Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells, and
this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,
episode number 120.
In this episode today, we will cover a
collection of poems. Almost all of them love poems
that, and I quote, philosophize, celebrate,
attack, plead, and express pain, longing, and despair,
all in a tone of voice that rarely rises above a reflective murmur,
all spoken as if in an inner monologue or dialogue and
all within the tight structure of the English sonnet
form, close quote, which that was according
to Barbara Mallett and Paul Wurstein, editors of the
Folger Shakespeare Library Editions.
Now I will preface our conversation today
by saying upfront that I
am not a quote, unquote poetry guy. I
don't know poetry. I think the greatest poetry probably ever written was
the rhyming poetry of Ogden Nash. Doctor
Seuss drives my kids crazy, and the the only point is that I remember.
So I am not a poetry guy. I am a prose fellow. And by
the way, we're gonna be recording an entire episode on Tennyson coming up here in
a few months, and I'm already working my way through
that. But I do recognize poetry as a literary
form. And I think we have to talk about poetry as a
literary form, but also as a form that can impact leadership.
Now when I think about these poems, I was supposed to read them in high
school, and I assiduously avoided it at all costs. As a
matter of fact, part of the collection of this author's works
had all the the sonnets in in the in the work. And it
was a giant white book because because of Bible. And I
I literally read everything else other than that, and then I put it away
back on the shelf. And that is a
perfect example of my approach to this content, at least in
the past up until this point, is the perfect example of
what I talk about in the opening to all of our episodes where I
state that we are reading books and plays and
poems that you fell asleep trying to read in
high school.
Perfect example of this. But
and Muhammad Ali, I think, made this point years ago, although he might have ripped
it off from somebody else. If you are the same person 30 years later that
you were in high school, you probably haven't grown at all. And by the
way, I'm coming off of this, I'm coming to this podcast recording
today, having watched both 21 Jump Street, the movie, and 22
Jump Street, the sequel with Jonah Hill and Channing
Tatum. So I've got that floating around in my head as well.
And don't worry, this podcast episode, while it may need more Tatum,
isn't going to get any Tatum beyond what I'm going to mention
here. The point of this podcast is to push
me and you, of course, to be open to other content
that may not traditionally be considered to be classic literature.
And this collection of poems and how we talk about this
collection of poems is going to do that today.
Leaders, push yourself into different genres and
into different areas and grow as a
leader. Now to help us wrap our brains
around all of this, and we've we've already heard her chuckling along
as I have been doing my open here, my cold open, such as it
were, to help us wrap our brains around this content, and help
us think about this, in an interesting kind of way. We have
invited back to this podcast our guest from
episode number 112, where we dissected or barely
began to dissect the count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre
Dumas, Kristin Horn. Hello.
Back to the podcast, Kristin. How are you doing? Thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm
very excited. I'm like kind of the complete opposite. Not complete
opposite. Sorry. I definitely fell asleep reading some of these books in high
school. Mhmm. We all did. I loved the
poems though. Like, and I actually got my start in
writing as a poet. Like, I won, like, even I
think I was, like, in 4th grade, 5th grade, something like that. I won, like,
a little prize, like, a little local prize for a poem that I submitted
to a competition. And so I was just like, it's funny now
to be coming back around and being like, oh, I love poetry.
I don't like a lot of modern poetry because I'm like,
I don't think that's a poem. Like, just because you spaced it out
funny on the page, I don't does is that what makes it a poem? I
don't know. I think that might even be offensive to say or ask. So
but I love the old stuff. My brother, for my birthday, bought me, like,
a stack of poetry books that I had asked for.
So I loved going through these. And in high
school, just to, like, kinda actually brought that back Yeah.
It was like sonnet 90 just rocked my
world. And when I got back around to it after reading it for this podcast,
I was like, this is still a banger. This is still my favorite song.
So it just it was it I'm I'm I'm thrilled. I love I love
poetry. It's like, I can't wait. Can't wait. Well, maybe I should bring you back
for the poetry episode. Like I said, we are going to be covering Tennyson, with
another cohost. And, he is a poetry
guy, weirdly enough. And he but he also writes prose. So he he's
kind of Yeah. Talented in all those spaces. That's one of the reasons I
started getting back into it, is I don't know if I can consider myself a
poetry person yet because, like, I haven't I'm not I'm not very well
read on it yet. I'm going back into it. But,
I started getting back into it on the advice of of, like
like, he just he it's an he's a he's a fantasy author, and he just
writes and writes and writes and writes. Prolific. That's the word I was looking for.
And he's like, before I read or sorry. Write before I write every
day, I read poetry because it helps
make your prose better. And I was like, what?
That's amazing. I already love poetry, and it's gonna make my writing better. Okay.
Deal. So Well, when I should, I shouldn't.
And we'll get into the we'll get into the sonnets here in just a second.
I should probably like it more. I mean, like, I remember lyrics to,
like, songs, and songs and poetry are pretty basically the same thing. It's just set
to music. Right? I get it right. I remember rap lyrics
from the early nineties when I was bumping to
whatever degenerate rap music I was bumping to in the early nineties.
And so I I remember those kinds of things.
I remember a rhyming structure,
but there's something about it sitting on the page.
It doesn't up until this point and honestly,
I'll be I'll be I'll be honest. Like, the the the even how I consumed
this, I'll talk about a little bit about that here when we get into, like,
the literary life of William Shakespeare, a little bit. But, like, how even
I consumed this, I needed to put it into a bucket where I could
relate to it. And the bucket that I relate to it on, and this is
probably a negative on my part, is not just reading it on the page. It
doesn't it lays flat for me. Because I'm like, okay. What is what are we
doing here? How are we doing this? It has to sort
of be lived in order for me to wrap my arms around it. And I'm
still carrying that from high school, so I should probably let that go.
I should probably let that go. I should probably be the bigger man or
whatever. I don't know. Older man. I did post on
my Facebook page one time. Yes. I am on Facebook. If you want to go
follow me, that's that's fine or not. You don't have to. But, I did
poke post one time that I'm growing old, but not gracefully.
All right. Let's kick it off with the
sonnets by William Shakespeare. We're gonna read directly
from Sonnet 2. Now, for most of these sonnets, and I'll just tell you this
for you who are listening today, these sonnets are mostly
short. Right. And so you can go get an audio version
of the sonnets by William Shakespeare. They're not
long. They're not laborious pieces. Right.
But they are meaningful. And they do sit,
as I stated in the the introduction
there, they do sit inside of an English literary tradition
of short form poetry, particularly
short form love poetry. We'll talk about here in just a moment.
Alright. Sonnet 2 by William Shakespeare.
I'm gonna go down to a murmur here in a moment. When
14 winters shall besiege thy brow and dig deep trenches
in thy beauty's field, Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed
on now, will be a tattered weed of small worth held. Then
being asked where all thy beauty lies, where all the treasure of thy
lusty days, to say within thine own deep sunken eyes
were an all eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauties use? If thou could
stand stir, this bare child of mine shall sum my
count and make my old excuse, proving his
beauty by succession thine. This were to be
new made when thou art old and see thy blood
warm when thou feelest old.
I think I did a pretty good job of reading that, actually. You did. I
I was yeah. I'm gonna pat myself on the back. I mean, I'm not happy
to read this. Yeah. Not that guy, but I think I
did okay. In the literary life of William Shakespeare. Let's let's talk a
little bit about this because we've talked about Shakespeare before, and this episode sort of
wraps up our month of Shakespeare. We did not get to
Macbeth this year. We'll bump him, to next
year. But, there we
we, as usual, have access to the Folger Shakespeare Library,
which you can get online at folger.edu,
the largest sort of public domain available
repository of Shakespeare and Shakespeare and writing about Shakespeare
and analysis of Shakespeare probably on the Internet. And it's a it's a
great resource for the podcast, and we'll have links in the show notes to where
you can go and grab all of that. But from the full quote, the
Folger Shakespeare Library Editions introduction to Shakespeare
Sonnets by Barbara Maude and Paul Wurstein. I'm going to quote
directly again because it sort of lays the foundation for what we're talking
about here today. And I quote, yet it is not just
the beauty and power of individual well known sonnets that tantalize us,
but also the story that the sequence as a whole seems to tell about Shakespeare's
love life. The 154 sonnets were published in
16/09 with an enigmatic dedication presumably from the
publisher, Thomas Thorpe, end quote, to the only
begetter of these ensuing sonnets, mister w h.
Attempts to identify mister w h have become inevitably tangled
with the narrative that insists on emerging whenever one reads the sonnet
sequentially as they are ordered in the 16 09
quattro. The narrative goes something like this. The
poet, I e William Shakespeare, begins with a set of 17 sonnets
advising a beautiful young man, seemingly an aristocrat, perhaps mister w
h himself, to marry and produce a child in the interest of preserving the
family name and property, but even more in the interest of reproducing the young
man's remarkable beauty in his offspring. These
poems of advice modulate into a set of sonnets which urge the poet's love
for the young man and which claim that the young man's beauty will be preserved
in the very poems that we are now reading. The second set
of sonnets, sonnets 18 to 126, which which in the supposed narrative
celebrate the poet's love for the young man, includes clusters of poems that seem to
tell of specific events as the young man's mistreatment of the poet, the young
man's theft of the poet's mistress, the appearance of, quote, unquote, rival poets who
celebrate the young man and gain his favor, the poet's separation from the young man
through travel or through the young man's indifference, and the poet's infidelity to
the young man. After the set of 109 poems, the
sonnet concludes with a third set of 28
sonnets to or about a woman who is presented
as dark and treacherous and with whom the poet is
sexually obsessed. Several of these sonnets seem
also to invoke, or involve the beautiful young man who
is, according to the sonnet's narrative, also enthralled by the, quote, unquote,
dark lady. Close quote.
So that gives us a little bit of idea of what we're doing here. There
is a narrative structure to the way these sonnets are put together and that the
way they have been collected and even the way they've been read and consumed,
over the last now, 400
and, what, 18,
400 and 17 years, give or take a
few years here or there. And
so this is why I wanted to get Kristen on, because Kristen's a big fan
of poetry. I did not know she was an award winning. Oh, gosh. I
was like like I said, 5th grade man. So Well, you've
made more money from poetry. Look. You made more money from poetry than I ever
have. So you're award winning to me. You're award winning to the
audience of 1. Award winning poet. I'll make sure to put that in our little
bio when we publish our novel. There you go. Award winning poet.
That's right. Hey. Look. I put on my LinkedIn profile of a 3 time least
selling author ever. I'm I've sold the least books of any author you know.
We all have to stand on our accolades somewhere. Otherwise, no one else will talk
about them. Yeah. Right.
So tell us about the impact and the importance of the of the sonnets on
you and your life and your creativity. Let's start with there, Kristen.
Yeah.
Sonnet 90, I think, like I said earlier, was the first one to
really, like, stand out to me. Especially in high school, I
was pretty depressed, but I was a high functioning depressed
person. So nobody blinked an eye. I was, like, I was fine. I had
straight a's. I was well adjusted. Everything was
fine. Inside, I was dying. And so when I found
Sonnet 90, I was like, somebody
understands me. And they By the way, do you wanna read Sonnet 90 so
we get a full Oh, I guess I could. Yeah. You know what? Let me
see. What the heck? Why not? Let me 90. Yeah. We're breaking the format
of the podcast. It's fine. Sonnet 90. Okay.
I did not practice this, so I apologize. I I read it cold.
Not Patrick Stewart. Listen, Kristen. I read it cold.
You'll be fine. Okay. Okay. So this one,
then hate me when thou wilt if ever now. Now
while the now while the world is bent my deeds to cross,
join with the spite of fortune, make me bow, and do not
drop in for an after loss. Do not,
when my heart has escaped this sorrow, come in the rearward of a
conquered woe. Give not a windy night, a rainy morrow,
to linger out a purposed overthrow. If thou wilt
leave me, do not leave me last. When other petty griefs have
done their spite, but in the onset come, so shall I
taste. At first, the very worst of fortunes might,
and other strains of woe which now seem woe, compared with
loss of thee will not seem so.
And there's, like, for me, there's, like, this ringing sensation
all throughout that that was just
was my existence in high school. Yeah.
And as, like, influence
on, like, my life and my creativity,
there was something bright. Like, you know, remember inside out with those
core memories? That's like Oh, yeah. That's like a Mhmm. Very bright
blue core memory for me.
And it was, like, it was almost an anchor point. Mhmm. It was like, okay.
Someone understands. That was really important to me. It is still really important to me.
It's, like, this idea of understanding. Yeah. And
and I didn't, like, think this
cognizantly at the time, but, like and
what I am feeling can be expressed. Mhmm. Which as
an artist, it's very important. Very important.
Yeah. So that that was just
that's that's that's the that was the core. That was the core for me.
Back in high school when I was, you know, falling asleep at, like,
what is it? The Scarlet Letter. I was just like. Yeah. Or
persuasion or That one yeah. Right? But this just like it felt like
it left off the page Mhmm. At me. And, you
know, to you mentioned about, like, how you consumed the sonnets. Like,
I even me, I'm not practiced at reading Shakespeare
anymore, so I had to listen and read at the same time. And
I still had to listen to some of them multiple times before I
was like, okay. I think maybe I understand maybe. And some of them still, I'm
just like, I've I don't get this one. Yeah. But
for my creativity oh, I can't remember if we were recording when I mentioned this.
The the the author that recommended reading poetry,
before writing, I definitely felt like as I was just, like, immersing
myself in these sonnets, I could feel it
almost like almost what was it? Like, one of those big puzzles? Not not
really the Rubik's cube sort of thing, but you can just almost feel your brain,
like, clicking, clacking, and and shifting. And I was like, this
is so cool. I can't wait to do more poetry.
That's awesome. And now when I go through and I'm editing, because right we're we're
in the middle of, like, heavy rewrites for our books. I'm going through it. I'm
like, oh, we don't need that. Delete that. Oh, we don't need that. Delete that.
Oh, gosh. This is delete that. Delete that. All of a sudden, I'm seeing my
writing in a almost in a completely with completely different
eyes. And it wasn't that long ago that I was writing them. So,
normally, it takes much longer. Mhmm. You know, people say, like, put
it away. Like, even freaking Stephen King, he's like, yeah, just put it
away until it looks like a brand new book. You've never seen it before.
Yeah. We're still working on getting published. So I'm like, I I I don't have
time to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I gotta get paid here, Steven. But
immersing yeah. Right? So I'm in so but but it's weird that,
like, immersing myself in these sonnets almost seems to have accelerated
that happening because now I'm just like,
oh, I'm looking at it with a diff completely different perspective. Yeah. I'm like, oh,
this is that's not as effective as I thought it was gonna be. Okay. Did
you know, delete that. I'll, like, switch this over here. And it's just like, it's
so cool. It's so much fun. Well and it's it's it's interesting
because neurologically speaking,
the way our brains work and, again, this is something that I've learned over the
last 30 years. The way our brains work around
things that are prose based, narrative structures
versus something that's more rhythmical or lyrical, it it activates 2
different parts of our brains. That's that's one of the one thing I do understand
now. So I understand why. I mean, I understand why I remember
song lyrics versus remembering maybe the entire opening
anymore to the Gettysburg Address, although I do kinda remember
chunks of that. Right? Because it it activates a different
story center in your in your head. Right? Which is what
you're talking about as a writer. But, also,
it's interesting how the structure and I noticed this one with all of the sonnets,
actually. The structure of them is, here's
our setup. There's a weird sort of muddy middle, and then
there's a stinger at the end. Oh my gosh. I can't tell you how many
couplets I wrote down. And I was like, okay. This couplet is amazing. This
couplet is amazing. I just wrote them all down on my phone. I was like,
these are so cool. Yeah.
And and and I I am fascinated
by the idea that, number 1,
we we know a bit about Shakespeare, but we don't we don't know as much
as we would like to know. Why we don't know as much as we would
like to know in a sort of a postmodern, I got to know everything about
children down to your bottom of your psychology kind of thing. Like, we don't know
anything about Shakespeare, that kind of thing. And by the way,
that's good. That was actually probably one of the better things that he did other
than dying. Not one of the bad things that he did, you know,
because what it does is it creates mystery and then you can fill that bucket
with whoever or whatever you want it you want it to be. But there's
clearly a mind back there, not only behind the plays,
obviously, but behind the sonnets most particularly
that understands something about couplet
structure that is
very, very sophisticated and is
very, very demanding. And it's almost as if and I look at
it, of course, you know, I look at it through a martial arts lens because,
of course, why not? But also through a business lens or an
entrepreneurship lens where once you get to a
certain point, you've seen enough and you've
been through enough to where you can now begin
shaving away the excess. Mhmm. And
that's what he did in his sonnets, apparently. He shaved away the
excess. And, you know, really good
poetry writers will eventually wind up
in a space of a haiku where you know, and I don't understand the haiku
structure at all. It doesn't rhyme at the end, and so I'm,
like, frustrated. But, you know, you know, you're gonna
have, like, what is it? What is the high school? Haiku structure is, like, 3
words and then 6 words. It's syllables. I believe it's 575.
575. Okay. Alright. I'll I'll take your word for it. You go ahead and Google
it and look it up, while I'm rambling. To make sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. While
I'm rambling. 575. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Three lines,
5 syllables, 7 7 syllables, 5 syllables. Yep. Right. So I look at that, and
I look at that as like, okay. That's a Japanese sword master kinda deal where,
like, you're killing somebody just by slicing
an ear off and they, like, fall down. Like, I'm looking at it like that.
Whereas Shakespeare is more like medieval, I'm gonna hit you with a bunch of
things, but it's going to be the right things in the right area. It's it's
a fundamentally European versus a fundamentally sort of Asian sort of
approach to to lyrical structure.
I don't know if anybody like, y'all watched the shogun?
I have heard immense things about it, but I refuse to
get Hulu because I'm not bundling anything for Disney. That's fair.
That's fair. But I might rip it off. I might So ride the
pirate waves. It's so good. I mean, we all knew that was coming
back. Like Yes. As soon as yeah. Yeah. But, there
is a there is there are a couple of
episodes that start to really focus in and and zoom in on the poetry,
and it's just amazing. Yeah. Like and I don't pretend
to fully understand Japanese poetry. Yeah. I think the
haiku is also supposed to this is not like everybody's like, oh,
haiku, 575. It's also supposed to have something to do with,
a season. Like, that's like a that's like an underlying
a true haiku has, like, a seasonal reference
or something. And it was like, oh, I never knew
that. Well, that's that's interesting, you
know, particularly for this podcast because, you know, we
do focus on the idea, and we'll get to it at the end of this
episode as well. We try to focus on solutions to problems at the
end of the 4th turning, which we I fundamentally believe that we're at the end
of that. We're in the last bit of chaos before last bit of
chaotic winter before spring shows up, in the West
again. And, you know, leaders have to
have to have to I think that leaders need to be
tied in more to the cyclical and the lyrical versus and we'll talk
a little bit about this today with the ideas of romantic love, which, of course,
lay underneath the sonnets. But, I do think that
leaders have to be tied into the cyclical and the lyrical in a deeper
level than than they really are. Right? Because leaders are very much
tied into the mechanistic. And that really sort of happens with capitalism
and making money and sort of figuring all of that out.
But there's a whole other unexplored world that
exists underneath there that if you're ignorant to it,
I do believe that there are dragons that can come out of that water and
eat you. And and and you won't have any defense for
a mechanistic mind has zero defense against something that's cyclical and
lyrical and is and is and is
fundamentally sort of confused when it shows up, and then then
everything falls into chaos and, like, you know, When you're talking, what
what came to mind was being reactive
versus zooming out and understanding that there's a big arc.
Right. Yep. Right. Yeah. Well and even
so When I look at the sonnets, the
sonnets are written in a Shakespeare
is sticking to a particular structure.
Now he's doing art inside that structure. He's peeling away. Like we just said, he's
peeling away the meaning inside of that structure, but he
is inside some boundaries. Right? Now I
do think it would have been interesting, and this is one of the one of
the sort of mind games that I do sometimes when I read stuff like this.
What would it have been like if he had been able to travel to Japan
and read a haiku? Like, how would that have blown his
mind? Right. Or or what if a great haiku master
from Japan had been able to go to England and be able to
access sonnets, you know, in the in 17th
century? How would that have blown his mind? Right. And that's what you're getting with
the Internet right now is all this cross pollination of ideas.
Yeah. And that's why it feels like a chaotic a chaotic mess a little bit,
because we're coming up with new forms. Alright.
By the way, why don't you tell the story of how you sort of consumed
this with that that not Oh, yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, then tell tell a little
bit about that and a little bit about the Patrick Stewart piece because I think
people wanna hear about that because Yeah. They go like, what what was that reference?
So don't so if you decide you wanna read the
sonnets, don't feel bad if you can't just sit down and read the book because
I couldn't. I'm I'm out of practice reading Shakespeare.
And so I knew that in order to get through these in time for
the podcast, I was gonna have to listen and read them at the same time.
And thankfully now, like, audiobooks are like, they're everywhere. So
I was like, sure. Surely, there will be an audiobook. But I actually feel like
I found something better. So during the COVID lockdown,
sir Patrick Stewart read a sonnet a day.
And that that playlist is on YouTube. You can
go find it. Just put sir Patrick Stewart sonnets. There you
go. And it's just it's it's amazing. And don't
get frumpy. I will I will tell you right now. Frumpy. Sorry. That's a word
that I use all the time. There are sonnets that he just
skips, and I was very irritated about that. But then, like, sometimes he'll
he'll, start a video and he'll be like, I'm
sorry. I have to apologize. I'm going to skip that one because I
don't like it. I find it rather offensive and no one's going to make me
read it. It's like, okay. And so there's a handful
that he just doesn't read. I think in, like,
the seventies or so, he just skips, like, 4.
Mhmm. And I'm like, okay. So you you'll have to go
find someone else to read that. There was another playlist. I don't
remember what it's called. But it looks really bad because
it's it's a video of someone pushing a tablet,
to, like, pull up someone else reading the sonnet. But
those are actually amazing reads. Okay. They're
those are amazing reads. So whenever Patrick Stewart just skips a sonnet, go see if
you can find that playlist, because that some
of those are are better. Like Nope. Nope. Oh,
I No. That was sacrilegious.
I know. So You know, we all can't
be, we all can't I mean, Captain Picard can't hit every I mean I know.
The president Xavier can't hit all the he can't he can't hit all the the
president Xavier can't hit all the he can't he can't hit all the marks, so
it's fine. Well, also, you know, he's preparing them in, like, an hour and casually.
So it's just like it's all good. When you listen to the one that he
has memorized, you're like, oh, this
is a completely different level. Right. Because it's actually embedded
into into his Yeah. Yeah. Soul such as it
were his his psyche. Okay. Awesome. And then Ian McKellen
through Ian McKellen makes a a surprise appearance for sir Patrick Stewart's
birthday, which is just like, oh, we're all benefiting from this is
amazing. And off came. Yes.
So just Awesome. Just such it's a great playlist.
Excellent. Well, we will be sure to put the link to that in the, in
the show notes, underneath the player for,
for this episode. So go click on that link and listen to that
playlist back to the sides, back to
the Folger Shakespeare library translation or
version or publication of the sonnets by William
Shakespeare. I'm gonna put my NPR voice on now as we read
sonnet 18.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely
and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
and summer's lease hath all too short to date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, and often is
his gold complexion dimmed, and every fare from
fair sometimes declines by chance or nature's changing
course untrimmed. But thy eternal
summer shall not fade nor lose possession of that fair
thou's nor shall death brag that wanderst in his
shade when in eternal lines to time thou growst.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives
this and gives and this gives life
to thee. Shall I
compare thee to a summer's day?
Now I'm not Pablo Neruda, although I do have a book of Pablo Neruda's love
poems floating around somewhere in my house. And I've been
married a while now. I won't get into the specific number of years, but I've
been married a while now. And when you've been married a while, shall I
compare thee to a summer's day takes on different kinds of meaning than when you're
first in the throes of a relationship when you're like 18
or 25 or 40.
So while I'm not going to get into that
aspect of this because this sonnet has been often
quoted in romantic
in a romantic context, right, for romantic novels, romantic
films, you know, the kinds of movies you see, like that silly movie
serendipity back in the day, hate. But,
you know, where, oh, each other and, oh, we're gonna fall in love. And then
there's gonna be this tragic middle thing that happens. And then the
day new bond, everybody gets together and she loves him and he loves her, yada,
yada, yada. Okay. We've seen this structure before. Right? I'm not dismissing
it. There's relevance for romance. As a matter of fact, we're gonna talk a lot
about romance today, in philosophical,
moral, and even leadership terms because there is a role for romance, I
believe, for leaders. And, no, it does not mean having
romance with the people that you work with. I would
strongly reject,
putting the line, shall I compare thee to a summer's day
in any communication that you're having with your team members
or employees? And don't tell them that
they are more lovely and more temperate. Don't don't don't do that part
either. However, reading this
and understanding what we talk about when we talk about
love has to begin with an understanding of sort of
where Shakespeare was coming from, in medieval
times. Right. Or, well, not even medieval post medieval
times in that weird moment that happened between the end of the
medieval era in Europe, historically speaking, and the
beginning of the Renaissance. There's the low Renaissance and there's the high Renaissance. And high
Renaissance is what everybody thinks of, like, Michelangelo and David and Raphael of the great
paintings. That was the high Renaissance, which was also a time, by the way, of
Martin Luther and Christopher Columbus. Everybody forgets that. That's a
lot of dynamics were happening in Europe all at the same time and globally.
Right? But Shakespeare was writing in that weird middle moment where the
transition was being made. And in
medieval times from the 13th 14th century up to Shakespeare's
day, love
was considered to be a secondary or even tertiary
or minor consideration when it came to
marriage. As a matter of fact, romantic love is a driver for marriage,
and you can Google this and research all this yourself. And
lifetime partnering really didn't start until in full
force until around 18th century. As a matter of fact, it became
industrialized during the 20th century and led into all the kinds
of current issues and challenges that we have right now, which we'll talk about some
of those today. So Shakespeare was
sitting in a weird cultural shift that
was happening where the mediaevils who were concerned,
quite frankly, about business arrangements
and property where the status of women
and by the way, feminism was not a thing, okay, in the 13th 14th
century, where the status of women as property and
women not being able to hold property was indirect
contradiction and was in direct challenge to Christian
ideals of egalitarianism. There were also rule in
Europe throughout the medieval period. And, of course, we're influencing
Shakespeare. And so this idea that you would marry for love,
this idea that a woman was more than just a piece of property. She was
a romantic object with her own, yes, a romantic
object. I did use that term with her own ideals and her
own emotions and her own needs to be fulfilled.
Right? And here's another practical consideration
that was going in that was also being considered in Shakespeare's time that somehow
romantic love would act as a,
I'm gonna use a different a challenging word here, an ameliorative barrier,
right, to the very real,
very real challenges of infant mortality,
disease, poverty, and death. I mean, when
Shakespeare was writing in the 7th the early 17th
century, you know, a quarter of Europe's population, a
little more than a quarter of your population, had been carried off by the black
death in the previous 150 years. And so that
wasn't something that was sort
of a back of the
mind consideration. It was still very real. He was surrounded by people who would
actually have relatives that had you know, died of the
bubonic plague, and they wanted to I think one of the
even mentions, like, common cure or, like,
something for the plague. So Correct. Right.
And then you put all this in the milieu of Western Europe where they
are in the hangover from Roman and Greek paganism. Right? So the Roman and Greek
ideals of love, and of platonic love versus
romantic love versus agape love, which is the love that
Jesus talked about in the New Testament. These ideals,
while they were supposed to be spread throughout
the gothic not gothic, throughout the medieval world,
by monks and priests and and and Catholic, yes,
Catholic, folks,
it had sort of gotten into being more of a business, which is
how all systems eventually run too. It had sort
of gotten into being more of a business of religion in Western Europe and
in England at the time, which was in
contrast or intention with the actual religious
practice of religion. So people were getting married for a whole bunch of
different reasons just like now. People had a whole bunch of cultural or
numerous cultural challenges around marriage and mating just like
now. But romantic love was not the primary driver,
And then Shakespeare dumps sonnets like this into a
culture indicating that a sea change is
beginning to occur. A key
change, maybe? Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. Sorry. Well
well, let's let's start there.
So why is love a powerful motivator for people to engage
in romance? And I, you know, I'm fascinated by the idea that
that marriage used to be more of a business arrangement and you went and got
your love someplace else. Like, your marriage was not the one that was supposed to
be. Okay? Yeah. That was fine. Like, nobody nobody cracked it. The only
people who couldn't afford to do that, by the way, were the medieval
peasants who had no money and no access. Right? But
if you which, by the way, we had all lived during medieval times, I wanna
just even the people who are listening here, let's just be real. Without industrialization,
all of us would have been medieval peasants. We would have been living on
lands of feudal lords regardless of race or gender,
whatever. We would have been living on lands of feudal lords and working those lands
and dying in wars. The industrial revolution, the
American revolution, all those things matter, free speech, the
constitution, the declaration of it, all those kind of the Magna Carta,
which was getting ready to come up, all that kind of stuff
matters to get us to where we are at now. It didn't just sort
of pop out of the woodwork. And it's not guaranteed, by the
way, to last. Okay? So we have to like actually hold on to that stuff.
Because you could easily the default the default for humanity is
service for somebody else because the default is slavery, and you just
live and work and die. And if you fall in love, well, that's
nice, I guess, maybe, but no one cares. That's the default.
So having romantic love is great. I'm
fascinated by the idea of it. Again, you get your partnerships, you get your romantic
love over there someplace else, and I'll gonna bring up an article that I just
saw the headline for in the Atlantic, like literally before I came on this
podcast that I wanna bring up to this. But it's interesting
that as we are arcing through the early part of the 21st
century, we're now talking about the difficulties of
romantic attachment, infant or infant or not infant. Sorry.
Fertility is down everywhere across the west. Replacement weights are down all the
way across the rest, all across the west. And because of our technology
now, almost no one can hook up. Although everybody can hook everybody can hook up.
Everybody can hook up to do everything to do everything, but almost no one can
engage in romantic love. But everybody still
wants that. We're in this weird conundrum just
like in Shakespeare's time. And so that's what I connected with on this
Thoughts that you may have. Thoughts, ideas, you're you're brimming over. I'm not
Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot it's a lot. It's a lot. It's fun. As usual.
You know, Hason sends me this, the the the kind of the
guideline for the podcast. And it's like, why is love such a powerful motivator? It's
like, we don't have time. We don't there is not enough time
to talk about this. We've only got an hour. Yeah. Right?
I think people have written their dissertations on this. So, like, they're just written and
Yeah. It's fine. Anyway, so
I I but I wanna point out something. This might feel like nitpicking,
but, like, just almost breaking down this
question. Love is different from romance.
Okay. Right? So that well, I mean, that's that's how the question's written. Why is
love such a powerful motivator for people to engage in romance?
Mhmm. So people, I think, get confused.
Mhmm. And they expect love to be
and feel like romance. Mhmm. And that
causes a lot of pain and strife in
relationships when you go into a romantic relationship,
and then you're in it for long enough that the romance it doesn't like, you
have to actively keep it up. I think that's what shorter lived relationships don't
they don't understand. You like, that has to continue to be
an intention. You have to set it, your husband, whatever. Like, you
you you have to work at that because otherwise, you fall into a rhythm and
then the relationship goes stale. That's that's that's just kinda how life
goes. So you could you could apply that to kinda everything.
But love, one of my favorite shows used to
be Doctor Who. I love the old
seasons. Please don't find me and send me
hate mail. I can't stand the new seasons. The the writing is
just atrocious. But back when
they first revived it, you know, you've got
Christopher Eccleston. You've got David Tennant. Matt Smith was not my
favorite, but whatever. It's fine. Peter Capaldi
gets in there for a couple of seasons, and I still
didn't love those seasons. Capaldi was an amazing doctor. But, anyway, all that to say,
there's this punch line at the end of one of his seasons, and it's
absolutely amazing. And he says, love is not a feeling.
Love is a promise. And that just, like,
boom. It's like, oh my gosh. That's that's the the like, talk about a
compact way of expressing something that I feel like I've always known.
Mhmm. So love, like,
but back to, like, the actual question. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's
okay. Love is a many splendor thing. We're gonna talk about that too.
Because and I think the because like, why is love such a powerful motivator?
Because we know I think all instinctively, we all know how
powerful love is. Mhmm. Like, true, deep,
crazy love. Like, it's it's I mean, I'm Catholic, so I believe, like,
love doesn't end. Like, love like, Guru really is. You know, God is
love. Mhmm. Right. It is everywhere. It permeates all things.
It is, like, it is all powerful. Mhmm.
So is there a better motivator? Like, what's that? I don't I don't know. It's
it it is it's divine. So we but then engaging
in romance, I think we almost think that romance
is love. Right. Romance is not love. We have 2 different words
for it for a reason. Well, and I think what the other thing that and
maybe you can address this as well. The English language has only one
word for love. Yes. That too. And so
And love is like multifaceted. It's like, it's way more than
just like physical attraction. Right. Like, I I I
mean, I have I have talked about my kids on the podcast. Like, okay. I'm
not gonna talk about them. Like, I have friends. I do, actually. I have people
that hang around me and like to hang around me, and I like to hang
around them. I know it's shocking. But, like like yeah. Like, I I
you know? But I will use the
term love. I love hanging out with this guy. Right? Or Yeah.
I love doing this particular thing with this particular person. Right? But
then we'll also use that same term to to make it about business and
leadership for just a minute. I love doing I love standing
up on stage, right? Or I love, talking with
my employees, right? Or I love starting a new project, or I
love feeling as though I'm being recognized for my,
my unique gifts and talents and skills and competencies. We're using
that word love, but the context
changes the container that that word sits in, but it's still just one
word. And it's this one word covering a multitude of sins in the
English language. Now in other languages, in other language groups,
in other language forms, love, that word is split
up as I believe it probably should be in in English because, you
know, you talk about the difference between romance and
love. Romance is much more to me
much more of an intentional act. And then it
gets that gets me into trouble a little bit sometimes. But it's an intent well,
it it does because you have to put some people people
want romance to be spontaneous.
And and and and,
that's not the reality of life. The reality of
life is that I'm busy, you're busy, everybody's busy.
And to your point, if you don't work on romance,
by the way, the work implies intention Uh-huh. You're not
gonna get the thing you wanna get on the other side of romance, which is
deep, meaningful physical, spiritual, material,
emotional connection. You're not gonna get that. You're gonna
get a big fat 0 because you have to be intentional.
You have to put in work. Romance does have an element of work
to it. It has an element of intentionality.
Now it also has elements of and I would be remiss if I did
not admit this. It does have moments of spontaneity,
for sure. But just
like Denis Leary said in his
great comedy album in the 19 nineties, no cure for cancer,
you eat the chocolate and you feel good for, like, 5 seconds,
and where you, have the orgasm and you feel good for 5
seconds. Right? Like, these things happen for 5 seconds, and then you're back to your
crappy life. Like, that that that that's it. Like, you're back to the thing that
you're always doing. And the spontaneity and romance
happens for and then you're back to talking about like, when
are we gonna get how are we gonna deal with the grocery list this week?
Because those things also matter, right? So I think the
struggle in the west has been how to how to and it's been a 500
year long struggle, and I don't think we're out of it yet. I think we're
deep and technology just made this worse. But the 500
year long struggle in the west is how to have both those things at the
same time between 2 people. And none of us knows
the answer. Nobody knows the answer. We're all just, like, blind
people groping around, trying to figure it out in the dark.
We don't know. We have no idea. Like, I'll stand in line. I'll
use a Louis CK example. Right? I'm standing in line in the grocery store. This
has actually happened to me, and I'm just watching people's marriages fall apart.
Just all over the place. And it's not because it's not for lack of romance.
It's not even for lack of love. I think the 2 people probably do love
each other. I have to presume the best modus for everybody. But, like,
he's on his phone and the kid's screaming, and she's staring, you
know, 10,000 yards daily. She's got PTSD, like a Vietnam
vet. And, like, just what's
happening there? That's a relationship that's like
the sound that it's making is it's disintegrating. And if
you go and ask either one of those two people, they will inter they
will intertwine the words love and romance together
if you ask them honestly. And so this is the thing I think we're struggling
with, and this is what this is what the the ideal is what
Shakespeare delivers to us. He delivers us the ideal from the top of the mountain.
Interesting. I
thought it had some legs. It was a thesis. Yeah. Yeah. It's,
my my thoughts about that was that,
you know, reading through, especially all the ones that were about the beautiful young man
Mhmm. Is it felt like they were
poems about a love
about someone he couldn't have. Right.
But to your point, that might be that might
be what that might be the point you're making. It's like, yeah. Yeah. The Shakespeare
is delivering the ideal. None of us can have it. It doesn't really exist.
We just can't. Like, we can't get there. Well, on the
ideal, we'll judge you because that's what an ideal does. Like, it it it judges
you, and you're always found wanting. You are always wanting in comparison to the
ideal. You're never meeting the ideal. You're never meeting your potential.
Not happening. Like, for instance, here's an ideal.
I live in a community where the average age of the individuals in the
community is 55 to 75.
A lot of retirees, a lot of folks who are on the downhill
side of life. Matter of fact, I just went to
a barbecue this weekend that had like 6 couples
there. And my wife and I, we're in our mid forties. We're the youngest couple
there with our 2 children who are 7 14.
And they were all fascinated by the 7 year old, and he put on a
good show, and he did his job. He did exactly what he was supposed to
do. And my 14 year old, she put on a show. She did her good
job. She's starting to understand, like, the social stuff, like, how
that works. She's 14 till, like, it's it's sort of starting to begin to happen.
Right? Right on time, by the way, developmentally. But we were the youngest people there.
And it's just fascinating to watch
these, you know, 4 other couples or 6 other couples
who have been one woman said, I've been married to this man for 45 years.
I've already heard this story. And I was just like, okay.
Alright.
And you still have romance after 45 years. 45
years with the same person. This is what we struggle
with in the west. Was that a question? Can you have romance? It is a
question. It is absolutely a question. This is the question that all the Gen
Zers who are between the ages of 2535 now are asking,
and they don't believe the answer is yes. This is the question that all the
millennials who the oldest of them are now 44
are struggling with. This is the question that all the boomers,
many of whom worked on their or or on their second marriage, just hanging on
for dear life, and the Gen Xers who are on their second marriage hanging on
for dear life can't answer. This is the challenge question of the west in
particular or the west in general and America in particular right
now. How do you stay with 1 person for 45 years and still have romance?
Because what everybody seems to want in
survey after survey after survey from Cosmo all the way to,
you know, the Gallup organization, what everybody seems to want is that
field that ideal. Everybody seems to want that ideal, but no one has a clue
how to get it. I'm only
34. So so I I have I
like, thinking about this, I wonder my my
my my proposed answer. I know nobody has the answer. But Yeah. Nobody knows.
Is so I've been with my husband for
almost 20 years now. We haven't been married that long. But
something that I wonder is if the answer is growth.
Just keep growing as a person. I know people think they
look at that. They were like, we've grown apart. That's that's the most, like, common,
use of that word in terms of the the
context of relationships. Like, I'm grown apart. I just don't love them anymore.
But if you both keep growing and you
both keep your intentionality of, like, building this relationship,
strengthening the relationship Mhmm. You just kind
of keep finding new reasons to fall in love.
You can also Yeah. Can also find reasons to fall
out of love For sure. And go apart. You can do both. Both, I think,
both pads Mhmm. Are available.
But that that was what popped into my head. Keep
growing Yeah. As a person. Because I am like you
said earlier, like, if you haven't grown in 30 years or if you're the same
person you were 30 years ago Right. You haven't grown, like, you don't wanna be
the same person that you were when you started the marriage.
And the person that you are now, if your husband is the same
person, then there might that might be where that
discrepancy is, maybe. Mhmm. I don't know. I just, like, that was the thing that
popped into my head. It was, like, oh, I wonder if growth is a factor.
So just keep finding reasons to grow as a person
and grow closer together. I wonder.
Yeah. And I yeah. And, again, I'm saying I I I don't know what the
answer is. This is one of those areas where
I think the questions are a bottomless pit. And yes, I
want you to put that image in your head. It's a bottomless pit of questions
because, and I'll use an example here. I
once had a business conversation with somebody, interestingly enough, on a
networking platform, which I won't say the name of. And it was
during the business day and we had her having this conversation. And I
don't remember how we got into this. It was a 45 minute long sort of
interaction. And she was talking about how her and her
partner, which by the way, anybody who uses that term in
the modern context, I'm like, oh, my my my radar starts
to go the back little thing in the back of my head goes up, because
I don't know where I don't know where they're going. Right? With this. I don't
know if that means they're cohabitating. I don't know if that means they're cohabitating in
the same sex, you know, relationship. I have no clue. So now my radar
goes, okay. What are you talking about here? And she
says her and her partner, decide not
to get have decided not to get married. And, you
know, they've been together for almost the same amount of time that you've been with
your husband, right, 20 years. And
she said it works for us. I wouldn't recommend it for other people. And I
thought, that's an incredible insight.
That's incredible insight because what we say
very often is I've been married for X number of years,
or I've been with this person for ABC number of years. And then we go
around using shoulds after that. You should, we should, he, she,
or it should. Now, is there an
ideal? Yes. There is an ideal. I was gonna say because you
could go around interviewing. I'm sure it's been done. Like, there's gotta be through lines
of the people, like, who have been married for forever and has still
have romance. Like, they have to exist. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Like Oh,
absolutely. Information has to be out there. This is the information age. It exists.
Oh. Yeah. And you can actually weirdly and interestingly enough, you can go to the,
national it's the National Research Council. They have a ton of
graphs. And I did some of that looking into for this particular podcast. They have
a ton of graphs on divorce rates, marriage rates, cohabitation rates, same sex
marriage rates, black, white, Hispanic, Asian. Like, they
bring it all down, and they've got graphs and charts. It's it's it's great. You
can go look at the National Research Council and find out all of this information,
more data than you could possibly, know. And
Yeah. But I'm talking about, like, qualitative data. Right. And this is my
point. And yet when you dig into the bottomless pit of
data, you have to find individuals. And the point
that she was making, and this is why I thought it was a good insight,
is when someone decides to break from the ideal, in
general, what we do in our culture, and this is a lesson for leaders, in
general, what we do in our culture is we say, well, my break from the
ideal should be the thing that everybody else does. And so let us go let
us go mold state policy so that it will be the ideal.
Because it made me it worked for me, and I see all this other dysfunction,
so it must be something that I must have the solution. I
must have the silver bullet that everybody else needs in order to
solve this problem. When in reality, what she was saying was, and
she didn't really know this, what she was saying was
the ideal didn't work for me. And so I found a compromise, but I don't
want this to go to scale for everybody else.
That's incredibly insightful. That's
maturity. That's looking at
forget romance and love. That's looking at the specifics of their
situation and saying, we figure out our negotiation around
this. Do what you want.
And while I may not agree with that because I want
people to pursue an ideal. Right. I do. I want
people to pursue an ideal. I'm a partisan for an ideal.
If you can't get there from here, to be intellectually and and more
morally honest with yourself about that and with the other person that you're
engaged with, to me, is hugely important. And
and that's another failure of our time. We don't have people who are intellectually and
morally honest with themselves or with the other party that they're involved
with. Right. So,
okay. We're gonna talk about marriage here in just a second.
Is it possible to take a very small break? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. We
can pause right here. Absolutely. We'll pause here. We'll go cut right here.
Right back. Yeah. Yeah. We'll pause right here, and you'll come right back.
Alright. Yeah. We're back from break. That's good. Alright. Well, we'll actually put a we'll
actually put an ad right there. So we'll do it. Perfect. Actually, we put an
ad right there. So there we go. Yeah. Back to
the sonnets. Back to the Folger
Shakespeare Library edition of the sonnets by William Shakespeare. We're gonna turn the corner
here. We're gonna talk a little bit more about marriage, but then we're going to
get into sort of some solutions to problems. And how do
you how can you be a romantic right in our culture
today? Because I I think there's there's romance, there's love, and then there's being a
romantic, which is a totally different kind of thing. Alright.
We're gonna pick up here with Sonnet 116, and I
quote, let me not to the marriage of true
minds admit impediments. Love is not love which
alters when it alteration finds or bends with a remover to
remove. Oh, no. It is an ever fixed
mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. It is
the star to every wandering bark whose worth's unknown,
although his height be taken. Love's not time's fool, though
rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickles compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours weeks, but bears it out
even to the edge of doom. If this be error and
upon me proved, I never writ nor no
man ever loved.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Interesting.
Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds or bins with the
remover to remove. Interesting. And the point here, I think, that
Shakespeare is trying to make is this. And let's talk a little bit about
marriage. So the practical container well, practical. One of the many
containers that we decide we're gonna cram love and romance into
in our in our and I'm only gonna talk about our American culture.
If you are listening to this in another country, we have fans globally. So if
you were listening to this in another country, just know I'm speaking out of an
American context, and you can see all of our dirty laundry live on TikTok and
YouTube. So you know what's going on because that's where
we put it. Oh, we do. We we do a
really good job of exporting our dirty laundry to literally everywhere.
There's no one who is not who did not know what is going on here.
All in the name of authenticity. Oh my gosh. And transparency. Yes.
There. Yep. Yes, ma'am.
So in case you didn't know, in other countries,
44% of millennials, 53% of Gen Xers, and 61%
of boomers are married as of 2020.
Now, there's an interesting thing that happened during 2020 called COVID.
And during that time, divorce rates actually spiked because
of lockdowns. I fundamentally believe because of lockdowns
and people couldn't leave to go to work. And I do think that absence makes
the heart grow fonder in weird kinds of ways. And then when people were locked
down and could not be absent, well, marriages fell apart.
And by the way, the most famous example of this is Bill and Melinda Gates,
who were in a 6,000 square foot home in
Seattle and couldn't stay married.
There just wasn't enough space between Bill and Melinda.
I'll leave you to wrap your brain around that one as Kristen's mouth just drops
open.
Oh, it wasn't the Epstein Island thing. It wasn't that. It wasn't the the
it wasn't she didn't have a problem with any
of that. It was a lockdown that killed that marriage.
Now the long standing feet. 6,000 square feet. I'm trying to think of how
many how big the apartment that I was stuck in
with 3 other men, one of which was my husband.
Sure. One of which was living in the living room. So I didn't have any
space. And I like, if my friendships and marriage made it through
that, and she what are you gonna see?
Your your hashtag winning. That's all you gotta put in your hashtag winning.
We did it. We did it. Yeah. There's a long
standing idea about marriage rates, the 50% of them end in divorce, and
that's not actually proven out by the numbers. And people, by the way, from
Bill Maher, famous people from Bill Maher, all the way to academicians
and professors who you've never heard of make this
claim, and have, by the way, been making this claim culturally since the
1970s. Now, the reality is that among
people who are working class, poor, and increasingly middle class,
yes, divorce rates up until the point of the 2020s,
were up, particularly through the 1990s. But guess what?
If you make more than, I believe, combined,
it's like $75,000 a year. If you make more than that,
you're not getting divorced, which tells me
something, by the way, about marriage. Marriage is still
about property, not primarily or maybe even almost
exclusively, about love.
Now You just People do split up.
People do I mean, I've known people who have gotten divorced in my
life, for what I think might be the
thinnest of reasons. And
there has been a rise. I would be remiss if I didn't say this on
this podcast because everybody can see it around them in cohabitating
and dating, particularly long term cohabitating,
and long term dating even without cohabitating.
And I think personally, and this is just my opinion,
not the opinion of the place where I got the statistics from, which by the
way, was the National Research Council. You can go look them up yourself. I think
the cohabitating and dating are far stronger drivers for reduced marriage rates in
America than anything else. And, again, I have no numbers on
this. I merely have observations
of note. And I'm sure that I could find some numbers that would bear
these observations out. There's another factor that has
occurred, which has opened up options, and that's the factor of technology.
And this has opened up options for both men and women in the
world. And you combine the availability
of individuals who want to titillate both men and
women, as well as I believe fundamentally,
and this is an unpopular opinion, but it is opinion that
I hold. Nonetheless, I do believe that the opening up of workplaces
to women and the integration of spaces that were formerly
men only has also driven some of this.
Now, my more feminist listeners, both men and women will object
and that's fine. We can have that discussion. But I do believe that it
is a factor that putting all the motion aside, we do
have to admit has done something. It's not
a value neutral fact. It's not a value neutral
advancement. Particularly if we're to claim the technology
that has done all these things, we have to look at all the human factors
as well. So I do think those areas have contributed
to how we think about marriage and divorce in the
21st century and the milieu that we are in, which we just came off of
discussing before the break, where love we would
like to have as a primary driver. But then there's all this other
stuff. There's all these other things. And I'm gonna use
myself as an example. Actually, no, I won't use myself as an example.
I'll use a couple I know. So they were married. They got
divorced. And the biggest impediment to the
divorce in the state that I live in was how the
property was going to be divided, specifically the home
and who was going to get most of the profit from the home sale.
That was the biggest impediment. And by the way, that's not unusual.
Did someone get divorced, though?
No. How does this relate to leaders? Because I know all of you who
are listening to this have been listening for an hour, and you're like, okay. The
sonnets, love poems, marriage, romance. Got it, Pason.
Okay. Can we get to something on the other side of the break here?
Yes. Let's get to something on the other side of the break here.
When leaders are leading in workplaces, if the
marriage rates are to be believed, at least
44% of their millennial staff, the
millennial age staff will be married,
but at least 60% of them will not be will be in some
sort of cohabitating dating relationship. 53% of gen
xers will be married, but somewhere around
40 some odd, 47% of them will not be. And then 61%
of boomers will be married, and they will probably working on their 2nd or third
marriages, but they are graduating or graduating, retiring out of
the system and out of the team. If I am leading a team of Gen
Xers and millennials, which more likely I will be Ryan and Gen Zers who
will not be married, by the way, they will be primarily cohabitating and
dating. And they come to me with the state of their personal
relationships, which they will, because we
are now transparent about everything. What do I do about
that as a business leader?
And by the way, I just saw a story the other day just to layer
on one more thing. I saw a story the other day on LinkedIn about how
organizations are now hiring coaches and mentors to get Gen z's
to be more loyal people in the Gen z generation to be more loyal to
workplaces. And by the way, if I'm coaching or mentoring, what am I going to
be talking about? It ain't gonna be all about work.
Thoughts. Because this is a real problem for real problem for modern
leaders. Boomers never talked about any of this stuff ever.
They thought it was all private over there. Don't talk to me about any of
it ever. But what we've seen because of technology, because of
cultural changes, we are now seeing the c shift, and leaders
have to address people's personal relationships. And this makes leaders,
particular leaders of a certain generation, extremely uncomfortable.
And I get this question quite a bit. Matter of fact, I actually got it
last week when I was working with a client, a variation of this question.
So I'm gonna ask you, Kristen. Go ahead. Well,
as someone who's been working as a freelancer entrepreneur
for 12 years now,
which, you know, is it isn't a lot, depending
on how you look at it. But one of the things that you have to
figure out as a freelancer is to and I have a
coach is how to process
and be mentally healthy, mentally and emotionally healthy with
all the personal stuff going on and still show up for your
business. Because if you don't, no one
else will because you are the business.
Right? So part of me is like, if
I can do it, so can the bosses. Be a
boss, care about someone else, have a heart.
Because that's the thing. Right? I think there's a lot of language out there
in in What's the name of the lock down? The wholesale culture.
Right? That's like, lock down the the feelings. Shut
up. Show up. Shut up and show up. That didn't work for
me. Right. That that that was a recipe for disaster. It led
to a lot of burnout, kind of re recurrences of depression. It
was just like, oh, I'm regressing. This is wonderful.
Yeah. But but so
there is I think there's a both and here. Right? So if, you
know, you're a a leader and you're running a business Mhmm.
Then have the
resources for them to to care for
your people. Mhmm. Like, care about your people. Their their
their their lives. But but but but so that they
can get back to work.
Because that that that I think that has to be the boundary or not the
boundary, the balance. Because it's it's like, hey. The
we're not just friends. We're not friends, actually. I'm your boss.
Mhmm. And while I do care about you, get back
to work. I and the trend that I'm seeing is almost like you
can't fire people anymore because anything
like, if they're not showing up, oh, it's because my boyfriend broke up
with me. And I was like, well, but you're still not doing your job. It's
like, oh, but if you fire me, it's because I'm you know? I don't know.
It's a personal attack on me. I'm like,
no. Not that either. You just are not you're not
doing your job. So I I I don't I
don't know if I have, like, practicals. Do a b c. I I don't but
that that's the The the overall strategy. The word
vomit. Yeah. That's the word vomit. There you go. There's the word
vomit. Find something in there. Right. Well, I think of
so I think of here's here's how I here's here's the pushback on this. I
think of the and it is floating around Instagram reels, and
I see it occasionally, not as often as I used to, but I see it
occasionally in the last year when I dip into
Instagram and then dip out again. My Instagram is
all about Dungeons the Dragon, so I don't see anything else. You don't see anything
else? Okay. Great. It's great. The d and d memes are the best.
So, the the the real
clip that I see is the one from Mad Men where Don
Draper is yelling at the female
individual or whatever. And she's like, you don't say thank you for any of my
ideas. And he's like, the money is the thank you. Like, you're young.
You should just take the money. Your ideas will be honored at a
certain point, but just take the money and get
out. Now, that's very much a boomer attitude, by
the way. That's very much a baby boomer attitude. The money is the thank
you. The money is the thing I pay you
in lieu of having a relationship with you. And so the pushback on
that is, and this is the pushback and it is legitimate. Here's
legitimate pushback. Inflation
is at 2.9% in the country. Groceries that used to cost
me, you know, $400 a month now cost me $800 a month.
Yep. This money isn't the thank you ing. If I'm going to keep showing up
for your BS job where you're only paying me $15 an
hour and I'm scraping by and you want me to be grateful for that,
there's a word that I could say, and you're not
gonna fire me because you can't get anybody else. So what are you
going to do? Well, you're going to care. And by the way, you will be
made to care. You will be made to bend. I'm
not the organization. That's a different thing. I will make you
manager, you supervisor bet. And I'm going to make you
bet by just deluding you with my personal
problems because I don't have I can't give it to my I was
raised by parents who allowed me to delude them with
personal problems and they solved many of them. And now you've
stepped in para familias because you're paying me.
Well, paying me means you're mom and dad now.
That's the pushback. Fascinated. That's the
psychological, I think, the sociological pushback to your to your
assertion. Now, do I think that everybody within a
particular generational cohort believes that? No. There's individuals. Give me a
break. You know, there's something like, what, like 85,000,000
millennials, and there's something like 65 or 70,000,000 Gen
Z ers. Like, it's it's it's insane. There's too many individuals inside of
that that those 2 group cohorts for it to be everybody. Right?
However, there is a media driven, potentially,
idea that
the industrial revolution boss, boomer,
is the greatest thing to be overcome, and the only way that you can overcome
that is through a deluge of feelings.
By the way, this is where you Why are we overcoming the boss?
Well, because the boss What does that mean? Because the boss is
the avatar for the man. You know how in the sixties
seventies, when they were young, they talk about the man? Yep.
We've bumped out the man for
corporations. We've bumped out the man for big pharmaceutical companies. We've bumped
out the man for climate change. We've bumped out the man for all these other
things that stand in for the man. But it's the same idea. There's this
system that has to be overcome. Yeah. And so we have to use tools to
overcome it so that the glorious revolution can come that we as
the youth believe that we are responsible for bringing forward. Except the
problem is there is no glorious revolution, and you're all gonna get old,
which, by the way, the older millennials now understand this. Once we're closer to we're
in their mid forties, they now get it. They now get that there's no glorious
revolution, and I might want to buy a house. I want to get out of
that I want to get out of that 2 bedroom apartment I'm sharing with 4
people. People. Right. When I was 35. Or 25 even.
Sorry. When I was 25. But, you know, like, I gotta leave
now. Well, but kind of back to your point. Like,
you you were mentioning, you know, that the not
boomers. I hate that phrase. I do too, but I'm just using it because it's
whatever you got. Baby boomers. Yeah. The baby boomers are retiring.
Something that I don't read, like, the news. I don't do any of this.
Like, I just kind of off in my my own little world. And I know
people are like, oh, you should be informed.
Like, that's fine. No. You shouldn't. My my husband stays informed. You're
doing you're doing fine. You're not missing anything. Right? And so well, but
somebody some one of the things that I keep hearing, and I don't know if
this is accurate, is that boomers aren't retiring. And
it's harder to find promotions. So it's it's to your point where, like,
$15 an hour. Like, how with prices
skyrocket is how are we supposed to buy a house? Right.
How are we supposed to do this? Which is which is also where
the Oh, and that's not even talking about student
debt. Yeah. Yeah. We whole another conversation. It's a whole another
conversation. The the challenge that
we are seeing for leaders, and it is one that I see
articulated when they come to me, is
leaders feel as though and I'm talking about managers and
supervisors at the mid level in organizations. They feel
as though they are already in a deluge between
demands and pressures placed upon them by the upper echelon folks of the organization that
they can't meet. And then all of the knock on effects of COVID
and all the bad behavior we opened doors for during the last 2 to
3, I would even argue 4 years, because there are certain bad behaviors that are
just continuing that are among folks who are
below them in the structure. And so they are squeezed in the middle and asked
to do an impossible job. And to
compound it, the folks who are rising up from the bottom
are not exactly folks that are mentally strong
Right. In order to deal with the nonsense
that's going to occur at that level. And by the way, probably the most mentally
strong generation is the Gen Xers, probably, individuals
primarily between the ages of 46 and now 64,
right, or 46 and 58, somewhere around there,
who grew up in literal who have grown and worked
literal in the last 20 years of chaos. It's just been chaos all the time.
And so it's like pressure, fizzy it's fizzy, fizzy water all over their
brain all the time. And it's just how you live. Right? This is
just it. Whereas, generations
subsequent to them, the
impression is that that pressure is a new thing.
This economic pressure is a new thing. And it's not
because people don't understand history, the cycle thing. People don't understand the cycles of history,
much less the cycles of romance. People don't understand the cycle of history. And so
because they don't understand the cycle of history, they have no anchor
point for what this is. Like, everything that we're looking at Life is hard.
It's so much harder now. It's unfair. It's like, no, life is just hard. This
is too hard. Right. Like, I I I tell young people that I talk
to who are in the 19 to 34 year old age
range, it was just as equally hard to people in the
19 seventies when inflation was on par with
what it is now. But they'll be like, oh, but this thing and this thing,
this thing. I'm like, but you're judging it through now's lens. Right? If you had
to go back to like 1974, it would be just as hard to buy
a house then.
This is hard. And by the way, they were getting paid less. They were gonna
pay, like, $2 an hour, 2.50 an hour, where
and and a loaf of bread, which used to be 15¢ and was made in,
like, Wisconsin somewhere at some white bread factory,
is now immediately skyrocketed to being a dollar
a dollar for a loaf of bread, and you're making 2.50 an hour. And you're
gonna tell me that it was better back then? The whole reason that
house values went up is because when you could grab a house, you stayed in
it as long as you possibly could. Yeah. You learn
those skills that now we all have to learn off of YouTube.
As the older leaders who understand this and have historical
knowledge are going, I don't know what's wrong.
What are we doing here? Like, you're coming to me
and you're telling me that you're having a you need a mental health day?
Why? For what? Like, life?
Which is which is to your point, you know, if you don't show up because
your boyfriend broke up with you okay.
I'm gonna go a step deeper here. What does the leader do with the
person who is solid? This is a challenge question. The person who
is solid, they show up every day. They've been doing the work.
They appear to be solid family people. And then, like, they show up one day
and they're like, my I gotta move out of my house. I'm getting a
divorce. Oh, and by the way, I'm gonna need to work more
hours. I'm gonna need to pick up a second shift because,
yeah, this is gonna suck. Lawyers and everything. This is gonna be terrible.
What does a leader do with that?
I'm probably the wrong person to ask. I don't know. Right. Right. Well, but but
you're the person on the
We're like, well, can can you give him more hours? Is that even a possibility?
Do you have the coverage? Like, sometimes the answer is no just by
the numbers. Like, sorry, dude. Can I help you get a
second job?
Well, and on the female side, no, that's the dude side. On the female side,
it's my husband's moving out. I've got to go get childcare now,
and I'm going to need to be I'm not going to need to take on
another shift. I actually need to do less work so I can go pick up
my kids now. Yeah. Because I actually have less
coverage. That's the practical consideration on the female side
Mhmm. Of the equation. And I don't know what what and and increasingly, we've
seen calls from government, not just in this country, in the United States, but all
across the world for paid maternity, paid
paternity, these kinds of leave policies. But the leave policies
don't actually address what happens in the event of a divorce. They don't actually
address that. No nation state currently is even remotely
interested in addressing that challenge. Oh,
interesting. At least none none that I'm aware of. Most nation
states are desperate to get men and women together to have
babies. Please get together and have babies. We don't care
whether they're in wedlock, out of wedlock. Just have babies. And if you won't have
babies, then we'll import people who will.
I mean, that's I mean, I hate to be that
direct, but I mean, that's the policy of the World Economic Forum and
all those people who go to the Klaus Schwab meetings every quarter. Like, that's that's
the policy. If you won't have babies, we'll import people who will
because Oh. We
need live bodies to work. Oh, wait. What happened? Okay. You're back now.
Yeah. That was strange. Yeah. My mic cut out a little
bit. Yeah. I bought my I bought my mic. Anyway,
so we need live bodies. Like, we need people who will do the act
of increasing our population. Not to be prurient or
salacious. We just we need taxpayers.
Yeah. Right? Because how else are the social programs gonna get funded? Where else are
we gonna get the money from? We can't print our way out of it. The
United States tried that. Didn't work. So we can't print our way out of it,
so we're gonna need more bodies. And by the way, in the United States, we
now have an immigrant population. We're not gonna talk about how they
got here. We have an immigrant population that is increasing and that
immigrant population does what? They have babies.
Most nation states are focused on how to get people to have babies. They don't
really care what happens at least not at a national policy level
from what I'm aware of what happens when that
relationship breaks up. They don't really care about that.
And, fundamentally, I think that's a blind spot in leadership.
By the way, I've been a freelancer. I haven't worked a regular job in, like,
15 years either, so it's fine. Right. But I've but I but I've
your world. So you But I've led other people. Right. I I've met other people,
and I've put put teams together. And I have had team members come to me
and say, I need to work a few hours because I gotta pick up my
kid. Or, I'm thinking about a
particular individual in person in particular where, like, he did break up with his girlfriend,
and it was a lot of drama for him, and he brought that drama to
work. Yeah. See, that's not that
that's that's what can't I feel like can't be okay.
You gotta oh, that that was the you you said, you know,
I need to work less hours Mhmm. Because I have to go pick up the
kids. Something that I really admire
about a gal that I coached with for a long time, she coached me.
Mhmm. And her company, she doesn't,
like it's it's it's the idea that you your the
value that you produce is not tied to
the hours that you work. Mhmm. So as long as you're
doing the thing that I need you to do, I do not care
how long it takes you to do it. Right. So and that's how she structures
her company. She doesn't pay people, like like, I
think, like, obviously, I think she pays everything. Everything's above board. She's not
doing Right. Right. Anything shady or anything, but
she she she talks about paying people for the value of the job that they're
doing Yep. Versus and she's like, I don't care what hours you clock in.
So as long as you're doing the stuff that I need you to do.
Mhmm. And so that's kind of how I think
about that that quandary. We're like, well, I okay. As long
as you get your job done. Yeah.
I know that's not, like, a perfect solution, especially for, like, a lot of
our structures right now. People are paid hourly.
But I I would love to see that's an
ideal. And I know we'd we'd we'd we we move into that later.
Yeah. The idealistic and romantic and, like, ideally,
romantically, like, I would love to see us move away from the hourly,
like, paid hourly. Ideal
structure. What's the format? Well, what I wonder if
part of what I wonder is happening is or I wonder the
no. Let me frame it this way. I think that we
are in the mid, the midst, the cusp of,
and I I'm not gonna use the term 4th industrial revolution because it's used by
the World Economic Forum, and it implies a whole bunch of different things that I
don't think will happen. And some that I do if if people
in power and organizations in power get their way.
But I think underneath there is a core conception
that is true, and the core conception is this.
The industrial revolution that brought us everything that
we are looking at, including, by the way, our modes of leadership
and our modes of marriage and habitation and family raising, because
it's all even schooling, it's all part of it.
That no longer works. And it's
not because we aren't getting the same outcomes that we were getting
from it previously. It's because those outcomes are matching
and aren't useful in the reality that we live in. So I talk about
sometimes I went to the schooling. Right? Why did the kid have to go to
school from K through 12 in America
and sit in rows and be educated from the sage on the stage at the
front of the room? Does it make any sense?
And so COVID broke open that. And I believe that fundamentally
we should have a basket of educational options that people can take advantage of. And
the state, quite frankly, should be agnostic about which
option a parent picks. Just
like, by the way, the state should be agnostic about who the parent marries or
doesn't marry or whatever. The state should have zero interest in any of
this. But I understand at a taxation
level why the state does. On an educational level, I understand that an
ideologically an ideological level why the state has
an interest in that. Right? But education is
just one area. Right? And so we've noted, but
what we would do, we don't have enough, what do you call it, will,
maybe it is, political will, small p political will, to break the
structure and go through to the other side, which is part of what's happening,
I think, or part of what's building in our time, right? So
while you're correct in outlook at current events, I believe I believe fundamentally
that there are fractures in the system and in the structure
that everybody can see, but no one has a clue what this is
gonna look like on the other side of the structure breaking apart.
However, there are some people who are proposing ideas, like a basket of
educational options or like like in health care. Like,
why would we go to this one hospital in this one town when I can
do this basket of health care options, right, that are available to me?
Which puts more power, by the way, distributed power in the hands of individuals,
less hands in the power of a centralized state, which is why the state pushes
against all of this. K?
Well, when we talk about marriage and child raising,
I'm opposed to the state issuing marriage certificates for
anybody, by the way. I think marriage certificates should be issued by
religious institutions. Religious institutions should be left alone by the
state, be done. Now that doesn't work for
everybody. It doesn't work for same sex folks, it doesn't work for folks who
have more progressive ideologies, it doesn't work for folks that believe in
glorious Marxist revolution, it doesn't work for them. And I get it. It doesn't work
for you and where you want to your outcomes and things that you want. I
get it. I understand. It doesn't work for you. Cool.
But the state should be neutral on
this. By the way, the state should also be
neutral. Or not, it should be neutral. The state should be as neutral on this
as it is on divorce. Now, if you go look at divorce laws in various
states, divorce laws tend to favor
women and children over men because the
state steps in in the role of protector and provider
that a man would traditionally be in. If the state got out of caring about
that, I think more men and
women would make I think men and women both
would would shift in how they make their choices
about who to cohabitate, have relations with,
have romance with. And I think it would be much more transactional
in a way where it's not transactional now. It's it's sort of a
faux romantic kind of thing versus a transactional
thing. Because, look,
if I'm getting married, I should be looking at whoever it is
I'm going to be married to, yes, as a person who I can grow with,
to your point earlier, who I can grow with and and all these kinds of
things. By the way, grow within a practical kind of way
across all spectrums of agreement, understanding that that person may grow into
something that I might not like. And so I have to be okay with that
over the long term. And by the way, I may grow into something that they
may not like. I have to be practical about this.
But if the state is the backstop to me making a bad decision,
which by the way it is in divorce, and it is in divorce laws, the
state's the backstop for women, well,
then I can just be romantic because there's no
what's what's the downside? And, by the way, this is a
very red pill argument. It is. It is a very red pill argument, and the
red pill community will probably be clapping for me and be like, hey. You didn't
go far enough. Shut up, boys. Sit down. And then I got problems with you
too. You're not making decisions based on romance. You're
basing decisions based on sex, which no one wants
to talk about that out loud, but that's true. You're making decisions based
on how this woman looks, you know, in a tight
dress, which is great, except here's the
problem. When you get what it is you wanna get from
that woman and she has a baby, her body ain't gonna look
like the same way it looked in that tight dress when you first got her.
It's just not. And are you willing to live with that? You're not. Because you
have this weird ideal in your head and the ideal judges you, and the
ideal stop. So stop it. And so I think if you've got
the state out of part of that process, what would
happen is men and women would adjust naturally.
And by the way, it would happen organically. And in 5,
10 years, we have a totally completely different system and structure because it'll happen quite
quickly. Men and women are gonna make those negotiations quite quickly at a very practical
level. Women would start withholding sexual favors, all
for all kinds of different reasons, they would make up the 10,000 reasons women have
in their heads for withholding. They would make up all those reasons, and men would
come on. And men would make all the reasons for why we gotta storm the
castle, and history would move on.
Right? But the state would be agnostic. And by the way, I think if
Russia did this, Russia's fertility rate would go up. If Vladimir
Putin stops talking about this and just got the state out of the
way. Does Russia ever get the
state out of the way? Well, you know, this is a challenge. Right? This is
a challenge for nation states. Right? China, perfect example. One
child policy. The state
explicitly made a made a policy about fertility
and, quite frankly, in areas even they didn't touch on, marriage, cohabitation,
divorce. They made they made a by making a one child policy, they made a
statement about all those things and look at how well that
worked. They don't even report their population numbers anymore. They'll
probably be at 800,000,000 people by the end of this century,
maybe, we think. For what?
Because you're trying to prevent overpopulation? You're trying to prevent
whatever is gonna happen naturally between men and women who couldn't negotiate it, by the
way, on their own without the state interrupting. And that's my objection.
I do not think the state has an interest in this. Just like I don't
think the state has an interest in or should have an interest in education or
health care. All these areas, the states involved in
why why are you there Right. When people who just
negotiate those things independently. My word vomit
over. There you go. Okay. Rant
over. Just push the box out of the
room. You may all send me don't
bother, Kristen. She's the guest. You can send me all your dirty
emails at I don't really care to hear your
feedback.com. No. No. It's fine. No. No. Please tell
me that I'm wrong. Really? I mean, mark it up
in LinkedIn, wherever it is. You get this, my guest. Tell me if you've made
it this far, tell me that I'm wrong. Tell me that I'm like, this is
not correct. Because I think at the root of this is that ideal of
romantic love, like we've been talking about with the sonnets, but then it grows into
all these other areas because people are trying to scale their experience,
and I think it's a real challenge for leaders. Okay. Back to the
sonnets. Less of me and more William Shakespeare.
Sonnet 73. From sonnets by William
Shakespeare from the Folger Shakespeare Library.
And I quote, that time of year thou mayest in me behold when
yellow leaves or none or few do hang upon those
bows which shake against the cold, bear ruined choirs
where late the sweet birds sang, in me, thou seest
the twilight of such day as after sunset fadeth in the
west, which by and by black night doth take
away death's second self that seals up all
in rest. In me, thou seest the glowing of such
fire that on the ashes of his youth, not lie as the deathbed
whereon it must expire consumed with that
which it was nourished by. This thou perceivest
which makes thy love more strong, to love that well
which thou must let you leave long.
That's a good one. It's a very good one. Being
a romantic in a cynical,
skeptical, as I just ranted, mechanistic age,
surrounded by the results of and and by the way, they are the
plentiful results of a scientific materialistic aesthetic
is a real struggle. When we
talk about being a romantic, we're typically referencing
the culture and ideals of the Romantic period. And the Romantic period in
English literature was a direct response, a revolutionary response, such
as it were to the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
The Romantic period began in 1798 and continued into
some will say 18 37 or even 18 50. And
that famously covers a time that encompasses
the American Revolution, the British Industrial Revolution, and the
French Revolution, as well as Napoleon.
And it was also a time of the painters like Eugene Delacroix, who
painted in a particular kind of way, and the poet William
Wordsworth, who wrote in a particular kind of way, and of
course, the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
the German who wrote in a particular kind of way.
Now, in our time, almost no one is a romantic anymore
due to the fact that romanticism requires a connection to the land
as opposed to a connection to technology, a love for the individual
rather than a love for the revolution
of the masses. For the romantics, the critic
Isaiah Berlin says this, and I quote, in the realm of
ethics, politics, and aesthetics, it was the authenticity and
sincerity of the pursuit of inner goals that mattered. This
applied equally to individuals and groups, states, nations,
movements. This is most evident in the aesthetics of romanticism
where the notion of eternal models, a platonic vision of
ideal beauty, which the artist seeks to convey, however imperfectly on
canvas or in sound, is replaced by a passionate belief in spiritual freedom
and individual creativity. The painter, the poet,
the composer do not hold up a mirror to nature, however ideal,
but invent. They do not imitate the doctrine of mimesis,
but create not merely the means but the goals that they
pursue. These goals represent the self expression of the artist's own
unique inner vision to set aside, which in response to the
demands of some external voice like the church, the state, the public
opinion, family, friends, or even those arbiters of
taste, is an act of betrayal of what alone
justifies their existence for those who are in any sense creative,
close quote. But,
Berlin also notes in his essay from which I pulled that quote that in the
20th century, the Marxist revolutions,
Hitler and fascism, and, of course, all of
the communist revolutions that killed almost a 100,000,000
people in the very bloody 20th century knocked the hell out of
the innocence of the romantics. And of course, the moral and
political power of romanticism has declined over the last declined
precipitously over the last 100 years. I would
assert that in our era
in our era, it might be time to resurrect the power
of the romantics yet again,
where the artist seeks to convey, however imperfectly on canvas or in
sound, a
passionate belief in spiritual freedom and individual
creativity.
I think at the end of the 4th turning, where we are
surrounded by the benefits of technology I mean, heck, look at this
podcast. Right? I would not be talking to you without mechanistic
engineering technology. And I think that artificial
intelligence is going to prove that we've kind of
hit dead end on some of this. Not that there won't be technological
wonders on the other side. There will be because people are creative,
but I think we've currently hit a dead end.
Peter Thiel, the investor, invested in Facebook
and owns Palantir, and who also was part of the PayPal
mafia along with Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman infamously
has said, and I'm going to rough quote this, we
were promised houses on the Moon and vacations to
Mars and instead we got Facebook and tweeting in
280 characters. A
mechanistic mind gives you tweeting in 280 characters.
A romantic mind gets you to Mars, no matter how
mechanistic that mind may be. So I would
argue that Elon is probably a romantic.
By the way, he's got he's got 12 kids and 4 marriages, I think, and
5 relationships under his spouse. So, I mean, he's doing his job. He's
doing his part for I'm doing my part.
Increasing the increasing population of the country.
He's doing his part. But I think we
need to resurrect the ideals of romanticism. I think we
need to set aside the the demands of the external voice, church, state,
public opinion, family, friends, arbiters of taste, in exchange
for a perception of not a perception of pursuit of quality
first, a romantic pursuit of quality.
Not idealistic, not in a John Lennon kind of imagine there's no heaven
kind of way, which by the way is a terrible song.
But a oh, it's terrible. Everybody knows it's terrible. Come on now.
But but I think we need to set it I think we need to
pursue quality in opposition
to a merely mechanical mind, a merely evolutionarily
driven AI produced
automaton vision of the future, which I think a
lot of people want to push us towards.
As we close here, because it's time for me to let Kristen go. She's been
with me long enough today. How can romantics operate
in our mechanistic time? And I ask you this as a writer specifically, but that's
kind of why I came up with this question here for you. Well, I have
been thinking about the definitions. Like, how how are
you defining romantic? Because you did you did just distinguish it between
romantic and ideal. Or just you did did just
make the distinction between romantic and ideal. So I'm trying to figure
out what does it mean to be a romantic? Well, I
think I think to be a romantic is to acknowledge that there are
eternal models. Right? And I think that that there
are, I think it is also to acknowledge and to
pursue quality. I think that that is a romantic
pursuit and not quality in sort of a, again, a mechanistic
conception of quality. But quality in terms
of we are pursuing a platonic vision of, of, of,
of an ideal, a platonic ideal of beauty or a
platonic idea of capital T truth. And we're
going to do that, with spiritual
freedom and with individual creativity in direct opposition
to a mechanistic, framework.
And we're going to do this ruthlessly, and we're going to do it with a
smile on our face, or maybe we're gonna do it frowning, it doesn't matter, But
we're going to do it ruthlessly. And, by the way, I think there are romantics
in our time. I think we've got or people who have a romantic bent
in our time. So I mentioned Elon Musk already.
I think, Jordan Peterson is probably a romantic.
I think that, weirdly enough,
the writer Jack Carr is a romantic.
I think that as far as directors go, like if we're talking
about film directors, you'd be hard pressed to find a romantic film
director in our time. I think Christopher Nolan is probably about as close
as we're going to get right now. You're with del Toro?
Yeah. He just doesn't do enough work, but, yeah, I would throw Del Toro in
there. He just doesn't. He just doesn't do enough work, you know? I mean,
you're muddling around Pinocchio on Netflix. Like, what are we doing? Did you
watch that? I I so I've I've seen the trailer for it, and
I kinda go, well, okay. I mean, I see what you're doing. It's amazing. It's
amazing. Okay. It's amazing. Okay. Amazing. It's amazing.
Okay. Alright. I loved it. I loved it. I will take it up on
your recommendation. Yeah. But I also see it in Craftsman. So there's this
show I watch on, oh,
on HBO Max, which comes through either TLC or the
Discovery Channel, whichever property they own, called Restoration
Road where this guy named Clint Harp, and it was on for about 5
seasons, where basically he goes around the country working with people who are trying to
restore barns and restore,
and restore, what do you call it, old buildings, right, and literally taking
them out of the northeast. Like, he'll take a barn out of upstate New York,
where I used to live, where they don't care about it. It's just rotting in
a field somewhere because it doesn't fit the mechanistic
mentality of our current time. And then he takes that to, like, Idaho and turns
into a cheese factory where people are being taught how to make cheese and do
weaving and and do, you know, handcrafts and all these kind of amazing
things. And he does this repeatedly. He's on 5 years of
content, you know, on this. And it's not
just Barnes, it's also silos and things like that. He's getting into the history, and
he's understands that. And you can tell when he shows up that he cares about
the Platonic vision and the ideal of truth,
and his carpentry skills that he brings to the game
are secondary to pursuing that with quality.
That's what I'm talking about as being a those are people who I believe are
romantics. Those are examples that I would that I would call on
in our time.
So how do you do that? Yeah. How do you operate? How do we get
more of that and not less of that? How do we get more of that?
That's really the question. How do we get more of that? How do we squeeze
more of that juice out of the body politic? Because I think we need more
of it. Yeah.
Well,
my brain just went all the way back to, like, child formation.
School. You just have to completely
change the format of school because right now, like,
what gets pushed in school? Oh,
nonsense. Science. That's
physics and But even there, it's not good STEM.
It's the most basic level STEM stuff because
because And kids are doing calculus before high school now. It's just like
what They're doing they're doing calculus before high school so they can think
like computers, but they're not being taught literature
in high school. That's They're trying.
Yes. It is. It is. It is. And so,
yeah, start there. But but but that doesn't really answer the question.
That that's, like, long term. Right? You have to you have to you have to
shift things, when when children are
forming. But how like, romantics because I
consider myself a romantic. Mhmm.
And how do I my my first thought was that, well, I have to
have my needs met first. Mhmm. Right. So
it's kind of like, well, how do you do that without forcing yourself
into the the utilitarian mechanistic system?
Mhmm. That's that is one of those questions I think
the answers will be different for everybody. I think I I've said this before
on the podcast. I feel like I gotta get lucky where, like, I had to
have a couple. I've, you know, multi passionate. Like, I'm I'm I'm
a classically trained musician, and I can travel pretty
closely to a fairly affluent neighborhood and teach private music lessons
there. But wait a minute. Wait. And that doesn't take a whole lot of time.
So now I can work part time for a pretty full time
income. And then But let me push back on that a little bit, though. I
don't think that's luck. I think that's a series of tiny
decisions that you made based on your talent, skills, and competencies that I
couldn't have made. If I tried to make those exact same decisions, I would not
have wound up in the same clearing at the end of the path that you
wound up at. Just like if you had made the same decisions
that I had made, you would not have wound up here. There's no
way. We were different people. So people what we call luck
or what people call fortune, I really think we
need to use an older term, and it is a religious term,
so it's a term of the romantics, like, particularly the American romantics,
providence. Mhmm. It's this idea that there is
this entire superstructure called God that
cares about who you are at an individual level, at a
microscopic decision making level, and is pushing
you and or or in some cases, you are you are
allowing yourself to be taken down a particular path that's going to
wind you up at a particular clearing, but no one else can go
can go on that river other than you. The
guy across the street can't. And by the way, it's brutal
because the guy across the street might be homeless. He missed his
river, and we can have compassion for him and we can
wanna feed him and take care of him, and Jesus said the poor you will
have with you always, which is a brutal truth, by the
way, that no modern nation state wants to hear. But
that person rode down the particular river they were on and they wound up in
a clearing at the end of the path. There's no guarantee that you would have
wound up there either. So we call it luck. I would push
back on the luck piece. I I I No. That's fine. That's fair. I that's
just usually it's, like, the easiest turn of phrase. We like Sure. Through all of
this craziness. Sure. I never would have guessed that this is where and now
I'm like so kinda to your point about being a romantic, I,
back in November, I, purchased the
music store that I teach out of. Mhmm. And
the model that that store runs on
is not was it mechanistic? Util like,
it's it's in terms of profit, it's terrible idea. And when we
were trying to raise money to preserve that model, everybody kept calling in. They
were like, you have to change your model. You have to change your model. And
we were like, no. We're not gonna do this because this
model, romantic, ideal, whatever, like, this model
serves music education the best. So we're going
to figure out a way to preserve it. So I think it's like
sorry. The phrase both and comes to comes to mind again. Mhmm. Because,
like, we don't like, we we are
adjusting our model and that we are taking ideas that
people suggested to create revenue in
a different area so that we can support and
keep the model that supports our teachers,
our music teachers, and therefore, our music students,
and therefore, our entire community so well. So
there's a chance a romantic vision. That's a romantic vision. 100%.
100%. Because the other like, the the the suggestion that we got
was turn all of your teachers into w two and pay them less. And I
was like, what? I wouldn't have like, I wouldn't be at this store
Mhmm. If that's if that's why if that's how the store
operated. So, like, we're not doing that. Right. But
that is the best way to, like or not best way.
Sorry. Some would say that that's the easiest, most efficient way
of getting to higher revenue, of making the business more sustainable. Well,
in part of what the Romantics historically between 1798 and 18
37 did right around 1848, 18 50, what they
were pushing back against was capitalism. They were pushing
back on the growing accumulation of capital
via industrialized mass.
And the response that you're getting is the hangover
from that ideal.
The problem is on the other side of the industrial
revolution that we all now live in,
we've gotten to the edges of that model. We financialized all the
way out to the edges of that model. This is what this is why when
MBAs run Boeing Airlines, engines fall out of planes in
the sky and you can't get astronauts back from where you put them on a
space station. This is why. Because the
MBAs are running things and they financialized out the
system, all over the system, the organization, all the way out to the
end to drain the last piece of capital from
it for shareholders or for,
or for executives or whoever or even for just
regular people. And, by the way, people like to bag on executives. Usually, those
executive compensations are usually stock options, usually not
salary. And by the way, most of your salary utilization also
goes up. Yes. Not as much as the CEOs, but also goes up every time
the stock price goes up. So I don't even wanna hear about it. But, please.
It's everybody in the ship together. Okay? But they financialize
all the way out to the nearest to the to the nth degree, And
a romantic view says we can leave
something on the table. Yeah. That's okay.
But and as you were talking, what came to mind was, like, what is the
point of accumulating all of that? Like, could people literally have more
money than they can spend? Right. And it's not us,
but it it doesn't matter. Like, it I think part of
clinging to the romantic view is realizing
that before you scrape and fight to get there and you
realize this wasn't worth it. Right. Like,
what am I going to do with the
resources that I have now and, like,
the training in my brain and, like, what what value can
I give to people? What's what's meaningful to me? So maybe
that's maybe that's a a decent answer.
Like, find figure take the time
to slow down. Go walk at a beach
or in a forest or next to a river, because I
do. I go to the beach once a week at least just to walk and
listen and pray. Mhmm.
Yeah. Absolutely. I get lots of
ideas. See, that's part of
riding that river that the transcendent is sending
you down. It's providence, not luck. And so that providence is
carrying you to the next thing too. And and I think I would I can
hear the cynics being like, I don't have time. Like, I have to work. I
am so exhausted. And I'm like, I was there too. Mhmm.
So the hard part is, you know,
doing all the math, making all of the making sure, you know,
your bills are paid or or crashing with mom and dad for a while
because we did that. Mhmm. Just it's kinda doing what you have
to do to get to what's worth doing. Well and what
is what is doing with less look like? Does doing with
less look like
does doing with less so you can homeschool your children look like,
you know, all the weight of, making money
falls on one person, and that other person
takes on all of the weight of the other pieces of running the household.
Period. Full stop. Period. And
there's no resentment, by the way, in that. There's no room for resentment in that
because what is happening is occurring at a particular
quality level that could not have occurred in order
to pursue a platonic vision of truth to educate
the next generation. Most people think that and I I think this is a tragedy.
I think many people, not I think most, many people I
believe are operating on the idea
that a child's decisions
that they make when they're 19 20 are a reflection on them as
a parent. And the reality is
the decisions they're making at 19 20
after you've dumped $375,000
for a year, every year for 20 years into them, the
reality is and by the way, that's
at the top level. Like you can raise a child on not $375,000 a year.
Like, please give me a break. But if you've done that, if you've bought
into that idea, then the decisions that they make are a return on your investment.
But the reality is the decisions that they make have nothing to do with
you. And the romantic ideal,
which by the way is very practical, not soft, the practical
romantic idea is we will, for less than $375,000
a year, put into this child the
ability to make decisions that will impact the 3rd 4th generation
down rather than worrying about how much money we're making or not making
right now. Because this is temporary and we are temporary and we
will not be here forever. We have to continue somehow.
That's a romantic aesthetic that now we can link back
to practical considerations of marriage. Who do I marry that's going to have the
same aesthetic as I do? And if that person doesn't have the same aesthetic, which
by the way, I should probably be asking this by them on like date number
3, and after date number 3 probably should be like move on.
If their non aesthetic isn't matching, then I'm not going to be
engaged in the immediate hedonistic gratification of my base
desires, and we all know what that is. Instead, we're going to wait till
we actually have some meaningful connection on all of these levels.
Whether or not the state agrees with us is irrelevant. We're going to have some
meaningful connection on all these levels because we're actually in charge of creating the
future state, not the current state that the state
is in. But that's a romantic ideal all
wide to marriage and family and childbearing and
all of this. So with that
Kristen, do you have anything you'd like to promote today?
Yes. I know you're working on a book. We are. You're grinding towards the end
of it. What what would you like to say about that? And, of course, we
we would love to have you back on. I keep I said this last episode.
I'll say it again this other, though, we would love to have you back on
when you have the book and talk all about that and the process and Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How all that came together. And so those
those where we're at with the book and what's happening with that. Give us an
update. If you like if you like the conversation on romantic
love or love in general, it that our first this the
novels that we're working on right now is a trilogy, and it is a romance.
So it's we explore a lot. I've had lots of thoughts
about relationships and love. And so it's I think it's very interesting and very
different. It's very different for a romance, because I think a lot
of romances focus on the will they, won't they. And then, kind of a
spoiler. We we we ditched the will they, won't they.
Not not not halfway through really, but, like, buy book 3. It's
like, no. We're into, like, hey. How do you make 2
very different people to have fallen off? Like, how do they make
their relationship work? Mhmm. So it's just been so much fun to
explore that psychologically. It is fantasy though,
I will say. I'm just I grew up playing or not playing, sorry,
reading fantasy. Mhmm. I love fantasy. I play D and D. So if you
like that sort of thing, we are posting our chapters. They are the rough drafts.
But if you would like to check them out and just see, hey. Do I
like this? Please let us know. Also, if you like, this chapter sucks, we're like,
cool. Why? Why does it suck? Please tell us.
We are at world of Orda. So world of Orda
is urda.com. And we're also
I've I apologize for the state of our website. We're trying to update
it. I threw it together, a couple years ago, and now I
look at it and I'm like, oh my gosh. It's so bad.
My websites can be updated. I might have a look at that point. Yeah. Yeah.
So can be updated. We do need to update our website. But the posters are
posters. The chapters are there. That's probably the
easiest place to go find them unless you're on, like, Wattpad, which
who's on Wattpad? Not I. There's a lot of people on Wattpad,
but probably not your audience. They're probably not. No. They don't know what Wattpad
is. That's okay. That's alright. I know a Wattpad is, and I'm not even
on there. So Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Awesome. Well, we will
post a link to world of Urda. Right? Did I say that
correctly? Awesome. I mean, I think I put, like, a German pronunciation,
not, but it's fine. Yeah. Urda. My coauthor says Oder. It's
fine. Urda. I cringe a lot. We'll we'll have a link to where you can
find it. Yes. We'll have a link in the show notes where you can go
and check out all the chapters of her new book. And, of course, when she
has her book out, we will invite her back to talk about
her book and the writing process because I'm fascinated by all of that, and
I think that you all should be fascinated by that too. And
so, well, with that,
we're out.