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Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo with Tom Libby and Jesan Sorrells
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Dive into Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis as Jesan Sorrells and Tom Libby unpack the novel’s critique of leadership in an era of wealth, technology, and cultural upheaval. They discuss the dangers of disconnected leadership, the ongoing crisis of accountability among elites, and the pitfalls of managing strictly by data and dashboards. The episode draws sharp parallels between fictional failures and real-world leadership challenges, offering actionable lessons for those navigating today’s ever-shifting leadership landscape.
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Dive into Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis as Jesan Sorrells and Tom Libby unpack the novel’s critique of leadership in an era of wealth, technology, and cultural upheaval. They discuss the dangers of disconnected leadership, the ongoing crisis of accountability among elites, and the pitfalls of managing strictly by data and dashboards. The episode draws sharp parallels between fictional failures and real-world leadership challenges, offering actionable lessons for those navigating today’s ever-shifting leadership landscape.
- Book Title: Cosmopolis
- Author: Don DeLillo
- Hosts: Jesan Sorrells, Tom Libby
09:54 Discussing a prolific modernist author.
16:00 DeLillo's risk-taking in writing.
17:47 Reflecting on character minimalism.
25:36 Discussing key themes in book and movie.
28:33 Early AI's impact on finance.
35:52 Challenges of Leadership Disconnect.
41:42 Billionaires don't live in my town.
49:38 Reflecting on 9/11 emotions.
55:27 Catharsis in Cosmopolis.
56:19 Reflections on WWII veterans' honor.
01:06:32 AI accountability in decision-making.
01:09:49 Wealth Redistribution for Global Issues.
01:15:24 Discussing money and character.
01:18:23 Exploring Worldview and Character Development.
01:27:08 Discussing a retirement plan.
01:31:38 The crisis of tech outpacing morality.
01:35:09 Gut feeling vs data in decisions.
01:40:30 Leadership lessons from Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo.
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- Opening theme composed by Felipe Sarro - Bach - Silotti - "Air" from Orchestra Suite No. 3, BWV 1068
- Closing theme composed by Brian Sanyshyn of Brian Sanyshyn Music.
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Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells,
and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books
podcast, episode number
202. So
we're going to open up
with a summary of some information
from our book today, because the book that we are covering today is
still under copyright, and so we don't want to— we don't want to get
ourselves or the author in trouble.
The book that we are going to be reading, and again, I'm going to start
off with a summary, is divided up into 4 parts,
and each part focuses on a different aspect
of a character, a man who, when we open up the
book, the first part, cannot sleep. He wanders
around his high-rise, multi-roomed apartment, Seeking
rest but cannot find it. This high-rise penthouse
apartment has all the things, the
materialistic things that any good 1980s
millionaire would have in their apartment,
including a poetry room, including windows
with views, including a koi
pond, a marble lobby with
2 elevators. And of course, it's a
tower, a tower that rises above all of the banal
little people. By the way, this comes back later.
It's going to be an important detail. The character can't sleep.
The character's name is Eric Packer, and when you first meet him, he
merely refers to himself as he. And
the first thing that he desires is to, ironically enough,
get a haircut. But he can't.
He can't because the president's in town. And by the
way, before you ask which president, it's the president of the United
States. They make that clear in the novel.
By the way, he doesn't just refer to himself as I. He doesn't just say,
I want a haircut. He then switches to, we want a haircut.
Going back through the first and third person is in the first part of the
novel as he goes in and out of his own consciousness, trying to
understand his own mind as he goes across town in a
white stretch limousine that's corked to
avoid the silence— to avoid the noise of the New York City streets,
just to get something as banal as a haircut.
Now, there are other characters that are introduced in the first part of this novel.
There's a security guard. a thick-necked man named
Torval, whose job it is to keep Eric Packer
alive and to monitor for threats. There's also
analysts that meet him in this limousine, people that come in and out,
and not just analysts, but lovers, uh,
wives, and others who float in and out of
his stretch limousine as it crawls through
Midtown Manhattan traffic towards something as banal
as a haircut.
This novel is one of
several that were written during the course of the
1980s and the 1990s, where the author today tried to make
sense of what was going on at the
intersection of wealth, culture, status, And
finally, even in this novel where the inside of the limousine
features banks and rows of computers, technology.
This novel was written right at the beginning of,
well, the beginning of the rebuilding after the dot-com
crash. And this novel was published 2 years
after 9/11. And in the world that we live in
today, Well, the deep 20th, 21st
century that we are in, a novel like this probably
wouldn't have been written. And that is why it's important to
look at this novel today.
There is an idea that
the past grows brighter and
brighter, even as the future seems grimier and grimier.
And this idea haunts the footsteps of Western man like a specter.
That's one of the pieces that's in this novel, one
of the points that it's made. And the coming
apart of the understanding and communication among people
driven primarily by technology is something that this novel
focuses on. Now, our author today
was one of the quiet documenters of the last 50 years. of not only
American culture unraveling, but also he was a
documenter and a predictor of the last 25 years of chaos
that we've all sort of been through. He also
accomplished something that very few American authors, at least that I'm aware of, have done
in the last 50 years. He proposed actual solutions
to the problems that we face. Sure, not solutions we may
like and not solutions that make us comfortable, but they are solutions,
Nonetheless, as was once infamously stated or
quipped in one of the great movies of our time, The Big Lebowski,
say what you want about National Socialism, at least it's an ethos.
Well, say what you want about what this author is proposing today, at least it's
a solution. The author proposes,
and we as readers presuppose, and then we have to figure
out, does this actually, or is this actually going to work in
reality? Today on the show, we're
going to discuss themes from a book I read for the first time when I
was 23 years old. And reading it again now,
almost 25 years later, well, I can say this, and I
think our co-host today will agree with me, uh, the book did not
age well.
Resuming our month-long jog through the science fiction
genre, We will try to extract lessons, at least a couple,
from a book described once by a New York Times— New York
Magazine, a New Yorker magazine writer as, quote,
an Ayn Rand hero in a minimalist rendering of Ulysses
that morphs into an urban thriller. We're going to be looking at the
book Cosmopolis by Don
DeLillo.
Leaders, you won't find solutions to problems
the way Eric Packer was looking for them, floating above the problems themselves
and by committing to nothing and to no one. We've already tried that. We
tried that for the last 25 years and it hasn't worked. We need you to
get out of the limo, get into the office, and
actually get in the game.
And joining me And to kick us off,
back from our 200th episode conversation with a bunch of guest
co-hosts smarter than both of us put together,
is our advocate for pragmatism in leadership. And he's going to tell us
what he thought of the movie that they made about 9 years
later based off this book, Tom Libby.
How you doing today, Tom? How's it going?
I am doing very well. Really, really good day today. I mean,
for those of you who don't know New England, This is probably one of the
5 or 10 days in New England that you actually love being from here.
This is the weather. It's so nice. Literally perfect, you
know, 75 degrees, bright and sunny, slight breeze to
the air, no humidity whatsoever.
We only get about 5 of these a year, but these are the days that
you hold on to in New England. But yes, I am doing very, very
well today. Thank you. Excellent. Normally you're like, well,
you know, I don't know, I don't know. But you know, the weather's working for
you today. So that's good. It's working for you
today. So let's get into
Cosmopolis, a book that, by the way, was widely panned when it
was published. It got incredibly negative reviews. Critics did not
like this book when it was published. And I'll talk a little bit about
DeLillo's background as a writer and kind of set the table a little
bit. So Don DeLillo
is a— he was born on November 20th, 1936, and
he's still alive, by the way. He has not— he has not passed away.
He is a playwright, sort of in the David Mamet mode. We've talked
about Mamet a little bit on this podcast. He wrote Glengarry Glen Ross and
other great plays that were turned into movies. And Delilah is that guy. He's the
guy who writes a book and then takes that book, either turns it into a
play or turns it into a movie. But he's a playwright, an author, and
what I consider to be a cultural gadfly.
He discovered that he could write because he read a lot of books, weirdly enough.
Delilah published his first book in 1971, Americana.
I think he was around the age of 35 or 36 or so when he
published his first book. And then he published 6 novels in the '70s and
'80s, and he just sort of kept going. As a matter of fact, he,
he looked— he revisited Americana, I believe, in the '90s.
And he wrote about that book, quote, I don't think that book would have been
published today. I don't think I would have gotten my start from that book.
He's like, that book was really bad. You know, but I
mean, like, That's really good for an author to say, because
if you, if you, you know, are 50 years away from something, you
should probably have a different, a different thought process on it, or 30 years away
from it. You should probably have a different thought process on it than when you
originally, when you originally wrote it. Delilah has been
prolific. He's produced— he's published at least 1 or 2
novels every decade since at least the 1970s. He's one of our most
prolific We would call him a postmodern author.
He does not— he rejects that label. He doesn't want to be called postmodern. He
thinks that he is in a line of modernist authors
going all the way back in time to
William Faulkner, right? And he was deeply influenced
by Hemingway and by other folks who looked at the culture and
critiqued the culture of their time. Me personally, when I read
Delilah, When I read Cosmopolis or other— or some of his other novels like
White Noise is really good. I put him in
that long line of '80s and '90s authors that were trying to define the '80s,
and you see that a lot in Cosmopolis, going all the way
from Jay McInerney, who wrote Bright Lights, Big City,
to— which was turned into a movie with Michael J. Fox— to Bret Easton
Ellis, who has his own podcast now, and he, of course, wrote American
Psycho. which was turned into the great movie starring Patrick Bateman.
No, not Patrick Bateman. The guy who— he was played by— Patrick Bateman was played
by the guy who played Batman, Christian Bale. Christian
Bale. And of course, then you have Don DeLillo
and Cosmopolis. And by the way, Cosmopolis was turned into a movie in
2012 starring Robert Pattinson, who
was just coming off of his—
jaunt through the Twilight films and hadn't
quite sort of gotten out of that dark, broody,
vampiric horror mode that everybody sort of knew him in as a, as an
actor. By the way, directed by David Cronenberg, which we'll talk about the movie here
in just a moment. Delilah describes himself and his writing approach as
follows, and I want to read this quote very briefly before I let Tom jump
in. Quote, I'm a novelist, period. An
American novelist. And, quote, it's important to write
against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption
and of debilitating entertainment. I think writers by nature must
oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to
impose on us. Close quote.
So that's a little bit about Delilo. Not formally trained in writing, but
has just sort of, you know, just done it. He's done the act.
Tom, I don't know how much you knew about him before I proposed this
book. I sort of slapped you onto Cosmopolis, and then I sent
you the link to the trailer, and then you went off and watched the movie.
And so why don't you— why don't you tell the
listeners your experience with this
wonderful piece of content? I'll say it this
way. I didn't know much about him prior
to this. Mm-hmm. But because of watching the
film, I decided to go down a little bit of a rabbit hole.
Because of my reaction to the film, I just felt like there
had to be more to this guy if you were doing him on the podcast,
right? Right. I just felt like him as an author, him as a writer, he
had to have more depth. He had to have more, um, he
had to have more substance to him. Yes.
Yes. I'm trying to be very
careful how I word this because I don't want to give too much away of
what I felt and thought about the actual movie
versus the screenplay versus the writing
versus the acting, etc., etc. There's a lot to unpack there.
But once I started kind of going down the rabbit hole realizing, wow,
like this guy First of all, won a
ton of awards, nominated for a Pulitzer.
So I'm guessing some of his previous works were really
good. I didn't think this one
was. It's okay. You're not alone. A lot of
critics did not. They did not like this book. Right. So when you told
me that it got poor reviews, that did not surprise
me. Right. Now, had I knew him, had I read
all this stuff about him and his life, and then had not read
or seen the book, read the book or seen this film yet, and you said
this got negative reviews, might have been surprised by that just because of all the
positives that he's had in his life, wins, so to speak.
And he's had enough of them. Again, when you look at some of the awards
that he's won, some of them were significant. These are not like, you know, I
won my high school essay report, you know, award.
Some of them are pretty significant. And again, being nominated for a Pulitzer, in my
opinion, is simply— that's amazing
enough because there's only so many of those given. It's not like, you
know, it's not like the Golden Globes or
the Emmys where we're literally handing out thousands of them per year.
Right. You can say what you want about there's only one Best Picture,
one Best Actor, whatever. I get that. But we're giving these things out
like, like Pez dispensers at this point. But we're not doing
that with the writing. I don't see the same thing in writing. I see the
same thing in writing. It's when you win a Pulitzer or you have a best—
you have a New York Times bestseller, you're legit at this
point. Like, so again, I'm just kind of trying to clarify here. I
feel like this guy is a legit author. I feel like he's In most
circles, people would consider him a good author, but this
particular work I did not find very fascinating.
Well, and, and, and he, he, he is noted for, if you read in his
biography on his, on his Wikipedia page, which I did, um,
he is noted for doing experiments.
So he'll write a book that's an experiment. And if
it works, it works. Like his second book, he's— second or third book, he said
was like the hardest book that he'd ever written. Because it was this
experimental sort of magic, real magical realism. I think he was
probably influenced by Gabriel García Márquez.
Yeah, Gabriel García Márquez. I probably said
that wrong in the wrong order, but he was, he was influenced by magical, magical
realism. And so he wrote a very layered, complicated novel that again also
didn't do well. But when I look— and so when I look at
Delilah, I expect there to be for every, you know,
maybe Americana or White Noise, there's going to be a Cosmopolis because he's just
going to take a risk, right? He's just going to take a flyer, right? And
to me, that backs up what he says about
himself in that he's a writer.
So he's willing to take risks and sort of work things
out in public. And I think if he had come, come in,
probably, I mean, he was born in '36. So if he had
come in 2 generations later, you know, and had been able to
experience the internet directly versus coming from a
literary culture, right? I think he probably would have been a blogger and a
Substacker by this point. You know, he would have made that turn.
Such as it is, I don't think that he's out there doing any of that
because he looks at novels as the way that he sort of works, works that
out. Now, with that being said, Cosmopolis is a very minimalistic
book. So the reason I sent you the
link to the— essentially link to the trailer, and then I had you watch the
movie, was because the book and the movie are roughly
similar, you know, and Delillo helped out on the writing of the
film. So he, like, he— because he's a playwright, so he understands how to
strip things out and what works in the medium of film versus what works in
the medium of a book. And those are 2 different things, right? Because with the
camera you can show, whereas with a novel you have to tell. Okay,
got it. And he understands how to go back and forth, back
and forth between those 2. And so what I liked about the novel, I will
say this, what I enjoyed about the novel is
the pacing is quick. It's a minimalistic read.
It's only, I mean, it's barely over 200 pages. It's
209 pages, you know, so it's not hard to read. You
don't have to, you don't have to sort of do a whole lot for it
there. Um, you, you
get the sense of who the character Eric Packer really is
from the minimalism. Um,
and you can come to the novel, as I did when I was 23, with
all of the
intimations of the 1980s to this thing,
and it works just fine. Like, you can slap this on onto the 1980s, it
works just fine. And I think if you could, if you could write this novel
today, and I'll just say this out loud. If Delilah had written and
published his novel today, you would just slap the social media and AI,
you know, people on top of it, the AI titans on top of it, or
the startup people on top of it. Now, I'm not quite sure that
anyone would read it because even as minimalist as it is,
it's still not stripped down enough for a modern audience where,
you know, 1.6 seconds, that's what Bob Rucker said in the 200th episode,
1.6 seconds is how quickly people's attentions move. That's ridiculous.
So I think Delillo would struggle, as most authors are struggling right now,
to get people's attention in the novel, using the novel as a way to get
their attention. I think he probably would just do it as a— he
would just do it as a streaming Netflix show.
Just in the car. This is a streaming Netflix show. Like, the whole show is
just in the car.
Actually, you know, the funny thing is, as we were discussing before
you hit the record button here, the subtle differences between the book and the
movie. And I think if they did it as a 6-episode,
35 to 40-minute episode Netflix series,
they probably would have been able to include every bit that they left
out from the book into the movie. Oh, yeah. All the little details
with the worker bee in the beginning versus the worker bee in
the end. And again, I'm trying not to give too much away in case somebody
wants to go read this. But Right. They probably could have
included all of that instead of leaving some of it out.
Because you get the gist at the end of the movie, you get the
gist that the worker bee expects him to know him.
Right. But because he doesn't, that's a big deal. That's a big deal. That's a
big deal. Which I think you could, in a series where you did like 6
episodes or something like that, at like 30, 40 minutes long, you could have
probably put that in there. So that you didn't have to figure that out by
listening to the dialogue. Right. It's a lot more of a slow burn
over a series than a 2-hour, well, hour and a
half to 2-hour long movie. Which, speaking of the hour and a half to 2-hour
long movie, so I watched it.
I made it about 45
minutes in before other external factors
forced me to abandon the film. I had
to go negotiate with other parties. And, well, that was it.
I then moved on to Slaughterhouse-Five, just because, you know, Vonnegut.
But, but you and your wife watched it. And I know
your wife had a visceral reaction to it or a visceral response to it, as
did, weirdly enough, most people when this movie came out. It was not a popular
movie either. So for our listeners,
Cosmopolis, 2012. Tell them a little bit about that, about
the film version. So
yeah, should I tell them the whole story?
You edit however it is you see fit. At this
point in our show, on the relationship we have on the show, do whatever you
feel. Go ahead, whatever you want to do. I know, but now I'm injecting my
wife into this. I'm not sure. You are, right? So I mean, how much is
you versus her? Yeah, I know you gotta make Editing decisions.
I'll lay the groundwork. I'll lay the groundwork is this. So when my wife and
I watch a movie, typically I will be sitting up watching the movie. She will
lay down. She puts her feet— she rests her feet on my lap, whatever. I
rub her feet while we watch the movie, blah, blah, blah. Stupid husband-wife stuff, right?
Yep. So I had— I had to— I had sent you
the text because at the end of this movie, my
wife abruptly sits up. And looks at me and
says, do you talk to Hasan outside of
work hours? Now, for those of you who don't know, we've mentioned this several times
in the podcast. Hasan and I have a couple of projects that we work on
together that are within working hours. So we have
working meetings together, et cetera, et cetera. And I said, yeah, of course. I said,
we're friends. I talk to him all the time outside of, outside of
work hours. Why? She goes, you need to text him right now and say he's
dead to me. And I go, he's dead to me. No, I was like,
what do you mean? She's like, she's like, I just lost 2 hours of my
life I am never going to get back. And that was her response to the
movie. So then I proceeded to tell her,
I said, you have to understand, hon, this is homework. Hasan and I are going
to talk about this book on Monday. This is about the podcast.
And she goes, this is the leadership podcast thing that you guys do, right?
And I go, yeah. She goes, what exactly are you supposed to take from
leadership out of that movie? And I go,
well, there were at least 2 or 3 things that I took. And again, I'm
watching this movie. I'm not watching this movie for
entertainment purposes. I'm watching this movie as quote
unquote homework. Homework. So, I'm looking for things for you
and I to talk about today. Exactly. So, again, I was not looking at
this as like, oh, I'm watching this movie because Are you not
entertained? You know, like, this is not what I was
thinking of. I was, I was looking at the, at the, at this as a
cheat code. You sent me this in lieu of having to go read the
book over the course of a weekend. A weekend. You know, you didn't expect me
to read the whole book in a weekend, so you just thought the book would
be worth it. I mean, the movie would be sufficient anyway. So that was my
wife's reaction to the movie. Now, that being said, I will say
that I do agree with her. Had I been watching that for
entertainment purposes, I probably would not have watched the whole movie.
Yeah. Now, for the sake of this podcast, I'm glad I did because there was
a couple of lessons that leaders should really pay. If you are a leader,
if you're leading a team, if you're leading a company, if you're lead— if you
are a community leader and you watch this movie
from that perspective, this guy supposedly runs a
giant company and he's riding in the back of a limo because he's very wealthy
and he made all his money running this company. And he is supposed to be
projecting himself as the leader of this company. And you can very
easily watch this movie and think of things that you should not be doing as
a leader, or will not do, or won't do, or change if you
are currently doing. And that's the way that you come across. You need to change
a few things. So overall, yes, movie was very
bad. Robert Pattinson, I am sorry, I hate to say this for those of you
who are fans of his, not Not good.
He is not good. Now, in his defense,
you're trying to take a 2003 book and turn him
into Mark Zuckerberg, which didn't exist in 2003. But you're
trying to make the 2012 movie based on a person who's alive
today that didn't exist in 2003. So again,
there's some things that Robert Pattinson had no control over, but still
very bad. Very bad, very bad, very bad acting. The screenplay
wasn't very great. It wasn't written really well into the— they
didn't give the actors a lot to
work with. I thought the best character in the whole movie was the
security guard. Oh yeah, Torval. Yeah, Torval. And then
he— I don't even understand, why would you do that?
Made no sense to me. So the
things we will focus on
in the show, now that we've sort of laid out the book and the movie
a little bit, here are the things that we are going to focus on.
The— there are several beats that occur both in the book and in the movie.
So the first beat, which I think relates to leaders, is about the flow
of data, right? It's about this idea that
somehow, and I kind of said it in my opening and my warning to leaders,
First off, you have to make a decision to get in the limo. But once
you make the decision to get into the limo, once you make the decision to
get into your startup or get into your business or get into the thing you're
doing, that can be both a— and we
see this with Eric Packer. You see this with this character played by
Robert Pattinson in the movie. You can
become trapped by— you could become
trapped in a self-sealing A self-sealing bubble of
logic. And that's what the car represents, right? So he's going,
he's pushing through Midtown Manhattan traffic. There are riots that are
occurring around him. There's a whole sequence in the movie with rats
where these people come in. This is the Cronenberg touch, by the way, where people
come into a diner and they throw rats and then they run out. It's hilarious.
They, you can, you can be sealed away from the whole scene in the
library with his, with his wife, right,
who eventually, you know, he takes her money too. And, you know, eventually, like, she
goes broke too. And the, the, in the
book, that's actually done a lot better because he actually, you get to
understand that he's smelling the library and he's drawing connections between something
that's very, very old and something that's very, very quote unquote new,
right? New and self-sealed, right? So anyway, as a leader, you can get into your
new thing, your new car, your new business, your new whatever. And
now you're self-sealed away
from from everything. And you think that whatever comes in is
the thing that's going to be the information or the
data or the tool that's going to help you be successful. So that's
really the second thing. The first thing is how do you get out of it?
How do you get into the car? But then once you're in the car, how
do you not fool yourself? Then the third thing I think you can take from
both the film and the book, and we'll talk about this today, is sort of
the— Huh.
When there are data points that aren't working with you. So he's trying to short
the yen. This is a huge thing in the book. It's a huge thing in
the movie. Why is he trying to short the yen? Well, he's trying to
manipulate finance and he's a finance guy because it's, it's
written again, Delilah is writing from the perspective of a 1980s person
looking at 2003, not to Tom's point, the perspective of someone in
2026 looking at tech billionaires, right? He doesn't have that information at the
time. So he's looking at finance guys. He's looking at people who are like Wolf
of Wall Street or Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street. You know,
greed is good. He's looking at those kinds of guys. And those kinds of guys,
by the time the end of the 1990s came, they were telling everybody
finance will all be run on numbers. There will be no human being inputs whatsoever.
We will need nothing. It was the first sort of intimation of everything that has
washed up on our shores in the last few years with AI. It
was the first sort of proto version of that because they were all gathering data
and they thought the data was clean and cool and amazing and all of this.
Well, what happens when your data points don't work?
What happens when that cool, clean thing gets screwed up by, to your point about
Paul, Paul Giamatti in the film,
what happens when human beings come in and screw up your
data? How do you engage with that as a leader? So we'll talk a little
bit about that because I think that's also really relevant for leaders out of this
book. And then finally, and I think I think this is
also the piece that, that like flummoxes us about this film.
9/11. This, I mean, this book was published 2 years after 9/11.
And we are on the 25th anniversary as of 3
days ago, 25th anniversary of 9/11. Uh,
I don't know about you, Tom, but I have definite opinions
about that event. Um,
you and I both lived through it. We're of that certain age. And, uh,
we didn't live through it, watching it on a YouTube video afterward.
So, and I remember being 2 years away from that
and really not understanding still how to put that into any
sort of structure that made
sense.
Um, 25 years afterward, it's a little bit of a
different, little bit of a different story. But not, not that much.
So I think there are some points that we could hit on in this book.
I do think there is some value, but I would agree this is a book
or a movie you can chew once, spit out, and then be done.
I think you can move on to other Delilah books. White Noise, like I said,
is infinitely better than this one. I
also really liked, let's see, which
a lot of people didn't, The Body Artist, which this actually, this book is considered
to be a follow-on to The Body Artist. A lot of people didn't like Body
Artists, but they liked it better than they liked Cosmopolis. Or you could pick up
DeLillo's book that he won a bunch of prizes
for called Underworld, which is actually
pretty good. Okay.
As you roll through the book, so let's go back to the book for just
a second. As you roll through the book, Eric Packer, you know,
gets out of the car, in and out of the car. He's wandering in and
out of the car like all the time. This is also reflected in the film.
He's wandering in and out of the car, and one of the, one of the
key characters in the, in the book and in the
movie, interestingly enough, is, is his, is
his wife, who is a wealthy
woman who is a poet. And
not a poet in terms of an actual artist. And I think this is what
Delilah is talking about. She's a poet in the sense of rich
people picking something that they want to do. And then sort of just doing it
and calling themselves this thing. Meanwhile, all of us average schmucks have to go out
and actually, like, earn a living. That's how she's a poet. And
Packer sees this in her. And they were supposed to be married in an
arranged marriage, but they haven't consummated the marriage. By the way, in case you're—
just to put this up front, right up— well, not right up front, but put
this in now, now that you're sort of, you know, 30 minutes into the show.
Uh, sex is a big driver in this. in this book,
just so you know. And there is a lot of sexual content in the movie.
Don't watch it with kids. A lot of sexual content in the movie. Don't watch
it with kids. But it is a huge driver. And
Eric is trying to get his wife to consummate the marriage with him, and she
won't do it. And that's a huge, like, linchpin
moment in the second part of— of the first
part of this book.
Then, of course, there's the scene with the folks with the rats in the rat
suits. There's a whole
sequence inside of here that
talks about the markets and the shorting of the yen and the South
Asian markets and what that means, right?
Then there's a riot. The car is spray-painted because, you know, people want
to eat the rich, even in 2003. And there's a
line in here that actually is reflected in the movie, but it's way
deep in part 2 of the book. It says this, a specter is haunting
the world, the specter of capitalism.
And of course, this is a variation on
the Communist Manifesto, in which Europe is
haunted by the specter of communism circa 1850, right
before communism actually becomes a thing. And Delilah, of course, is making
parallels between communism and capitalism. in the way that it— the way that
those systems, not the way that they're actually played out, but the way those
systems focus around power and hierarchy and authority. Okay.
So that's in the second part of the book. Eric is rolling through, you
know, the streets of Midtown Manhattan, avoiding the
president's barricades and blockage as much as he
possibly can to get his haircut. Again, the most banal thing possible. I'm going to
go get a haircut.
He opens as a character who can't sleep, and I think that's actually
significant, Tom. Um, it
makes him disconnected, first from himself and then from everybody
else, and then from his wife, his intimate relationships. He's so
disconnected, he has to go get a haircut, which we find out later on the
barbershop is owned by his father. So we like, you know, there's a whole dynamic
that's going on there. Leaders need to get
out of the car. And yet disconnected leadership is often rewarded.
Yeah, we saw how, how Eric managed it in the movie. We read how
Eric managed it in the book. Not well is the answer. So what's a
better way to manage that disconnected leadership? Or, or how do leaders avoid being
disconnected?
Well, I think I think I'm not, I'm
not gonna, I'm not gonna give him a pass here.
No. I think, I think it's hard for any of us to even comprehend
what those guys go through because we don't have that kind of money. We don't
have that kind of authority over, uh, over
markets. We don't have that kind of pull or power over,
uh, you know, just the, the, the
sheer The sheer arrogance of
thinking— I mean, and again, if you're thinking about
specific notations in the book or the movie, his
people are telling him, this is not a good idea. The president's
in town. Right. There's a funeral procession for somebody who's very, very
famous that's going on. You're never going to get there. And
the thought of like somebody who feels like they're above
everything else, Not just above, like, not above the law, sort of. Well,
maybe he does feel that too, but he's got so much money,
he's just gonna do what he wants to do and no one's gonna stop him.
And no one's gonna stop him. Yeah. So, and again, that's why
I preface all that by saying I'm not giving him a pass here, but it's,
it's easy for us to be judgmental of that when we don't have that
scenario to, to lean on or, or that, or that, that
experience to, to kind of come from.
Because every one of us that have been in leadership roles are probably going to
look at him and say, you disconnected
on— you did it to yourself. As soon as you get to a certain point
where you're starting to hire people that you don't give a crap about,
right? So now, or you're not the one hiring them anymore. So
you've gotten so big and so powerful that now you have people
that have people that have people that hire people, right?
So, right, when you're running a multi-billion dollar organization like that,
you're so disconnected. I'm not sure there is a way back for those people.
Think about all of the quote unquote billionaires that we see in the, in
the, in the public eye, right? Right. The Elon
Musks of the world, the Sam Altmans of the world, the Mark Zuckerbergs
of the world. How many of them do we actually think
understand what we're talking about or saying? Oh, yeah. No, they don't.
Can you name any of them? I mean, the one, the only one guy
that I can think of that gets, I don't even say he gets a pass,
but more often than not, you hear, well, but he came from where
we come from. So, he knows us a little better than the other guys, is
Mark Cuban. Yeah. Okay. Mark Cuban,
when people talk about the billionaires who get it, he's probably the only
one that gets named and everybody goes, oh, yeah, you're probably right. Now,
whether he does or doesn't, I'm not suggesting that, but I'm saying, Sure, sure.
His mannerisms, his actions, the way he does things, the way he
interacts with certain people, the way you see him,
the way you see him engaging with startup world, it's like
people feel like he still gets it. Right. I don't
think we can say that about anybody else. Who else do we— like,
who else do we talk about? So, so I'm not
sure how much we can pull them back at all. is, I guess, my point.
What they should be thinking, if they can't be pulled back, what they should be
thinking is, can I create an inner circle? Can I
surround myself with people who won't be disconnected so they can
keep me in check? And that's what I don't think they do well. That's the
thing that I would vilify them for. Okay, but wealth is always relative.
It's always relative to the guy standing next to you, right? So think about the
people in the town that you live in, in Massachusetts.
Think about who is at the tippy top of status and class
in that town. Like, I'm thinking of somebody in my town, right, who's at the
tippy top status and class. I won't say a
name. And
I found out yesterday something that I didn't know about this person, that
apparently the only reason they went to the local
church that we have— I won't say the name of the church either— but the
only reason they went, that person who's at the tippy top of our social status
in our town, They're the town's version of Eric Packer.
Okay. That person, the only reason they went to
the church for like 2 or 3 years
wasn't because they were particularly religious or particularly had a particularly strong belief
system, but because they held the note on the church.
And I can go to my local grocery store and see that person
walking around. with their family. And that, by the way, that person isn't
young either. I don't live in a town full of young people. I live in
a town full of old people. Okay. The person is not, let's
put it this way, that person is not under 40. Just frame it that way.
Okay. Think about the town you live in. I'm sure you can think of a
person like that in your town. So wealth is relative.
We always talk about millionaires, not even millionaires. We talk about billionaires because it's easy
because they're over there in the stratosphere over there. Let's make this really
real. If you're the leader,
if you're at the tippy top of the social structure in your town, I agree
with you. It's incumbent to surround yourself with people who will keep you
grounded. And I think it's just as hard at the town
level as it is at the billionaire level. I think wealth is relative
on this. I don't know.
So you're, so you're thinking So, the guy that owns the,
let's just say, I don't know, a restaurant down the street
that happens to be a world-class restaurant. I get it. Sure. I'm just saying. Yeah,
make up something. Yeah, that's fine. The restaurant makes the guy a millionaire.
Yeah. My— and
I say this, I use that as an example because I've spent a significant amount
of time in the restaurant industry. Sure. If it were me, I
would still be in the kitchen. I like the kitchen. I
like the cooking. I like the structure. I like the organization. I
like the creativeness that comes out of the kitchen,
right? So, whether I was making $1 million a year, $10
million a year, or $1 a year, I would still be in
the kitchen running that at the— so, I would
know all the people that worked in the kitchen, right? Like, I get—
that's what I'm saying. at the town level,
I'm disagreeing with you a little bit because— Oh yeah, that's okay. At the town
level, it is easier. I think it's— I think when we,
when we are— I'm not suggesting
that the same thing doesn't apply to the status part of it. That part, maybe
you're right. Maybe you're right. The arrogance level is probably the
same. I'm not talking about that. But when I'm talking about, like,
people that People that know their employees' names to the
point where they're not going to go have a conflict with them and not be
able to identify them. I just don't see that happening at that level.
I don't see that happening with people who own— Now, I will
say, at the local level,
if you have a particular— if they own an international organization, like
some sort of large company or something, then maybe, sure.
Sure. But then I'll tell you what, if that person happens to be a friend
of mine, I'm going to smack the crap out of him when I see him
at the supermarket acting like he doesn't know any better. Like, you know what I
mean? Like, that's— yeah, there's, you know, they don't live in my
town. The people— Zuckerberg doesn't live in my town. Sam Altman don't live in my
town. I promise you, we do not have billionaires in my town,
right? So, so, so again, my point is, my point is we get
caught up on the M, the million— the M for millionaire and the B for
billionaire. I think we get so caught up on like the material
nature of the money and the numbers we're working with. And by the way, we're
about to get caught up on trillionaire too. Like we're about to get caught up
on that number, right? And to your point, Mark Zuckerberg
doesn't live in my town. Neither does Sam Altman. And I'm
never going to see those guys. However,
the guy who runs the 500-person manufacturing company,
I'm going to see that guy. I agree with you there. And I think that
guy, in relative terms,
struggles with connecting with his
people just as much as a Sam
Altman does. No, not Sam Altman. Mark Zuckerberg does, who runs a 50,000,
150,000-person global organization. So
here's— I'm not suggesting you're wrong, but I
happen to be at a— No, go ahead. Suggest that I'm wrong. It's okay. I
happen to be at a company outing on Saturday. with my brother. My
brother invites my wife and I to his company outing every year
because he works for a really cool company. They do— they still do company outings.
500 people that work for the company there. The owner of the company
shows up, walks around, shakes every godforsaken person's hand to make sure he
knows who they are. Okay. So, it still exists
is my point at that level. Okay. When you got to— and by the way,
he owns a very large company and he is easily
His net worth is easily in the triple millions. Okay. I
would say he's probably worth about $120, $150 million. So, again,
he's not Sam Altman. He's not Mark Zuckerberg. But to your point and to your
assumption, the
money matters. The money doesn't matter to him. He still feels like the
employees that brought him there are worth knowing.
And I think that's the point that I wanted to make. Like, that's the whole
point to me. If you get to the
point where you're running it, again, I know we keep throwing the same
names around, Zuckerberg, but they have thousands. Elon Musk has
thousands of employees. There's no possible way that he's going to know every one of
them. There is just not possible. But can he
build it to the point where everybody above you
cares about the person below them so that there's a trickle effect?
Right. So, at least you feel cared. My wife works for the
largest healthcare company in our country. And the
person, her boss's boss, barely knows her name.
That's where I think the problem lies. We're not setting up systems
in place to make people feel like they're worth it. We're
not putting in systems in place to make leaders and give
leaders the ability to make
people feel that they mean something to each other.
Okay. So, let me ask you this question. And this is a challenge question. We've
kind of Talked about it a little bit previously on our show, but this is
a good spot. I mean, this is a sharp point. This is where Cosmopolis really
works as a sharp point, a wedge to sort of break apart this question.
Okay. Delilah thinks like you do. I would argue,
I would assert, I think he would agree with you if he were sitting here
talking about his book. I think he would absolutely agree with you. I think
Delilah would probably say that I'm naive. That's fine.
No, no, it's fine. And the reason why I say it's fine is because I
think the question that we can't get our arms around is
not a question of wealth and wealth disparities, because wealth is always
relative. I'm going to keep going back to that. Wealth is relative. Okay?
If I'm standing— if I'm a trillionaire standing next to a billionaire, I feel rich.
The billionaire feels poor. Doesn't matter. Wealth is relative.
That's number 1. That's my first assertion. My second assertion is that
Because wealth is relative, as you go down the scale of wealth,
right, you get to the games that people play. The status
games that people play shift around, but they're the same games. They're coming from the
same place. And so this goes to my third point, which is enveloped
in this question to you, is the thing that we're not getting
our arms around, not the money or the status, but who
these people were before they even earned a dime.
Is that the part that we can't get our arms around? Because I would assert
that that is. I think that that's the root thing. That's possible, but we're
also making, making a direct correlation between the,
the, the financial stature and the financial, um,
how you just worded it, sorry, status. Status, sorry, the financial status
to leadership and the status. Like, we're making those 2 things be the same
thing, and I don't think they need to be. I think My point
to the gentleman that I met over the weekend is,
and maybe it's a personality thing, to your point, he built the
company from zero. Like, he built the company from nothing.
Right. And by the way,
he's one of the few. I don't know if we're aware of this at this
point, but the average length of employee tenureship right now in the U.S. is
18 to 20 months. That's the average length of
tenureship in companies. He— this guy still has people that have been working for him
for 25 years. That doesn't happen very often anymore,
but it's a direct correlate. That's a direct correlation to leadership, in my opinion.
People don't leave his company because they love working for him. They like
the environment. They like the structure that he's put in place. They like the style
of leadership that he has developed. And when I say he has developed, he
He pushes that leadership style down on his people. You're going to lead the
same way I do. And it's a taught thing. It's not a forced thing. It's
not like he's saying— he's not cracking a whip saying, do this, do that. No,
he's saying— Right, right, right. If you are the right fit here, you're the right
fit here because you lead a certain way. You care about people a
certain way. You look to solve problems a certain way. And if
that fits in my mold, you're going to do well here. And these people have
been there 25 years. Okay. So
this trips us into something else. I don't even need to go back to the
book. I won't even say go back to the book. Read Cosmopolis. This will
trip you up a little bit here. So one of the things in the movie
is the, the, the, the, the events in the
book take place in the year 2000. Yeah. Which is interesting.
The book was published in 2003, 2 years after September
11th. I'm going somewhere with this. One of the things that was
noted that I noted, and I was talking with
my wife about it in the car on Sunday as we were coming home from
church and my daughter was asking us about 9/11 because she's 16.
For her, it's not grainy history, but it's getting there. And for my
9-year-old, it'll be like his, when his grand— when my grandparents told me about
Pearl Harbor, you know, and his kids will have no connection to it whatsoever.
Okay. That's where we're going with this. Well, that's where we're going as a
culture with 9/11.
The September 11th terrorist attacks. I remember where I was,
what I was doing, who was around. I remember those. It was a seminal traumatic
moment that happened to us. I posted
something on Facebook. I don't know if you saw it, Tom, but I posted something
on Facebook that was written by somebody from a different organization,
a public, different, an online magazine, doesn't matter. And basically the
guy said, I'm still angry. And guess what? I am too. I'm still
angry about that. And I'm going to be angry about that for the rest of
my life. And it's going to be something that me and Jesus and the wall
will all work together to figure out. But I'm going to be angry
about it. And I, and I think that
if you watched this happen on TV and you knew
people who went through that, Or even, even closer to
it. If you were in or near any of the
places where any of those planes went down, were forced down and were used as
weapons. I've been to the 9/11
Memorial. I took my kids down there, my oldest daughter down there when she was,
when she was probably 9 or 10. Right. And I impressed upon
her, this is a graveyard.
This is a graveyard in a city. And there are things that
happened to us as a country that not only
did we have to deal with, but we had to struggle around and we're still
struggling around. I don't think all of the ripples have gone out from
9/11 in our culture. I just don't. I think it's gonna take a long time.
One of the ripples that went out, and this is really
important because it ties into this book, It ties into our frustration
about the ways that billionaires and millionaires and soon-to-be
trillionaires are treating people in leadership positions. It ties even into the
frustration that got me to start this podcast as I'm thinking about it now.
There is a sense that nothing ever happens
as a consequence to people for leadership failures. Hmm. So
think about 9/11. Who got fired behind that?
Who got their government pension taken away behind that?
Yeah, we had a commission and there was a report with a book that was
published. But where was the actual
material consequence? And I'm not talking about the wars that
happened afterward. That's a separate issue over there. I'm just talking about that thing right
there. You and I both lived through this. This is lived history for us. I
don't remember anybody falling on the sword, much less being pushed
down the steps. And then you go to the 2008
financial collapse. How many bankers lost their jobs?
And I'm not talking about the average teller at your local Wells Fargo branch.
Those people lost their jobs for sure. Bank of America closed a bunch of
different branches. Chase had to restructure. Is Jamie Dimon still at the
top of Chase? Last I looked, he was. He's not
retired. Nothing happened to him. He was just in a room with
Ben Bernanke who told him, sign on the dotted line or else, you know, we'll
take away your bank. We'll nationalize your bank. Don't worry, we'll keep you in charge,
but we'll nationalize your bank. No penalty.
And then we have the big boy, COVID. Regardless of where you come
down on COVID, by the way, the other end of 9/11. So you have 9/11,
you have COVID. Yeah. Regardless of whether or not
you, where you come down on masks and all the stuff.
We just saw Fauci, not this, not just this,
just this summer, get called up to Congress. They grilled him.
But that guy's not losing his government pension. I'm not asking him to lose his
life. I'm not asking him to be put in jail. He didn't even lose his
pension. He's still getting paid.
I think the frustration that we have as little people is that there
seems to be no material
consequence for failures that are
obvious to everyone. That's number one.
And then number two, there's a massive frustration that there's failures
for us in our lives
when we screw up. Like you were talking about your wife, for
example, or myself, right? We all work in organizations
where if we screw up, we know if we screw up, we're out. Our pension's
gone. You know, our retirement's gone. Things get
taken away from us. We have to figure out how to live. But at a
certain point, and we all down here in the hoi polloi don't know where that
point is, but we know it exists. You just, there's no consequence.
And I think The Cosmopolis is written partially out of the frustration of a
lack of consequence. But I also think that over the last 25 years, that frustration
has grown. And I don't know who fixes that problem. That's a
problem of leadership. I'm going to disagree with you on one point,
but for not, not for the reason that you might think. Okay. So I
disagree with you when you say there's no consequence.
Like, so the people up here make these mistakes and there's no consequence. You
have to be clear about what you're saying because there is
a very— there is consequence. It just doesn't happen to
them. Like, it's like I hit a certain
point in my career, I can make whatever mistake I want and the only person
getting fired is the person beneath me. Right. Yeah. That does happen,
right? Like, think about this. Think about the corporate structure. And I'll just give you
an example that I lived through, by the way. So, I
worked for a VP of sales and marketing for a company one time. I was
a sales manager. He messed up so bad. He gave us
directive. He gave us this plan that he was going to roll out quarter 1,
quarter 2, blah, blah, blah. By quarter 3, 3 of the sales managers were fired
because they didn't get it. No, it wasn't his mistake that the
plan sucked. Excuse my language. It wasn't his mistake that the plan
didn't come to fruition. It wasn't his mistake that nothing worked the way
that he expected it to work. 3 of the 5 sales managers
underneath him all got terminated. So, to your
point, there are consequences, but usually it's like that
whole, the shit rolls downhill kind of scenario, right? Yeah.
Where the guy sitting at a certain pinnacle point
can make that mistake And then say, oops, my bad,
I'll fix it, but I need a different team to fix it. So I'm going
to fire these people and get a new team. Right. And Delillo writes
Cosmopolis, and you even saw this in the movie, as a cathartic
outworking. You talk about the guy, the guy at the end of the movie, the
Paul Giamatti character, right? The cathartic outworking of this
lack of consequence. Someone has to be out of consequence
to these people directly.
And who's it going to be? Because apparently the government is impotent.
Apparently the systems are impotent. This is actually— here's
the analogy. Here's the parallel. The systems are potent enough
so that when the yen gets shorted, as a small investor, I go broke,
but they're not powerful enough to make sure that Eric Packer goes
broke. Right. Right. That's
what we don't like. That's what's driving us crazy.
Yeah, I agree with that. And I, I think that
there used to be a sense of honor
in our culture, not big time, but I think the,
the post-World War II guys, the veterans
who came back home after they had gone through Iwo Jima,
And the firebombing of Dresden and everything else. If
you went through those things, you absolutely understood what honor was.
You absolutely understood what responsibility and leadership was. You
absolutely understood that if a failure occurred
on your watch, you were going to be fired.
Because you just went through Iwo Jima and the guy behind you and the guy
to the left of you and the guy in front of you all died. I'm
thinking of Kurt Vonnegut, right? The number of things that that guy went through in
World War II where people just around him just died. And now he's
like alive and he can't figure out why. I think there were a lot of
vets like that. Like, why that guy and not me? That impresses a
sense of responsibility on you, a sense of weight on you in a leadership position
that then you bring back to the home front. And from about
1945 to about 1975, we have the biggest
explosion in leadership success in the United
States because guys understood honor and responsibility.
And I think that we don't have that now. I was going to say, I
can't, I definitely can't argue with that because I agree with you. I absolutely agree
with you. I think that the leaders that, and it goes back to the, you
and I have had conversations, several conversations about this too, where the younger
generation, I mean, because I went to college
And because I graduated college, I have this piece of paper in my hand now.
You should give me a job. Like, it's this entitlement that
we have that has kind of drifted or not drifted, kind of leaked
into our leadership mentality. Leadership is becoming
an entitlement phase instead of an earned
phase. Well, I think we're turning the corner because I think,
remember I said 9/11 and COVID, I think those are the twin
Oh, you were about to say it. I was. Yeah. Yeah. I have
my hands up. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to
do it. But you know what I was going to say? Of cultural
chaos, right? They're the 2 bookends. Bookends.
Better term. Bookends. Bookends. They are
the bookends of cultural chaos. And this ties into
like theories that I have of the generational turning from Strauss and Howe and the
fourth turning and all that, right? Okay. And other people disagree with me and
whatever. It's fine. Whatever dates.
I think both of those events, both those bookends,
on the one hand, you had the bookend of, or the beginning of it.
And I will tell you, when I saw that plane, I was standing at a
Borders bookstore looking up at a big screen
TV and I saw that plane turn and hit the South Tower. Saw that
live on TV. And everybody around me was like,
and that was like, I was like, oh, this is on purpose. And I was
like, oh, we're, this is going to start now. Now we're going to begin.
This is okay. Oh, wow. And
that's when the anger started. Because I'm like, who, who, who is this? Because this
doesn't just happen. This is not just a thing. This isn't an
event from nowhere with no one behind it. There's a
brain and a mind back there. Anyway, you get that
one event and then you go all the way through with no consequence,
by the way, as I already pointed out, no consequence, no consequence of
significance. Let's frame it that way. 2 leaders
who were supposed to be holding the public
trust. I'm looking at you, Bill Clinton, who were
supposed to be holding the public trust. Like, people forget
this. Bill Clinton was offered Osama bin Laden in 1995.
The Saudis said, would you like him? And they
said, and, and, and, and the Clinton administration
and the Clinton State Department basically said, no, we don't have anywhere to put him.
So guess where he went? He went right to Afghanistan
because the Saudis wanted him out of their country
for a whole variety of reasons that eventually later on would become pretty
fairly evident. You can't have a guy like that in your
country running around. He makes trouble.
No significant problems, no
significant problems, no significant consequences to Bill Clinton, no
significant consequences to anybody in the State Department or in his administration.
And I know we don't do that traditionally, historically, like once a presidential
administration and their folks are out, We don't have, we don't do the things that
other countries do where we go back and we hang people. Like, we don't do
that. We just move on to the next election cycle. And that has created stability.
And the downside of that, the dark side of that, the minority report on that
is that when mistakes were made and someone needs to be held responsible, you
have no one. That's the minority report. That's the dark side of that choice.
Okay. From there, you go through the last 25 years,
you go to, you go to COVID. Again, a situation where
name me the governmental official who we put our trust in,
who's fallen on the— I mean, maybe you could maybe make the argument
that Andrew Cuomo kind of got it in New York State. Maybe you could
make that argument. But one guy, I mean, Gavin Newsom was
partying with no masks on after telling everybody to go like mask up and
don't hang around your folks at Thanksgiving. No penalty, no structure. That guy's
going to run for president. Yeah. Yeah. In
2026, and I'm sorry, in 2028, in 2 years, that guy's going to
run for president. That guy's going to ask for your vote and my vote.
And that guy might win. And that guy might
win. That guy might win.
Again, no responsibility. So I think
I'm not the only one. I think we are at the end of the lack
of responsibility. But here's the but. Remember I said at least
Delillo proposes a solution, the solution that Delilah
proposes to fixing that problem is not a solution that we would find
palatable. We don't want to hang bankers in the street or execute people
who fail as startup founders. We don't want to hang our politicians
like they did during the French Revolution. We don't want to do any of that.
So I guess the question becomes, for this section anyway,
what do we do with those leaders who fail spectacularly?
I'm not talking about failure a little bit. I'm not talking about things you can
come back from. I'm talking about spectacular cultural failures.
What do we do with people like that? Because we don't
have a solution right now. And I think the Gen Zers, I think they
desperately want a solution. And that's why they're looking at, shall we say,
more revolutionary forms of political expression,
because at least those more revolutionary forms of political expression offer
the option for if something doesn't work, I riot and
fix it. Well, yeah, we
tried that too in 1992 with— in LA. That
didn't work either. We did. And that didn't work either. But you know what? They
weren't alive then. So they've got to go through it themselves. Yeah. You
know, the— And this is a really hard
question because I don't know what the solution is. I really don't. I just know
the problem's there. The problem is, to your point, to your point
a second ago, the problem is it doesn't matter. it doesn't matter whether
we have the solution or not. There's always going to be a sect of people
that don't want the solution that we provide and they want a different solution. And
there's going to be a— it doesn't matter whether there's 2
or 5 or 25 solutions presented. You are always
going to have factions and sects of people that are going to— Sure. I like
this one. No, I like that one. So it's almost like
that Oh,
there's a term for it that I'm losing my mind on right now, but
it's almost like you have so many options that you just
fail to make a decision. Oh, paralysis analysis. Yeah. So
that's essentially what would happen anyway, because no matter what
solution somebody presents, somebody's going to go, oh, that solution sucks.
Let me present my own. And then somebody's going to go, I don't like either
of those 2. Let me present my own. And now we have a dozen
or dozens of solutions and no one's going to make a decision because they're going
to have analysis paralysis. That's
my— that's what I fear. I, I'm worried about— because to your point,
not only do we not have a solution, but I'm worried that even if we
do present a solution, it's gonna, it's gonna have a, uh, it's gonna have a
trickle effect or some sort of steamroll effect where
now everybody has a solution. Because that's the other thing about Gen Z, If you
want to talk about Gen Z, because it's, if they can't
collectively do something, it's okay for everybody to do their own thing.
So, well, well, you, there's no sense of coordination
here. We kind of, we kind of, I think we kind of proposed a
solution. Interestingly enough, I go, I go back to this in my brain when we
talked about, um, um, Hannah Arendt's book,
um, about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, right? Eichmann in Jerusalem.
And one of the points I made on that podcast, I don't think you co-hosted
with me. I think that was— No. Bob Rucker or somebody else. Might have been
Libby Unger, maybe. One of the points I
made on that episode, and it now comes back to me as maybe the
solution, or at least the beginnings of a proposal,
because we need something. We need a proposal of some— the
right representative from Texas proposes something. Okay. That way we've got
something on the table here that we can at least argue over. Um,
Arendt made a point in there that basically you
can't have— Adolf Eichmann's defense, one of parts of his
defense was that he was just making decisions
to move things along inside of a system where he had
ultimately no responsibility. And because
he had ultimately no responsibility, even he was being victimized by the system and
thus could not be held responsible. I've made that, make
that, made that argument about, about his participation in the
Final Solution and his participation in the Holocaust and all the things that happened in
Germany between, you know, 1929 or '28
or so and 1945. Okay.
The Israeli High Court didn't accept that. By the way,
the International Criminal Court at Nuremberg didn't accept
that either. Nor should we accept it.
And my worry is, or not my worry, my concern is,
as we put AI into decision-making roles,
now you get more and more of the person, person,
the software from nowhere that can never be held responsible and things just
happen. I
think the solution to this problem is And this is the
solution that, again, the right representative from Texas proposes. Since I've brought up the
question, I'm going to propose a solution. I think the solution is we start
taking away people's government pensions. Start with
Fauci. Just deny him his pension. That's fine.
Just get enough people, vote in Congress. I don't care which—
I do not care. I think we could get bipartisan. I think we could actually
get bipartisan. I think we can get bipartisan agreement on this. Actually, I think we
could. And you just propose, hey, He's no longer—
his pension stops in 2026. And good luck. Go
have fun with the pharmaceutical companies. I think this— I think we have to start
taking away people's money and their benefits because then it
becomes real for people. I'm not asking you to take away their lives. I'm not
asking— I'm not even saying that Dr. Fauci can't go and get another job somewhere.
Absolutely. Go get hired by the Idaho Health Department. I don't care.
Move to Idaho or Kansas or Wyoming
or Florida or Alpha Centauri, anywhere else will hire
you. It's fine. You just don't get to get paid here.
Because I think it's money. I think money is the thing you have to start
taking away from people. And I'm not just talking about actual cash on the
barrelhead, although we'll do that too. Start
taking away benefits. No, you don't get lifetime healthcare for the rest of your
life. No, you don't get lifetime stock options. I'm looking
at you, Nancy Pelosi. You don't get lifetime stock options. And Dan
Crenshaw, I'm looking at all, both, all of you. No, just start taking it away.
Now, who will enforce that? That's a different question. How will we get there? That's
a different question. How will we whip the votes? That's a different question. The proposal
is on the table. Simple. 2 sentences. If you
violate the public trust, we take away your pension.
I think that would be fair. I would vote for that, just so you know.
But I also think, like, I think that there's, you know, so my—
I have a couple of kids that are Gen Zs. And they—
when we're talking— where you're talking about,
like, you know, the relevancy of the M or the
B or the T, right? The millionaire, billionaire, trillionaire. Yeah.
My Gen Zers have come up with a global
solution that says all the
sports industries have salary caps. Why don't we put salary caps on people?
Oh, I'd be fine with that. And by the way, they're not talking about
like, like, you know, stopping people from earning a living. Like,
obviously, if you want to be— go— you want to go be Mark Zuckerberg, go
be Mark Zuckerberg, but pick a number. And
by the way, they're open to the number. Whether it's $1
billion or $500 million or one— or
maybe it's $10 billion, whatever that number is. But pick a number
and just say, from now, when you hit that number, everything you earn after that
goes back into a general pool that helps— that helps actually,
you know, feed the world, feed hunger, uh, the homeless, whatever.
You can even pick the charity, whatever, it doesn't even matter. Or, you know, maybe
the cause, maybe not the charity, but— You pick the cause, and then a
selected group of people from those causes will be the ones
basically divvying up the money to whatever
501s exist in that cause. So whether it's clean
water, world hunger, poverty,
homelessness, etc., etc., pick a global
problem. And once you hit a certain number, the rest of any
money you earn after that goes right into that. Now, by the way, They were
perfectly okay. This is so funny that they had this conversation, but they said they're
perfectly okay if your number dips, you can earn it back.
Like, they're not going to take the money from you if you don't hit the
number. So, if the number's $1 billion, like we just talked about the
trillion, Elon Musk hit $1 trillion, 2 or 3 days later, went back
under $1 trillion. Their philosophy or their thinking is
there's no penalty for going below it. You only
get it's not even really a penalty, but you only hit the salary
cap if you hit it. Now, if you know anything about sports, Mm-hmm.
the salary caps in some sports are not real. There's
always ways to manipulate the salary cap. I'm sure these people will
figure out some of those ways. But the reality of it is, until they do,
you could take— to your point, you could take a lot of that stuff right
out from underneath them, and you can level the playing field of
a pretty high mountain. And again, They're not trying to put roadblocks in
front of people who are going from, you know, I earned $1 million
to I want to earn $10 million. You go right ahead. That's
capitalism. Go get your capitalistic, you know, fill. And you want to go
from $10 million to $100 million, go for it. But at some point, the
money becomes so irrelevant that
what number is the number that we think of when we think
right now, I'm just talking. I'm in my 50s,
right? I'm in my 50s. If I were to
earn, there is a number that I would never be
able to spend. I just know it. I know there is. I know
there's a number. If I had $10 million or $15 million or $25 million or
$100 million, I would never spend that money.
So, what do I do with it? Do I reinvest it into myself or
my family? Do I create a— A trust that now my kids
get to earn money on money they never earned? No. Well, first of all, just
letting everybody know that is never happening. I will
never— I don't care. This generational wealth thing has to go right out the window.
My kids, my children, I tell them all the time, every dollar in my bank
account I'm gonna try to spend before the day I die because you did not
earn that money and you are not going to get that money. Now, so I
take the, I take the opposite tact, and I'll tell you why in a minute,
but go ahead, Tom. I was just going to say,
I'll make sure there's enough in there to bury me, whatever kind of funeral you
want to have, whatever kind of party you want to throw because ding dong, the
witch is dead, whatever. I don't care. There'll be a certain amount of money in
there that I know that you're not going to get wealthy on because you didn't
earn that. You didn't work for it. Now, that being said, I've
presented options to all of my kids that say, if you want to help
build the company that we're building right now and you want to earn some of
that money, then I will leave that money to you. But you gotta earn it.
You're not gonna go, you're not gonna go plant
trees and for— and then come back to me and say, I'm broke, I need
money. It's not happening. I'm not doing that anyway. So, right, or write poetry.
You don't want them to go off and write poetry. Yeah, exactly. They're not—
back to the book. My kids are not writing poetry, calling themselves a poet, and
then living off my money. That is not happening ever.
Just letting you know.
So I am a believer. I will say this. I am a believer
in generational wealth. I do believe in that because
it is the way in which families have grown in America
over the long course of time. However, you only
really have control 3 generations out. And then after that,
you know, things, things get really shaky
3 generations out. And by the way, 3 generations from the time in which you
made the money, right? So, you know, the first generation builds
and saves and scrimps and builds and saves
and scrimps. The second generation tends to, to Tom's
point, tends to spend because they didn't earn it and don't appreciate
it in general. And then the third generation has nothing
and has to go back to guess what? Scrimping and saving
and not spending. We used to call that shirt
sleeves to shirt sleeves in 3 generations. That used to be the, that used to
be the phrase. I think it's from like David Copperfield or something. Dickens observation.
However, not however, with that being said,
I am not opposed to generational wealth.
I am opposed to, and this is where I slightly differ from
Tom here. I am opposed to
the presupposition that some
people have around what I should do
with my money. And I'm also
opposed to the presuppositions and the assumptions that
exist underneath the thing that exists
underneath money, which is, and this also is the thing
underneath leadership that we haven't really touched on, but we'll get to it now and
then we'll go back to the book. Character. So
Eric Packer, at the end of the day, even though his father was a
barber, didn't get that thing
transferred to him other than in— and he has a great line at the
beginning of the book that we've sort of skipped over when he's talking to his,
his chief financial analyst guy, the one who's like 22.
He's like, well, you've been with me ever since we were like at that itty-bitty
startup. And he sort of says it and you got to go on to the
next thing, right? These guys, and I
make this point all the time, these guys didn't come
from nowhere. They're not just in
situ. They didn't just pop out like Athena out of the head of Zeus.
Okay. They came from somewhere. They have a
root. And what we've done poorly at a
cultural level, and by the way, I have no problem with a salary cap. No
problem with that at all. Sure, put that proposal on the table. Yeah, let's propose
a salary cap. Now, my question is, how do you enforce that? To Tom's point
about getting around salary caps, I'm looking at you, the NBA.
You're the most notorious out of all of them. But, um, but, um,
the way you enforce all of that is cultural
enforcement. We need a cultural change
around not money and what you spend on it, but a cultural change
around your character. To close the loop back to the guy
who was the leader of the company that he built, who's a multimillionaire and yet
shook everybody's hand at the barbecue. Where did that come from?
Came from his culture, came from his character. Did he pass that along
to his kids? We don't know. And that's
the part that we can't control. That's the part I think that drives us insane.
Because if every generation had the same character as the first generation,
maybe not in the same coming out in the same ways. but had that same
character, you wouldn't have shirtsleeves to
shirtsleeves in 3 generations. And even when you had a country where
people did do the care— not people, culture did the character
molding based on, and I'm just going to put all my cards on the table
here, based on a Christian ethic and a Christian worldview.
I'm not going to say we had more moral people, but I am going to
say that people were more morally checked in their character. and more ethically
checked in their character because guess what? They knew the
rules and they knew they understood at a deep level that
if I violate these rules, something eternal is going to happen to me. They didn't
have to accept it. They just had to realize that that's the rule. We've
abandoned all that. We've said that doesn't matter. I'm actually doing a lot of work
on this right now. I'm involved in a program called the Coulson Fellows Program. We're
doing a lot of work around these areas of worldview. And almost while I'm
reading this book, it's kind of interesting, like how these things are running parallel. And
I'm reading a ton of books from a ton of authors about this kind of
problem. Because at the heart of it, how do you enforce a salary
cap? At the heart of it, how do you have somebody who has the will
and the ability and the character to look at somebody like a Fauci in the
face and say, nope, not today, we're done? Where does that come
from? And that has to come from character. And character is
informed by culture. And that's the
entire loop that we're trapped in. that we can't seem to, we can't seem to
work our way out of. And maybe we never will. Maybe it's, maybe it's one
of those human problems that we just never will be able to work ourselves out
of. But it seems really sharp in the last 25 years.
Well, I think it's really, it's really funny that you say it like that
as we're talking about this stuff, because like, it's,
it's almost like we need some sort of reset button to push. Yes.
Right. And that reset button is going to have to
be some world event that
just stops people in their tracks, right? Like, whether it's,
I don't know, enter the name of whatever
movie or book you want to think of that, like, you know,
2012 or The Day the Earth Stood Still or
War of the Worlds. War of the Worlds. It doesn't matter. Like,
Day After Tomorrow. I'm just thinking of random
that's not always one thing, right? Like, think of like whether a
geostorm, whether it was like something that was like some
extreme weather thing that just basically annihilates the Earth's population
like Day After Tomorrow. War of the Worlds is an alien kind of creation.
Okay, great. If we saw an alien race coming at us and we knew we
only had 5 years until the alien race got here to the world, like we
saw the Hubble telescope showed us some— Sure.
whatever. I bet your bottom dollar that every country on this planet would
eventually figure out that their problems with each other are not that important.
So this is Project Hail Mary. This is the first part of Project Hail Mary.
Exactly, exactly my point. Yeah. So project— like I said, enter your name and the
name of your movie here.
But like, but, but that's— but that something like that would
have to happen, some sort of reset, because whether you're talking about the—
and by the way, there was a good
amount, a fair amount of people that I knew that
thought that COVID was going to be that reset. Yeah.
And it did not turn out to be the Spanish flu or the
Black Plague or anything, but— Or World War I. Right.
But they thought they saw that coming. And anyway,
but like, But it just never happened. I know other people that thought that
2008, that crash, the banking crash of
2008, that was going to be the button. Think about this, though.
Aside from COVID pretty much everything that happened that we could think of as the
reset button is happening in an isolated instance, meaning
like it's just happening to the US. Right.
It's just happening in Afghanistan. It's just happening in
North Korea or in the Korean Peninsula. Like,
these are very isolated. If you want a reset button, it needs to be global.
It needs to be something that threatens our entire globe's economy, our
entire globe's function. It has to— it
has to be humanly unifying
in order for it to be a true reset. And I don't see anything like
that happening anytime soon. So I will tell you, as a person who had
Who was raised in a Christian household and had a lot of Left Behind books
in my house. Thanks, Mom. A lot of Left Behind books. And I don't know
if you know what those books are. It was a part of a Christian subculture
thing in the 1990s, basically fictionalizing the Book of Revelations.
Okay. And it's fine. Like, once
people who are in Christian subcultures who are listening to this will understand what I'm
talking about. If you're not in a Christian subculture or you weren't an evangelical Christian
in the 1990s, you'll have no idea what I'm talking about. And it's fine.
The Christian version of that is the Book of Revelation. It's the end of the
Bible. It's the apocalypse. It's Jesus riding on a white
horse with the sword coming out of his mouth in judgment.
Let me tell you something. I grew up underneath that
sort of thinking. Sure. That eventually there would be this thing. And by the
way, that sort of thinking still exists in the Christian, in the American Christian church.
I don't know about globally. I can't speak to that. But in the American Christian
church, it definitely exists. It's still there. That strain hasn't gone anywhere.
Yeah, of course. And the irony is
that for both the secular person who's not a believer
and for the person who is a believer, they're both looking for the same thing
out of the sky to come and unite the
people. And the thing I always
say is this, while you're waiting on the thing to come out of the sky,
let's get a proposal on the table because Because what,
what if something never comes?
What if this just goes on and on?
Hmm. What if instead of us looking to the
sky, we do
the hard work? And this is the character part. We do the hard work of—
and like, I love that you and your family are having these kinds of conversations
because we're having these kinds of conversations just on the other end of the worldview
continuum, right? Starting from a different set of presuppositions,
but winding up in the same cul-de-sac. Yeah. Interesting.
I think that's more of what has to happen. And it's a
drip, drip, drip thing. And we want it to happen immediately because we want it
to happen at the speed of a tweet. But it doesn't. Culture is
slow. It took us 25 years to get to COVID.
Well, and we, we have mentioned this on this podcast
several times, what you described. is what we
think needs to happen at a visceral level to me
and you. It has to start at home. If we're
not teaching our kids character, if we're not teaching our kids morals and
judgment and all that, then why would we expect society to be the ones
to teach them? Why are we thinking that they're going to go off
to college and learn how to be an adult? That's so dumb. Or
why would we expect that after they make their first million, Or their first
$500 million or the first $500,000 or their first
$100,000 that somehow they will become a moral person.
No, the morality has— the moral has to come first.
The morals have to come before the $100,000. Which, by the way, which, by the
way, so in that conversation, I said to my, my young— my youngest, my daughter,
I said, so let me get this straight. You hit the Powerball tomorrow. Let's say
you hit the Powerball for $500 million.
Are you going to still go to work on Monday? And she's— her
answer was, I don't know. Good answer, because you probably don't
know. I get that. But are you going to start
donating every paycheck you get after that because you have
$500 million? If $500 million is enough. Yeah. So
now every dollar you earn, don't bother putting that $500 million in the
bank or in some sort of stocks or whatever, because if you earn
money on that $500 million, you're not going to get it, right? Like,
that's what you're telling me, that you'd be okay with that? And she basically said,
yeah. She's like, yes, I would be okay with that. I was like, it's easy
to say when you don't have to— It's easy to say when you don't have
it. It's easy to
say. On the flip
side, though, on the flip side, I'll say, I'll say this way, I'll say this
a different way. I'm involved in another project with
somebody that we both know, the two of us know very well. And
I'm involved in this project and we're building something. We're building something very
real. And I think it's going to be saleable in the very near
future. Not, not, this is not, this is not a 10-year project.
Yeah. We're thinking about 3 years and we should have something saleable.
Now, whether it sells in 3 years or not, different story. But I
said to him, just a couple of weeks ago. I have a
number. I have a number in my brain. If somebody offers me that
number, this is gone. We're selling it immediately if they offer me that
number because I hold the majority
stake. Yep. I have more authority in
the sale. And I said to this person, I'm telling you right now,
if that number— now, that number is a
6, 7, 8-digit number. Sure.
So 8 digits, just so for everybody who doesn't want to do the math, that's
$10 million minimum. Like, I'm just saying it's in the— it's in the 8— it's
in the 8 digits. So it's in that range, that number from
10 to 99. But it's in that number, it's in that range. And I said,
anybody offers us anything close to that or that number, we're out. We're
out. I'm just telling you, we're out and we're going to go retire and we're
going to go You can go build another company if you want, but I'm out.
At my age, if I get that number, I'm out.
I'm going to buy a vacation home in the Keys and you're going to see
me in New England in the summer and the Keys in the winter. That's it.
I'm going down to the Keys. I'm going to hang out on Tom Lippy's boat
or whatever the heck he's doing. And it's going to be great. But
to your point about the salary cap thing, but that's— it's a different
way. It's the opposite version of looking at it. Right. But it's kind of
the same in the sense of like, I'm not saying that I
want to be— I don't need to be a billionaire. I don't need that in
my life. But I'm making a conscious
effort to say, I know there's a number I'm never going to be able to
spend until the end of my life. And if I can hit that number today,
I'm out. I'm going to go live the rest of my life doing what I
want to do and not beating myself up and
like, I, it's, it's, it's just, it's just that
way. It's just that way. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. No, no, no. There's a, there's a
Chinese proverb I wanna close this segment with because we got around the corner here.
So close this segment. There's a Chinese proverb I wrote down. I saw it the
other day and I wrote it down in my, in my notebook that I carry
around, my little black notebook where I write interesting things down that I see. May
sometimes eventually they may become blog posts, Substack articles.
Sure. Tweets, whatever. Old Chinese proverb says this,
if you must play, decide on 3 things at the start,
the rules of the game, the stakes of the game, and the
quitting time from the game.
And I think we need to embellish. I think we need to embed that thinking
in leadership, in leaders, if we want to have good future leaders.
Eric Packer, didn't know what the stakes of the game were. Well, maybe he did
at the beginning, but the stakes changed. He sure as heck didn't know when the
quitting time was.
And so he had trouble, right? He had trouble getting out of the car. He
had trouble every time he got out of the car. Every time he got out
of the car, there was a problem. But you know what? The
problems are the human things that leaders have to deal with. And every
time he got back into the self-sealing sacred environment of the
vehicle, The yen was crashing. There was more damage
being done even at a virtual level. So he's being attacked organically
and virtually all at the same time, trying to return him to something that is
human, trying to bring him back. And this is what circumstances do to leaders.
They mold us and shape us and they try to return us to
base and they try to build us into whether we want to be built into
or not people of character. That's what all of ours— that's all the
failures do. That's, it's trying to get you to
have character. And when you read the diaries or you
read the writings of these leaders afterward, after events have happened,
you get to see if they became people of character or
if they learned nothing at all. And that's,
that's one of the really disturbing things.
Let's round the corner here. So we kind of talked about solutions to problems. I
put forth a couple of different proposals. Tom put forth
a salary cap. I said we should just be taking people's money
away when they violate public trust. I think those are 2 things that are on
the table right now. I think we should do both of them. We shouldn't have
to pick between those 2. I think we should do both of them. Okay. Both
hands. The right representative from Texas. Sure. Yeah, you can get my vote on that.
Both and.
I think the other thing that we have that we need to understand about culture
is that writers And we talked about this in our 200th episode, right?
Writers have a lot of, a lot of power. Like if you could figure out,
and this is what Delilah's trying to figure out with Cosmopolis and with every other
book that he wrote. If you could figure out how to turn your talent to
critiquing and, and gadflying on culture, you could get
people to understand maybe the character is a problem, or
maybe there's an alarm bell that should be rung, or maybe we are gonna have
a problem. And I think Delilah wrote Cosmopolis cuz he saw a problem
happening, but he didn't know how to articulate it. And it's the only tool he
had. Yeah. One of the things
that we struggle with is we live in a time where our technological
power, and we saw this with Eric Packer in his car and with his manipulation
of the yen, where our technological power has outstripped our moral
meaning-making. And we've wound up in a crisis.
And it's very much a,
whatever we call it after postmodernism, postmodern,
modern crisis, right? It's, we call it a crisis of
meaning, but we also call it a crisis of
ethics, or we call it a crisis of leadership.
But I think these crises are primarily driven by our technology.
They're driven by what we can see on the dashboard. This is the AI thing.
They're driven by what we can see on the dashboard. And
I wanna, I wanna kind of close with this idea.
We can talk about this. How can leaders
avoid or not avoid, mitigate, that's not, avoid is not, I don't
think you can avoid it these days, mitigate managing only by the
dashboard. Because that's what Eric Packer was doing. He was trying to manage by the
dashboard. The dashboard was clean. The dashboard was pure. You know, leaders
like that, the data is clean, the data is pure.
It's the same impetus, just in a different
flavor. that leads people to like fire AI folks. We were just talking about this
in the meeting that we were in this morning. Fire AI folks because I could
do all this development, we could do all this development in Claude. And you get
out far enough on Claude or you get it far enough on any AI-driven
software development. And all of a sudden you realize, oh, oh,
we need all those people back. I mean, I called this like 2 years ago.
And by the way, you're going to rehire them at twice what you would have
paid them. And the longer you wait, the more you're going to— the more you're
going to pay them. And you're going to be mad, but you're not going to
have a choice because your code is garbage. And so the
code is garbage. The dashboard data was not accurate.
The real world keeps pushing in on us. And
our technocratic hubris
convinces us that we can, like, push back on that. And nature always reasserts.
Always. So how do leaders, how do
leaders avoid the seduction of managing by the dashboard
or managing by the AI?
Well, I, it's, I'm gonna give you an example of,
I was talking to my kids the other day about, you know, quote unquote AI
taking over the world, et cetera, et cetera, or whatever. I was like,
let me tell you what Here's why, here's why it scares me a little
bit. And here's why the human element
in the, in the, in the example that I gave them is a must and
not a, and not a, you know, paradise by the
dashboard lights here that you're talking about. Yeah.
Let's say you have somebody on life support and AI and you're
looking at the, and you're looking at the dashboard
The numbers are the numbers, what they, what they are. If you leave the
decision strictly up to AI and there is a
51% chance that this person doesn't recover, AI is
pulling the plug. It's not worth the resources to
continue to perform, to give this person life,
artificial life. Artificial life. Yep. Artificial life. You're gonna pull the plug.
Life support is now gone because the AI said it's 51%.
It's more likely that they are going to be a drain on the system, that
they're going to be a drain on our— every system that you can check the
box on, right? Electricity, resources,
personnel, blah, blah, blah. When the doctor walks into
that room as a human being and sees the
same exact numbers and says, this person's got a 50/50
shot, but Or a 51% shot that they're going
to die anyway, no matter what I do, and a 49% shot that I can
pull them out and save them. But my gut tells
me, based on what I'm seeing in my experience, based on other
people that have had the same similar symptoms,
the numbers can tell them whatever they want. But my gut tells me I have
an 80% chance of saving that person's life. AI can't
duplicate that. So, by
what the point I'm making here is by strictly looking at the dashboard and
not actually looking at the human interaction and
leveraging your experience, we say our gut, but
reality is your gut is not a real thing. Right. It's your
life experiences that tell you stuff, like, they give you the instance, they give you
the vibe or
whatever you're calling your gut. That's not a real
thing. What is real is that you're basing this on
something else that you know that you just can't put your
finger on. You can't pull the subject matter out of your
mind, but you just know. That's what we're
calling our gut. So, to not
strictly lead by the dashboards, you've got to fight that urge
to not lead by the dashboards because The dashboards are— there's
no human element in the dashboard. If you want to, if
you want to be, if you're going to lead by
strictly by the dashboard, then you should go lead an AI program
that is all AI agents and you can lead by the dashboards.
If you want to lead people, then you need to interact with people.
It's really that simple. You cannot— I don't, I don't—
somebody who just looks at dashboards and makes decisions strictly by the numbers, I don't
think I would give them the title or a label of leader. I don't think
I would be able to or willing to do that. Somebody who understands their people,
who works with them, who sees them, who talks to them, who is
up to their elbow. Now, when I say their people, again, I do take into
consideration the people that are managing a
1,000-person company. I don't expect them to know all the 1,000 people,
but their inner core, their executive-level
board or whatever, I do expect them to know them really well. I expect them
to know how they lead. I expect them to know how they trickle down the
leadership responsibilities into the mid-tier leaders and the, you
know, the entry-level leadership roles in a very large
organization. It might be a sales manager that reports to a VP of
sales that reports to a senior VP of sales and marketing, etc., etc.
I expect every level to know and understand the level above them, the level
below them. And how they interact. So
there's that. It just seems to me
that, and again, I give you the scenario of the person on life support, because
if you're leading by the dashboard, you're pulling the plug on that person,
and it might be a little bit premature. I think
that humanity will always, not humanity, nature
will always reassert itself. And we see this with Eric Packer in Cosmopolis at the
end. Where he, where he, he
has a deadly interaction with someone that he ignored,
a data point he couldn't see. Yeah. Because he was so
seduced by the dashboard, so seduced by the AI,
such as it were, that he believed that everything would be clean.
Everything's going to fall down. And by the way, the hubris and the narcissism started
with shorting the yen, but it wound him up right
there. And our egos always trip us up. This
is the thing, like hubris, ego,
narcissism. These are the, these are the cardinal sins of
leadership. And if you're leading by
dashboard, it gives you a nice little cover.
Just like leading by AI, lead with leading the AI
chatbots gives you chatbots gives you a nice little cover.
And at the end of the day. When the chips are down, the
human beings are going to be the ones, or nature, or circumstances
that didn't make it into the software or into the algorithm or onto the
dashboard. Those are going to be the things that screw you up. Those are going
to be the things that you didn't pay attention to. And we see this in,
we see this in Cosmopolis, not just also the book, but in the movie. And
we see it in real life. We see this reflected in reality.
And I think that the average
person, the average leader who's further down in status on the totem pole than the
trillionaire, the millionaire, or the billionaire, should be just
as cautious as those people are. Just as cautious,
because if you are the local hundred-thousandaire in your town or the local
millionaire in your town, you can also be gotten
by hubris and narcissism and ego. You need to pay attention.
All right. See, we squeezed more. You can tell your wife
we squeezed more out of Cosmopolis than she might have thought there was.
If you don't mind, if you don't mind, though, real, real quick, I want to
finish. I want to finish the— because I thought we would get to all of
what I said on the couch. There were— I'll just round this
off by saying, and I'll make it very, very quick. I told her there were
2 or 3 things that I pulled out of that movie that were explicit,
like very good lessons for leadership leaders to learn, one of which
I think we've touched on most of them. But when I said to her,
be careful of your own ego, the fact that he thought that he
was going to get across town to get a haircut regardless of what was happening,
that showed a level of arrogance that only rich people have,
right? Number one. Number two, only people that have made it to a
certain point in their lifespan without
roadblocks getting in the way in the first place. That seems like that, again,
the Zuckerberg era thing where he just kind of, he just kind of fell into
that billionaire role, fell into that $100 billion, like it just fell into it. Number—
so that was number one. Number 2 was the, uh, the interaction with the
Giamatti, uh, character at the end where if you're disconnected so
deeply from the people that work for you that you can't recognize that they're, that
they, they themselves are in trouble, which in turn puts you into
trouble. Mm-hmm. Like that's poor leadership, in my opinion. And
then the third one was never taking the advice of
somebody that you pay for their advice. His head of
leadership— his head of security— Security. Constantly trying to
point him in the right direction, and he completely ignored him, even though
he pays him to do that. So if you're gonna
pay somebody to give you advice, take their goddamn advice, because if you don't,
then just fire the person. Like, get rid of them if you're not gonna— why
do you have them if you're not gonna listen to them and pay and take
their advice? So those are the 3 things that came out of that conversation with
her on the couch. And she went, oh, you got all that from that
crappy movie? I said, yes, because I was watching it through a
different lens than you were watching it.
Well, uh, I got someone knocking at the door of my self-sealing
podcast studio here. Uh, so we gotta go, but I want to thank
Tom Libby for coming on the show today. And with that, well,
we're out.