Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Exploring Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, hosts unpack the dangers of self-deception and the challenge of living with integrity as a leader. They analyze how self-awareness without mastery leads to alienation, the importance of matching words with actions, and the societal consequences of habitual lying. The episode weaves Dostoevsky’s legacy with real-world leadership, discussing how courage and honest self-examination are vital in modern organizations.
  • Book Title: Notes from Underground
  • Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Guests: Jesan Sorrells (Host), Dr. Hana Kabele Gala (Guest)
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Time Stamped Overview
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00:00 The enduring power of truth
06:38 Introducing Co-Host Dr. Hana Kabele Gala
12:52 Discussing Dostoyevsky's challenging books
20:55 Living and writing in Arkansas
22:52 Dostoevsky's productivity and inspirations
30:58 Dr. Hana Kabele Gala's Internship with Vaclav Havel
33:44 Christianity and modern evangelicalism
40:04 Dealing with societal challenges
48:26 Navigating choices as a leader
52:46 Discussing moral courage and context
56:37 Struggling with self-identity
01:03:10 Discussion on storytelling and conflict
01:09:16 Meaningless corporate mission statements
01:12:17 AI's impact on middle management
01:20:07 Mentoring and coaching team members
01:22:51 Putting aside self-righteousness
01:29:04 Seeking constructive feedback
01:36:46 Money and social status in Russia
01:42:45 American perception of wealth and class
01:45:33 Comparing serfdom and chattel slavery
01:53:27 American Christianity's future challenges
01:57:30 Lessons from Dostoevsky's characters
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Creators and Guests

Host
Jesan M. Sorrells
Host of the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast!
Guest
Dr. Hana Kabele Gala
Producer
Leadership Toolbox
The home of Leadership ToolBox, LeaderBuzz, and LeadingKeys. Leadership Lessons From The Great Books podcast link here: https://t.co/3VmtjgqTUz

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 188.

Opening up with a selection

from our. From our book today.

We start with part one,

Underground, and I quote,

I'm a sick man. I'm a spiteful man. I am an

unattractive man. I believe my liver

is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease and do

not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it and

never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors.

Besides, I'm extremely superstitious, sufficiently so

to respect medicine. Anyway, I am well educated enough not to be superstitious, but

I am superstitious. No, I refuse to consult a doctor from

spite that you probably will not understand. Well, understand

it. Though of course I can't explain who it is precisely that I

am mortifying in this case, by my spite. I am perfectly aware.

Aware that I cannot pay out the doctors

by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that by all this I am

only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if

I don't consult a doctor, it is from spite. My liver is bad. Well,

let it get worse. I've been going on like

that for a long time. 20 years now. I am 40.

I used to be in government service, but I'm no longer. I was a spiteful

official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not

take bribes, you see. So I was bound to find a recompense in

that at least a poor Jess. But I will not scratch it out. I

wrote it, thinking it would sound very witty. But now that I have

seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way. I

will not scratch it out on purpose. When petitioners

used to come for information to the table at which I sat, I

used to grind my teeth at them and felt intense enjoyment. When I succeeded in

making anybody unhappy, I almost always did

succeed, for the most part. They were all timid people, of course. They

were petitioners. But of the uppish ones, there was one officer in particular I

could not endure. He simply would not be humble and

clanked his sword in a disgusting way. I carried on a feud with him for

18 months over that sword. At last I got the better of him.

He left off clanking it. That happened in my youth, though.

But do you know, gentlemen, what was the chief point about my spite?

Why, the whole point, the real sting of it lay in the fact that continually,

even in the moment of the acutest spleen. I was

inwardly conscious with shame that that I was not only not

a spiteful but not even an embittered man, that I was simply

scaring sparrows at random and amusing myself by it. I might foam at the

mouth or bring me a doll to play with, give me a cup of tea

with sugar in it, and maybe I should be appeased. I might

even be genuinely touched. So probably I should grind my teeth

at myself afterwards and lie awake at night with

shame for months after.

That was my way.

Close Quote

the Marketer the author, the blogger Seth Godin once

infamously quipped, we are all marketers now.

He said this or wrote this in one of his many books, I can't remember

which one, in response to the rise of social media and

the penetration of the endlessly ubiquitous Internet into

every single aspect of our lives.

He was noticing that when ordinary people have access to the previously gatekept

tools of broadcasting, they wouldn't fail to begin to market themselves as

aggressively as corporations marketed products to them for the majority of the

industrial Revolution. What does that have to do with

what I just read with our book today? Well,

if we are all marketers now, then it naturally follows from that

that we are all liars now.

Cause if you know marketers, you know

that all of them do two things without fail. One, they ruin everything they

touch. And I'm saying this as a marketer, by the way. And two,

they are usually lying to get you to buy something. But a

society can't exist on a steady diet of lies. Eventually,

truth, capital T, truth crushed to earth, as my grandmother would have said back in

the day, will rise again. And this is not

a new situation. Back in the day, about

2,000 years or so ago, a man was arguing with the dominant cultural power brokers

of his time and he said something that took them by surprise then and continues

to take us all by surprise even now. He said, and I quote

or it was framed and I quote to the Jews who had

believed on him. Jesus said, if you hold to my teaching, you

are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth and the

truth will set you free. John 8:31

32 KJV

the book we are covering today trans stands at a transitional

moment, or is positioned at a transitional moment in the history of mankind

when European society at a time and at that

time the vanguard of the Western world was transitioning from

individuals knowing the biblical truth, such as it

were, and advocating it for vociferously and moving towards a time, the

time in which we now live at the end of where individuals,

communities, even the state struggle to state the truth in a time

of comfortable, habitual and institutionalized

lying. On the show today we are going to cover a

book whose narrative links ideas about lying but Lives Inside of

liars and the power of moral courage. That's all the way at the end of

this book. From the three books we've already covered this quarter. So

we've looked at the Third man, we looked at east of Eden

and Invitation to a Beheading. You should go back and listen to those

episodes. And we are going to glean what we can from

this book today. Notes from

Underground by Fyodor

Dostoyevsky Leaders

I'm beginning to believe that the problem isn't that all marketers

are liars and that we are all marketers. Now I'm

beginning to believe the problem is that we can't or

won't find our way back to telling the truth.

And today on our show we have a new

guest co host. This is her very first

episode. I want to welcome to the show

Hannah Cabela Gala.

Ahana tabella gala. Dr. Hana Cabela gala

is a certified Executive coach and the creator of Rapid

Transformational Neurocoaching. For more than a decade, she has helped high

achieving professionals, especially tech leaders, entrepreneurs, particularly

men in their 30s to their 50s, recover their identity and break through the

patterns that keep them stuck. As a professor of

business management at South Seattle College in the

great state of Washington, she also

shapes the next generation of professionals and entrepreneurs through courses in service

operations, ethics and talent management, bringing the same

blend of practical business experience and rigorous insight into both the

classroom and the coaching room. Welcome to

our show, Hana. How are you

doing today? Thank you so much for having me. As you

know, I love the concept of your podcast, so this

is a super exciting time for me and thank you

for having me. Absolutely. So I had a long intro there.

I typically have a long intro. I do a lot of yammering to kind of

set all this up. It's just, it's my want.

I want to start off with, as I always do with talking a little bit

about the author of our book. We have covered Crime

and Punishment, but only like the first four chapters and we did that with Dave

Bomb Rucker. Gosh. Now about a two years ago now

we got to go back and re pick up Crime and Punishment Notes

from Underground is significantly shorter, significantly shorter than Crime and

Punishment or Brothers Karamazov. And I'm probably

mispronouncing that so you can correct all of my pronunciations, if you would like.

But Notes for Underground is a unique

book by Dostoevsky. But let's jump in a little bit into

who he was.

I know that you really like this book. You really enjoy Dostoevsky's

writing. What is it that jumps out to you about

his life and talk a little bit about what you know about him because you.

You hail from the part of the world that he wrote from. So. Yeah,

yeah. So I. I was born and

raised in the Communist Czechoslovakia, and

there we actually had mandatory Russian

from fourth grade. Everybody and

I grew up literally surrounded by the Russian

greats. It's a privilege

in a way, looking back. But my mother was a.

She taught Russian and literature and

history of art. And so the bookshelves in our

living room were lined with the grades. Tolstoy,

Dostoevsky, Chekhov, the lot.

And I loved War and Peace and

Tolstoy growing up. And I always

shy away from Dostoevsky because he

seemed so morose and

sad and, you know, he is. That

just. He is. But I was thinking about

the. The difference between,

say, War and Peace. And look, this is not

a book from, like, for everybody. But I

loved it because I'm the.

The person who will just revel

in these huge tableaus and the

depictions of, you know, 45,000 characters

and the Russian and French

intertwining and all of that. It's so epic. Right?

But I thought, you know, when I discovered

Dostoevsky, I thought

the magnitude and the sort of the epic

scale is there as well, but he

turns it inwards. So to me,

Dostoevsky is so profound

because he has this ability to look inside

one's soul and really get into

those ugly corners we don't want other people to

see and discover. And he has this

laser sharp ability to just go in there and

just keep pushing. And I will

say, Brother Karamazov are or is

my probably top three of all the books

I've ever read in my life. And

about the. You said something about Dostoevsky. I

actually wrote about him

writing Brothers Karamazov. Somebody can find it on my

substack somewhere. But

he reminds me a little bit of David

Foster Wallace like this, you know, like, I

see his writing. If I was to describe to another

person what Brother Karamazov or

Crime and Punishment is, to me,

it would be. This is like David Foster Wallace in the

19th century. Wow. Okay, I.

I had never thought of. Well, no, but like, this is why I love

inviting on folks coming from different

nationalities, different ethnicities. Different, whatever, different

regions. Because as an American, I can only

look at the context of the books that we cover on this show

through the, the lens, through the window of my American ness

right now. That, of course, is going to break down into different structures

in the United States, which is just sort of how it, how it, how it

happens. And we've had tons of those kinds of conversations on this show.

But we are, when we read books like

Notes from Underground or we were going to tackle Brothers

Karmazov last year, and I just, I looked at it and

I was like, oh, this is 800 pages.

And I put it down and I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a big

boy. Like, I'll get in there, I'll wrestle with, with a text. I just, I

didn't have the will at that point to be able to go in there

and really do that, really do that work fair.

And so. And I appreciate the fact that, like, you're, you're a big fan, which

means that might be your second book that you might come on for, because I

might need a hand holding through the brother's garments off.

But, but Dostoyevsky is a writer for

me because again, I'm coming at this through an American

lens. And yes, you know, I've talked about this on the

show. I'm, you know, I'm a Christian. You know, I was, you know, raised,

embedded in sort of that, that. Not sort of in that environment,

also being African American layers on top of that. And then there's class

structures that layer on top of that. So I bring all of that to the

text right now. That doesn't mean that

I allow that or I try to allow that to

disengage Dostoyevsky from the text, which is what a lot of deconstructionists will do.

I reject all of that. The text has to stand on its own. It has

to stand as it is. And then I have to look at it and go,

okay, how do I bring this into, into the framework that I'm in?

And so when I look at Dostoevsky, to

your point, I see a. I do. I see a deeply pessimistic

guy about human nature. I

see a person who is struggling with their orthodox Christianity and trying to make

that fit with what they see happening around them.

But I also see a person who is really into. And I

wrote something on my substack about this that you commented on. And by the way,

if you have an opportunity, go look at Honda's substack. It's Great. It's Tough Cookies.

Fabulous name. Go, go check it out. We'll have a link

to it in the, in the, in the show notes. Go, go, go get it.

It's a nice plug. I'll take it. Yeah, go subscribe.

But I had written, you know, he, he also

struggled with, with, with gambling and

with playing poker and with the thrill of. And I, I

understand. It's. It's the thrill of that.

It's a thrill of the chase. It's the thrill of the getting. And, you know,

it wasn't until, you know, his wife kind of got a hold of him

and even then, I don't even think. I don't know, she fell in love with

his words. And I wonder about. I wonder if she really ever got a hold

of the man or if it was just constant because men and women don't change

across culture. I wonder if it was just constant, just like, just like whipping

him to keep him out of the gambling dens.

Is this a question? Because. Yeah, this is. Yeah, this is a question.

Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, you probably know more about this actually. You probably know more

about this than I do. So his,

his first. And the historians out there don't, you

know, hold this against me, but I believe that. So his

first wife passed away kind of young,

and then he married woman

who was. And I wrote about this

because I think that it's just so.

How, how shall I describe this? It's such a great example

of essentially technology allowing you

to be productive. Bear with

me where I'm going with this. When I read Brothers

Karamazov and I had this, like, I'm so into this

text, it just pulled me in. And yes, you're

correct. I think the audiobook is like 45 hours.

And the, the, the book itself again, is like this big.

And the. I had

this feeling of, you know, when I think of

David Foster Wallace, who I actually really, really like. He's

my, one of my most favorite American writers.

But I always had this image of him sitting at the keyboard and

just like typing in this

headed trance. And, you

know, he was not. He was an addict,

kinda like he, he was playing with different

drugs and, And I think that it kind of

helped his writing, at least the productivity part.

The genius was there always, but the delivery was

definitely helped. And I thought, so how did

Dostoevsky. Right. Brothers Karamazov. Because,

like, with a pen, with a quill. What was happening?

Like, how do you, how do you produce? I mean, I'm always. This

is my toxic trait I'm always looking at, like, how was it

literally delivered? Like, tell me the execution bit. How does

this mechanically work? And

so the story is that he was under a

deadline, as he was always. Because he was always out of

money or in debt, and the

creditors were onto him and he had to deliver like

a book, short book, I think it was the

Gambler, actually. And he found

a. By recommendation, a young woman who was.

She was studying and she was top of her class in

stenography. And so he hired her

and she would come in and. And take whatever he

was dictating and do the

shorthand, and then transcribed it

on a typewriter, I think. Was it a

typewriter? No, it was also by hand, but longhand, that's what it was.

There were no typewriters because I looked into it and wrote about it.

Because eventually through the words and through the work,

she transcribing his dictation,

they fell in love. And she did

have a huge impact on his life in a sense that he

got way better. I can't imagine living with

some like a genius like this. And constantly,

when he did publish something and he got money

or advances theory is, you know,

relatives would show up and ask for money. He was never able

to say no. So they were constantly

struggling materially. But I think that she brought a

lot of peace and

structure to his life and made him

better. And I think they had like three kids, two

survived. And I think, you know,

this whole. Behind every great man there's a woman.

I. I kept thinking about that when. When I was looking into

this particular story. Well, and I think.

So Stephen King has a great book called On Writing, Right.

And probably other than Ernest

Hemingway's Collected Quotes, you know, about writing that people have

sort of collected from things, interviews and things that he wrote over the course of

his life on writing by Stephen King is probably. And myself and other

guests have talked about this before for probably the best. This is how

the sausage is made book on writing ever published by a

major author. Right. And

I do believe fundamentally that writers

really break into a bunch of different

categories, Right. So you have writers like Charles

Portis, who wrote True Grit. He

literally lived in a cabin in Arkansas. After he published True Grit,

he went off, he became a journalist for a little while in London and then

he went into a cabin in Arkansas, wrote True Grit and then, well, actually wrote

a couple of other books and then wrote True Grit like it was his third

book, if I remember correctly, Charles Force's third book. And that became a huge hit.

And he Stayed in his cabin in Arkansas for the rest of his life, which

is amazing to me. That's the ultimate sort of

writer's revenge, like a comedian's revenge, where they show

up to your house and heckle, you know, or they show up to your job

and heckle you.

Jerry Seinfeld tells that joke all the time. And it's a great joke. I mean,

because it's. It's spectacular. I don't show up to your job and, heck, will you.

I'm working here. Like, what are we doing?

But writers tend to fall into. Or at least they tend to be

framed. And Stephen King talks about this in terms of. To your point about

addiction. The addiction is the thing that drives them. Like David Foster Wallace or

Dostoyevsky, whatever the addiction is. The addiction is the thing where the genius has

to. Has to live. Or writers are. And he talks about this again

in On Writing. Writers are considered to be just typists, right?

So, for instance,

it's either Ray Bradbury or Isaac Asimov. I think it's Ray Bradbury,

actually, who wrote. No,

it was Isaac Asimov wrote a ton of books. A

ton of writing came out of Isaac Asimov.

And yet only a few of those things were hits because he just. Every

day, just typed for four hours. And he would describe himself

as a typist because it was the discipline. And he would type it whether

it was good. He'd type it whether it was bad. Sometimes you're going to get

a hit, sometimes you're not. You do it for four hours

and you go home, right? And then, of course, you have the earliest Hemingway

types, where the weird sort of hybrid of both of those, where they have the

discipline, but they also have the addictions that drive them in certain

ways. When I look at Dostoevsky, I say all that to say this. When

I look at Dostoevsky's life and when I look at how he. How he

produced his product, right? How he produced

his ideas, I often think of.

I wonder how much more productive he would have been

if he had had a typewriter. Like, would he have been the

obsessive that sat at the typewriter? Or would he

still have been. We still have been chasing the gambling bug. Like,

would that still have been a thing for him? And so

I see something like Notes are Underground, which I'll talk directly about the book here

now, but I see something like Notes from Underground is sort of his first attempt

to sort of wrangle his obsessions together and put them into one

spot. That way he could do a Bunch of other different things later on.

You know, maybe here is a good point

to say that if I have never read

Dostoevsky, I would

not recommend reading Notes from the Underground as your first

foray into Dostoevsky. And here's why.

So it's enticing because unlike all

the other, you know, beasts of a book,

this is what, 300 pages less.

And so it's like, oh, I can feel

smart, see what Dostoevsky is about, and

I can read this slim book. And let me tell you,

don't. If this is your first attempt, I would

discourage people from doing it because it

is so bleak. It's

so bleak. It's. I think that the structure

is a bit of a challenge because the book is divided into two

parts and the chronologically

earlier part follows the later part.

So you have to pay attention. But also

it really is. He is at his

best describing the.

The bad in humans. And I would maybe push back a

little bit on the sort of the

struggle with. With faith. And I think that you

mentioned at the beginning, I think

that, yes, his time,

he was writing at this extremely

violent, as in volatile time.

You had the sort of social

upheaval in Europe. You had the

sort of. The changes with the

serfdom and all the legal and

practical consequences of changes

in the tsarist Russia that he was living through.

So he was noticing all of that. And he lived in Russia,

but he also traveled to Europe. Right. His gambling took

him to like Baden Baden and all these fancy

casinos of the. Of the time. And so

there's this tension that is really

present in his writing. And

back to the. Back to the Notes from the

Underground, I think that he is.

The main character is awful.

The main character is a bad guy. Now, you quoted

different translation. Mine opens with

I am a wicked man. And I mean, it

starts with, I'm a bad.

I'm a sick man, I'm a wicked man and an

attractive man, et cetera, et cetera. And

I think that the power of that book is in

a lot of lessons, which I'm happy to

dive into. But I think that it

is also really hard to read

a book where the main character or the

hero is really the anti hero. So, like,

I thought about this because as much as I love

Dostoevsky, reading this book is a challenge. It's, you know,

and I don't. And it reminded

me of. I like movies and I'm

a huge cinephile, yet there

are stories that are really hard for me to get into

because like all the mob, you Know, like,

say what you want about Sopranos and this

particular genre. I have such a hard

time rooting for a

murderer or a gangster. Like, it's really hard for me.

So. And. But there's always a redemption.

There's always this humanity you

can relate to. And I think in this book there is a

recognition. I think it resonates with us because

we can sometimes recognize some of the toxic traits,

but there's also no redemption. And I think that's

where it hits so hard. Yes, I would

absolutely. So I would absolutely agree with that. We'll get. We'll

get back to the book in a second.

I. I absolutely agree with you. And I'm also a huge cinephile,

so maybe we'll. We'll talk later about what are your top

five directors of all time. If.

Well, if Christopher Nolan isn't on that list, I don't know if we could be

friends. I don't know. I don't know if you can come back. No, it's fine.

No, no, he absolutely is. I'm sure it's fine. I know. No,

um, but. But I think so. You're

right. There's the arc of this book. If you're. If you're going to read this

book, I. I agree with Hannah. If you're going to read this book as a

leader and you're going to look for leadership lessons in this book,

this is one of the harder books that we've. We've. We've addressed on this show.

I would put it up there with Lolita

by Vladimir Nabokov, a book that made me incredibly

uncomfortable. A whole variety of reasons. I've talked about that before on this show.

Go back and listen to that episode. We did that episode with Claire Chandler.

I would also put this book on par with

Adolf Eichman and the Hannah

Arendt. Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem,

Another book that on the surface looks

easy to get into. Or there. Right. Yeah,

yeah. But. But reveals so many other

things underneath, as Hannah Aaron is kind of going through this process of

watching this trial and trying to figure out what.

Well, what. What secular morality actually means when it's

unhooked fully from. From religion. And then the other

book that I would put it on par with that we've covered on this show

is. Is

the Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havell. Another

book, small. Right.

And yes, I do see. I do see. You've got the biography of Hovel behind

you. Yeah, yeah. Fascinating guy. But.

But I worked for him. Oh, really?

Okay, I'm sorry. Peeling away layers of the onions. No, it's fine.

Peeling away layers of the onion. No, this is good. Okay, I'm gonna take

a. I can't just let that go. How?

I was like, this is, like finding out that you worked for, like, one of

the. One of the disciples or whatever. Oh, yeah, I dictated. I dictated Peter's

Gospel. Oh, really? You might want to have dropped that earlier.

I was the first intern there they

ever had at the Prague Castle, which is where the president's office

is located. And I was studying political science

at Charles University, and

my aunt actually was like, why don't you go? Because we

were so high on the

revolutionary spirit after the Berlin Wall fell. And, you

know, we. We all kind of lived through it, and it was such

an amazing experience. And I happened to be

in Prague, and. And, you know, Havel was such

a. An icon for. For us,

and the fact that he was a playwright made a

huge difference, and for

a lot of people, me particularly. And so I just

went in and I was like, I want to be an

intern here. And they looked at me and they were like, we don't know what

an intern mean. What does that mean? And I said, I will do

anything. I will stand by the copy machine, the

Xerox machine. I will do whatever you need,

and you don't have to pay me. And they were like, okay, great. So I.

That's the part they heard was the I don't have to pay you part. That's

the part. And. But, yeah, I ended up in the

press office and worked there for a couple years, and it was

absolutely amazing. And I have met a lot of very

important people, and I have tons of lessons from that time,

one of them being, we're all people.

And I think that. To take it back to the book we're

discussing, I think that's what's really hard, because

similar to. I'm so glad that you brought up Hannah Arendt, because

she struggles with that. You know, like, there's. There's this.

We're all children of God. We're all.

There is this knowledge for most of us that

were part of the whole. There is

shared consciousness. You are a bit of

a villain, and you are a bit of a good person depending on your

circumstances. There's so much

into this, about this sense of

wanting to belong to humanity. And

when you read about people like Eichmann or

when you read the Notes from the Underground, you go,

really? I'm part of that. That's awful. I hate

it. And, and there are moments when you go, oh, yeah, I have done

that. That's not comfortable at all. Well, and it gets

to this idea. And I think this is where.

The, the, the Christianity piece has to come back in because

modern, and I can only speak to modern American evangelicalism, which

is what I know modern American evangelicalism has,

for better or worse in, in, in the post war,

and by the way, post World War II, last 80 or

90 years now of that history has fallen into

the trap of just being nice,

being the greatest commandment. If we're just nice,

then we don't have to worry about all those other, I'm going

to use an old school word here, sins. We don't have to worry about all

those other sins. We don't have to worry about greed or lust

or vanity. We don't have to worry about pride, which we talk about on this

show. Envy, which is of things, jealousy, which is of

people. We don't have to worry about any of those things. We don't

have to, we don't have to comment culturally on

coveting your neighbor's wife or your neighbor's stuff

or your neighbor's husband. We don't have to comment on any of that. Just be

nice. And that reduces Christianity

to being a very personal thing without cosmic significance.

And the second that an Eichmann shows up,

just being nice doesn't work. The second

that the dyspeptic, and I'm being gentle here,

underground man shows up,

that doesn't work. For dealing with her, for addressing that

sort of person, we're going to talk a little bit about Plato's Cave because I

think there's, there's a lot of parallels to the allegory of Plato's cave in here.

When people are happy in the cave, they're happy looking

at the shadows on the wall and they don't want to see the real thing,

that happiness in and of itself. And this is a, this

is a philosophical jump here, folks, and I'm going to make that happiness in and

of itself is evil, but we don't have. It's lying. It's lying. We don't

have language for that when we've just decided in, again,

in the United States of America, evangelical context that the

highest sin that we can commit is to not be nice.

Now, that sounds. When I say that, and I recognize that some of my evangelical

listeners will be listening to this and they are going to get off the train

and stop listening and some of my secular folks are going to be

like, yeah, you guys Are. Whatever. No, stop. Because

the secular people fall into the same trap too. You think that the highest thing

is to just be nice. Just be nice and everything will be fine. And

that's not. That's not the highest thing. So when evil does show

up, and we talked about this in Eichmann in Jerusalem a little bit,

but we also have talked about this in term. In 1984, we talked about this.

We covered Brave New World. We even talked about this. We talked with the

unreliable narrator in Lolita. When evil does

show up, whether it's seductive or

deceptive or whatever, you have no.

Heck, we talked about this last episode, an invitation to a beheading about the Nuremberg

Trials. How are you going to judge evil if the only

barometer you have is we have power and we're

not. And we're. And we're not. We have power and we're nice. So

that makes us better. That's not enough. That's thin. And I think

Dostoyevsky saw the thinness of that coming, but he didn't have

an answer for how to solve that problem. He could just show you the problem.

And so I actually see a great peril

to not. I have two points, not just

to the evangelical

Christianity. I see this.

Let's be nice. And that overrides everything in every

Single Corporation in 2020

of, you know, like, it's such a

easy default that

cannot stand because truth requires

courage. They. These two are

inseparable. And the moment you separate them,

you are living a lie. You are the

happy pig, you know, and.

And it's the sitting in the cave and watching

the shadows. That's not happiness, because it's not

truth. And I will say the second point

is to me, because Brothers Karamazov

is Dostoevsky's last

publication, I think that he

is resolving this.

I think that he leaned into his faith a lot more

towards the end of his life, and he.

He urged people, or at least it seemed to

me through the reading that I,

as. As a Christian, I too saw.

And it doesn't matter if it's, you know, Catholic or Orthodox.

The. The Christian spirit is. It

requires you not only to act,

but also there you cannot have a

framework only based on morality that is

civil. You absolutely have to have transcendence.

And I think that is one of his

most powerful messages. At least that's what I took from

it. Yeah, yeah. Civil morality will always

fail. Eventually it's going to run up against something it cannot deal

with. And I don't

for leaders. I'm not Talking about civil morality, I

want to be very clear. I'm not talking about civil morality in terms of

what someone is doing in some governmental office somewhere over there.

I'm talking about civil morality in terms of what you are doing in your organization

right now, even if your organization is five people,

that's civil morale. You've created an environment where that

has to exist. And by the way, most of us aren't taught that, right? And

so we're not even trained in how to think that or even think

in those kinds of terms. But because.

Because uncivil and deeply

unserious people are being pressed down upon us all the way

down to the substrate level and their ideas and their posture

and their perspective on the world. And by the way, deeply unserious

people rely on lying to protect them and

allow them to keep being unserious. That's the state that they have to operate

in when their power is pushed down to

the substrate just because it's power. Now, we

at the community level, we at the, the level in

Seattle or the level in north central Texas, where I live, right, where I'm recording

this from right now, today, we have to live with that. We have to live

with the outcomes of that. And we have to figure out how to face it,

particularly when it shows up in our schools, it shows up in our churches, it

shows up in a bunch of institutions that we thought were solid but

maybe proved to not be as solid

as we anticipated.

But got something, I think, that will point this

out even further. So I'm going to go back to the book, going to

go back to Notes from Underground. I'm going to pick up

from part one, and it's going to be

chapter seven. So the way this book is divided up, there's

multiple chapters in each part, and they

are. They're short.

Right? And this is what Hannah is saying, and she's exactly correct. It's

deceptively short. But the Titan, the writing is incredibly tight,

even for someone like myself who's like, I'm working my way through Ben Hur and

Les Miserables for the show in June, right? I'm going to.

I'm going to the barricades. Go look at

the French Revolution and go to the barricades. But.

But in looking at this book, it is definitely written.

He definitely thought about every single sentence. And he, and he, he,

he. I could see him sweating through every single sentence.

And so the writing is tight, even though the, the passages or the

chapters are short. So let me pick

up here, like I said in Chapter

seven. I marked this

piece here. He's.

Well, the underground man is talking about

the laws of nature and man. And this

relates a little bit to what Hannah was saying about corporations.

Then this is what you. This is all what you

say. There we go. New economic relations will be established, already

made and worked out with mathematical exactitude. He's talking about the

industrialists, by the way, who were beginning to

rule in Europe during his time.

So that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye simply

because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then

the quote unquote palace of Crystal will be built. Then. In fact,

those will be the halcyon days. Of course, there is no guaranteeing, this is my

comment, that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull then.

For what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated,

but on the other hand, everything will be extraordinarily rational?

Of course, boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one

sticking golden pins into people. But all that would not matter. What is bad,

this is my comment again, is that I dare say people will be thankful for

the gold pins then. Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally

stupid. Or rather he is not at all stupid, but he is so ungrateful

that you could not find another like him in all creation. I,

for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all

of a sudden, apropos of nothing in the midst of general

prosperity, a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a

reactionary and ironical countenance were to

arise and put his arms akimbo and say to us all,

I say, gentlemen, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter

rationalism to the winds simply to send these logarithms to the devil

and to enable us to live once at more,

live once more at our own sweet, foolish will. That

again, would not matter. But what is annoying is that he would be sure to

find followers such as the nature of man. And all that

for the most foolish reason, which one would think was hardly worth

mentioning, that is that man, everywhere and at all times,

whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the

least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose

what is contrary to one's interests and sometimes one positively ought. That's

my idea. One's own free, unfettered choice, one's own

caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to

frenzy. That is the very most advantageous

advantage which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which

all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms.

And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal,

a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man

must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man

wants is simply independent choice, whatever that

independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice,

of course, the devil only knows

what choice.

I read things like this, and

Hannah, you don't know this, and I haven't talked about it on the show in

a long time, but I took a lot of philosophy classes in college, a

lot. Matter of fact, I would have probably run off, become a philosophy major if

my mom hadn't told me, there's no money in that. Go do something else.

So I went and became an art student because, of course, that's better.

But I'm. I'm fascinated by what Dostoyevsky is

doing here, because when you talk about

independence and you talk about choice again, I think about this in an

American context. We're a weird country because

we've staked our existence on

a creed. And yes, the creed is, is

most notably named in the Declaration of Independence. But then the thing that

follows on from the creed, if that's the vision statement, the

mission is laid out in the Constitution, and the Constitution

is staked on two amendments right at the beginning, right up

front, there's the First Amendment, which is. You can say

whatever you want to say. Dave Chappelle has this great joke, right? I'm going to

read it. I love that. Oh, my God. Yeah, you can say whatever you want

to say, but here's the Second Amendment. You're going to need a gun.

You need to arm yourself, because it,

the Constitution fundamentally understands something that Dostoevsky is

getting to here. You can give human beings independent choice.

You can grant them all kinds of rights that, by the way,

the government isn't granting them, they come from God, which is a whole other conception

there. But let's just go with that. You're granting them the rights

and, and these people, if you give them free and unfettered access to

these rights, they're going to. They're going to take

advantage of them. With that being said, there will be consequences

and repercussions. There always are.

And Dostoyevsky gets. And, and, and to your point about the serfs earlier,

he's positioning this during a time when

Russia is leaving its, for lack of a better term,

slave state. I hate using that term, but it's one that will resonate

with my, with my Audience here, it's leaving that state, it's leaving that and

going into some transitioning into something else that's not fully

defined. While these tensions from Europe, these

industrialized tensions. And when he talks about, and the reason why I picked that section

is because the way he talks about the industrialists are the exact same way we

talk about the technologists right now.

Yeah, this is true. Go ahead. No, no. So I guess my question here

is.

How do you, how do you

navigate choice as a leader? And

that's a very deep philosophical question, but how do you navigate choice as a

leader? How do you, how do you take something like notes from underground?

You go, okay, the first part of this, to your point, which is philosophically heavy,

is really focused around this idea of what man is going

to choose to do versus what he's going to be compelled to do.

And then the second part is about how he lies to himself and compels himself

to do different things. Okay, but let's just focus on this. How do you,

how do you, how do you navigate this world as a, as a leader or

just as an individual? When the algorithm, not the

logarithm, the algorithm now is designed to

push you to engage in certain behaviors and to

undermine your free will and to under, or at least to give you the idea

that free will is non existent. How do we, how do we navigate this? Because

I think Dostoevsky would look at the environment that we're in now if we could

transport him from back then to now. I think he would say we're having

the same problem. It's just in a box that we carry around

in our pocket. Yeah, the packaging

is different, but the main questions remain very

similar or are identical. I think that

when it's interesting, you're phrasing it in terms of

choice, I phrased it almost in terms of free

will. And one of the things that

I'm taking from the book, and I think any leader

can take from the book, is

that self awareness without mastery

is hell self. So the main

character is super self

aware. Dostoevsky lets you

see everything that goes on in his mind. He is

super self aware. The self awareness is totally there.

But because he, there's a point, I don't know where it is.

But I think he, like, he's awful. He knows it. And

he says, I can't help it.

And it's like, well, sure you can. Do

you have agency? And that's where. So to

me it's self awareness is not enough.

Self awareness without mastery is meaningless.

So we are I think societally at the point where thanks

to immediate access to every little

brain fart by billions of people we're

very self aware. But the question now what?

That's still unanswered. So self

awareness without mastery is meaningless.

He has. Back to your question about choices. The

main character, the man in the underground, he

had choices and he often

made choices that were irrational. So

back to the question about the leaders. You will

have people who will do

things that are essentially they will self destruct

just not to give you the win. So I think

that that's something that like

we have free will but we a

don't always follow it and act upon it.

Two we. The. The

power of spite is very strong.

So he does so much in the book

out of spite. He's just

annoyed with himself and he's annoyed with everybody else and

he knows that he's going against his own

proclamations and his own if he even has any

moral standards, which he doesn't. But

he goes even against that

because he's so. And it's almost like telling you

I know I could, I'm not going to. He

admits to lacking moral courage in part two. He outright

admits to lacking a moral courage when he goes and sees the

prostitute. The prostitute right after the, the party that by the way,

I have a question about the party which I'll ask you because again based on,

you know, you know, your knowledge of Russian, there's some cultural things going on in

there that I could sense that I'm totally, completely missing as an American because to

me that entire sequence seemed ridiculous.

Also as a Gen Xer I'm like, I don't care about these people. Like why

do I, what do I care if they like me or not? Like I'm just

going to go home. But I get it. It's a different context. So

I need to kind of understand that before I jump to the prostitute and

the party. I want to close the loop on this idea.

So I love what you said there. Self awareness without mastery as hell, I love

that. That's, that's, that's like clippable. We're going to put that in. That's going to

wind up somewhere. The,

the challenge of our. One of

the challenges, one of the many challenges of our time is that we believe we

have mastery. We're deceived into thinking we have mastery because

we have at our fingertips all this information

but no practical wisdom to apply it.

So the self aware person can be self deceived

by their own self awareness, by Their lack of mastery

and to your point, wind up in hell.

What does the.

How do you separate that out? Because I don't think people need to know how

to separate that out. I don't. And I also think,

weirdly enough that people are afraid to separate that out,

because I think they're afraid. And I think the reason they're afraid to separate it

out without going all Freudian is that

the separating out process, I think, would

deconstruct them. And they're not prepared for

where that. They're not prepared for the cul de sac at the end. Not even

the cul de sac, sorry, the clearing at the end of that path. So

it's so interesting because I have.

I have personal professional experience with this. I work

with people who. This is very important,

have achieved tremendous success

because. And they're. They have certain personality,

character beliefs about themselves based

on external validation.

And the main character is all about

external validation. He goes after people who

he despises, but he is so hungry for

their approval throughout the whole book. Right. What

you're touching upon is so important because I think that he

understands that he is. Modern

psychology would call it disalignment or. I

actually brought this book, so I have it handy.

Martha Beck Talk has a great book called the Way of

Integrity. And she basically describes the like

in the aerospace, a plane being in

integrity means that the sort of. The bolts

have to align right. Perfectly with the.

With the COVID of the. Or the

shell of the aircraft in order to

move properly. Right. Like, the aircraft has to

be in integrity. And in a way,

so do we. We have to figure out who we are

and act in integrity. I think

Shakespeare in Hamlet says, you know,

integrity is being true to yourself and truly true

to the others. Right. So there's the dual being in

integrity, being truthful. That takes incredible

courage. And the main character in this book,

he's afraid, as you said, to deconstruct and

then put together to be in alignment. Because he

hates himself. He doesn't like the person

he thinks he is.

And that makes it really, really hard to move through the

world. Because if you don't have clarity about yourself,

if you don't have this understanding of who you are without

the external validation, you

will always chase after what people

tell you you should be. You will always try to sort of fill

out the form that they are giving you, the mold that they're giving you.

And so, like, my clients are very successful,

you know, accomplished individuals, high achievers.

But at some point, if one of these things goes away,

A bad deal, a marriage crumbles.

You might not get, you know, you might get laid

off. Who are you if you're not who

you thought you were based on the external validation? And so

these are deeply existential, deeply existential

questions. And I think that back to what you were

saying about him, you know, having the

courage to face who he is, he doesn't have that courage and

he's afraid to look because it's not pretty.

It's very ugly. Right. What he sees. And there are glimpses.

And if I'm on this track, I will add another book

that I thought I will bring to today, because

your essay that you published on Substack

was in reference to Dostoevsky and

you talked about lying. And I think that there is a

distinction between lying, which is,

I'm a liar and I know that I'm telling a lie. I know

that this cake requires three cups. And I'm going to tell you, you

should use 2 cups of flour so that your cake comes out wrong.

Right. Like I'm lying on purpose.

But there is a wonderful essay by. You've

Already Know Where I'm Going with this by Harry Frankfurt on

bullshit. And I think that. And in

his take, bullshitting is, as

a verb, is believing your own lies.

And I think that that's really interesting and an important

part of the psyche of the

man in the underground, because he so often

wants to believe his own

fables, but he can't. He knows deep down that

he can't. So there's like these ventures into, oh,

okay, I'm going to believe this. And then he

realizes that his actions are actually completely

not in integrity. Right. And that gets

to exactly where. Where I was going in the second part. So part two picks

up with him remembering.

And I'm going to sort of summarize this, but him remembering or him recalling

a series of incidents that occurred to him during a

snowstorm. Interestingly enough, in.

In, I believe he's in Moscow

and

runs across.

I don't how to frame this. He runs

across former associates. Let me frame that. Let me frame it that way.

I think they are schoolmates. They're schoolmates. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

And. And the title, of course, of Part two is

and when I. When I ran across. By the way, when I wrote just a

side note, when I ran across. Apropos of Nothing, I double underlined that because actually

I. I read Woody Allen's band biography,

autobiography, all 800 pages of it, looking for the things that would have

made people go over. Clem didn't want to cancel it. And of course

his biography is Apropos of Nothing. That's the title of it. I was like,

oh, that's where you got it from. Gotcha. Okay, so the joke

goes deeper there, Woody. But part two in

Notes of Underground is titled Apropos of the Wet Snow.

And it of course opens up with this poem here,

which I'm not going to read. But he starts off

with remembering an incident that occurred

to him when he was only 24. And he says, my life was even then

gloomy, ill regulated and as solitary as that of the

savage. I made friends with no one and positively avoided talking and buried myself

more and more in my hole. At work, in the office. I never looked at

one. And I was perfectly aware that my companions looked upon me not only as

a queer fellow, but even looked upon me. I always fancied this with a sort

of loathing. Right, so he's got the self loathing, he's,

he's again a gentle word, dyspeptic. In his

temperament and his posture, he is not high achieving.

To Hannah's point, he has not achieved nothing. By the way, the

first part of the book is written as a 40 year old, 40 year

old looking back. And of course he's still dyspeptic and believing that no one should

live past 40. As a person who's going to be in my

late 40s, actually not going to be. I'm in my late 40s. I

looked at that and I went, well, okay, sir,

whatever. Okay, as a person over

50, absolutely disagree.

Yeah, like, whatever. I don't, I don't have anything for you, sir. I guess. Okay,

that's fine. This is my whole fine.

But, but the incident that he, that he describes

in getting together with those, with those former classmates, the

desperation that he has in

seeking their external validation, their external approval

drives him to spending money he doesn't have to

robbing his servant. Well, not robbing, no denying his

servant wages that were rightfully his. Drives

him into this brothel house where he meets this prostitute

who he also proceeds to sort of tear down. Not sort of

to tear down. And there's

no, there's no

denouement. Nobody becomes better at the end of this.

There's no. It's kind of like the bit from the

movie adaptation with Nicolas Cage where he stands up at the Robert

McKee Screenplay Writing Seminar

and Robert McKee is played by the brilliant Brian Cox

and he says, Nicholas Cage says,

what is, what, what happens if you're going to write a story where Nothing happens

where nobody, nobody changes. Right? Nobody develops,

nobody grows, nobody, nobody, nobody

overcomes everything and succeeds in the end.

Like what happens if you have that story? And of course Bob McKee then

blows him off the stage and tells him to get the hell out because if

he has no conflict. Why am I going to watch your. Why am I going

to waste my time with your movie for two hours? Which is by the way

that is the correct answer. Why am I going to waste my time with your

movie for two hours? I don't know what Bob would have done with Dostoyevsky

or this but he's. He. There's no

resolution with this. Right.

And you see a lot of people running around like this. You talk about

subset. We talked about substack several times. I have a substack. It's called Crying Voice.

Crying in the wilderness. Go check it out. Go check out Hana substack. That's the

second plug there. We talk a lot about substack. A lot of the writers I

follow on substack are very. They're very

not depressed but they're very much the 24 year old underground man

types and they're just churning out content and much of it's good analysis.

But to what end? What's the denouement here? And I've reached a point in time

in my life where. And I don't know if you have but I've reached a

point in time in my life and I try to talk to leaders who are

tired of masticating endlessly over problems and let's get

to a solution already or at least a trade off that we

could then execute on. On.

He's not at that stage and I don't know how you get a person like

that from from there to here. I don't even know if you can.

So I will push back on this in. In a way

and one is

absolutely agree let's be real and give the leaders

something to go on and. And like take home and I

agree. So. So we already mentioned some of the things like

the you know, self awareness is nothing without

mastery. But also. And that despite is a great

motivator. But I think that we are circling

around the truth and how

it is meaningless without courage. Right. Like

you have to walk the talk and

the. The main issue here

is he is the main character in this book

is lying to himself and he

is completely dependent on external validation.

But I think that there is a development.

So it's not a resolution but it is in a

way. And Dostoevsky really smartly flips

the timeline. And

when you meet the man in the underground, he's a

miserable, miserable man, wicked man. He's

spiteful, he hates himself, he

hates the world. He has all these ideas

and there's this narcissism

and he kind of revels in his own misery, right?

But you look at the same person at

24, and I think that there are two things.

One, he didn't have a bad life.

He was pretty well off with a servant.

He had a job that was pretty decent.

He was 24. So, you know, like

what's. And he pretty healthy, right? Like, he opens with

this. He is healthy, he has means.

And. And yet he's deeply miserable. And

I think that because he decides to

be miserable and just revel in his own misery,

to me, it was a great

example of how toxic and terrible

victimhood is. And he blames

everybody for where he is and he completely

lacks agency. So one of the. And

and because of that, he makes all these bad choices

and he ends up completely miserable. 40 year old,

right? So I think that it's not that it's a resolution

or a happy ending, but we see the end. Like,

you keep going, this is how you're gonna end up.

And so to me, if I'm looking at people in

2026, leaders, you know, people who need to follow

you, I think one

message stands up really, or stands out for me.

And that's. Truth is like a

verb, you know, to sound trite, but

it requires courage and it

has to be shown.

People will not trust you because of what you

say. Because the main character keeps saying all these things. When he

meets the prostitute Liza, he tells

her so much and then. And

tears her down, tells her her life is horrible and how is she

going to end up and blah, blah, blah. And then she

takes his word, comes to him for help

a couple days later, and he completely rejects her. Right?

Like this is an example of. These are words

I can keep yapping, but my actions don't

follow. So the take for the leaders, to me

is you cannot rely on these

platitudes and mission statements that mean absolute

nothing. You have to tell people what it means.

And this is something that I'm really passionate about because I've met

a lot of people who, you know, were.

Are part of these big corporations and you have these

meaningless, you know, do no harm and

like, they're all bullshit, because what does that mean? And

I actually am a big fan of

looking at actions and forcing leaders

to come up with specific actions. You can't just tell me

what you want, what is the wish, but also what does

it look like in reality, right? So if you

say, I listened

to Ben Horowitz speaking about. He actually wrote a book

about this too. But you know that Andersen Horowitz has like

this list of things they

want you to do. Like their mission statement for the

employee. And one of them is you have to respect the founders, right?

And treat them with respect. But what does that mean?

And so he would say, Hurwitz was talking about, okay,

respect means that you're never late to a meeting. And if you're late, I'm going

to fine you like 20 bucks a minute, right? You cannot be

late. And that to me is very

meaningful. Not just what, but like how does that

look like? And so if you're a leader, you can't just say,

follow me because I'm telling the truth. You have to actually

demonstrate that you do. Because all the people around

the main character in the Notes from the Underground, they

sense how awful he is

because he never does what he says. And so that

gap is never bridged. He doesn't bridge it inside

himself and he never bridges it with other people. And that makes

him a laughable, despicable character.

Okay, well, he's full of, he's, he's full of

self. He's,

he's full of self righteousness, right? Because he.

In our own time, we have a lot of this, the self righteous.

Actually I wrote it. I wrote a blog post about this. Yes.

So we have a,

a growing problem,

right? And AI, it's the first time we're, we're,

we're about. Yeah, we're about an hour and 20 minutes into our conversation here. So

now I'm going to mention AI. It's a good spot. So

what AI allows us to do what the LLMs allow us to do

as mid career, like I'm, I would be considered mid career. Mid career

to senior leaders, right? What it allows us

to do is it allows us to

not have to deal with the self righteous 24 year old

who just graduated from maybe Seattle

College, maybe colleges I used to work at, I came out of higher education as

well, right? Who know everything

and are obnoxious and can say it louder and louder and louder,

but actually don't have any life experience at all to back

up anything that they're saying. And normally

as a mid career senior leader, my task from the

organization would be to develop those people to do the hard work of

knocking off all the obnoxious nonsense,

utilizing the tools of social shaming and embarrassment in their

appropriate forms to basically mold this person

into someone who is quite

frankly able to be managed by other people.

Um, that's the job. That's one of the main jobs of middle management and has

been the main job of middle management, I would assert, for the last 50 years

in American culture. The LLMs

eliminate all of that because for a thousand dollars a month

I can get an LLM stack that isn't obnoxious.

I don't need to knock anything off of it. I just have to write better

prompts. That's all I have to do. I just have to write better prompts.

So on the one hand, we have the first generation of people

graduating college this year who

fully went through college with ChatGPT,

graduated by the way, which gives them confidence

to say things that they don't have any experience about.

Layered on top of the fact that every obnoxious thought that has come out of

their head since kindergarten has been supported

by peers, parents, educational system

all the way up the ladder. And by the way, we're in the second generation

of this now. This is no longer a passing millennial thing.

The zoomers were all raised in this way. And we're busy working on the third

generation right now. Kids. I have a nine year old, so kids who are like

his age, right, we're working on third generation of that. I'm watching it. I watch

it happen at soccer practice, like I coach my kids soccer team. I see it

how, I see how the kids show up. So it's, there's more of it coming

in, there's more on the pipe, let's just put it that way. So

we have that dynamic, right? And mid career and

senior professionals are correctly looking at the what's

coming down the pipe and going, I don't have to deal with it for a

thousand dollars a month. I don't have to deal with it. It's cheaper to spend

the thousand dollars a month now. We'll be okay as mid career

and senior professionals for a while.

But here's my point. The self righteous

obnoxious 24 year old in Notes for Underground, the

underground man who now has access to a cell phone and

LLMs in our time isn't going

to become better in 25 years. They're just

going to become more of what they already are and they're going to become more

of what they already are without having been developed or

caught by the mid career and senior professionals. So

my assertion is, and I'm working on this idea and tell you can tell you

what you think of this. The mid career and senior professionals like the folks that

you coach, that you work with. I think the hardest job they have right now

is not developing the juniors. That's actually not the

hardest job. The hardest job is resisting the temptation not

to develop the juniors because it's

just easier to not do is it's just easier.

And when you don't have to put up with any nonsense. Why would I, I

don't want, I don't need to be told that like my language

isn't culturally appropriate. Shut up.

You're 24. What some tick tock video

shows you that? I don't even go to that neighborhood. I don't know anybody. I

don't know her. I don't live over there and I don't have to, by the

way, I don't have to live over there. But you do have to know,

you do have to know who Kevin Costner was in Waterworld. And yeah, he's not

just a guy in Yellowstone. Like you do have to know. It's part of your

cultural legacy. You do have to know what that means. So when you make

the, when I'm sitting in a marketing meeting and I make the reference

of we will build it and they will come and somebody goes,

you have to know what that means. And if you don't know what that means,

if you're like confused and I tell you, go watch a movie, you can't get

offended. You don't have room to get offended because I could replace you with an

LLM tomorrow. Go hang out with your mom or

whatever who came in on the interview with you when we still hired you. Like

go away, go, go away. Just get out, get out.

It's still free association. I'm still not required to hire you. The state

isn't like holding a gun to my head saying I must hire this 24 year

old who has this particular worldview. It's still free association for

the time being. So get out, go find another job, go work at

7:11 or something. I don't know. This is the

challenge for mid career professionals who I'm speaking for. And I don't,

I don't know if you're seeing this but I'm working on a, working on a

thesis and eventually I'll have a longer substack article about this because I'm working through

thoughts in my head. Am I seeing this correctly? I guess that's the question. Am

I seeing this moat correctly, this growing delta or

is this something that I've overblown. And it'll all go away tomorrow. Because this is

just cultural development. No, I think it

tracks. And the jobs that are disappearing

first are the entry level

positions. And that's because the

LLMs work, you know, 247 and they are

infinitely cheaper than the people.

I think that a huge part of like my students

are coming through. Generally they would

have an associate degree from like a technical or

community college and then they would come back for their bachelor's, which is the

management program I teach. But they usually have

a couple years of experience, then they

get their bachelor's and they are

amazingly humble, which is a rare

quality in

their peers or in that generation. And

so they don't struggle as much. But I, I

do see this as a problem. And it's interesting. You're talking about

almost like, you know, we are, we're almost giving

up on the

responsibility to mold the new generation

because you run a 3

seconds cost benefit analysis and

you go, screw that. Nope. Right. Like again,

why? And the answer is because these people will, you

know, hopefully still work when, and pay your, your

retirement, but maybe not. And

you're going to threaten me with Social Security? Don't threaten me with, don't threaten me,

Will not. I don't, I

don't need to threaten anybody. Social Security is disappearing in about seven

minutes. Right? Yeah. So like, what are you really, what are we threatening with?

But, but I think it's a. I, I do

really like the point that you made about

agency and how it is the responsibility

of the others to, you know,

like, this man clearly has nobody. Right. And,

and by his own choice. But the question

is, if you're the leader and you have a bunch of

younger people on your staff, are you

taking the time to mentor and build

that agency and do you have good system

for that to happen? And, and I think that

in a way it is a two way street that everybody keeps

forgetting, which is they need to want

to get coached. And when that is

lacking, you're like, right, I'm sorry,

why again, why would I put myself in this?

And, and so it goes back to

looking for people not based on their skill set, but

based on their character. And

the willingness to be coached

is extremely important.

And you want people who not only will listen, but

also then apply. Yeah, yeah,

yeah. Looking for people based on the, the, the

way. There's a way to frame this. You

know, Martin Luther King Jr. Said content of their character, not the color of their

skin. Right, okay, well, the, the content of their character,

not the, the the, not the nature of their

academic or credentialing. The degrees. The degrees. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So to the 24 year olds that I just like raked over the calls.

Okay. How it's

hard. And I get it. I was 24, you were 24. I get

it. You're out there, you're unproven. You want to make your mark in the world.

You want to be taken seriously. You,

you, you do think you're special and you do

think that you're unique and you do think that everything that has ever happened to

you is the first time that it's ever happened to any human being in the

history of the world. And by the way, I say this again just

to be fully transparent with you. You know, I've mentioned this on the show before.

I got four kids, you know, they're in age range from like 30 all the

way down to nine. I have a 21 year old and a 16 year old.

They're girls. So I'm dealing with this like I'm in the developmental loop of some

of this directly out of my own house, right. And so,

and I'm seeing it show up in their friends, right, that they, that they bring

to the house or, or when we go places and we interact with people. And

I, I see it, right? So I'm not talking about this in just sort of

like some ephemeral theory kind of thing that I saw maybe somewhere.

I get the frustration with the old heads, as we say in the

African American community. That's the term. I get the frustration right.

To the 24 year olds, how do they put the self righteousness on

the back burner? How does that, how do you put the self righteousness and,

and the, the. I have all the knowledge, but I don't

have the wisdom thing. How do you put all that on the back, back burner

in order to come humbly and ask

for coaching or ask for mentoring? How does that happen?

And ambitious people, by the way, will always do this. So I do think

there will be and I think, I think the, the strike,

the separations are already starting to happen. They've been happening for a while

in which you'll have the top folks who understand the game

and they will pursue ruthlessly what they need to

pursue and the rewards will start to accrue to them. And

they've been pursuing it ruthlessly since they were 13. And good luck to you catching

them. They're building them out. Then you'll have all the people at the

bottom who are the man underground, the underground man

they, they're going to tweet,

they're going to go onto Blue sky, they're going to have a substack,

scrape together a couple of subscriptions and like I said, go work at 7:11. They're

angry. They're never gonna, they're gonna wind up a 40 year old civil servant with

a bad liver. That's just where they're gonna wind up at. Okay, but

then you have the vast majority of people in the middle who don't understand what

the question is. So for

the vast majority of people in the middle, what can they do?

The vast majority of 24 year olds in the middle who know they have to

break through but don't know how because senior leaders look like

they're over there and it's not. There's no

mediator there. You got to go do it. But you also have to

pay your rent and figure out how to live and maybe

have a relationship and navigate modern dating and have all these

things you have desperately going on inside of yourself that no one understands.

And you of course have 50,000 people following you on Instagram reels every

time you post something because you've been posting on Instagram since you were like six.

What do we say to those people? Because they are living in it. They're living

in an environment where every single thought, to your point earlier in this episode,

every single thought is public. Every single brain fart. I loved how you put that.

Can just come out. I'm a personal

believer that maybe everyone doesn't. So thought you die in your own head.

That's why I have this podcast and you know, I think about it a lot

and then I spout things out. But what do we do with that 24 year

old who has come up in that environment, who's in the middle, who's not

ambitious, but also not, not the underground

man. What does that person do?

So if I had a good answer, I wouldn't

be sitting here. I would probably enjoy bajillions of dollars

somewhere in the French Alps.

But

I actually have started writing a book for teenagers

especially about like specifically about these topics.

So I think that if I may, I would bring it

back to one of the core topics we touched upon already, which

is self awareness and

integrity. So you want to be true

to yourself and the outside world.

And the part about being

true to yourself is really hard for a 24 year old. If you were

told that you are fantastic, special and the

best since you were a toddler,

which you know is and experienced, many

have, right? Like you're great. You're great. We,

you know, you don't have to even work that hard to get decent

grades. You don't have to like. It is true. I see

the lowering of standards in many

areas, right? Like you don't do the chores that people did 50,

30, 20, 10 years ago. There's a lot that is

happening, right? Even the activities are

less frequent because you're spending a lot of time

on the electronics, blah, blah, blah. So I think

that the number one thing you need is

humility, right? This, this sort of like, well,

maybe I'm not as great as I thought I am and, or

I am great for who I am, but I want to be better. Right?

Like you don't compare yourself with anybody but yourself ten

years from now. So I think

there, I took a note and I think there's

two sources of wisdom for you.

And not just wisdom, but also action. The again, self

awareness without mastery means nothing. So you need

that the action piece.

And I think books are, again, I would send people

back to books because there's so many

great lessons. And again, like you think you're the first person going

through this. Guess what? There's about, you know, 5 billion who

had that very same experience. So I think

going back to the classics and making yourself

ready is great starting

point. And then because I think that it also reminds you again of

the struggles and just physical struggles that people

had to live through. You know, at 24, you had usually six

kids already. So like, that's

a different. That really gives you gratitude

and self awareness. So I would start there.

That should give you some again, knowledge and self awareness. But then

the second piece is you don't know what you don't know.

And there are others who can

lead you to more of a self discovery. And

the simplest trick is if

you want to do better, you know, ask your friends, hey,

like honest talk. What is it? Like, what do I do

great and where I could improve? Right. And if it's somebody

with whom you have a close enough relationship and then,

then, okay, let's start there. You can, you can kind of start improving.

And the second piece would be if

you're surrounded with people like you, then they might not always give

you their like, valuable

feedback because they are in the same boat. Yeah,

but going to mentors and they

don't have to be mentors, you know, it can be like,

I can talk to you as your professor and say,

great in class, writing is sloppy. I

would probably choose different words. But then, you know, you're Always

late with your assignments. That cannot happen

in real life. Like we, you know, there are certain

expectations, and if you have three times a year,

you know, grandma died, emergency, I don't trust your words.

Like, so I think you're right

that knowledge and wisdom are completely different and you

can grow into wisdom later. But I still think

reading is. Is really, really valuable.

Checking in with other people and sort of

being open to the feedback. And the reason why I

suggest Friends first is because they will always

phrase it the kindest way. They will always try to make

it as palatable as possible, even though they're delivering something

that it's not that wonderful. And so if you

start learning that feedback

is not about you, it's about your actions or it's

not a. It's not a reflection of your character

most of the time, but it's about your abilities that you

can improve, then I think that eases

you into this state where you are able to take feedback. And when

somebody who's your senior leader will say, hey,

this was not great, but I like the direction, do it differently.

You're like, okay, great. It's not a. I'm not gonna focus on the

90% that was. That was. You know, I will not

focus on the 10% that was bad. I'm gonna focus on the 90% that is

actually great, which is I still have a job and I have a second op.

You know, second chance. Yep. Yep. All right, I'm gonna pause

here because I gotta go to the restroom. Oh, yeah. I'm gonna get some.

All right. And we're back. Okay.

Yeah. Truth is meaningless without courage. I

love how you've talked about that self awareness piece

without mastery being hell. I love that.

I also think you're onto something here, because the underground man at

24 has no evidence of a.

There's no evidence of a social structure around him of any kind.

And the friends that he does have going back to just the party for just

a second, not only do they dislike him

immensely, they. They

are shocked that he's even still around, right?

As if they expected him to fade into the. Fade into the. The verge. Like

Homer in that. In that great. That great meme.

And maybe he did right when he went into the civil. A little surface, right?

Just sort of. Just sort of recedes. Just recedes. Seeds into

the distance. The question. One of the questions I wanted to ask very

briefly about that section in the book in the original

Russian, what are we missing there as an American reader? Like, are there a

loot? Is it. Is It a one for one translation. Are we getting everything or

are there things that we're missing inside of that, that, that sequence? Because

there's some class themes in there that, as I said

previously, don't really

resonate with me because I, I don't like what.

Well, so he has this whole thing about the money, right?

Like he's ripping. He's ripping off his, his, his. He's not paying his, his.

His butler, basically. Polo is his name. Yeah. Of

all I know. So random. He's

like, okay, well that's fine. He's not paying

him his wages and he's doing this and doing that. And I thought,

you know, I would just go write the man in iou.

Like, what's the problem here? Now I'm, again, I'm looking at this

through the framework of, you know,

we don't really. I mean, if you're going to pay somebody, you better pay them,

right? Like, this is, this is just sort of the reality of, of. Of life.

I don't know that that was the reality of life that Dostoyevsky was seeing. Clearly

it wasn't. But are there things that I'm

missing in the original Russian that are illusions or

that you would miss if you were reading a translation of it and it's not

in the original Russian? I'm always curious about that with authors that write in different

languages, because I know there's things we're missing when it goes into English, but I

don't know what they are. So a, you are

under the false assumption that I have read this in Russian, which

I have not. I can read

Cyrillics, however, that is now,

like, you know, I see a tombstone and I am able to read the name

and that's about it. So not enough for

Dostoevsky. Okay, I will say,

and this would be for another podcast, but I would

love to talk about translations and how

immensely important they are and how. I think that the

reason why so many books that were

not English can still be

relevant is in a large part thanks to

translations that kind of modernize the,

the, the words.

And so the meaning remains, but the words might be different.

And I think that one of the reasons why today's people, the

students struggle with, like, Shakespeare is because it's

so hard. Like, thy. What? Like, I don't.

But like, I grew up reading Shakespeare in translations and

it made it way more modern and way more relatable.

And, And I think there's a huge

power in translations. So that's

one point. Second point. So

money. I have noticed for

Dostoevsky is a huge topic.

And in. Yes, because he was

constantly in debt because, you know, like, this was a.

A very real personal situation

for him. But also what you're

kind of picking up on is

the relationship between money

and personal

pride. And this.

How shall I describe this? Honor.

The sense of honor. And so that

like in Brothers Karamazov, one of the. The brothers

is like, he borrows money and then he has

this idea that he. He borrows money, he

spends half of it on his,

like, you know, women and booze and blah, blah, blah. But in

his mind there's this, like, if I don't spend it all,

I can still return it honorably, right? Like,

I can spend some of it, but if I don't spend it all,

then I still retain some shred

of honor. And. And it

is the, in the

society, in the Russian society that he's

described, Dostoevsky is describing. Another

angle about money is also that you were

often wined and dined based

on your pedigree.

And so even if you didn't have

the money to pay because you were

nobility, people would

invite you and pay you because you

are the nobility. So there's this idea that

when he goes out with his friends or the schoolmates,

the people he despises and who hates him, but, you know, that's the

society or the set of people. In

the second part, there's this Zverkov

character, somebody who is like a really accomplished

guy, and they all talk about paying

for his dinner, paying for him, even though he's the most

accomplished. So there's this. There's this aspect of

borderline servility

and respect for money and, and

your pedigree, your social status,

that goes against logic. Right. And

so I noticed the,

the way I interpret the interaction

between the main character and his servant

is he could just say, hey, I'm. I'm

withholding the money. And essentially, you're my servant. You're my

serf. I can do whatever I want, but he

can't do that. And he is ashamed in front of the

servant because it.

He's aware that that's bad. It's

dishonorable. Right? Like, he needs to get money

from somebody who's lower status.

And that's so uncomfortable because it's so dishonorable.

So, like a door in

the floor in my head just opened up with

what you just said there.

I would never have tied again. I'm an American. I

don't. Wow. Yeah, Well, I mean, that's. The depth of that's the depth of the

cultural assumption there. So I would never tie

money to honor. So in

America, here's the weird thing about America. And

Marxists often comment on this.

At least they did in the 20th century, not so much now because they're younger

and they don't know history. So, so stupid.

It's, it's fine. They're, they're going to learn. They're going

to learn because human nature hasn't changed. But Marxists in the 20th century would

often comment that the reason the first stage towards

Marxism never really worked the United States to their conception

of work is that everyone in America wanted to be middle

class and they had no way to overcome that. They had no solution for

that. Well, the reason why everyone in America wants to be middle

class is because we don't tie money to honor. Money is this other thing

over here. And honor. If we even talk about honor,

which we don't because we're not an honor coded society anymore. We haven't been an

honor coded society for 80 years. Honor is over

here somewhere. Honor is about a different thing. And so we

separate those two. And the door that

just like swung open in my brain was one of

the. Was related to something else that we read on the show. So we read

Lenin's basically Lenin's manifesto about how to

organize. How to organize the question of how to organize the

populace or something. I can't remember the title of it. And

Lennon is a fascinating character to me because

he was absolutely a sadistic and

megalomaniacal tyrant who

also had.

Who also hated himself much like the underground, big time, big

time hated himself. And, and

somehow through. Not somehow through the exegesis of

history operating outside of him. Wound

up running the whole thing and then appointing somebody to replace him.

Well, not appointing, sorry, selecting someone to replace

him who. And

you wouldn't think it would be worth. You could replace somebody worse with Lenin,

but he managed to do it. He managed to replace some. Somebody

who's worse than him. And so one of the things that's always

been fascinating to me is how he, how he

successfully took over an entire culture. And

the money and honor piece ties that. That's why Marxism worked

as an overarching way of organizing, not as an economic theory, but as

an overarching way of organizing society in

Soviet Russia for 80 years because of that conception of honor

tied in. Or one of the factors was that conception of honor

tied into money and then how that then striates

through class. Whereas in America it

strikes totally differently and it's Not a one to

one comparison. Even nowadays when Alexandria

Ocasio Cortez, the representative from Brooklyn, runs around in

a dress at the Met Gala that says Eat the Rich on it

or Tax the Rich or whatever the hell that dress said, like

everybody in America knows,

every American knows she's playing a game. And ultimately one day

she'll be, the next day she'll be running down the street in sweats

and a T shirt, jogging like

anybody other, like any other 30 year old woman in, you know, in

Washington D.C. and she will be indistinguishable from Bill Gates, who will

show up at a grandma, you know, or a grandpa sweater, having a hot

dog at a stand. Like

everybody wants to be middle class here.

Which I get it, if you're looking at that from

other countries, that makes zero sense how that works.

But we don't tie the money to, not in that way anyway. We don't tie

money to honor. So that was a huge insight for me. So like I said,

you swung open the door in my head. I got to think some word through

that idea, but I never heard it express, expressed that way.

And so there's two things and, and just

quick point one is that

it's not that the money is tied to

honor, it's that he

sees it as a demonstration of

his own failure, right? So, so the real

he cannot unmask himself as a loser

in front of his servant.

And that is like he would rather

avoid that because it's embarrassing. But I will say

the second point is money absolutely has been

tied to. Not in Russia,

not to honor per se, but definitely

goodness of some sort. And

a nobility, right? So like you have these,

you have almost like a character.

There's something about your good character if you come

from money. And again, there's this almost

servility right about this. But also

the situation in Russia has been so

vastly different from what was going on at the time

in the US and or in Europe, because. So the

serfs, the difference, like the chattel slavery, right? Like

people, slaves are objects, right?

You treat them as objects. They have zero rights, the

serfs. I actually talked about this in a context

of feudalism in Europe.

The people were tied to land. So the feudal

nobility owned land. And the village that sit on that

land, those people were your people, but they still

would have to ask you if they can marry. And

you had to work on that land, on that property for

six days a week or whatever for the master,

but you still had some rights, right? Like you could go and say,

I'M going to Italy to learn how to be a carpenter or whatever.

And maybe they would say yes, and then you would leave

and come back and build the church in your village. But then

in Russia the disparity was so

stark, right. Like the, the, the poverty was

so bad that the

sort of. And, and for life. So you were tied to the land

and you had way less rights. I almost. If there's

a hierarchy, you have the, the slaves at the

very bottom being treated as objects. Then you have the Serbs in

Russia who have some rights,

but any master can overrule them anytime he wants.

And, and he will. And, and you're tied to the

land. And then you have the, again, like the,

the nobility. Yeah, and, and, yeah,

and. Or the people in sort of the Western Eastern Europe, like Austro

Hungarian Empire, where we Also in like 18th century, they're

there where some, some changes to the

system. But yeah, you were, you were essentially born, raised,

tied to the land. That's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then that whole system of

course fell apart in. Right in the trenches of World War I

and earlier for Russia. Yeah, yeah, but the.

Yeah, I, I can go into that

rabbit hole of the. But, but I, I think that if

your brother is hungry by the Tsar,

but which is what happened to Lenin. His brother was, was

killed for, you know, revolution against the Tsar and, and

it radicalized him and he was poor and, and I

think that the, the idea that again, like it's a,

it's a so enticing you can see today, like

let's dismantle freaking everything. Okay. That's

easy. And how are we going to build? Oh, we're not. Okay. We don't have

the plan. We just have the, like we're fed

up and we're gonna dismantle and we're gonna like everything is bad.

And you're like, is it? Well, and that gets back

to, I mean, the three revolutions, right. That made the modern

world. Right. So you've got the French Revolution, you have the American Revolution, you have

the British Revolution, all based on fundamentally different

conceptions of what reality, quite

frankly should be. And I look at the

Russian Revolution as a, the, the

follow on or the logical conclusion such as it were

from the French Revolution. And

I'm not quite. No, no, I'm not

quite. The

challenge that we try to approach or on this show is.

And with the kind of books that we, that we are covering here, we try

to look at things historically obviously, but then

also bring this down to individuals and try to, you know, there's a hierarchy. Right.

You got to scale it up the hierarchy and scale it down. Right. And to

your point, deconstructing everything doesn't work. Matter of fact, I, I would

assert that we're at the end of a 25 year long

American deconstruction project. We actually rudely

ended it. I think January 6th was probably the end of the

deconstruction project. And now we're in

a weird middle ground between the end of

deconstruction and the beginning of something else.

And there are people, not just politicians, but also cultural

folks, social leaders, economic folks who are looking

around going, we're done with that. We're done with the

deconstruction. Because to your point, you could deconstruct down to nothing and then what

do you have? You just have raw power. And even raw

power can be deconstructed. So you, so you wind up with nothing

basically. And nothing is not a forward.

Is that fuel in the momentum? There's not fuel for forward momentum. Right.

And so now we have to begin the building, we have to begin the laying

of the rails for the building. So no more deconstruction. We're done with that.

That's it. It's over. Maybe 80 years from now you could

deconstruct again. But we got to rebuild institutions, we've got to rebuild

systems, we have to rebuild structures. And

I, I, as a partisan for America, I think this is

the best place in the world to do that. Agree. But,

but other places, you know, I think they're gonna have to go through the same

thing. You're gonna have to do that because deconstruction and

revolution doesn't work. It doesn't lead to building.

So if I may, tied back to the

man in the underground. Yes. To me

the, the tearing down is easy

and the building is hard. Yeah. And so

we, what we have on display is somebody who's like

tearing down and revealing. He's, he's showing

up like, he's showing us how

rotten he is. Right. Like he has this infinite

self awareness. But we see

16 years later when he's 40, that he

hasn't done jack shit about where he is.

And, and, and we see the

complete utter despair that he,

that he is experiencing when he's older.

And so I think the, the sort of,

the parallel to today is

now we know, okay, you told us how bad America is and you

told us how this is all, you know, failing

and how these institutions don't work and how these

principles don't work. But if you're Going to sit in this

16 years later, you're going to be rotten and

miserable and we're not going to move an inch and

that's not where we want to be. Right. So there needs to be this

agency, this bias for action.

And I think also the, and he doesn't

talk about it in the book, but I think that eventually there needs be to,

to be the hunger for transcendence that, you know,

something that goes beyond what you're doing. And in

reality, in 2026, I was just looking at some numbers and

like the, the turn to Christianity among young

people and particularly Catholicism,

like the old school Christianity is on the

rise. So I think that people do sense

that you need more than

just the rumination and self

analysis and ad nauseam, you know, like

revelations about our inner, like the navel

gazing that leads nowhere. Yeah, yeah, no,

I agree and I'm seeing those numbers too on the turn to

Catholicism, orthodox Christianity. And

you know, my particular group of Christians, the American evangelicals, have no

answer for this and they need to develop one. And there are

some that are beginning to sort of light bulb is kind of gone

off and, and I do believe

that fundamentally. I was actually have a conversation with somebody who's

a good friend of mine this weekend about this, but I do believe that fundamentally,

you know, in America anyway, those three, those three

or four, four strands. And American Catholics, I hate to tell

you, you're more Protestant than your European brothers. Just point

that out. But, but agreed, but just.

Anyway, we're, we're gonna have to figure out at a

theological level over the next 25 years what

does a uniquely American

theology with those, those strains influencing it

look like and what does it look like when it

builds both in opposition to and

in some cases hand in hand with a more secular,

materialist, reductionist culture, which by the way is just going to keep right on going

there. It's not like the secular materialists are going to, are going to stop.

Okay, we got around the corner, we gotta, we gotta close this out. This has

been a great conversation, Hana. I've had a tremendous,

this has been tremendous. You opened up the. Like I said, you opened the door

on the floor in my head for a bunch of different things. I want to

invite you on, to have you back. We got to continue this conversation, keep this

rolling. I love the, the,

the quote from Thomas Sowell, the great Thomas Sowell, the, the

Economist. He says it's amazing how much panic one honest

man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.

We are in a time where Foreign

that's spreading. I believe we're fundamentally in a time where people are

kind of like in the Matrix, kind of like waking up and we are

going into Plato's cave. We are pulling out folks like the underground man. And we're

bringing them up into the light and they're fighting, they're kicking and screaming all the

way, but we're bringing them up and we're saying, hey, this is the light. Now

there are some people you can't pull out of there. They want to stay in

there. They want to stay in the cave of the Internet ordering doordash and

being self righteous and self aware all at the same time in equal measure.

But to be honest about it and to engage

effectively with those folks, books like Notes from the Underground give us a map

of where we can go and how we can maybe not a map of how

what we where we can go gives us a map of the territory that we

are facing in a way that's manageable.

And a book is still the most subversive way to get

across ideas ever, the human beings have ever created.

How do, how can leaders. This is my last question. How can leaders stay

on the path? I think we've talked a lot about this today in one form

or another, but you get the last word as usual for guests on this show.

How can leaders stay on the path with.

With this book? If they're going to pick this up for the first time, how

do they stay on the path? Reading this. Reading this very small but very

difficult book. Well, thank

you so much for having me. I will. This was such a blast

and I'd love to come back to answer your

question. How can leaders stay on the path

and what lessons they can take from this book

I'd say kind of to recap.

1. The Self

Awareness is nothing without

mastery. So I think

thinking about what's inside is great and

important, but it cannot stop there.

The second lesson I think is really

about integrity. Dostoevsky shows

somebody who doesn't have any integrity. He

lies to himself and he lies to everybody else.

And the lesson here is if you keep

doing this, you will end up alienated,

alone and miserable

later on. So it's not a mirror

of what could be

as a good example, but it's really a terrible example example

of what may happen. And I think

the last thing I would say is if I am

a leader today, the lesson I'm taking from the

Notes from the Underground is definitely that

you have to walk the talk and you cannot

bring people with you by Just talking.

You have to demonstrate your integrity in daily life,

in your daily actions, in the

everyday operation of

your small company, big company enterprise, what have you.

Either we come, you know, either we show up on

time or we don't. And if we tolerate this, then

okay, that's the company you have. If you

work hard and you want other people to work hard, then you better

work harder than them because you can

ask for things you're not demonstrating. And I think that there is

and has been a gap between what the

management is telling us and what it feels like

on the ground. And I think that there is

now the reckoning of sort

of closing the gap and the companies. And it doesn't

have to be great or enviable. And I think above

all, you can stay pretty unique, right? Like you

can be a company that does things certain way that

nobody else does. Nobody else is organized

the way you are. But if you have a

vision and you walk that talk and it is, you

will attract people who, who will fit that, that

culture and, and you can make it happen.

I think that the, the idea that everything needs to be

ubiquitous, you know, like we all have to,

and, and that is one of those, like it forces you to

be who you're not. And so this, this courage

is a verb and truth is a verb

because you need to have the courage to sustain it

and be that sort of a sovereign

individual is really critical.

Awesome. Thank you Hana for coming

on the podcast. We will have links to

Hana's substack and her LinkedIn profile. We'll

also have links to a couple of the books that she mentioned and articles, as

you mentioned in the show notes below the

audio player where you are listening to this show

right now. Once again, I would like to thank Hannah for coming

on the podcast. And with that. Well, no, you're welcome

with that. Well, we're out.