The Third Man by Graham Greene w/Jesan Sorrells & Ryan J. Stout

The Third Man by Graham Greene
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Exploring Graham Greene’s postwar classic, The Third Man, Jesan Sorrells and Ryan J. Stout unravel the psychology of unreliable narrators, leadership in times of nihilism, and the timeless challenge of ethical decision-making amid a world of grifters and cons. They dive into Greene’s cinematic writing style, his nuanced character portrayals, and how postwar Vienna mirrors our own era of skepticism and manipulation. The conversation draws out practical leadership lessons—particularly the need for sincerity and humility—in a landscape shaped by both history and human nature.

• Book Title: The Third Man
• Author: Graham Greene
• Guests: Jesan Sorrells (host), Ryan J. Stout (guest).

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Time-Stamped Overview
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00:00 "The Myth of Modern Nihilism."

07:55 Graham Greene's Mastery of Characterization.

12:38 "Relatable Characters and the Appeal of Dark Humor."

20:30 "Graham Greene's Cinematic Legacy."

24:03 "Post-War Struggles and Black Markets."

31:58 Post-War Deals, Distrust, and Vienna.

34:01 "Vienna's Loss and Legacy in The Third Man."

39:21 "Friendship, Loneliness, and Keen Observation."

48:00 "Observations, Language, and Hidden Motives."

54:59 "AI Scams: Bots and Deception."

59:01 "Children, Leadership, Ethics, and Modern Challenges."

01:04:17 "Making Others Feel Heard & Valued."

01:06:28 "Critiquing the 'Citizen of the World' Ideal."

01:12:01 "Finding Meaningful and Spiritual Connections."

01:18:18 "Harry Lime’s Iconic Ferris Wheel Scene."

01:26:27 "Recognizing Transformation Through Self-Love."

01:29:33 "The Importance of Open-Minded Humility."

01:37:47 "Moral Choices, Lost Knowledge, and Invention."

01:42:29 Defending Free Speech and Objective Truth.

01:45:51 "Film Versions and Orson Welles Radio."
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Opening theme composed by Brian Sanyshyn of Brian Sanyshyn Music.
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Creators and Guests

Host

Jesan M. Sorrells

Host of the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast!

Producer

Leadership Toolbox

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

Guest

Ryan J. Stout

weekly podcasts on weekly poems

What is Leadership Lessons From The Great Books?

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

Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and

this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books

podcast, episode number 183.

From our book today, I'd like to pick up

and, and maybe make a little bit of a, maybe make a little bit of

a character introduction.

Now, when I talk about this character, when

I introduce this character, you're going

to see him in your mind, hopefully,

cinematically. And I quote,

one never knows when the blow may fall.

When I saw Rollo Martins first, I made this note on him for

my security police files. Quote, "In

normal circumstances, a cheerful fool drinks too much and may cause a little

trouble. Whenever a woman passes, raises his eyes

and makes some comment, but I get the impression that really he'd rather not be

bothered. He has never really grown up, and perhaps that accounts for the way

he worshiped Lime," close quote. I

wrote there that phrase, quote, "in normal

circumstances," unquote, because I met him first at Harry Lime's

funeral. It was February, and the gravediggers had been forced

to use electric drills to open the frozen ground in Vienna's Central

Cemetery. It was as if even nature were doing its

best to reject Lime, but we got him in at last and laid

the earth back on him like bricks. He was vaulted in,

and Rollo Martins walked quickly away as though his long gangly legs

wanted to break into a run, and the tears of a boy ran down his

35-year-old face. Rollo Martins believed in

friendship, and that was why what happened later was a worse shock to

him than it would have been to you or me. You,

because you would have put it down to an illusion, and me, because

at once a rational explanation, however wrongly, would have come to

my mind. If only he had come to tell me then,

what a lot of trouble would have been

saved.

We postmodern people, we believe that we

invented everything from sexual behaviors to

ironic detachment, from sincerity

interpreted as cringe to anger

interpreted as social reforming passion. We

believe in our own time, in our own era, that we invented

nihilism. We believe we invented existential dread and

that we believe that we are the only folks in history or in the

history of the world to notice, to

recognize, right, that there are patent absurdities

that exist in the realm of human experience.

The problem with such a belief system, the problem with such a

worldview, the problem with our us convincing ourselves of

this so deeply in our own time

is not that it is so

fallible and naive, but that it is so

incorrect. It's partly incorrect

because we are not students of history in the same way that people of the

past were. We don't believe in the cyclical nature of human

experience because our technologies, like the one bringing you this podcast

here, and our propaganda factories from the schools to the

media, act perpetually and breathlessly surprised

every time some human being does something somewhere,

usually in the form or usually in the context of the 24-hour

news cycle. It's also

incorrect because we tend to ignore the evidence presented to our very own

eyes of the cyclical nature of life, from the

seasons that we live in to the ways in which the

homeless man behaves like clockwork on the street corner when

he's panhandling. Either way,

we are constantly fooled by history, constantly mugged

by reality, perplexed by change, and rendered

unable to address the deception and manipulation of,

like, some of the people we're going to talk about today, like a particular person

we're going to talk about today, unreliable narrators,

or even the behaviors of characters

that may show up unreliably in

unreliable narratives.

Speaking of which, today on the show we

are going to cover a book whose fictional narrative links the

books— links the book we covered in episode number 121,

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, with ideas we talked about

in episode 166, where we discussed the book by the British historian

B.H. Liddell Hart, Why don't we learn from history?

Today we are going to glean what we can and apply it to our real

lived lives from a great little book,

The Third Man by Graham

Greene. Leaders,

the fact is that when we postmoderns don't learn from

history, unreliable narrators and unreliable

narratives can have their way with us in all

manner of human endeavors.

And back for this episode from his most recent

jog with us in episode number 180,

where we discuss Thomas Sowell's thesis

about the tension, the Hegelian dialectic between the

constrained and the unconstrained vision

deeply embedded in the human heart, which, by the way, a little of that shows

up here. Actually, a lot of that shows up here in The Third

Man. Is our friend Ryan J. Stout.

How are you doing today, Ryan? How's it going?

I'm doing well. The sun is shining and,

you know, I woke up, got most of my teeth and

feeling pretty good. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure as always.

Honor to be here. Absolutely. To talking about

this to this book

and the human condition,

such as it were. Yes. So we talked a little bit

about Graham Greene, and we talked about the

literary life of Graham Greene. You should go check out the most recent Shorts

episode that we released, Shorts number 215,

on leadership in absurd times. We talked

in there about the background of Graham Greene, who he was as a

writer, a journalist, and his

stature or the way that he was perceived

by other writers of his time, including William Golding, author

of Lord of the Flies, as a Catholic writer,

right? Graham Greene in that space

is going to act as a precursor to another very Catholic writer we're going to

talk about,, later on this month, uh, when we

cover the book The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K.

Chesterton, uh, with our good friend Neil Kalachovsky,

uh, former physics genius

inventor and current venture capitalist and

SBIR advocate. Uh, so we'll have him on the show, um, another couple of

episodes. You're going to want to listen to that. But

Graham Greene, And I made this point in the shorts episode, and

this sort of leads into my first question to Ryan. As an author, Graham

Greene was able to observe human behavior, um, not only

in the character of Rollo Martin as the

mark, you know, in The Third Man, which is sort of how he's set up

there by the narrator just in that first little piece that we read from the

first chapter, but also the behavior of the British police

officer narrator, um, a gentleman named

Calloway. And even in the behavior of— and we'll talk about this guy quite a

bit— the grifter, Harry Lime, the hustler,

the matchstick man, such as it were.

And the way Graham Greene sort of sets up all these

characters, he sets them up in

a way from that open where you get everything right away.

And this was Graham Greene's mastery, right? So So we

have a funeral that's happened. We know it's in Vienna. We know

it's post-war. We know

that Rollo's 35, so too old to

be a child, but not old enough to be a font

of wisdom. And we can sense from the

narrator Calloway that he's a little bit of a, for lack of a

better term, a stiff upper lip British police

man, right, um, in, uh, in this part of,

uh, in this part of Vienna. And the thing

is that unlike Nabokov, who I already mentioned, or

even Liddell Hart, Graham Greene was a writer and

a thinker and a creator who— and I definitely got this from reading

The Third Man— um, who saw through the veneer of decency

that surrounds most human behavior, but he wasn't dismissive of

that decency in and of itself. He wanted people,

and he pushes his character Rollo Martin to behave

decently, if fallibly, but indeed decently throughout

the entire narrative, right? He

believed, as most of our modernist grandfathers and great-grandfathers

did, that a human being could rise above banality

and absurdity and even nihilism and

overcome. And so that sort of opens up, I guess,

our first question for Ryan, who, by the way, is a big fan

of absurdity, big fan of absurdist. We've had a whole— we've had discussions

about this. We've sparred back and forth about this over the course

of our friendship and our time

together. I am less of a fan of the absurdist only because I think—

and I made this point in the shorts episode— I think pointing

out absurdity doesn't get you anywhere. I think it's

a childish sort of response to absurdity. Like, give

me the solution for this. And please don't tell me that the solution is just

to eat, drink, and be merry, or tomorrow we may die, or just to

like have fun, or even just to like smoke in a

French ironic existential way. I need something more than irony

or cynical detachment. And Graham Greene, to his credit, I was not going into

The Third Man looking for this. Graham Greene does give you an

alternative to the, to the Camus, Sartre sort

of deal with

absurdity. But it's an alternative that takes a level of sincerity to pull

off that I think us postmoderns don't have because we interpret sincerity

as cringe these days. So

I guess maybe the question to open is,

Ryan, what did you think of the book? What did you think of

The Third Man? And then I'll ask maybe a couple of follow-up

questions as I, as I sort of round the corner here towards a point. So

what did you think of The Third Man? Let's start with that. Thank you kindly.

Great intro. Um,

I, I like, I like the book. I like the language.

I like the details

that at

times, uh, I mean, could be seen as unnecessary

because it does not necessarily add to the depth

of the story. It

almost seems, um,

it will— it adds to the depth of the characters, and it also

gives you more insight into who Calloway

is. Much like John Denver would, you

know, would say, you know, when asked why he's so popular,

or, you know, he said, I write about the human condition. So the human condition

is, it will never be out of style. It's

something relatable. At some point, I

can relate to every single character in the story because

there's just enough good and just

enough— what's the word I'm looking

for— just enough

temptation kind of throughout where you can understand where the character is coming

from, often pushing up to that line very much so with

the specks of dots and down there. And so, and so where

is It's fun to entertain, and that's probably why we find

things humorous that are kind of dark at times,

because, you know, we get to see played out in movies and in

literature what we're thinking but we would never

behave. And so I think Green does a tremendous job

of doing that with all the characters. You get to see the

motivation of— I mean, the Schmidt

character And even I was listening to something

earlier, and this is in reference to the movie and

how almost in a Fellini-esque way, I

believe the person said that in the movie that, you know, everyone is

kind of grotesque looking, you know, even like the little

boy. And, and, but Anna's not. And then, and then, of course,

Harry Lyman. And so there's, there's these, these

these figures that kind of like, uh, transcend, that add to

the— this kind of like the sinister nature of,

of, um, of the, like, the behavioral aspect of, you know, you

could, uh, like, don't trust the book, judge a book by its

cover. Yeah. Um, yeah, I just think, um,

and, and the language that's used throughout I think is, is really wonderful

as well. I just like, you know, in Stephen King's

On Writing. He talks about the one when he talks to

other writers when they do readings

and what's a question that they wish they were asked more. And, you

know, so many writers say, we wish people would ask us about the language. And

I just think that's an excellent use of language. There's not a

wasted word. It's a really short,

compact, delivers on all fronts. And I

think contributing to that is, you

know, we see Rolo like right out of the

gate, like he's already— all we know him is

in the act

of— he's already in despair and confusion out of the gate. We have no

pre— there's no— there's no— he's not talking about spaghetti westerns and he's not

talking about like his failed writing career or anything. You're just going right

to the conflict, and so you open with that. And so,

right, and even though it opens like

that, Green does a fantastic idea with filling

in all those gaps

pretty quickly. The bar scene with Calloway, the

caviar sandwiches, the expense account, you know. And

so, yeah, he drinks a little too much, the blow, you know. And

yeah, his perception of of how

Roland Martin perceives

women. So you're talking about the underlying— so it's like, you're getting like

the response of a response, right? Perception of a perception, a perception

of reception. Yeah. Well, and he also, I

mean, in the, in the edition that I have, there's an introduction that was written

by, by Graham Greene. And he talks about

how he co-wrote this, co-wrote The Third

Man, um, with Carol Reed, who directed the film, the 1949 film The

Third Man, which of course starred Joseph Cotten, um,

as Holly Martin. They changed the name to Holly

Martin. Um, Trevor Howard was Major Calloway, and of

course the great humbug actor of the 20th century,

Orson Welles, And I'm not saying that as

a negative either. I think he understood something

about Hollywood that, and being an actor and being

a producer and being a writer and being a thespian, that a

lot of actors have missed. They miss the entire joke on

Orson Welles. Like, they miss the entire thing on him.

But, um, but he was in, uh, he was in, obviously he was in The

Third Man as, uh, as Harry Lime, right? And

so in the introduction, Graham

Greene talks about or writes about co-writing this with Carol

Reed, talks about the writing process. And one of the interesting things that he says

is this, I'll just read directly

from my book. He says this, and I quote, on these treatments, Carol Reed and

I worked closely together, covering so many feet of carpet a day,

acting scenes at each other. No third ever joined our

conferences. So much value lies in the clear cut and thrust of argument between

two people. To the novelist, of course, his novel is the

best he could do with a particular subject. He cannot help resenting many of the

changes necessary for turning it into a film or a play. But The Third

Man was never intended to be more than the raw material for a

picture. The reader will notice many differences between the story and the film, and he

should not imagine these changes were forced on an unwilling

author. As likely as not, they were suggested by the author. The film,

in fact, is better than the story because it is, in this case,

the finished state of the

story. Close quote. So to your

point, um, in looking up The Third Man, and this is one of my knocks

with like modern movies, particularly in our post-Marvel,

post-CGI, post-Marvel world, Um,

you know, The Third Man was an hour and 33 minutes.

It was a 93-minute film. They told an entire story in

an hour and a half.

We can't even get out of the gate in the first act

under an hour anymore in a movie. And it

has nothing to do with the script because it isn't

the script's fault. The script actually The writing is actually

terrible. Writing now is actually worse than it was in

the 1940s, even where writing is adapted from a novel.

So we just, we just talked about our previous episode, episode number

182. We talked about Oil by, um, by Upton

Sinclair. The first 100 pages of

that 575-page novel, which

was written in the 1920s or 1930s or

whatever, um, the first 100 pages of Oil were the basis for the

2007 film There Will Be Blood. The first 100

pages, that's all they could adapt. Couldn't

adapt the rest. It's like a 2.5-hour-long movie or 2-hour-long movie. It's a 2.5-hour-long

movie. And Paul Thomas Anderson just won an Oscar for Best Director for One Battle

After Another, a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio that I— and

I like Paul Thomas Anderson as a director, I

watched one trailer for that sucker. I lasted 10 seconds in and I

was out. I was done. I was like, I can't,

I don't need to see this. I already know the joke. So what

are you doing to me for 2 and a half hours? Graham Greene and Carol

Reed knew how to structure a story. To your

point, short sentences, really well-developed characters,

start with the conflict, They understood something about writing that I think a lot of

modern film writers— but let's put that aside for just a second. It's not

a film show, though we do talk a lot about film on this show, and

we will talk about the Third Man film because we have to talk about Orson

Welles. I mean, we just have to. We don't have a choice.

But, um, but putting that aside for just a second, the novel is definitely written

in a cinematic form. I agree with

that. So In thinking

about Graham Greene as a writer, I don't know if you did, if you looked

into his background or kind of dug around on him a little

bit. Um, had you ever interacted with any of Graham Greene's work before this? Did

you have any idea of who he was? He wrote something like 65

novels, um, during the course of the 20th century. He was shortlisted

for the, uh, Pulitzer— no, not the Pulitzer, the Nobel Prize for

Literature a couple of times, never won it. He was considered to be one of

the most prolific writers of

the 20th century actually. Just quoting from

his Wikipedia— oh, no, he didn't write 65 books, hold

on a second. Through 67 years of writing, which included

over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and

political issues of the modern world. His one novel, The Power and

the Glory, won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize. And The

Heart of the Matter won the 1948 James Tate Black Memorial Prize

and was shortlisted for the best of the James Tate Black. Greene was awarded

the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the

1981 Jerusalem

Prize. Unfamiliar with his work. Like I said,

the, the most I knew about the movie was that last

scene that I saw 20-some years ago sitting in

my grandmother's living room. And I just happened upon it,

WHYY Channel 13.

And I just remember Anna Schmidt walking and

then Holly leaning on the car and then just

that, and that row of trees on both sides, and how there was

like an R-esque feel to

it. And picking up a TV

Guide and going, what day is this? What date? And they're

going, oh wow, The Third Man. Well, I

never, uh, I, this looks like an incredible movie. And I like, that

was kind of the extent of my, uh, my Graham Greene knowledge.

Yeah. And I have the, uh, so this is The Third Man and the Fallen

Idol. And so Uh, I went through the book

twice, um, and I'll probably, you know, just pick up and, and read

The Fallen Idol as well. Yeah, I believe that was turned into

a film as well, if I remember correctly, um,

in 1948, um, also directed, I believe, by Carol

Reed. So, um, okay,

so Graham Greene. So you're, you're, you've got a little bit of a window into

him. You're a writer, you're a poet. Um, you talked about his

writing style, his language. What were you able to glean maybe

about his psychology a little bit as a writer, just from, just

from the little glimpse you've had with the third

man? I would

say, um, the importance of— well, You could

say the importance of

research. Okay. Um, because right out of the gate, so you have a war-torn, post-war-torn,

you know, the four quadrants being

occupied— what, Russia, Great Britain,

uh, Vienna, or it's post-war of

Vienna. Um, yeah, so the insight that goes in to kind of

like grasping the psyche of who would

be living and what their, uh, what their sort

of attitudes would be. And it goes into the

racketeering, and everyone was into racketeering. So clearly it was not a

wonderful place to live. Uh, it was not

economically this booming thing. There was a lot of people doing a

lot of kind of like black market activities

in order to survive. So it

wasn't behaving in a sinister way

for evil's sake, if I could say that, which makes

the lime thing

even more sinister. Because at one point, I believe

he's asking the neighbor, or if it's the doctor, and he said, well,

everyone was into trading cigarettes for

buffs. And or I'm trying to think of what

other kind of nefarious activity, but it would be the equivalent

of, I don't know, like I used to sell chai, like

black market chai, you know what I mean? Or I roast my own coffee and

I'm selling coffee out of my house rather than selling it to the

store. And then so whereas it was stamps, you

know, I think they mentioned stamps. And so

whereas it may not be like legal, those behaviors, but it just seemed like

a fairly destitute economy and a

destitute society where they were able to live and function because

it was governed under these, these four powers.

Um, but also

that the Governing Bodies

understood kind of the, the plight of the area and understood

that everyone was kind of into these

things. It reminds me of, in a

modern, postmodern context, that show from the

early 2000s on HBO, The

Wire, where, you know, yeah, it's,

it's drugged out Baltimore, right?

It's, it's, it's, you know, drug violence, all that. But

The Wire never dealt

with the situation that the

drug dealers and the kids and the, and the,

and the mothers and the fathers and the

cops and the command structure, and the command structure

of the drug user— the drug users, yes, but also the command structure of

the drug runners. They never dealt with David Simon on

that show never— and by the way, he was a journalist.

Graham Greene also came from a background in journalism, so there's

a comparison there. And David Simon never— was

he a former officer also? Yep, he was a former police officer

too. Yep. So Simon never dealt with

the characters in The Wire

as caricatures, right? He didn't draw them as

caricatures. He drew them as real people. You see the same thing, I

think, from Graham Greene in terms of the racketeering, the scammers, the

hustlers, because everybody in The Third Man, everybody in this book is on the

con. Everybody, everybody's on the con, from

the, from the, the woman

who allegedly was Harry Lime's love

lover, all the way to even,

even the mark Who is Rollo Martin? Rollo's the mark

throughout the entire book. He's the mark, but even he's on the

make. He's trying to hustle something. He's trying to scam

something. So Graham Greene, just like David Simon, and I think it's

that journalistic eye that you're talking about, gets to

something about human nature that I

think a pure novelist might miss. Like,

Like, you, you maybe get, maybe you get close with like someone like David Copperfield,

or not David Copperfield, I'm sorry, Charles Dickens, um, who wrote David

Copperfield. By the way, there's a great episode of,

um, of, uh, The Wire. I think it's in the third

season, the Dickensian aspect. Yeah,

yeah. And sort of that deep double inside joke that you're only gonna get if

you're a literate person. Um, but

the Dickensian aspect of Vienna

is writ large in this, um, in this book.

And I don't think we have as moderns, particularly not in America. I

mean, we didn't experience any, any structural damage

from World War II. I would argue that we, we experienced a

lot of psychological and emotional and,

and spiritual damage from World War II. We sure as hell did

that. But the physical damage, the actual burned out buildings,

the actual husks of whatever, people walking around,

ex-soldiers with nothing to do, we didn't experience any of that. Um,

one of the miracles that never gets commented on, or one of the, one of

the things of a post-World War America that never, America never gets any

credit for this, but, um, the

American military command structure was really

worried that they were going to bring back 16 million men that had served.

And that these men just weren't going to disband. They just

weren't going to disband. They're going to take over the government because that's just what

they had seen in Europe and in, and in Asia, in Japan. They were going

to take over and they were just going to come back and they were going

to run the government. And they were really, Ike was worried about

that. Eisenhower was worried about that. The entire command

structure, um, that ran the war was worried about that. And

it didn't happen. Everybody, all of those

guys got off the boat and all they wanted to do was go back home

and get jobs. And that is, that

is so uncommented on that

it's unbelievable. And to me, that's an aspect of leadership. But

anyway, um, I mean, that also, I think, goes to

show, um, the psyche of and the

paranoia of power that is associated with power.

Sure. Because, and there's, there's, I mean, to bring the

psychological term narcissism in, to think that 16 million people

are going to think like the people who were pulling the strings of the

American government is, I

think, a bit of a reflection or a bit of a, some insight

onto what these people really thought or how

powerful You know, people think they, uh, well, and you could— I, I sort

of give them a little bit of grace because again, they had just seen that

with— I mean, Nuremberg, the Nuremberg Trials had just wrapped up by the time they

shipped over every, every guy who was serving. Um, they

still had— the United States still had forces in, to

your point, Vienna. They also had forces— I mean, this

is 1949, the Iron Curtain was down across

Europe, so we were already We'd already

divided up Berlin. Berlin was already being contested between us and the

Russians. Stalin was— Stalin was still alive, you know,

still yelling and screaming, you know, still locking up people in gulags

and sending them off to concentration camps like it was a bodily function. So all

of these things were still happening. And by the way, Stalin

hadn't yet tested the bomb. I think that happened in 1950, if I

remember correctly. And so The

Americans, because, you know, what we did was we got all the Nazi scientists, and

then, you know, the Russians, well, they got all of Eastern Europe. I mean, that

was the, that was the trade, such as it were. Maybe not,

maybe not an on-purpose trade after the Potsdam Conference, but it

was the trade. Um, and so, um,

and, and thus we got to, you know, do the space stuff and do the

nuclear stuff, and the Russians got the

land. Um, my point is that in that sort of

post-war environment, the level of distrust— and I

think Vienna stands in for Germany, it stands in for

Berlin, I think, because Graham Greene couldn't write that book. It would have been too

hot. That had been too close to the bone for his audience because

they had historical memory of this, right?

But Vienna Vienna was

the pre-World War II Vienna in that weird

post-World War I, you know, pre-World War II time

period. Vienna, obviously part of Austria. Vienna was the height of

like classical culture in Europe. It was the place

where the arts were, were

huge. Germany, um, was, uh, was trying

to envelop Austria into its, um, into its

security umbrella., or, or was trying to maintain that

in a post-World War I world. Uh, Hitler

loved the Austrians, loved Vienna. Um,

most of the physicists that helped the Americans build

the bomb were educated in mathematics and physics out

of the University of Vienna. Like, there was— it was

a group of— that was a place where

highly educated,

urbane artistic, culturally

sophisticated people lived. I feel like Nietzsche and, and

even Einstein, right? There's— yeah, yeah, it was kind of

like the— and they had a long history of, of intellectual,

you know, and then, you know, you bomb the hell out of

it and that's the end of that and everybody leaves. That's what

you find a point on it. But I mean, like, that's,

that's what happened. And so the Vienna that we

get to see in The

Third Man would have been a Vienna that it would have

been psychically traumatic to be in that Vienna because

the people who were of like Rollo Martin's 35,

that's old enough to have heard rumors, not even rumors, but to have been

like, not only heard rumors, but to have been educated by people who came

over to America or came over to Britain from

Vienna and told stories about how much of a jewel

Vienna was. And then what do you do with that? And I think Graham Greene

ties into that the same way that David Simon— just to sort of close this

loop— the way David Simon does in The Wire when he talks about, particularly

in season 2, talks about what Baltimore used to be.

And David Simon's always said that The Wire was a love letter

to Baltimore. I think of The Third Man as a love letter to

Vienna from Graham Greene. Is—

I really have to use the

restroom. We'll pause. Let's pause. I'll be

back momentarily. All right, we're back. You good now? You good? Great.

Never better. No, never, never better. All

right, good. Um, so let me take a little bit of a— let me take

a little bit of a turn here. So we've been talking a lot about postwar

Vienna and how Graham Greene sort of,

you know, looked at, um, looked at the environment he was in. And he did

do a lot of travel, by the way. That's another thing that you get from

his, uh, his profile that I was able to find. Um, he did go around

to various places around the world. Matter of fact, he, he globetrotted

so much that there is a belief that Graham Greene, um, worked

for an— worked for intelligence agencies. Um,

uh, MI6. Like, one of his best friends Actually, he did work for MI6, if

I remember correctly. And so one of his best friends

who was his commanding officer in MI6 actually

later on was discovered to be, or

to have gathered intelligence for the Russians through

the British intelligence service and sent it back to

the Russians. So Graham Greene was involved in intelligence. He was a globetrotter. He

saw a lot of places. And every single one of those places influenced

how he wrote and what he

wrote about. I want to talk about Rollo Martin a little bit because he's the

mark, you know, want to talk a little bit

about him. Rollo takes the position in The

Third Man, you know, against

Calloway. That, um, that he is going to find out

things that, um, that Calloway can't. Let's— let me frame it that way. He's going

to go places that

Calloway can't, um, and because he received— as

a British subject, he received money

that he basically couldn't

spend in Vienna, in post-war Vienna. That's the other thing that would be weird

to people, the idea that you couldn't spend money in

certain countries because of currency exchanges or to

Ryan's point, instability in government. That was the other reason why there

was so much racketeering because if you're a French citizen living

in the French zone, You can't

spend French francs, right, to get anything that you need. So you

got to figure out how to get what you need. And I'm not talking about

like luxury items. I'm talking about things like bread and milk and gas. You know,

you have to figure it out. You got to be hustling.

And so Martin's is set up as a, as an

author of spaghetti westerns. He's also set up as

a person who has

his own sort of

belief that, well, as I already said, that he's going to figure out what the

cops can't. He sort of has this arrogance, a sort of chip on his shoulder,

right? The thing about amateur detectives is you

don't have to work 9 to 5. That's right. Something along those lines,

you know. That's right. Yes. And you don't have to have— I think about

every procedural cop show I've ever seen in my life You know, if you're

an amateur detective, you don't have to follow rules of evidence. You can

do whatever the heck you want to do that was on Law

Order, whatever the, the latest spinoff of Law Order is that you saw like 10

minutes ago. Like you can do all of that, right? Um, what did

you think of Rolo Martin's like, and, and I sort of put

myself in this kind of situation. Like if I had been dropped in a

situation like that, how would I have responded or how would I have reacted? And

I can't say that I would've reacted any

differently than Rolo did. The friendship—

I understand the friendship aspect

and holding people who've influenced you in

to such high

regard, but there's also,

uh, there's a desperation And you could— it

just seems that even as he's talking about

Lyme and then Calloway

is talking about Lyme,

that, uh, like, the insight I get into Rolo

is that he,

he doesn't have much going

on in ways of things to

look forward to, or people, or lots of loved

ones in his life, say family, uh, friends.

I mean, if his best

friend is in Vienna and he

came from the States and, and he's 35, and when's the last

time he saw him? And so there's a

lot

of vagueness Um, whereas there's

this dichotomy between the— I love when Green talks about— these are, these are the

little details that I really, I really enjoy. So he

talks about the toupee, and yes, he adjusted toupee with

one hand and with the other hand seemed to wipe the smile off his face

as if it didn't exist. Yes, and then he talks

about the horn-rimmed glasses that are too thicker than he'd ever

seen. So little details like that. So you get

into Calloway that Calloway must be a good detective because look at all these

small details that he's adding to the situation. So

he has a keen eye for

the, the nuance,

whereas Rollo is, is swayed by

the romanticization of, say, uh, the

lifestyle of a writer, uh, falling in love with the woman

immediately. She's an actress or an aspiring actress, so

he doesn't know her. She could be acting, so

everyone is acting, right? He's like

falling for every

single infomercial, right? And with the dichotomy that I mentioned a few moments

ago, it was like the maître d' or the person— maybe

it was Cribbins, I'm not sure— at

the hotel. Oh, yeah. Says he's one of

your— my favorite novelist,

right? Yes. Cribbins. Cribbins. Yes. Cribbins. And so Cribbins says, you're one of my

favorite novelists. And then And then he says something about cheap westerns, and he's

like, well, I write cheap westerns.

And then he's also— Lime set him up to speak

at an engagement. Yep.

As an author. And I would think

as an author, I would be over

the moon. Oh yeah. And he has no time for it. And he says,

Well, he'll do anything for a

drink, and it's just an

opportunity to really— to, to, to, to, uh, to get as

much dopamine as possible with minimal effort. It's kind

of like, you know, um, it's kind of the feeling I got,

you know, just it's He's— it's like Charles

Bukowski without the talent, you know. I'm in it for,

for this. I'm in it. It's like the, the

path of least resistance to get what he wants,

which is really just, you know, uh, like I

said, hunting dopamine. Hunting dopamine. Well, and, and this is

Green's— this is Green's brilliance, because you get the sense that like like there's

some authors like Charles Portis. So we read True Grit, right? We covered

True Grit. Can't remember what episode it was, but we've covered True

Grit, Charles Portis, right? We also covered— I already mentioned

Nabokov, right? We covered Lolita.

We're about to cover later on this season, we're going to cover Invitation to a

Beheading. We're gonna go back into Nabokov yet again, and see one more shot at

one more crack at that.

Milan Kundera, Unbearable Lightness

of Being. Greene,

Kundera, Nabokov,

these European authors, right? They seem to understand

something about human nature. And they put it in their characters that I think American

authors— I already mentioned Dickens—

I think American authors miss, right?

They have a certain And this is also why I liked Green. So

they have a certain cynicism to

them, obviously, about human nature.

Where Green separates from Kundera and Nabokov and those

kinds of guys is he

doesn't allow that cynicism to be the primary driver of— again, we're

going to talk about Harry Lyman in a minute. But Harry Lime's comeuppance. He doesn't

allow that to be, because he allows Rolo to

actually, in his character arc, get a—

not get redemption for himself, but

to be the vehicle that redeems Harry Lime, the only way Harry

Lime could be redeemed. And that's unique to Greene. Nabokov

doesn't do that in Lolita. There

is no redemption for Humberg, like there's no redemption for

that guy. There's no redemption in that arc. There's just punishment

and then an unreliable narrator. In The

Unbearable Lightness of Being, please. I like Milan Kundera, but he

didn't believe there was redemption. That's why he sold out all

of his friends to communists, to the communists, and then ran

to France for the remainder of his career.

And wrote from there. Um, so, but Greene, Greene

took that cynicism that you see in characters like Rollo Martin,

or let's talk about Anna Schmidt for a minute.

He, I think, and I think this comes from his Catholicism, which I

brought up earlier. I think Christian, his, his Catholicism, his belief in a God.

Well, he called himself an agnostic Catholic at the

end of his life, but I can tell you as a— and

I always say this this way, you'll appreciate this as someone who has the background

that you have— I am a recovering

Catholic. You're always recovering. You're never, you're never fully

recovered. You're always recovering. Um, I can tell you that once you get

the Catholic on you, you, you never, you never

get it off. And Green tried to get it off, like he did. He tried

during his career, he tried in his writing, but it's always

there, sort of like Peter Pan's shadow, you know? Like, oh, I'm

gonna take my shadow and I'm gonna nail it to the floor and it'll never

go anywhere. No, you're gonna take that shadow, it's gonna nail to you, it's

gonna follow you around. And that's the thing I think that you see in

characters like Rollo Martin, um, Anna Schmidt. I want to talk about her. I mean,

she was in love with Harry Lyne. And she's the only female character that really

shows

up in here. Yeah, and, and, uh, I mean, and, and to backtrack just for

a second, and she changes her name. Yes, yes, she

does. Right, so that just adds

to the facade of, of the, you know, persona

needs mask. So just the personas of these

characters. Yep. I

mean, even, uh, Rolo has

a Dexter. This is his pet. So no one is who they say

they are. They are. Um, and even when you go to the

doctor's office, and this, like, back to the sort of the language— I know I'm

kind of like jumping around a little bit,

but when he says, uh, cleaner than any doctor he's ever

met, and he talks about his shirt almost crinkling as if

it were made of celluloid. Yes, it's just

like these little details that are kind of like thrown in, and

the use of language. And so you

get a sense that, um, that Calloway is observing all

these things, and he's observing Rollo fall for all of

these things as well. Um, but there is

no— there, there is, you know, to your point, like, there's no—

there's no resolution or solution.

And interestingly enough, like, if Rolo

Martin's is the mark What is being extracted from

him? Is

he there to, to, to,

to be the, to be the

solidifier of the murder? Is—

I think that's an excellent question. So, because that's a long game.

That is a long game. Well, well,

well, this is why So here's everything

I know about cons from my book reading and

from my movie watching and

from, um, and from, um, well, just from everything I've been able to observe from

people running cons in my own life. Um, so I put those

things in that order because that's, that's the

layer cake right there. Um, So there's a, there's

a short con, right? Short-term cons are

always immediacy. They're always about immediacy. They're all about, talk about the dopamine hit, right?

They're always about the dopamine hit. Three-card

monty. Three-card monty. Or, um, I don't know, get your red tops, get your red

tops, red tops right here. Short con, right? I'll give you something for

nothing inside of 3 seconds. It'll cost you nothing, but then I got

you hooked, right? Okay. Medium-range cons are basically what all marketing is. All

marketing is a medium-range con. All of it. All of

it. From Facebook ads all the way to the billboard that you see on the

street. By the way, medium-range has nothing to do with time. It has to do

with the impact of the con, right? So there's a great marketing story.

I don't know that I've ever told you this. I mentioned it on the podcast

before with another guest, but I'll tell you this story. Um,

there's a great story of

a luxury car company executive.

I think it was Mercedes or might have been BMW. I

think it was BMW. And he was interviewed at a

conference years ago and somebody asked him, some

naive person asked him, why do you

spend at that time, $30,000 a month on

billboards in Times Square? And why do you do that continuously? And

he looks at the person who asks him this question as

if they are stupid. And he

says, because the reason I spend $30,000 a month on Mercedes is because I have

to convince a person when they're 3 years old that by the time they're

35, they want a Mercedes. It's

worth it to me.

That's a medium-range con. And you're laughing because you know exactly what that means. You

know exactly the psychology of what is that. So the

money is irrelevant. And people who don't pull cons think the money is the thing

that's relevant. Money's— and you, I'm getting to, to answer your question about what he's

extracting, right? And then to your point, then

there's the long con. The long con always

extracts from

the mark everything. Everything. It extracts their

belief. It extracts their psychic energy.

It extracts their emotional energy. It's

about manipulation. It's about deceit. It's about

the amusement of the grifter or the hustler or the scammer

doing the thing. So it's for their entertainment because they're,

they're deeply— talk about narcissistic. Not only narcissistic,

in many cases, they're sociopathic. Sociopathic. Yeah. Yeah.

And so they're getting actual pleasure

from watching the mark squirm, um,

because they lack empathy, right? It's about extracting

the material good from the mark repeatedly over and

over again until the mark is dried up.

And then it's about depersonalizing or taking away the humanity

in a long con from the mark. In my experience

with cons, and again, those of you who are going to be

listening, you will have— your mileage will vary, as someone once said to me

a long time ago. You will have different thoughts on this, and that's

fine. But in my opinion, the long con is— the point of

the con is to extract everything. And that's what Harry Lime is

seeking to get from, uh, from Rollo Martin's. And this is why, by the way,

he doesn't show up until the beginning of the third— oh, the middle

of the third act. Like, that's— and that's a huge play because, like, you've built

him up, you built him up, you built him up, you built him up, you

built him up, and he better pay

off. And he does. And to,

to show and prove to him that he is no different

than one of the specs, right,

on

the ground, right? Yeah. Um, I think the challenge of our time as individuals— we

haven't talked about leadership yet. We've sort of done a book report on the book

so far. We've admired the book. We've loved the book. The book is great, by

the way, folks. Go and get it. If you're a leader, I absolutely think you

need to read this book. I think you need to put it

on your shelf next to Lolita, next to Unbearable Lightness of

Being. I think it stands alongside

those works as well for leaders because it does

reveal something about human nature. Um, and I think it

reveals something that we've forgotten in a world that's been flattened by the

internet and by social media, right? Where cons

and scams are still being run on us. Um, grifters and hustlers still

want to take our money. Marketers still try to separate

us from our hard-earned dollars. Propagandists and

conspiracy theorists on either end of the spectrum still are trying to convince us to

believe things that may not

necessarily be reliable. We live in a world where the number of

scammers and hustlers and grifters and con men has exploded exponentially.

And some of them are bots out of foreign countries. Matter of fact, most

of them are bots out of foreign countries, and they're designed to

take advantage of the stupid Americans.

And I think real leadership these days

is teaching the people who we are leading particularly if we're in a family,

the people that we love, how

to not get fooled by the people or

by the bots online. And this becomes a real challenge

with the rise of AI, being able to make images

that aren't a thing. I mean, I'm now starting to see ads in

my Facebook Reels feed of AI girlfriends.

I don't know if you've seen those in your Reels feed, but you will see

it. It's coming to a Reels feed near you. Click on the link here, I

can be your AI

girlfriend. And I'm like, who's clicking on this? Oh, well, well, the same

people that thought a Nigerian prince was going to give them a letter from some

bank with a billion dollars. Happy.

It's tapping into the depravity

in a way that's exploiting the

heck out of people's loneliness as we grow

more and more disconnected from

interpersonal connectivity

and having tangible experiences. Um, you know, it— I

see those ads and I, I

still think like, like, God, it looks like it's such a

hassle. Like, that's still too much. It's— you want too much.

You still want too much. Remember,

remember the line that,

that, um, oh, Lebowski gave to Jackie Treehorn when Jackie Treehorn was talking about how

everything was going to be digital in the future? He's

like, yeah, I

still do it manually. Yeah, that's what I always think of every time I

see one of those ads and I crack up. I

do, I crack up. But this is

the thing that's coming. Careful there. Hey, son,

to, uh, to, uh, to a household near you, to a

room near you. And we worry a lot about like kids

being online and we absolutely should be worried

about kids online. And, you know, I just had a practical level.

Um, we have a rule in our house where my children don't get a cell

phone until they're 17, 18 years old. And

if that sounds like restricting and whatever, well, we're parents. That's

what we signed up for. We signed up for our lives to be

restricted and be like managed and like, I don't know, we have

to lead people. So I don't know, maybe, maybe not having your

kid do every after-school activity is an okay thing.

I don't know, maybe, maybe not having your kid not get

picked up, maybe actually, maybe actually negotiating with your boss in a way or

negotiating with your wife in a way or your husband in a way where somebody

picks up the kid is actually a better negotiation than having

them the dopamine, handing them the dopamine-filled machine with the

scammers inside of it. Maybe, maybe, but that's just me. That's just me.

Again, your mileage may vary.

With that being said, you talk about interpersonal relationships. This is an ethics question. So

I'm going to ask you the ethics question. How can leaders bring

their followers to ethics? In the light of the collapse of ethics that we

have had in American culture? Because I think, I think Greene was on to

something. I think the collapse started in his time. I think

he would be shocked beyond belief. I think all

the guys that I've mentioned, all the authors that I've mentioned who wrote about the

collapse of narrative in the 20th century, would be surprised at

how far it went. How do we retain ethics in

a place where particularly online, or just even in our own families when we're

trying to deal with people. Like, I know you don't

have kids, but you deal with people who do have children. You've been

a child. This is why, like, I don't know, the people who don't have children,

you do have something to say because you've been a child. It's not

like it's an unfamiliar, like, you know, kind of thing to you that there might

be, you know, these small people in the world that might want to do things,

right? So, and they might be the future because they're going to grow up to

be adults that will work in your future coffee

shop., right? So how do

we as leaders bring our followers to

ethics if what they see as examples

everywhere around them is

just pache totalitarianism, but are many

hairy limes everywhere? Not many Eichmanns, we have those

too, but many, many,

many hairy limes just everywhere. Right. And everywhere is Vienna. Everywhere

is post-war Vienna now, just in an online space. Yeah.

I think the

great scam of technology is— this is gonna sound— this may not make

sense, but I will make

it

make sense. Okay. Is technology

think leans

toward convincing the consumer

that only everyone is watching. Say it

again. Only everyone is watching. So I was

working in a restaurant one

time, and, well, many times, but And this

guy Steve I worked with,

he was incredibly loud, tall,

uh, really

well-built,

lifted weights,

blowhard, loud. And the restaurant during high

volume is sounds like a cocktail party of geese at the reservoir.

It's loud,

there's things going on. And, uh, the din, as they would say

in the '50s and '40s. And so how

to disappear in the din is to raise

your

volume as well. And so Steve

and I would have conversations that would

last 10, 15 minutes long. We're yelling throughout the

restaurant. He's waiting tables,

I'm behind the bar. There's 100 people,

120 people in this building.

We are quite literally yelling the conversation through

the restaurant, talking to each

other, and not once did anyone

say anything about the

volume. Hmm. We disappeared by matching

what the environment was. Okay. Hmm. And so if

only everyone is always watching then in

a way no one's watching.

If that's the case, then your behaviors can

get— and I think that's, that's, that's

why I think music and, uh, I mean, music has

always been sexualized. However, yeah. There, there's gradients and stepping

stones. And I mean, we're, you know, we're 6 months

away from watching live sex at the Super

Bowl halftime show. Yeah.

Or 12 months away. Not— and I think

that's also why, uh, so although I'm not a parent, I, you know, as

you said a

moment ago, you know, How many

people I've met,

and people even that I've spent a lot of time with, who have been raised

by the television or the

computer. And so in this

way, people have

become depersonalized. And so If that's the case and

only everyone is watching, then no one is watching, then

you, you become not— I would say not even a cog. You're

less than a cog. You're, you're like a, like

a miasmic vapor that's just kind of

like floating

through the air. And so It has to happen,

at least in my experience, on a very— and this is like being

in customer service

for such a long time and having people come back to

me and even reading

reviews online of people saying They're like, the reason they

are over the moon about the experience is because

I treated this person who came to get

something. I made them feel special and like a

human being. They were valued. They were like, like they felt

listened to. They

felt acknowledged and their

existence was somehow validated. Whereas

in all

the noise and how time, popularity,

exposure has become a

currency, it devalues and depersonalizes. And so it becomes

about, you know, a like or a hit or,

you know, chasing the dopamine. And when you're

engaged in conversation with someone in a way that they

feel heard, valued, validated as a,

a, a, a human being,

then I think only then can those things

move past that, because otherwise everything is

just more propaganda. Although we are not—

often we are not aware that we're floating

in a sea of grifters. And

so, you know, I, I, you

know, the— what's it say— the, the global

and local Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The, uh, think

global, act local, right? Yeah. So how are you going to— you

said it doesn't exist. Well, I, I question in practice

how do you do that, because there is no citizen of the world,

right? Like, I've never met one. I, I see a lot

of people who talk about being citizens of the world.

I see a lot of protesting,

very idealistic, 18 to like 34-year-old. Yeah,

34 is right these days. 18 to 34-year-old young people

who are, who are going to buy fair trade coffee

and then go put on a kaifa and

scream about Queers for Palestine, or go

and post something on some Substack somewhere

about how the Israelis are really running all

of our foreign policy. And, you know,

um, the Holocaust didn't happen, right?

Or I'm going to see— who, by the way, then are going to go out

and, you know, go look smacks, whatever the hell that means, that

people are doing now, and weightlifting. I don't know what the kids are doing, but

they're doing things, right? All these very idealistic kids

are doing these things, and There's no meaning to any

of it. It's just a thing we're doing, to your point,

to get the likes or to get the attention. But

we're not doing it to engage in stickiness. Like, like

this show, this show is designed for people.

And I've had a couple people, you know, ask

me about this show recently, um, who, who wanted to, uh, who wanted to subscribe

to the show, right? And I love having subscribers. I love all my new

subscribers. Please hit the subscribe button. Subscribe to the show, YouTube, Spotify, Apple.

I don't care how you do it. Just subscribe to the show.

Tell all your friends. But this show is not for

people who are looking for

quick dopamine hits. It isn't for that. I have a

relationship with all my guests. I have a relationship with Ryan. I have a relationship

with other guests that I have on. I value their opinions. I want to hear

what it is they have to say. We're talking about these books.

I believe that the value of what they're bringing,

like the value of that insight about being over the din, that's worth its weight

in gold when you think about the ethical implications of how

we live in this world. But this thing is not

designed to— to your point, this thing is not designed to echo over

the din. This thing is designed to

kind of be like the kind of be like the quiet conversation happening

while you and while you're yelling at the waiter, you know, from the, you

know, we're having a quiet conversation in the corner. And if the people

around us want to participate in the quiet conversation,

great. If they don't,

well, that's great too. And it's not a chip on the

shoulder kind of thing. It's an actual making a decision to go against

the den kind of thing, which I think is, I

think in an attention-driven, dopamine-driven economy,

I think that the best way a leader can lead, one of the better ways

that a leader can lead or one of the other options that a leader has

if they don't want to shout over the den, which I think is a great

option, shout over the den, but just realize you're making certain decisions with that, like

certain consequences that come along with that. You could

lose your voice. The, the volume of the room could

go up to match you, or, um, the, the party could

move to a total another restaurant down the block, which it does all the time

online. And then you're left just shouting to people shouting inside of a

room where no one's there. Um, I like what you said about the

quiet conversation because how

many times have people

been in those

situations where, uh, you know, this is— it's funny, this is, uh, D— I was

gonna say this is a Jimmy Eat World

song called In the

Middle. Yes. And the video— so the video is these kids are going to a

party. They're probably 18, 19 years old, probably college kids. To

go to this house party and everyone

is taking their clothes off. And so it's just because everyone's taking

their clothes off, everyone's taking their clothes off. And there's this one boy and

this one girl who are looking around, they're like, I don't want

to, like, yeah. And so like, they're like, we don't want— this is

making— this makes me wildly uncomfortable. I'm not going to do

it. So they're walking around kind of like making the decision

whether to stay or to leave. And everywhere they look,

everyone is getting down to the underwear or taking

all their clothes off. And a guy and a girl, their eyes

meet and they're both fully clothed and they like get out

of there. It's for the— it's, it's to— it's to have the

moment of like, oh, well,

there's someone who— there's a— not all

hope is lost. There is there's promise of

relatability. There's promise of something

outside of what

is happening in the

macro. There's— there, there, there— we just have to look

a lot harder these days. Whereas I

used to have— in my drinking and

partying days, I used to I mean, that's probably why

I went out, was to have to run into

that one person who I could have

a conversation with. Yeah. And, um, as

things have become more

disjointed, louder, uh, and,

and more specifically, uh,

attention-driven than capturing someone's ear or

eye in a room full of

facsimile of a facsimile

of facsimile, it becomes increasingly more difficult. And so when you have the moment

or the opportunity to see

someone who's kind of like— and I don't even

know I'm sure there's a, there's a Japanese word that means it,

but it's like, you know, when you see someone and like your eyes meet and

it's kind of like, oh, this kind of like this kismet,

this like kindred spirit. Yeah. And so there becomes this sort

of relatability, and whether you're— it's

for an

afternoon, 2 weeks, a season, uh or

a lifetime, those

individuals do exist. And so, um, and it's another way of capturing attention, but

I think in a very different way, in a, in a, in

a more meaningful way. And dare I say, always come back to

kind of like some spiritual

connectivity. Yep. Where there is You know, and I, I, I like the— I like

the— I don't know who said this, but, you know, we are

spiritual beings having a physical existence, or physical— yeah, we're

spiritual beings having a physical, physical

existence. Yeah, physical, uh, experience. Yep. And so

more along those lines where, you

know, it has to be, uh— I mean, music does a great— I mean,

Nick Drake, I say, would be, would be a musical

artist who embodied that really well, where, uh,

or Edgar Allan Poe died completely broke,

uh, and it wasn't until many years after

he died that people, oh wow, this guy actually had something to

say, this is brilliant writing, you know. And, and there's lots of

music, there's lots of literature. I might be one of those people one day, you

know. That was kind of always the goal, to be honest with you, just because

that always seem to

be

the meatier, uh, uh, uh,

uh, more in tuned with how I want to

experience. And, and, and, and, you know, and right now, I

mean, we're, we're talking about the similarities

of, of the podcast. Yeah, this isn't for— this

isn't for you know, the, you know, the, the

Metallica ticket buyer who— so at the Sphere in Las Vegas where they're selling

Metallica tickets for like 10 grand apiece. Yeah. And you're like, wait, what

has happened here? What's

happening here? And so, and so I, I think just on a very,

you know, because you never know who's going to affect

your life and in what ways. And

so I and how the ethics

of it, it's, you know, you have no idea how, who you're going to affect

or how you're going to be

affected by any

subtlety in verbal exchange

or behavioral observation. And so I'm not saying you always have

to be on, Yeah, but you know, a lot of this

has to do with taking the high

road and, and kind of

being as, you know. So do you know the

show One Piece? No, I don't know. It's a manga, right?

There's over a thousand, there's over a thousand episodes. And okay, I've been seeing someone

and they're huge, they're, they're a cosplayer.

This And so anyway, the live action, they're like, do you have any

interest in watching this live action of One Piece?

And it's like, live action of

anything is usually like so bad. Yeah,

usually it's not good. And she's like, no, no,

no, no, Oda. So it's, uh, Oda is the, the last name of the creator

of this. It's like, no, he's had his hand in

every thing. Like, it's, it's— and so we're watching it and

I'm going, what is the— who is supporting the

budget for this? This is crazy. It's— they're doing things in

the live action that you can't do in cartoon, where it's usually the other

way around, right? Yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah. Unbelievable. Yeah. Um, and, uh,

and I, I mean, I don't know why I brought

up One Piece, but But, well, I think it ties into this

idea of, to your

point about having those quiet moments around something that matters

to a very small number of people, which on the positive end

is what the internet has done for us. It's this idea of the long tail,

right? We can all connect quietly in a room together around something that may

not be popular or rise above the din

of the masses. Right now.

The challenge is, of course, scammers are

like termites, right? Like they're always looking for

wood to eat and they'll eat the wood of a tree. But if

a house is there, they'll move right on to that house. They don't care. They'll

move right along to a shack. They don't

care. And that, of course, brings us around. This is my transition. This

brings us around to

finally talking about— well, finally talking about

the gentleman that Orson Welles made such

a famous character, Harry Lime. Harry Lime doesn't show up in The

Third Man until chapter 14, okay, which is in the

back end of the

book. And he shows up because Martin

basically goes to Kurtz, the the doctor's house, or

not the doctor's house, but the gentleman with the toupee's house, and basically

says, hey, you know what, make sure

Harry meets me in a

popular spot in Vienna. And, and at the time,

the popular spot at Vienna was

a, well, it was a,

a Well, there was

a canal and then went to a— oh, was it

a great— the Great Wheel, which was a— what

do you call it— a Ferris wheel. That's the term I'm looking for, a

great Ferris wheel, right? And even in the movie, this film

is— the scene is filmed in a Ferris wheel.

And it says here, for an hour, he, meaning Rollo, waited, walking

up and down to keep warm inside the enclosure of the

Great Wheel. The smashed freighter with its bones sticking crudely through

the snow was nearly empty. One stall sold

thin flat cakes like cartwheels, and the children queued up

with their coupons. A few courting couples would be packed together in a single car

of the wheel and revolve slowly above the city, surrounded by

empty cars. As the car reached the highest point of the wheel, the revolutions would

stop for a couple of minutes, and far overhead, the tiny faces

would press against the glass. Martins wondered who would come for him. Was

there enough friendship left in Harry for him to come alone, or would

a squad of police arrive? And then he starts, of course,

asking him questions. And then, of course, Harry

walks up behind him and he says this: Don't picture Harry

Lime as a smooth scoundrel. He wasn't that. The picture I

have of him on my files— this is Calloway writing— is an excellent one. He

is caught by a street photographer with his stocky legs apart, his big

shoulders a little hunched, a belly that has known too much good food for too

long on his face, a look of

cheerful rascality, a geniality, a recognition that his happiness

will make the world's day. Now, he didn't make the mistake of putting out a

hand that might have been rejected, but instead just patted Martins

on the elbow and said, "How are

things?" They get the Ferris wheel, they go to the top of the Ferris

wheel, they have a conversation. And Graham

Greene writes about this part of the book as it translates over

to the Third Man film. He

says this in the introduction.

Another minor point. In deference to

American opinion, a Romanian was substituted for Kuler. Since

Mr. Orson Welles's engagement had already supplied us

with one American villain. Incidentally, the popular line of dialogue concerning Swiss

cuckoo clocks was written into the

script by Mr. Welles himself. By the way, Mr. Welles was notorious for

adding things when he thought— adding a little English, as I've been telling my child

who I've been teaching to drive, my 15-year-old daughter, put a

little English on it. Orson Welles was notorious for doing that. And by the way,

the cuckoo clock line is the famous line in

The Third Man. Which usually comes along with whistling a tune and

a gunshot that comes along behind it. If you've ever

heard the show, the radio show The Adventures of Harry Lime, of which

I'm a big fan of, it's an old show from 1951

to 1952 that was released after

the movie The Third Man, which of course opens

up with zither music

and, and and a

great voiceover by Orson Welles, which then of

course sets up the line from the third man that

he says to Holly Martins in the movie, Rolo Martin in the book. And of

course, this line is not in the book, but it is in the movie. I

love this quote. He says, and I quote, don't be so gloomy. After

all, it's not that awful. Like the fella says, In Italy for

30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and

bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the

Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and

peace, and what did they produce?

The cuckoo clock. So long. Presenting

Orson

Welles as The Third Man. The Lives of Harry Lyon,

the fabulous stories of the immortal character originally created in

the motion picture The Third Man,

with

zither music by Anton Karas. That was the shot that killed Harry

Lime. He died in a sewer beneath Vienna, as those of you know who

saw the movie The Third Man. Yes, that was

the end of Harry Lime, but it was not the

beginning. Harry Lime had many lives, and I

can recount all of them. How

do I know? Very simple. Because

my name is

Harry Lime. And I would assert that

Harry Lime is the stand-in in our era, even in

our era, for all the matchstick men, the

professional swindlers, all those people who are just too cool to

be touched emotionally by anything. And you definitely got that sense in

the book. He's— he didn't care about Anna. He didn't really care

about the kids that he sold the, uh,

the fake penicillin to. Um, he didn't care about even the

scams he was running in Vienna or the people he

was running scams with. Uh, Harry Lime

was the original, the original scoundrel, and

he's so tied as a character to

the visage of Orson Welles. They've literally become that person. Like when I was reading

the book, all I saw was Orson Welles running around in my

head. That's all I saw. Um, and so

the mindset of Harry Lyme and the mindset of guys like Harry Lyme, of

course, has existed through history. But of course, we've taken it to our logical

conclusion. We already mentioned human scanners. We already mentioned

AI. That's the logical conclusion. Um, I think maybe the question for us

as we round the corner, as we whistle a little tune,

maybe some zither music by Anton Karas,

um, I think maybe

the question for us is, uh, Ryan, how do we,

how do we recognize the sharks and not get taken in

by them? How do

we

recognize the Henry Limes? So

very much the same way,

um, that people, you know,

uh, get

sober or change. I'll expound. Everyone tried to get my

mother, girlfriends, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Nothing.

I mean, it took a fairly drastic act of

God to

kind of like wise. Yeah, and, and, uh, some

luck,

as the doctor said, to, uh,

to, to initiate some— a

desire to change. And

so it's kind of a You

don't know yourself, then you're in really

no position to almost place judgment on anyone

else. And if you can't place judgment on anyone else, then you

lack the discernment to do, um, to lose— like, so critical thinking

is, is

enormous in this, um, And kind

of understanding

what makes oneself tick, understanding the foibles,

and dare I say,

most importantly is, you know, kind of

learning how to love

yourself. Um, because otherwise I think people are always going to be searching

for that solution, for that pill, for

that panacea, uh,

for the unconstrained, uh, uh, vision.

Yeah, yeah, the savior. Yeah. Um, whereas, uh,

you know, the only one You know, this is— it's, it's great. I

mean, the only one who can

do it

is myself, the individual oneself. Um, I mean, it's, you know, I love the— I

love the line, uh, you know, God will move

mountains, but bring a shovel. So you got to be willing

to do the work. But, you know, I mean, even before that,

you have to recognize that there's

work to be done. Um, and I, I say this all the

time, several times on this podcast,

is an old sponsor, and he was a district attorney in New Jersey, and he

would say, you know, no matter what court case

I go into,

I give every one 2%. It's because I don't ever— so 98%, he said, I

don't ever want to be in a situation where I think

I know everything. And I think once you start to

think you know everything, then you're starting to talk

about infallibility. And once you think you're

infallible, I mean, you open the doors

to any maelstrom that could

come through. And so it's, you know, remain open-minded

to the fact that you may not know everything, and that there's

always something to learn, and that there's always

going to be a blind spot. And I

mean, a lot of this has to

do with—

it's like rigorous self-honesty and staying true

to oneself. And sort

of defining what matters. Because otherwise, like I said,

it's kind of reaching for external

solutions to internal problems. And yeah, based on— yeah, so that we were talking

about before we hit record. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that— yeah. Well, and we

on this show, I mean, we talk a lot from a

position of certainty, right? So I've— we've, we've

had— I've had— we've had, uh, AI examine the transcripts from this show, right?

And one of the things that AI kicks

back at us is that, um, we tend to take a position on

this show and then we tend to find the evidence that we are looking

for to support that position. Um, and

this is what everybody does. To wit, to the AI, I say, this is life.

I mean, like, what do we What are we actually— I mean, is this a

critique? What are we doing? But the—

well, no. And what else we do

on this show is we set the

space, I think, for self-awareness to grow. And

we use these books as an entry door into

that. To your point, self-awareness will show up. You

have to bring the shovel. The book is

the shovel, but you have to want it

before you can start shoveling. When we

think about someone like Harry

Lime or anybody else who is cynically detached from

the work or ironically distanced— and by the way, you and I

are from the generation that sharpened

irony place with sharp and ironic detachment to like, we're

really good with that weapon. Like it's, it's the tip end of the spear and

we will, we know how to swing it. We've been swinging it for a while

now. We've been swinging it. We, as a generation, we swung it on the boomers.

It didn't work, but we

tried our best. Um, we swung it on our little brothers and sisters who turned

out to be the millennials. Didn't work there either. And now we're swinging it on

Gen Z. Some of us are raising Gen Zers. And

they're actually turning out to be a

little bit more willing to, to pick up the sharp end of that spear and

kind of swing it right back at us, which is kind of interesting. It only

took like 2 generations to sort of

like get there. And I've— we've come to the conclusion, I've come to the

conclusion on this show that after 3,

4 years of doing this now, The

ironic detachment of Harry Lime doesn't allow you to

pick up the shovel, and we need a mountain to move. We, we need a

mountain to move, and in order for a mountain to move, I have—

we have to care. And Harry Lime is

fine if the mountain is not

eroding, if the mountain doesn't need to be restored.

If the sediment doesn't need to be rebuilt, if we're not eating through the seed

corn of civilization, if we still have a thick

basement to go through, fine, be cynically

detached, be ironic, have ironic

emotional distance. Cool, fine. When this book

was written in 1948, '49, that's fine. I mean, you just went through a major

war, as we already said. You went

through the trauma of of, um, of World War

II, and, you know, you had done the thing that

needed to be done. And by the way, none of the folks in the Greatest

Generation would— I don't say none. I think

the level of ironic detachment was

probably way lower then, probably way lower, just looking

at the culture, looking at the product that came

out of those folks. Pre-World War II and then

post-World War II, right? Okay. But then you get into the boomers, you get into

a whole bunch of things we talk about on the show all the time. I

don't want to get into all that. And now we're at a space where

the seed corn has been

eaten through, to paraphrase from

Jeremiah, I think it's

23:16. What is it? Something— what does he say? What's the

line? It's, um, the, um, the fall is ended— or no, the summer has

ended and the fall is over, or the harvest has ended and the fall is

over, and we are

not saved. Like, there's nothing— I'll find the— I'll find the Jeremiah quote here in

a minute— but like, there's nothing there.

There— we've eaten through

the seed corn and irony isn't going to get us to pick up the shovel

or plant the seeds or do the thing.

We need sincerity for that.

And our books of the modernist era,

books that were written before the 1970s, I would say in that modernist era between

like the '30s and the '70s, I think that's where

we can go back. And I want to close on this idea. I think that's

where we can go back and pull the

sincerity forward that we need in order to start the

process of rebuilding, rebuilding the mountain, because it's going to be a long process. It's

going to take a long time, um, and there's going to

be a lot of resistance

and irony and ironic detachment. And my generation, us, we, we are going

to have to lead. You're part of it. We're going to have to lead. We're

the ones. We don't have any choice. There's nobody else. The boomers

are out of the game. The millennials will come along once they

actually see proof of life, because that's what they're looking for. There

aren't just, there just aren't enough, the numbers of

us as Gen Xers, but the numbers of us that there are, are going to

have to pick up. We're going to have to pick up the mantle and lead,

and we're going to have to do it sincerely.

Does that make us cringeworthy? Sure. Okay, fine. We're cringeworthy. I don't know what the

kids are calling it when you mean like sincere, but like, sure, we really

mean it. We really do mean that. Like, like one of the

things that Graham Greene really comes across in The Third Man, and I think

it's his rebuff to Harry Lime, he believes that

you can know objective truth. There are things, people that are

objectively bad and they are committing objective evil

and they should be punished. If that's cringeworthy,

Well, okay, fine, call me

cringe. That's fine. You call me cringe, I'll lock up the

criminal that steals your radio, and I'll do it sincerely. And when

you come to me and say, well, that person just hasn't been hugged enough,

I'm like, no, they got hugged enough. They

hugged themselves right into jail. I remember what I was going to say about the

one piece, and it has to do exactly what you just said. So

the Admiral of the Marines, this, the head figure of the Marines, gives

an order, and this one person comes back and thinks they're going to get punished

because they didn't follow the order. And he said,

you know, there's a time, uh, where you have to

make your own decision, and you have to live with that

decision. And if that decision is in line

with your, your moral fortitude then that's

the right decision, and you're not going to be

punished for that because you're insightful enough and saw all the throughways that

that was the right decision to

do. Um, and I was watching a podcast the other day,

Danny Jones, where a NASA scientist was on, and he said, you know, we can't

go back to the moon because we

don't know how to, because that

generation, all those scientists from, uh, that led up to the

late '60s going to the moon, the moon landing,

it's like that information

has gotten lost. And

so quite literally do not know how to get back. And we

would think where we think, and back to the So,

and one of my favorite, uh, uh, Picasso quotes— he goes into

the caves of Lascaux in France and sees

the cave drawings, and he looks at them

and says, we've invented nothing. But there has to be, like you said,

someone to carry the torch

and keep it

going. We, we have to— yeah, there it is. I found the quote I was

looking for from Jeremiah. Sorry. By the way,

a prophet who

was also— yeah. Yes. But also was

one who was ignored and led with sincerity. And by the way, got him dropped

in the bottom of a

prison cistern, and then he got to stay behind while everybody else went into

exile. The quote is from Jeremiah 8:20. The

harvest is past. That's what it is. The harvest is past, the summer is

ended,

and we are not saved. This is the

situation we're in. And to your point about the Moon, It's

not that we don't know technically how to get to

the moon. We

absolutely know the science. We don't know the meaning of

why to go to the

moon anymore, because we don't sincerely believe

that we deserve the why

of going to the moon. I think

real leaders in our time? Well, like I said,

I think it begins with understanding that there is

objective truth, period, full stop. Your subjective feelings

about that objective truth might be

interesting at some level, and there's objective truth. What

are you going to do, banish gravity? How about

air? You gonna fight air? Because if you're gonna fight air, I

wanna watch you fight air. You'll be no better than Odysseus, you know, trying

to fight the gods in, you know, Greek in, uh, in the, um,

in the, uh, in the Odyssey. Go ahead, fight,

fight the air. Go ahead, fight gravity. There

is objective reality. We can know it.

We can know objective truth. Capital T objective truth. We can, and

we can absolutely be sincere in our defense of it. And again,

if that makes us cringe, if that makes me cringeworthy, whatever the hell that

means, if that makes me a

cultural embarrassment as a leader, that's okay. That's

a minor price to pay to go to the moon or to rebuild

the mount. That's a minor

price to pay. That's nothing. That's nothing.

I mean, we already had— we've already come through

the 2010s where people were getting canceled left and right for talking

about objective truth. We've come through the free speech wars of

who can say what where, and where I don't think we're fully even done

with that yet. I mean, talk about European writers, they're locking

up

people in Europe for tweets. What are we doing? You

know, so we can know objective truth and we can have

objective free speech about that truth,

and that is worth defending. That's worth rebuilding on.

That's part of the American— that's part of the American project that we're on

here. We're on here on this show. That's what we're part of. And the Harry

Limes of the world, well, quite frankly. Uh, at the end of the day,

Harry Lime always knew that he was going

to get— spoiler alert— shot. He always knew. He just didn't know that was going

to happen in the sewer underneath Vienna. He just knew that it

was going to happen because he knew that there would

be a punishment that was going to

come, a day of judgment that was going to fall

on him. He knew this. And again, that's Graham Greene's Catholicism coming through. There

is a day of judgment. Judgment will get meted out. You do—

my father always used to tell me, you're going to pay the piper. You're either

going to pay now or you're going to pay later, but you are going to

pay. Nobody gets away free. Nobody. And I think our

literature is a

small microcosm of that fact. Last word. What are some leadership lessons we

can take from the third man, Ryan, as

we close out here today? Temptation

will come in

all shape and size.

We can't always identify

it as so And as you

know, if it feels too good too soon, it's

probably not

a good idea.

Yeah, wait. Find people that— find at

least one person you trust. Mm-hmm. Uh, if

you have an idea that it's a little

suspicious, or, or you're, you're questioning its, its, uh, I

don't know, validity or truth, uh, you know, it's good to

have sounding board. And remember, no one knows

everything. If I just say

that most people,

myself included, don't know

anything. Well, that's it. I think that's a good spot for us to end on.

So with that, I want to thank Ryan Stout for coming

on our show today. Go pick up your own. Yeah, you're welcome. Go pick up

your copy of The Third Man by Graham Greene. You

will not regret buying and reading this short book, and then go ahead and check

out the, uh, the movie. The Third Man, 1949, directed

by Carol Reed. The British version is 104 minutes, the American

version is 93, so they cut about 10 minutes between the two versions,

but either way it's worth your time. And if you have an

opportunity, go and check out

the publicly available—it's public domain—the Adventures of

Harry Lyme starring Orson Welles. It was

produced in 1950 51 and 52, I believe. And you can

go check that out on Spotify, Apple, or everywhere

where you get publicly available podcasts. I don't think anybody owns it. And you'll,

you'll get to

hear the amazing Anton Harris zither music

that was made popular by Orson Welles in

that, in that old-time radio show. All

right, well, with that, well, uh, we're out. Let's beat.