All right. Well, we

had a little bit of a disruption, technical glitch,

but essentially, you know, nuclear

was not something for us to pursue when we

needed— when we were investing in windmills and

solar-powered batteries. Now we need it for AGI.

And so for the greater good, we're now backing

these SMRs and

nuclear. But that does go to the bigger

question about who decides what technology

is, how it should be used for the greater good.

You know, AGI can be used for good, it can be used for

bad. Yeah. But, you know, as

I look at like Sam Altman and Dario, I can

never say Dario's last name. Yeah,

they want us to fear, you know, AGI.

So that they can control the

regulation, but yet they don't want us to fear

it so much that we don't embrace it in our everyday

life. Right. It's this weird two-step

and report on the Barnhouse Effect sort of reveals this too, right? It's this weird

two-step that has been going on in American culture since at minimum

the '50s, probably further back than that. I think of

the old phrase, right? God made all men, or the old quote,

or quip, maybe it's actually a better quip about the American West in the

1880s where God made all men equal, or no, God made all

men, but Samuel Colt made all men equal. Like,

oh, well, you hear a lot of that a lot in Texas. And it's true.

Like, you know, if you're going from the

prairie, if you're going from back east out into the prairie, Nebraska,

Oklahoma, Iowa, Kansas, you know,

Texas with the Comanche back in the, back in the 1860s,

1870s, 1880s, 1890s. And you were a woman.

Yeah. Your best friend was a shotgun

or a six-shooter. That was your best, most reliable friend because you know

what? Your husband could be killed. Your sons

could, could, could be killed or captured. And every

single, not every single, the vast majority of women on

the Great Plains from back

east or immigrant parties coming over from Germany,

they all were armed. And the reason I bring

that up is because a weapon is just a piece of

technology. Yeah. It just sits there inanimate until a

human agent acts on it. And so, From Samuel

Colt and even from the Gatling gun, but from Samuel Colt all

the way down to AGI now, there's a clear line to be

traced on. To your point about what Sam Altman's running around

doing, these inventors claiming that

they can't be— they need to be

constrained by government. Sam Altman running around going, oh dear God, please

constrain me. I can't help developing what I'm— shut up. Yeah,

we know it's regulatory capture. We know precisely what you're doing, dude. Come

on, you're not fooling anybody.

Like, tell it to somebody else who fell off the turnip truck 10 minutes ago,

right? Exactly. Like, it ain't me, babe. It ain't me. And by the way, Anthropic,

I'm looking at you too. Like, all of you doing the same thing.

And it is this— it is this iteration of

the disintermediation of consequences.

there's a term that always occurs with

military or with technology that could be used for military applications,

but that the civilian world gets a hold of first, from the

revolvers of Samuel Colt all the way to the

nuclear, nuclear power plants, all the way to

AGI now. And

what Vonnegut was pointing out was the absurdity of this, I think, at the

fundamentally at the bottom. He didn't know what the solution was. I just like, I

don't think leaders know what the solution is. I think he thought that part of

the solution was just don't play the game. And that's what Barnhouse didn't. That's what

this character didn't do. He just, he just like, you know what?

Like Bartleby Scrivener, you know what? I'd really rather not.

Bartleby the Scrivener and that, that great story by Herman Melville. Oh, will you do

this? No, you know what? I'd really rather not. And I

think in general, in our time,

the idea of not playing the game— you talked about conformity earlier—

is a real— I think that's a real challenge for people to not

play the game. It goes along with FOMO. It goes

along with all these other dynamics that we have that are, again, at a social

contagion level spread to us by the internet. But

if you just don't want to play, just don't play.

Well, I mean, sadly,

I saw the, the preponderance of

conformity, you know, 6 years ago, which I

was incredibly surprised by. Right. You

know, I really did think as Americans, you know, or human

beings, that there would be more common sense with

respect to individual health

and, uh, and ways to maintain your health,

uh, and that we'd be— and that there was such a distrust

in the government and health system that people would

naturally be calling BS. Mm-hmm. But, um,

this need to— it goes to status,

and the need to belong is a lot more

important to many people than not.

And, you know, and there's an animal instinct and a survival instinct associated with

that because in theory, you're, you know, in the old days you were more

protected, you know, in the bigger group and you were exposed if you were out

alone, you know, same like with, you know, pack animals.

Mm-hmm. Um, but, uh,

I, I just have a wire, you know, you would, you had

said that the reason that Americans, um, couldn't be

controlled in the same way that Australians and Europeans were,

um, is because of Christianity. And

I, I'm not sure that

that's it. I think the people who were driven

to go to America all had,

yeah, not necessarily a rebellious instinct, but there

was a pioneering instinct. And that, you know,

I have this desire to go to Scotland, you know,

now to see my peeps, you know.

And it's more like I want to see the

blood that I'm, you know, that I'm birthed from.

Braveheart warrior type. And I

think that, you know, whether it be the pilgrims or, you know, or

others, You know, these were individuals who were—

who couldn't stand within the system and they

couldn't conform and they refused to conform. Right.

So I just think that's naturally our blood and our system.

But I continue to be

surprised, and I shouldn't be,

at how many people choose who will, um,

who will shift their values to justify

roles and positions and decisions that they make. And

the— and I think it was— who was the, um, the Innovator's

Dilemma? Christian— Oh, Clayton Christensen. Clayton

Christensen, you know, who had— it was very strong. He

was Mormon, very strong in his principles, and would

never— I can't remember if it was like Sundays where he would never work or

he just refused. He said, if I make an exception once,

it's the first of a million cuts

in moving away from my principles. And it is

in those small moments that we make decisions

that are counter to our value system

that will erode and allow

us to move away from who we are

in order to conform and belong.

And I'm fortunate that I've just never had that ability.

There's something in my constitution that

if something doesn't feel right to me after I've done it, I

can't live with myself. Yeah. And

while it doesn't undo the damage

that I may have done, names I may have called people, you

know, decisions that I may have made, stealing stickers as a young

kid, you know, those are things that I can't, you know,

I knew were wrong and I couldn't live with myself if I did again,

right? So I changed my behaviors. But it shows up a

lot in the corporate environment because I grew up very ambitious

and had great goals for myself. But

one of my driving—

fortunately, I'm extremely curious and I'm more focused on learning

and making a positive impact than I am with belonging.

Right, right, right. You know, so I

One can't go against my values. Um, it just doesn't

sit in my body. And, you know, it's the same way

that, um, I'm more comfortable being uncomfortable than I

am being comfortable. Like, if I'm comfortable, my body is like, get up

and move. Mm-hmm. You know, you

need to get out there and get uncomfortable because that's where

growth is. Yeah, danger is

Danger is in comfort. Yes. Right.

Yeah, go ahead. No, no, no. I think that then leads into our

last story and our last point as we round the corner here. Because, you

know, the last few— the last— this last season, we've

been trying to very much focus on what do we do?

What are the practical things that we do, right, to restore not only

our culture, but to build for the coming spring? Right. And we started on this

idea back with with, with Candide and the great

instauration with Francis Bacon. We continued it through our

conversations around Shakespeare and around the Constitution. And of course,

we're going to continue it, you know, this month as we go through the sci-fi

genre, because I do think there's some solutions here.

And one of them is— go ahead. Yeah, no, no, no. I know we want

to move on, but I also want to go back to

the, the concept of, you know, the institution telling you

what good is, right? Yeah. And you knowing it's

not. And that's why, like, using your

powers to defeat the enemy was

good, right? Yet our,

you know, our, our hero is like, no,

like, doing good— I'm taking myself out of this.

You telling me what is good does not, is not

good in my heart and in my values. Right. And so,

yeah, but these institutions telling you and you

not listening to your heart or your instincts

is where we lose ourselves as humans.

I think there's another place we lose ourselves and it's something that you said before.

You listed status, place, and then geography. I think, I

think geography really matters, um, outside of maybe a larger conversation

about migration or immigration. I think at a very narrow level, place matters.

Yeah. And that's reflected in, in this story, Where I

Live. I'll read a couple of things

here from this. I think you'll find interesting. From Where I Live.

Not very long ago, an encyclopedia salesman stopped by America's oldest library

building, which is the lovely Sturgis Library in Barnstable Village on Cape

Cod's North Shore. And he pointed out to the easily alarmed librarian that

the library's most recent general reference work was a 1938 Britannica

backstopped by a 1910 Americana. He said many important things had happened

since 1938, naming, among others, penicillin and Hitler's invasion of

Poland. Pause. Just like who owns the dictionary, who owns the

Encyclopedia Britannica? Haha. I see you. I

see you, Vonnegut. I see you working. Back to the story.

Exactly. He was advised to take his astonishment to some of

the library's directors. He was given their names and addresses.

There was a Cabot on the list and a Lowell and a Kittredge and some

others. The librarian told him that he had a chance of catching several directors all

at once if he would go to the Barnstable Yacht Club. So he went down

the narrow Yacht Club Road, nearly broke his neck as he hit a series of

terrific bumps put in the road to discourage speeders, to kill them if

possible. He wanted a martini, wondered if a

non-member could get served at the bar. He was appalled to discover that the club

was nothing but a shack of 14 feet wide. And 30 feet long,

a touch of the Ozarks in Massachusetts. It contained a

hilariously warped ping pong table, a wire lost and found basket with

sandy, fragrant contents, and an upright piano that had been under a leak in the

roof for years. There wasn't any bar, any

telephone, any electricity. There weren't any members there either.

To cap it all off, there wasn't a drop of water in the harbor. To

the tide, which can be as great as 14 feet, was utterly out.

And the so-called yachts, antique wooden Rhodes, 18s,

Beetle Cats, and a couple of Boston Whalers were resting on the bluish-brown

glurp of the emptied harbor's floor. Clouds of gulls and terns were

yelling about all that glurp and about all the good things in it they were

finding to eat. A few men were out there too,

digging clams as fat as partridges from the rim of Sandy Neck, the 10-mile-long

sand finger that separates the harbor from the ice-cold bay. And ducks and geese and

herons and other waterfowl out there too, teeming in the great salt marsh that

bounds the harbor on the west. And near the harbor's narrow mouth,

a yawl from Marblehead with a 6-foot keel lay on her side,

waiting for the water to come back in again. She should never have come to

Barnstable Village, not with a keel

like that. This story

opens, Welcome to the Monkey House, where I live. And I

wanted to talk about this as a close to our

conversation today with Libby Unger because

Wendell Berry, the American gadfly and writer

who, who rhapsodized

prosaically about topsoil and

everything else from rural Kentucky, was a

person who believed— he died at 92 years old, lived a long life, by the

way. Same age as the recently departed, as the recently

departed Gloria Steinem, interestingly enough. Hmm.

Wendell Berry wrote for the vast majority of his career about the power of

place, the power of farming, topsoil,

climate. He wrote about the perils of

technology and capitalism at scale.

He wrote about the primacy of locality. And

the need to stay local, at the very minimum to

be regional, but to stay local. He wrote from a perspective,

um, that included a long chain of authors of the 20th century, from John

Steinbeck to Katherine Anne Porter, um, Charles

Portis, who wrote True Grit and never left Arkansas, by the way,

and Harper Lee, who wrote, you know, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Vonnegut is hooking onto that tradition in Where I Live. Even in

the way he describes Barnstable Village, the way he describes the

salesman's frustrations, and then eventually a couple pages in, he

leaves off from the salesman and goes on to describe the village as a

place where everybody knows everybody. And from the

perspective of folks outside, nothing much is happening there, and

the people inside are just fine with it.

It's not that they don't want anymore or they don't have ambitions. It's that they

are, as St. Paul might say,

satisfied with where they are at. They are

content to be in Barnstable Village, content to

be in the place where they are. Now,

writers write what they write about and what they know, right? They always write from

what they know. And Vonnegut knew about being grounded. And this is the thing

I think that we're missing here, grounded in a geography, grounded in a

place, grounded in a, in a locality.

And this leads to a point that I actually brought up earlier in an earlier

episode, probably a couple of years ago with Tom Libby, where I asked this question,

um, are there ever going to be any more great regional writers coming out of

America? And I think writing is

struggling right now because there aren't a lot of great regional writers because

everybody's captured by the internet. Everybody's captured by social media. And so if

you're a writer, you feel as though you have to write for this

vast expanse of global whatever, when in

reality, the best writers of the 20th century, from

Toni Morrison to Wendell Berry, wrote

specifically about places, specifically

about geography, specific about local things

happening to local people in local times, and

then Those books were published, which is a whole other kind of conversation,

and they scaled and found advocates and

ambassadors in other places. So we're going to read Beloved in

November on this show. We're going to read Beloved. I was challenged

to cover Toni Morrison, and it's fine. We're going to read Beloved. And I'm

going to bet that Beloved, from what I've read about Toni

Morrison, I'm going to bet it's just about as local as

East of Eden was. by John Steinbeck.

The locality thing is the thing I think we're missing. The place

geography thing is the thing that Wendell Berry was on. And I think that that's

what we have to recapture. So Libby, how can leaders stay local

in their mindset and attachment, but also be engaged globally, or at least

regionally in the world? And I hate this term, but it is the one we

use. The world we live in today.

Well, um, the piece of when— about Wendell Berry

that you didn't bring up is that he was

a Stan— he was, um, very elite and had a

promising career at Stanford University.

And he specifically opted out because he yearned

for what I would call real life. He decided he wasn't going to play the

game anymore. That's right. He went and played a different game. He went and played

a different game. And it also goes back to what you were

talking about with Vonnegut, um, in that good

writers don't know how to create, how to build a, or

fix a refrigerator. Mm-hmm. And the concept is,

you know, how do you balance? Yeah, so for me, I, I feel

like I've balanced this. Like, I know how to fix things.

I understand how life is created. you know, I'm

in touch with life, you know, from

gardening to, you know, my animals, to being

able to fix minor things around the house. But I also

had an intellectual education, and I've

danced in both worlds. Mm-hmm. And the, you

know, and I think you value

place and real life

the more you'd be— yeah, once you've become detached from it,

when you live in the city life and everything,

everyone just believes what they read and they ignore their

experience. Mm-hmm. And they,

they choose status,

um, as dictated by who, based on what

values. over real

meaning that we get in place. And your

place that resonates with me is

like my family's, you know, uh,

origins in Nebraska. You know, real

people with real problems. Right. Um, who are also,

you know, my dad would say about my uncle who stayed back, And

didn't go to Wall Street, but he understood Main

Street. And I think as leaders, we

need to— it's about, it's really

about understanding all aspects of

the world that we operate in. And there isn't like

place and locality

is meaningful if it grounds you in like

the real world, in physics of the real world,

in real human endeavors,

connection, the true connection to

soul-based living. Mm-hmm. We

need— that's how you can lead teams is when you understand

people's different motivations. And you have motivations that

are intellectualized, and you have motivations that

are part of the, you know, the physical and 3D

world. And we need to be able to bridge both.

Wendell Berry bridged both. Yeah. Right?

Because he could dance between the intellectual and the

physical. Vonnegut also

could balance the intellectual with the physical. And

those are the— this almost gets back into the

balance that we were talking about earlier between too much structure and

not enough. Mm-hmm. Place

in a world that is dictating

urban elite values,

does matter if you're going to be grounded, to be away

from urban and intellectual states,

right? Mm-hmm. Like,

that's why Iowa feels so, so attractive

when the only one— when one philosophy

is the driving force to feel connected, the place you

choose really matters. So,

as leaders, we need to find a way to balance

the intellectual and the ideal with the real. I

think what you said there is hugely important. And I'm going to close on

this note because I got to wrap up. I'm going to close on this note.

I think that balance that you're talking about, yes, it's what people are

seeking. And I think that I think that we will ruthlessly move in

that direction over the course of the next turning. I think that's what actually

we're going to wind up in. Yeah. I don't know

practically how that's going to look like or what that's going to look

like, but I do know that that balance will be a thing.

So we'll have the AI, we'll have crypto, we'll have whatever is going to happen

with VR, we'll have the internet, we'll have social media. None of those things are

going to go away, but Barry represents as

does Vonnegut and Steinbeck. And I mentioned

Katherine Porter and even Toni Morrison

represents the, the, the, the

deep psychology,

psychologization of how we think

about that local grounding. Yep. Um, by

the way, you can get local grounding in very practical material ways.

Here's a couple of practical material ways. Jiu-jitsu. Jiu-jitsu. Absolutely. It's the first

time at jiu-jitsu and we're closing. Look at that. You got me first time. I

was almost out. Um, but yes, jiu-jitsu,

um, third places. We've kind of talked a little bit about

that here, but those need— those I think will come back. I'm seeing

gradual pop-ups all over the country of people trying to revisit

that. Um, also it will come in

more institutionalized structures in our brain. Yes, churches,

um, community centers. Volunteering, none of those things are going

to go away. They will just be transformed, I think, into

being more concentrated locally rather

than being so focused as we have been for

the last 25 years of this fourth turning, being so

focused on what's happening globally and feeling as though we have to respond to all

the things happening globally. We don't. And Barry gives us

a way to, again, psychologize that. Vonnegut in,

in Where I Live, and even in Harrison Bergeron and the Barnhouse Report on

the Barnhouse Effect, and all the other stories that are in Welcome to the Monkey

House gives us a way of grounding that, of psychologizing that, of thinking about that,

because we need both ends. We need the practical material stuff that's

very hardheaded, but we also need the psychologization of it. We

need those 2 things together. And books are going to ground us

in, in that way, I think, as well.

All right. I'd like to thank Libby Unger coming on the show

today. As usual, always a great conversation, Libby.

So fun. And with that, well,

we're out.