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.