Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the
Leadership Lessons, from the Great Books podcast, episode
number one forty ain't in
chronological.
So today, we're gonna be looking at a few things.
But before we do that, we have to consider some
facts. Every good story, just like every life, has a beginning, a
middle, and an end. And the sentimental and romantic parts that
happen between those bookends are what makes for a life.
And in areas such as ours, where we are always on, always connected, and always
judging others and finding them wanting, Collectively, at this
point in time in the West, we are drifting back from the desire to know
everything about everyone all the time. As a matter of fact, before I came on
this podcast today, I just read a whole article from
someone on Substack, basically announcing their departure from Substack,
saying that it's too commercialized and no one goes here anymore.
What we really want from people is honesty,
transparency, and above all else, authenticity.
However, we are still in an era of social media curation
that's happening at the exact same time. Too many people, poorly
inculcated into a deeply visual cultural, still believe that the future is the
airbrush photo brought to you by artificial intelligence and large language
models. Except, of course, as in any other era,
the young, the sentimental, and the romantic are looking to be led out of the
space of the fake and into the space of the real.
But what does leading out of the seeming abundance of the fake and into the
desert of the real actually look like at a practical level for leaders?
How do they find their way? And what is the vision of the future after
we have sentimentalized to the past?
Today, we will be summarizing and analyzing some of the themes for
leaders embedded in the Roman a Clef,
Sentimentalizing the Decline and Fall of a Lost Generation.
Tender is the night. I f Scott, it's
Gerald. Leaders, it's
not the society that is tragically screwed up. The
tragically screwed up parts also live in all of us.
And I kinda called an audible on this intro and kind of rewrote it, which
was why if you're watching that video, Libby looks confused. But today, we will be
joined by Libby Younger back from episode number
one forty five where we did the geopolitical Victorian
romp through Ford Maddox Ford's parades end, what I
consider to be a bookend book. And later on, we'll be
bringing Libby back. We'll be talking about a farewell to arms this year
as well. But, welcome back, Libby. How are you
doing? I'm fantastic. And my little furrow
brow always gives me away. You're like,
what is he talking about? It's not rid of it, but it doesn't work.
Like, that's not on the script. Easy, and I had caught up. I had caught
up. But It's okay. It's alright. It's okay. I I called an audible. I
rewrote it because, well, this is the first episode of
our new our new format. So if you listened
to episode number one forty seven, which you should have listened to
before this, we introed Tender is the Night, and I talked about
extensively about the literary life of f Scott Fitzgerald
and some of his challenges with writing, with alcoholism,
with his wife, Zelda, and her,
insanity. We even read on that episode, the
great, not really
epigraph. It's not really the term I wanna use, but the great sort of commentary
that, F. Scott Fitzgerald or not F. Scott show. Sorry. That, Ernest
Hemingway had on her, in a movable feast, a
little piece in that book called, called, Hawks
Do Not Share. Right? Which was the first time that Hemingway
realized Zelda might not be all at home.
And that, of course, impacted how Fitzgerald wrote and the kind
of space that he wrote from. And, Tender is
the Night was Fitzgerald's probably least
selling book, of the ones that he wrote. And
he actually tried to rewrite it in the thirties, and it didn't it didn't land
in either. Matter of fact, this book sold fewer copies even than The
Great Gatsby, which is the one, of course, that everyone knows him from,
which did not sell like hotcakes initially. K?
This Side of Paradise, Beautiful and the Damned, these books sold a lot better.
Right? And, of course, Fitzgerald had his short story
output, which was incredible in the twenties and
thirties. So we're gonna open up with Tender is
the Night. We're gonna start off in chapter one, and, we're
gonna sort of lay the foundation for this,
as Fitzgerald describes the
French Riviera scene. And I
quote, on the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about
halfway between Marseille and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose colored
hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed facade, and before
it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately, it has become a summer resort
of notable and fashionable people. A decade ago, it was almost
deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Not many bungalows
cluster near it. But when this story begins, only the couple of a
dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed
pines between Gauss' Hotel des Francaise and Cannes
Five miles away. The hotel and its bright tan
prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning, the distant
images of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple
outbound at Italy, were cast across the water lake wavering in the ripples and
rings sent up by the sea plants through the clear shallows.
Now I'm gonna pause here. There's something very interesting that Fitzgerald
does because he comes from a different time. He fully and completely describes
what you are going to see at Cannes. Right? What you're going to see when
you go there. By the way, the Cannes Film Festival just took place, the
weekend before this recording. And, apparently, Jeff Bezos and,
Lawrence Sanchez were there with their yacht, which is obnoxious from
what I understand. One
more sign, I guess, of a decadent, gilded
era in which we are living.
Back to the book. Before eight, a man came down to the beach in
a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application to his person of the chilly
water and much grunting and loud breathing floundered a minute in the sea.
When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. Merchant
men crawled westward on the horizon. Busboys shouted in the hotel court. The dew dried
upon the pines. In another hour, the horns and motors began to blow down the
winding road along the low range of the mares, which separate the littoral
from true Provencal, France. A
mile from the sea is where pines gave way to dusty poplars
as an isolated railroad stop. Whence, one June morning in
1925, Victoria brought a woman and her daughter down
to Gauss' hotel. The mother's face was of a fading prettiness that would
soon be padded with broken veins. Her expression was both tranquil and
aware in a pleasant way. However, once I moved on quickly to
her daughter who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks litched to a
lovely flame like the thrilling flesh of children after their cold baths
in the evening. Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her
hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into love locks and
waves and curly cues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were
bright, big, clear, wet, and shining. The color of her cheeks was real,
breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her
body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood. She
was almost 18, nearly complete, but the
dew was still on her.
That's how we open Tender Into the Night with a description
of our character that will be moving
the plot forward and will act as a
act as a fuel, in what's about to happen
between, Nicole and Dick Divers,
a couple who are American
escapees, I guess, is maybe not the word. But,
they are they've traveled, right, to to Europe,
and they are part of the party set in nineteen twenties and
'19 early nineteen thirties, France.
And, that is one of the things you note about Tender is the
Night. Right? It is a
novel that shows how the other half lives. It is a
novel that demonstrated, in real ways
to people reading in America who were right on the cusp of the end of
the roaring twenties and the beginning of the Great Depression,
just how much they were missing in life.
And so I'm gonna open up my questions for Libby,
with this one. You know, you
mentioned last time when we were talking about Parade's End, a little bit off off,
off mic, how much you really enjoyed this book. What would you say for you
was the most captivating element, Libby, of Tender is the
Night? I think just how
universal, human your
humanity human humanity is that even as
we, you know, live in, you know, in the twenty
twenties, a hundred years later,
you know, the desire
yeah. Mental illness is, you know, is
prevalent, and, you know, they called it
schizophrenia back in, you know, the nineteen twenties, and now
a dissociative, you know, identity is
maybe the more common term now.
You know, numbing, you know, not wanting
to live in reality and numbing through alcohol,
you know, is a constant. Yeah. Yeah,
backdrop is just what is the only thing
changing. You know,
it was it was it was hard it it was hard to read.
You know, when you look behind, it wasn't that hard to read. I mean, I
you know, I as I told you, I really I love reading books from this
era. And the way that, F. Scott Fitzgerald and
Hemingway describe, the backdrops
and the people just are so real to me. I feel like I can just
plop in, and I, you know, I know the conversations, and I can
have, you know, you can have them all, and just feel a part
of it, you know, from the clothing to the smells to the backdrop, but it's
also because it's in, you know, in France. Mhmm. And
France is pretty timeless, at least, at least from, you know,
nineteen hundreds to 02/2025.
Backdrop is similar. The story
of the haves and the have nots, you know, are constant.
It it I I I I
think that the most resonating is how we'd wanna keep
mental illness to feel like a a secret
if we get out and how maybe it's a psychotherapy doesn't
work. No one has a
solution to therapy. I could've
told you that back in '2 you know, in February.
You know? But, you know, it's kind of a constant that
we have to live it through life as well as, you know, as
well as the numbing. And this pursuit
of more, more, more, doesn't
satisfy, you
know, the desire to feel real and more just
sitting back and judging and numbing. Mhmm. That's why
the feel yeah. The the need to feel
real. Well, and there's this there's this
and I think about it often when I read, when I read about World
War one. Right? We're sort of coming off grades end. Right? And and this is
all the stuff that happened after World War one. Right? So after World War one,
people wanted to party, which makes sense. After every war, people wanna have a time
of a break. They wanna party. They wanna forget the the,
problems and the challenges that were inherent in in
sacrifice that was involved in warfare. Right? Whether the sacrifice was large or small,
doesn't seem to matter. Even in our
time. Right? I mean, one of the interesting things with our twenty
year adventurism in Afghanistan and in Iraq,
is well, two interesting things. So one, we had to
party, but it all happened on social media, where everybody
across the world could see it. But then number two, that's our new
communication medium of choice. But then number two,
you know, George w Bush back at the end of 09/11, you
know, said possibly the worst possible thing you could possibly say, which was, you know,
don't worry about it. The economy is gonna be fine. Everybody go shopping. Like, that's
not that's not what you say. Right?
Which shows a failure of political leadership in our
time. Also, it sort of set the tone for the unseriousness
that we've had during the last twenty years of what are quite what's quite frankly
chaos chaos in my opinion, and we've talked about that on this podcast before.
A hundred years ago, however, and this is the thing that I always have to
think of, I have to kind of sort contextualize it. You talk about universality, and
I agree with you. However, a hundred years ago, there were some things
that were genuinely new on the horizon.
And we can speak about it a hundred years later because we're cynical, and we've
seen the backwash of it. But consumerism
was genuinely new then.
Consumerism at a capitalistic consumerism driven by
capitalism at an industrial scale was new.
You had people who were actually beginning to
live the kind of lives that later on at the end of
World War two and going into the nineteen seventies would just
become things that they expected. Right? But they were beginning to have that taste,
right, of quote, unquote the good life. And it was sort of starting to filter
down into the middle class. Then you also had celebrity,
you know, the beginning of the celebrity culture, which Tender is the Night kind of
personalizes that. And one of the things that really jumps out to me about
this book is,
Rosemary is a Hollywood Star, daddy's little girl. Right?
Which the way Fitzgerald writes about
Hollywood and then, of course, later on the struggles he had writing in
Hollywood are the exact same struggles. It's the exact same
parallel and the exact same way that people think about YouTube stars
now. The way we think about
YouTube now, if we're a Hollywood Star, is the way that Hollywood people
were thought of by people who believed that theater was the big art
form. And if you weren't in theater, you were nobody. What is this Hollywood
trash? What is this? Like, you just stand around and, like, the
camera it's it's garbage. The same thing that, like, the Hollywood people say about
YouTube now. Like, it's amazing to me. Like, Hollywood Writers will not
work in YouTube. They just won't do it. They refuse.
And and they struggle with the fact that YouTube is eating
their edges just and and actually eating the whole industry
the same way that theater people struggled
with movies eating their edges. Right? And later on, movie people would
struggle with TV in the fifties, right, at a much smaller scale. But movie people
kinda saw it coming and sort of able to integrate into that. So
that sort of struck me. So celebrity culture was
beginning. Consumerism was beginning. And
then you talk about therapy. We can only
I mean, that's that's that's the kind of statement we can make a hundred years
after because Freud was new. Like, Freud's, like,
Victorian and and Young was running around. These were
new I mean, Dick Divers is a psychiatrist. You know, all these things were
new, at the time, new ways of dealing with folks. Even
his interactions with his his rich psychiatry patients. There's one
that's in, early in book three when
when, his partner, begins to believe that Dick's not
serious after he comes off of the the fist fight with with the
Italian with the Italian cops, which is probably not wise.
But, probably not wisdom there, Dick.
But he comes off of that. He goes back to Switzerland, and then he, like,
starts his long slow, you know, decline into
ignominy. And, and it's
at that point that you begin to see how his
clients engage with him around psychiatry.
And Fitzgerald sort of shadows this early in the book or throughout the
book where he can't Dick can't even write a second volume
of his, like, medical book that was gonna make him famous. He can't get it
up off the deck. And, partially, that's the challenge of a writer's struggle,
which is Fitzgerald which which, shadows
Fitzgerald's challenges in real life with the partying and the drinking
and Zelda and everything else. But it also,
I think and maybe Fitzgerald wasn't intentional about this, but it's his
critique of psychiatry. Like, it's not there's something
that's not there, but it's too new for us to figure out what the something
is that's missing. And so you see all these things that are new. And so
I have to look back on this book when I was reading it. I say
all that to say this. When I was reading this book, I had to give
people forgiveness and grace rather than judge
them through a twenty twenty five lens. Because if I judge
them through a twenty twenty five lens, I will judge them harshly, and I will
find them wanting. Interesting. Yeah. I
didn't I didn't have that challenge. Yeah. And one of the things
that I'm thinking about is I'll probably
gonna double down on, individuals'
responses are universal. Yeah.
Okay. You know? So, right now, you
know, commercial consumerism enabled
by financial engineering and, you know, and all those
things has probably penetrated a little deeper
into, society.
But, and, you know, the
the narcissism associated with me me me,
you because there's a bit more wealth and decadence.
People are looking for ways to feel
valued and validated externally.
But I think those are all
regardless of what the trigger is.
Hate that word. I know. I know. But but it's the right it's the
right word. It's the right word. The right word for that context. Is Right.
Yep. Regardless of what the trigger is, the
struggle remains the same, which
is how to go how to
find yeah. How to survive in the world.
Mhmm. If you, you know, the base you know, getting past your base needs
from a Maslow peer inimative needs. Once those base needs
are met, we start to get into more decadent,
psychological responses to what's happening in the world.
And, you know, that's where,
you know, when people, you know, start getting what they're told is
supposed to make them feel whole, like, more
more wealth, relationships,
education. There are they continue to look
externally for answers to feel whole
that only internal, work
can solve for. So,
well, commercialization is real consumerism is really high right
now. We have the ability to be even more narcissistic,
you know, at scale than before.
You know, we have lots of people who have shifted from alcohol to marijuana
and all different types of drugs, but they're still numbing because
they can't fill the hole within within them.
Mhmm. You know, today, I don't know what the you know, we
have to move to microaggressions in order to
find, you know, a a PTSD that we need to hide
from, you know, versus back in
1920, it was legitimately World War one or,
yeah, World War one and new entrenched warfare. Mhmm.
But if you see the common thread is, I was
wounded. I'm a victim. Life isn't as I expected it to
be. And we'll look,
you know, externally for, you
know, validation, and or numbing,
in order to reconcile what I expected life to be with what
it is. And we will get yeah.
The common theme that I've been talking about since my
maybe, like, eighteen to twenty four months ago is where
right now with such a secular society, the set and the seven
deadly sins are everything that's
being promoted, at at
mass, and that's the downfall of a civilization.
You know, when you have a, a more god
fearing or religious society where
you have faith in something greater than yourself,
you're kind of released, from
needing to, you know, to, you know,
you're released from those other, you
know, from the the the self destructive sins, Greed, you know,
greed, pride,
wrath, gluttony, you know,
face in something greater than yourself is what
will put you into a place of being,
satisfied with satisfied with life or not demanding more from it than it
is, accepting life as it is. You do mention
the shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three, yeah, in three generations. I've
mentioned that several times. Yeah. It's because,
you know, that first generation is just trying to get out of the base
Maslow's pyramid of needs, and they're, yeah, and they're willing
to work hard to make sure that they have food and a structure over their
heads. Everything else after that, you know, they're told is gonna
fulfill them, and they're still left empty. Their
children still probably feel a little hungry, and they're
trying to find meaning in life, through more wealth
and education and, you know, etcetera. Mhmm. They find
that it doesn't fill them. And the third generation is like, we know that money
and all these other things you're telling us doesn't fulfill us, and they,
like, slide back down into poverty.
So these are yeah. It's all to say that the
universal human experience is the
universal human experience regardless of the trigger.
I I you know what? And you know what? When you frame it that way,
I don't I don't disagree. You know, one
of the brutal
truths that the West was able to integrate versus the
East, but but able to integrate from an eastern religion.
Mhmm. And people forget this. Christianity is fundamentally an eastern
religion, at its root. Right? But the the
truth that it was able to integrate into the West was,
to your point about, for lack of a better term, sin
Mhmm. The
material world is never going to fulfill
you, and to look for that fulfillment in the material world is
sinful in and of itself. And, you know, Buddhism kinda
goes halfway with this with all life is suffering. But then then
what would you do after that? And, and Islam
goes in the other direction to get another Eastern religion and says,
well, yeah, life is suffering. Let's just crush everything. And I know I know I
know that my my Islamic listeners are going to going to gonna get out of
me from being reductive. But I gotta be reductive for this point.
So let's crush everything and let's move on. Right? Let's conquer it
all for Allah. Judaism kinda gets
halfway there, but then locates everything in a temple, in a physical a
physical manifestation of god on the earth. And this is why
when Jesus shows up and says, I am the temple, and I'll, you know, tear
it down in three days and restore it, they all lose their minds in the
New Testament. Right? And I'm not talking about the average the average, you
know, on the ground Jewish person. That's not who I'm talking about. I'm talking about
the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the people who were in charge, and the temple really
worked for them. Right? Jesus gets to a core
truth, which the core truth isn't buried in Christianity, which is that
the material world will not satisfy you. Looking for that satisfaction
is sinful in and of itself in the material world. And the only thing that
will satisfy you is the grace and the
and the blood and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Okay.
And fast forward February, and I I
like your point here. I'm gonna restate it a different kind of way. We just
find new tools to send with.
And so, you know, twenty years from now, we'll be doing the same things
with AI. Right? We'll be doing we'll we'll
have come up with I mean, we're already down the road. We're already on the
road to AI pornography. We're already down the road to that. We're
already down the road to virtual reality, you know,
sexual pleasure, which is, of course, tied into dopamine
dopaminergic reaction. We're already down the road on that. And who
knows what sort of deviance
will will develop out of that. But it will develop because all
the technology does is give us new ways to to to to
to sort of try to to try to fill, to your point,
our base the the yawning appetites that are that lie at the base of
who we are. And going past that does require
something that is a a belief system that is existential
and exists beyond merely all of that. Right?
So I don't disagree with any of that. I was merely saying,
I gave them grace because
they the culture
that Fitzgerald came in, the cultural
context he came in, the bucket, right, was a
bucket of
coming out of the death of the Victorian era. Like, the Victorian era died in
World War one. So just like in our era
where the sixties is dying has been dying for the last twenty years.
Not fast enough. I know. I know. I know. I know. Every every Gen Xer
believes that. It's fine. I understand. The millennials will finally kill it.
They will. They were they are finally going to put it in its grave. It's
gonna be done. I'm already watching it happen, in real time.
But, the problem here is just like when we read books
on this podcast about revolution, what do you replace
that thing with? Right? And Fitzgerald didn't have an
answer for this. He just saw he was just a re he was just doing
cultural reportage, kinda like Joan Didion would do much later
on or, James Baldwin in a different context. He was
literally just writing what he was seeing. He was seeing that this
person was trying to fill it with alcohol to your point. This person was trying
to fill it with sex. By the way, there is a lot of sex in
Tender is the Night. A shocking amount. I was very surprised.
And it's not explicit. I will say that. It is not explicit. And if
you're a mature individual who kinda knows how things work, you
will see it everywhere. However, a high school student can read this book,
and it's not there's no there's no naked expose of this. Right? It's
just, like, the first time that Rosemary and Dick finally,
you know, do the thing. It's, it's one
sentence, and it's not even a descriptive sentence. It's just it's a
contextual sentence. And, again, if you know how things work between men and women, if
you've had any life on you whatsoever, you'll read that entire paragraph and you'll
go. And I did. I paused because, again, I come from a more explicit
time. I read that paragraph and I paused and I went, oh.
Oh, okay. That's what happened there.
Right. Yeah. It was it wasn't prurient. It wasn't
prurient. That's what it was. It was it's not prurient. That's
I can appreciate Fitzgerald for that. But when he was doing this, he was looking
at what people were filling that bucket with because they had no good ideas. They
didn't know what to do after World War one. Yeah. You know?
The other thing that's kinda touched on in this book, and then we'll move on,
I wanted to see if you caught this. But the other theme that was kinda
touched on, particularly with the rich folks, is a theme that I see
reflected in our own time, which was that sense of
self hatred, I guess, about their own wealth.
Because your point about shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, all of the second
generation wealthy folks that were coming to Dick
for psychiatric help either with their child
being a homosexual, the results of incest or
child abuse, using too much
alcohol, alcoholism, whatever the presenting
thing was. And we'll talk about Nicole Warren here in a minute.
She was fascinating. Regardless of the
presenting thing, these wealthy individuals who made money
all invariably had children. At least one of them, baby Warren, is is a
notorious character here, who either behaved badly
or or or were were wandering towards being socialist
revolutionaries. And that was another thing that was new in the twenties and thirties.
Like, everybody thought and I have to remind myself of this. It's really hard.
Everybody thought communism was the way to go.
Everybody thought that. They really did
because because Durant Walter Duranty went to Soviet
went to the Soviet Union and lied, and nobody had a way of
proving that he was a liar, not at the not the mass
public level. And so they just bought it. They just bought it hook,
line, and sinker. They bought the whole thing. I mean, again,
about, like, the left and the progressives who believed in it. They're no
different than today. This is what I'm saying. Like, this is the parallel I'm drawing.
Yes. This is the creative class,
and or the Uber elite that we're talking about with the
self hatred and the, you know, communism. And, you know, Marx was, you
know, a child of, you know, of wealth. You know? He
had a trust fund. You know? You know,
so I unfortunately, I think I under
like, I probably understand these people far too
well because I've walked with these people, and they're
miserable. So, like, to me, it wasn't
surprising. You know? Like,
Oh, no. It wasn't surprising to me either. It was just it was I found
it to be The self loathing is really
prominent. Like Yeah. Yeah. Self loathing is really prominent.
And that's, again, why you get to the shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves is they
feel they feel guilty like,
guilty, but they're not producing. They're not
creating. They're living a life of luxury. They're telling others how to
live, yada yada yada. I think of King Charles, like,
right off the bat. Right? Like, you know, he's
clearly a miserable man who hates
humanity, and everything's been given to him on a silver
platter literally. And, you know,
I went to a a private high school the last two years of,
of high school after having been in public school through tenth
grade. And, like, these kids, they came
from immense wealth and had everything handed to them, and
they were miserable. Like, they were super smart. Like,
they could, you know, SATs, perfect
scores, everything, you know, came really easy to them, but they had a
gray cloud around them all the like,
literally a gray cloud around them, like, all the time. And I saw it
same at at, you know, at Elite College.
You know, those of us who tend to be a little more optimistic,
I I refer to myself as a pragmatic optimist. I find great
I'm not, like, the smartest tool in the shed. The thing that differentiates
me is I'm willing to work my ass off, and I love to learn,
and I'm not satisfied with not understanding something. You
know? Yeah. You know? And there comes a
there's a a lot that comes from overcoming
challenges and doing it on a regular basis. Like, you feel you
feel good and grateful for what you've got because it
it's really hard to get. Well, I will
say this. Maybe maybe I'm in the first generation to
get some in my family because I don't feel a modicum of guilt.
Not one of modicum of guilt or self
loathing at all. No. It doesn't happen in that first class
because in the first generation because you know how hard you
are. Like, no one like, yeah. When when Obama
said you didn't do this on your own, it's like, yeah. The fuck I did.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's right.
No one else was getting up at 5AM and staying up until
12AM. And, sure, you know, one of my favorite
sayings is opportunity favors the prepared mind.
So people create, you know, conditions within
within which you can thrive, but I'm sorry. I
there like, if the if there's a wall, I'm gonna find a way
under it, over it, open a door. Like, you know, like
so, yes, the conditions need to be there. I'm not in a prison, so
you don't be in a prison, but I don't know. Like, yeah, you did it
on your own. Well, it's it's I think of Snoop Dogg's,
Hollywood walk of fame speech where, like, I I wanna thank me. I
always tell my wife, like, if anybody ever gives me an award, like, a
famous award, like, something that's really high profile, I am I'm gonna just basically steal
his entire I wanna thank me speech, and I'm just gonna do that. My wife's
like, you gotta stop. Like, you have to you can't do that. That's ridiculous.
But it is true. Like, I wanna thank me for getting up at
05:00 in the morning. I wanna thank me for not quitting. I wanna
thank me for, like, doing all the things and going the extra mile when other
people quit and weren't willing to do that thing. We're willing to take some risks
that others weren't willing to do while people are on the sidelines tell you in
the like, you're in the arena while on the sidelines telling you you can't
do it. Exactly. And make some decisions that, were
not that great, but did I learn from them? Yeah. Well well
and and well, it all and, fundamentally, I'd like to thank God for putting me
in the position where he did because you know what? I could have been born
in Russia or I could have been born in South Africa or I could have
been born in Brazil or I could have been born in Canada. I wasn't. I
was born here. And you know what? I didn't I didn't I would that wasn't
that wasn't the thing I picked. I was put here, and I took advantage of
what was given to me and the wealth that was given to me in
being put here. That's what I did. Right? That's the
free will part of the equation that, again, comes out
of comes out of a Christian understanding of sort of how the
worth is structured, and how reality itself is
structured. We do have free will. We do have the ability to choose.
And so we shouldn't have self loathing. Like, we shouldn't have that. We shouldn't have
that guilt. Now we should have guilt, I would assert,
if how we got our money was
illegal, immoral, or fattening, then
we should have guilt. Yeah.
Yeah. Like, for me, yes.
I, I agree. It's like, I'd, like,
exploiting others, using others. Yeah. No guilt about you
know, have guilt for that. For me, you know, part of what I wanted
to elaborate on the sense of faith is about also having a self
sense of service to others, wanting to help others thrive. Like, I honestly
believe other people's success is, like, is my, yeah,
is my success because I want them to be successful. Like, I help
those who are willing to help themselves. Right? That is yeah. And
that gives me great satisfaction to see others thrive,
but they have to do the work. Right. Right. Right.
Getting the material benefits from that. Great. I'm not gonna shake off of
material benefits, but I'm not gonna define myself by material
benefits. I'm not that isn't my slow pursuit. It's a nice outcome
of being a greater service to others beyond myself.
Well, there's a there's an interesting philosophical idea, which if you
don't buy into Christianity, that's fine. It's still a,
an idea that is about the cornerstone of reality, so you better buy
into that, which is, you know, the Lord gives you the
ability to to gain wealth. Now because of the pushback
I always hear from people who are
a little more, shall we say, progressive than myself, The thing they will always say
is, well, there's always poor people who are working their butts off and they're not
getting anywhere. To wit to wit, I point
out, yes. And are they
working their butts off at the right thing? Because if they're working their butts off
at the right thing and they're appropriately aligned, they will get
somewhere. Will they get as far as Dick Divers in Tender is the
Night? Will they get as far as Nicole Warren?
No. They may not get there. Will they get as far as Jeff Bezos and
his obnoxious yacht with his teak that he probably sourced from some,
like, woods somewhere in, like, Thailand that's illegal? No.
They probably won't. And and
because two things can be true at once, that's okay. If
you're an inch ahead of where you started
Like And we used right. And we used to sort of have this concept in
our in our country. If you're an inch ahead of where you started,
say thank you and be on your way. And that sense of
and this is the flip side of the self loathing if you're wealthy. The flip
side of that is the hatred of the wealthy. The
envy, which is the particular sin of the poor is, or those who don't
have as much, which if you're have a dollar less than somebody else, you're poor.
Okay. The envy and envy is about objects.
Jealousy is about people and relationships. Envy is about objects and
stuff. That's why we have to separate those two. But you will be envious
of what people have, and you particularly see this in everybody's
critique of Elon Musk. I mean, oh my gosh. The leftist critiques of
Elon Musk are all based on they're all based on envy. We we
can better decide what it is he needs to do with
what he's earned than he can. That's all envy. That's all
envy. Yeah. And I yeah. I I wanna go back to
where you started with, like, are you working at the right stuff to,
like, making the right decisions about, like, you know, like, you
know, saving your money, where you spend your money. Mhmm. And you always
hear about, like, the millionaire next door who lives really
modestly. And, you know, they worked really, really hard, and they just
put it in the bank or they invested it. Like, it's a whole set of
decisions that people are making. It's not just about how
hard you're working. Like, I always whenever I
went into a job, I knew what I was contributing, but I
also knew what I was getting out of it and where but the next three
options were that I was pursuing. It wasn't an in state.
Right? So, like, where am I growing? Where is this taking me?
Mhmm. So I always had to think about it from that perspective, but I also
knew it wouldn't take me anywhere if I didn't think about what they needed from
me. Right? Correct. Right. Right. Right. Right. How do you put yourself in
I don't know. As I've
gotten older, one of the things that's become more
maybe not animating for me. Maybe that's too hard a word. It doesn't really animate
me. It's it's just one of these intellectual things that I sort of chew over
when I'm, like, outside on my property picking up dog
poop, whatever. Yep. You know? Whatever. What do you what what else are you
gonna think about when you're doing that? Right? But,
you know, when I'm when I have time to intellectually masticate over this
stuff, one of the things that's interesting to me is I don't know, and no
human being does, by the way, how everything
links together to produce an outcome. I have zero idea. So
in working on the right stuff, I get it. If
you're poor in not understanding the correct questions to ask
because the people who came before you couldn't even couldn't even
frame where you should look correctly, yes, you're gonna
be upside down and it's and your life's gonna be hard, and it's you're probably
not going to get as far as somebody who framed the
question correctly and framed what the answer
might be correctly for you. Like, this is one of those things I try to
do with my children, and I try to surround myself with people who try to
do this with their kids. So the question is not, you know, for my eight
year old. Like, can you sell eggs on the
street for, like, a dollar or whatever? Right? The
question is, do you have everything aligned correctly
in order to be able to sell eggs for a dollar?
And if you don't have everything aligned correctly to sell eggs for a dollar,
you can go ahead and slap up something out there, but you're not gonna be
successful. And so these are the kinds of things that, like like, if that
framing isn't there for you, I get it. And we live in the
most open, free, and informed culture on the face of the
planet right now, historically speaking. We have the math
the massive sampling tool known as Google, where you can just go ask it a
bunch of questions. You could figure things out. You have zero
excuses. So we're all out of excuses, kids. We're all out of
excuses. We're all out of envy. We're all out of jealousy. We're all out of
that. And yet, because our technology allows us
to send more and just in better ways,
we we still continue to pursue this. Right? We still continue to have the
excuses. So, Well, yeah.
People will stop because yeah. Will stop
and become blocked because there's no certain path.
Right. You know, and that's why I stick to the what are my three options
out is because, an exponential number
of options out means I won't have clarity, and I won't be able to see
something as it is well. And one option
is, like, is locked on perfection and and
thinking you understand all the opportunities. Like, you don't know what's around
another corner. You don't know what's behind another door.
And too many people need certainty. And that's
why they'll sit on the sidelines, judging because they were
too afraid to just, like, take kind of some leaps of faith
about where something will take them. Mhmm. And,
you know, as you get older, you realize how little you knew
or could ever predict about what those opportunities were. You just have to have,
I don't even wanna say faith. Just know that, you know, you learn more
with each opportunity that's new and you per you know, and you pursue.
And that and your path will change because you
learn more. Yeah. Yeah. Be reckless
and, you know, and, expect the world, but
also don't stop because you need certainty. It's this balance
around optionality and just having a vision towards growth.
And, you know, even more importantly,
recognizing that from a job I always pursue economic. I
wanna be economically viable in the marketplace. Right? Because
economic viability gives me options so that I'm not locked
Mhmm. Into a specific career that may be dead ended
or a company that is dead ended. Economic viability,
it means I have optionality. I wanna make sure I'm valued in the
marketplace, so I develop skills that are valued in the marketplace.
And I am always looking at a job as, like, it's a
partnership. I am there like, they are paying me for
results. They're not my butt in a seat. They're not paying,
you know, or some companies are, but those aren't companies I
wanna work for. They're not paying for me to look busy. They're
paying me to deliver results that matter.
And so I look at, you know, am I delivering results that
matter? And it may be different if you have internal customers versus
external customers. And what skills am I gaining,
yeah, that I can take to that next opportunity? Unfortunately,
you know, too many people think a job is is a guarantee and
a right, and too many people
think that there's just one prescribed path and that learning stops after college.
Right. Yeah. Or even worse or sometimes worse, high school, which
is a whole other a whole other bailiwick. Yeah. Alright. Let's
go back to the book, back to Tender is the Night. I wanna I wanna
talk a little bit deeper about we we kinda touched on therapy,
and then sort of the model that's used in Tender is the Night. But I
wanna pick up deep into the book.
So we kinda introduced, Rosemary there.
I'm gonna kinda go into book
two. And and in book two of, Tender is the
Night, Fitzgerald, retcons. Well, not
retcons. He he he goes back into the history
of Dick Divers and Nicole Warren. And we
begin to learn that Nicole was a, a
psychiatric patient, that, Dick was, in
essence, brought in to
manage. And as he begins
to, deal with her, as he begins to treat
her for her for her mental illness, her schizophrenia,
he falls in love with her. Right? And this, of course, works
really well for the Warren family, who are wealthy and willing to throw
money around. Nicole's, older sister, baby
Warren, is a
a mini tyrant in her own right. You'll see that later on in book three,
after, as I already mentioned, Dick gets into a fight with some Italian
gendarmes, which is not really the term, but it's okay. It
works. And, and, and has and is thrown in jail,
and baby Warren is the only one that could get him out.
There's something there's something there about a screaming socialite that I wanna
say, but I don't I think I wanna just leave it there. Just wanna let
it sit. Just gonna let that sit.
But, but during the course of
doctor Diver's relationship with Nicole, they they moved to
Switzerland. And he opens up a hospital there, begins
to treat the, the patients, who
are wealthy, of other families, who are
expatriates, or who are coming from America to
Europe who want a private doctor who will keep their stuff
out of the newspaper headlines. And this creates
problems between him and Nicole, now not no
longer Nicole Warren, but now Nicole Diver. And,
the problems come to a head in chapter 15
in book two of Tender is the Night. So I wanna pick up here. I
wanna read some sections in here. That way, you can see just
how fragile things become with
Nicole. Meals with the patients were a chore
he approached with apathy. The gathering, which, of
course, did not include residents at the Glentine or the Beaches, was
conventional enough at first sight, but it brooded always a heavy
melancholy. But over it, brooded always a heavy melancholy.
Such doctors were present, kept up a conversation, but most of the
patients, as if exhausted by their morning's endeavor or depressed by the
company, spoke little and ate looking into their plates.
Luncheon over, Dick returned to his villa. Nicole was in the salon wearing
a strange expression. Read that, she said.
He opened the letter. It was from a woman recently discharged, though
with skepticism on the part of the faculty, and accused him in no
uncertain terms of having seduced her daughter who had been at her mother's side
during the crucial stage of the illness. It presumed that missus Diver would
be glad to have this information and learn what her
husband was, quote, unquote, really like. Dick
read the letter again. Ouch, in a clear and concise English, he yet
recognized it as the letter of a maniac. Upon a single occasion,
he had let the girl, a flirtatious little brunette, ride into Zurich with him upon
her request, and in the evening had brought her back to the clinic. In an
idle, almost indulgent way, he kissed her. Later, she tried to carry the
affair further, but he was not interested and subsequently, probably, consequently, the
girl had come to dislike him and taken her mother away.
This letter is deranged, he said. I had no relations of any kind with that
girl. I didn't even like her. Yes. I've tried thinking that, said Nicole.
Surely, you don't believe it. I've been sitting here.
He sank his voice into a reproachful note and sat beside her. This is absurd.
This is a letter from a mental patient. I was a mental patient.
He stood up and spoke more authoritatively. Suppose you don't have any
nonsense, Nicole. Go and round with the children and we'll start. In
In the car with Dick driving, they followed the little promenitories of the lake catching
the burn of the light and watering the windshield, tunneling through cascades of evergreen. It
was Dick's car, a Renault, so dwarfish that they all stuck out of it except
the children, between whom Mademoiselle towered mass like in the
rear seat. By the way, Mademoiselle is the, is the, governess.
They knew every kilometer of the road where they would smell the pine needles and
the black stove smoke. A high sun with a face traced on it beat
fierce on the straw hats of the children.
Nicole was silent. Dick was uneasy at her straight hard gaze.
Often, he felt lonely with her, and frequently, she tired him with the short floods
of personal revelations that she reserved exclusively for him. I'm like this. I'm
more like that. But this afternoon, he would have been glad has she rattled on
in staccato for a while and given him glimpses of her thoughts.
The situation was always most threatening when she backed up into herself
and closed the doors behind her.
Then I'm going to skip through and go
into a couple of different areas. So they
get out of the car. They go through, a
Punch and Judy show, through Khan,
and then, they get, they get back into, the
car. By the way, he also loses her at this Punch and Judy show in
the circus, so he's running around trying to find her. He leaves his kids with,
like, two random French women, which is just sort of amazing to me. I would
never do that. But okay. Whatever. I guess this is how the other half lives.
That's fine. And, they eventually,
get back in the car after getting the children who were, quote, unquote, with a
gypsy woman in a booth.
And they start driving again. And I'm gonna
pick up here. They started back with hot sorrows steaming down upon them. The car
was weighted with their mutual apprehensions and anguish, and the children's mouths are grayed
with disappointment. Grief presented itself in its terrible, dark,
unfamiliar color. Somewhere around Zug, Nicole, with a
convulsive effort, reiterated remarks she had made before about a misty yellow
house set back from the road that looked like a painting not yet dry, but
it was just an attempt to catch a rope that was playing out too swiftly.
Dick tried to rest. The struggle would come presently at home, and he might have
to sit a long time restating the universe for her. A schizophren
is well named as a split personality. Nicole was alternately a person
whom nothing needed to be explained and one to whom nothing could be
explained. It was necessary to treat her with active affirmative insistence,
keeping the road to reality always open, making the road to escape harder going. But
the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of
water seeping through over and around a dike. It requires the
unified front of many people working against it. He felt it necessary that this time
Nicole cure herself. He wanted to wait until she remembered the other times
and revolted from them. In a tired way, he planned that they would again
resume the regime, relaxed a year before. He
had turned up a hill, then it made a shortcut to the clinic. And now
as he stepped onto the accelerator for a short straightaway run parallel to the hillside,
the car swerved violently left, swerved right, tipped on two
wheels, and as Dick with Nicole's voice screaming in his ear, crushed
down the mad hand clutching the steering wheel, righted itself,
swerved once more, and shot off the road. It tore through low underbrush, tipped again,
and settled slowly at an angle of 90 degrees against the tree.
The children were screaming, and Nicole was screaming and cursing and trying
to tear Dick's face. Thinking first of the list of
the car and unable to estimate it, Dick bent away Nicole's
arm, climbed over the top side, and lifted out the children. Then he
saw the car was in a stable position. Before doing anything
else, he stood there shaking and panting. You, he
cried. She was laughing hilariously, unashamed,
unafraid, unconcerned. No one was coming on to the
scene no one coming on to the scene would have imagined that she would
have caused it. She laughed after some mild escape of childhood.
You were scared, weren't you? She accused him. You wanted to live. She
spoke with such a force, and in his shocked state, Dick wondered if he had
been frightened for himself. But the strained faces of the children,
looking from parent to parent, made him want to grind her grinning
mask into jelly.
Let's talk about mental illness.
The question I have here is probably not the greatest one about creative talent
and time such as hours. So I'm gonna ask a different kind of
question. Olivia, I'm gonna call it audible on this one. I'm gonna ask a different
kind of question here.
I don't have a whole lot of experience with mental illness, particularly schizophrenia,
at a practical level. I've known people who have
been anxious. I've known people who have been depressed. I have people in my family
who suffer from anxiety and depression. So I've seen up close what that looks
like. I myself have, been
a depressed person, and have bootstrapped myself out of that,
primarily because I'm obstinate and prideful. Those are my own two
sins. I'm also ridiculously stubborn,
and I refuse to ask for help for something that I think I can solve
for myself. So those are my,
particular problems and foibles.
But I've never dealt with someone with
that sort of split, right, personality. And I
don't know if you have, in your experience.
So I guess the question here is
or no. Not the question. The the framing around the question is this.
So the Victorians, where Freud came out of,
sought to leverage psychiatry
as a way to substitute for social shaming,
and as a way to to to to shortcut social
norming. Right? Because if we could just get people to be normal, right, and go
along, then everything would be fine. Right? And yet there's
these people showing up with these splits, and they do this thing, and then they
do that thing, and we don't understand why. And Jordan
Peterson, along with many others, I'll just use him as a a public
example. Doctor Jordan Peterson talks about how and I think this is very
interesting, particularly when we're talking about transgender individuals.
There's a there's a social
negotiation that goes on between all of us as individuals and then the
larger society. Right? We shouldn't
be trying to get the larger society to bend to our individual whims.
Instead, we should be trying to bend to the whims of society because maybe
the wisdom of crowds is actually a thing, and maybe people who
have come before us may actually know something. Okay.
Mental illness is the is the the the primary feature in
Tinder is the night. Past all of the stuff with, like,
ingenues that you get with Rosemary or
the alcoholism and the self medication which you get with Dick
and everybody else. But Nicole
and her family, the Warrens, specifically are
impacted by mental illness. And Nicole even breaks up her
marriage because she feels she is cured
of her mental illness even though there's some argument to be made that
the guy that she goes off with
Might be a little bit touched in the head himself as my grandma might say
back in the day. Well, back in the day, they I
mean, they're rough back in the day. Right?
And I'm wandering towards the question here. So I guess the question is I had
all that framing. So let me wander towards let me phrase the actual question, right,
and give you a chance to speak here. So yeah. So how do
we how do we deal with each other when we're mentally ill? And, you know,
I don't know. That that right. Like, this like, this is this is one of
the huge things for tender is the night that I could not I couldn't get
my arms around it. I can't either,
largely because it's a spectrum. Right? Right.
So you have the full on,
you know, one extreme where people need to
be institutionalized because they cannot
help themselves, and they are of physical harm
to others. Right. We see a lot of
those on the streets of San Francisco. Mhmm.
And then there's a full other
spectrum where people
just want attention and they act out for, like,
attention. Mhmm. Do that a lot right now.
Mhmm. Yeah.
And I think if you feed it too much,
it it evolves into greater psychoses
that force people into a reality that
is completely detached from reality, and they do become even more more
ill. Mhmm.
I really I I I don't think there's a one size fits
all. I I personally haven't dealt with anyone
who has schizophrenia, but I don't know if my definition of
schizophrenia is based off of, you know, Sally Field's
movies, you know, in the nineteen seventies and if that's
real or not. Ordinary ordinary people.
But I only know from, you know, for
me, similar to you, I dealt with
my my own, depression.
And I would I don't know if it was actually depression,
but I did medicate with, alcohol
and, you know, kinda that accelerate accelerated her path
into, like, shame and depression.
That is very common for, you know, addicts of any of any
type. And the only thing
you know, and I yeah. My bottom was feeling you know, is when
I am super stubborn as well, I don't ask
for help. I don't you know, I'm not someone who wants you know,
who will tell people when things are going on Mhmm. That's positive
because I'm not I don't want attention for either. You know?
Right. I don't I'm not I just wanna deliver
and do great things and go on to the next thing.
Mhmm. And but the shame when it
was no longer acceptable to be the party girl
and you're still, like, you know, drinking and doing all that stuff
was enough to start to get me on a path to wanting to
fix myself. But, shaming is
very effective.
Okay. And I but I and I think there's a balance.
I will also say I was a heavy kid. Right? Mhmm. And
heavy by nineteen seventies standards, not by
02/2025 standards. Okay. Sure. Right?
And, I didn't like that it took me a
long time to find clothes that fit. Right. And so
what did I do about it? I learned about, like, you
burn calories. Yeah. It's the it's the mathematics
of your what you take in and what you burn. Mhmm. And
I found great ways. I found out I liked tennis, and that tennis would make
me not only did it help me to lose weight, but I felt
really great afterwards. Mhmm. I found things that
opportunistically, I didn't, like, find, like, one path that worked.
But I was like, oh my gosh. Like, tennis actually feels really great.
Hitting the tennis ball against the, against the
garage door or playing tetherball with myself. Like, those were ways that I just
got myself out of feeling bad and
victim and into trying to do something about it. Those are
words that I use today. Those are words not words that I had when I
was eight, nine, 10, 11 years old. Right. I just knew what
felt good. And for me, fortunately, it was
things that were you know, had actually
led to a healthy life and to being successful because I was willing to work
really hard. And it felt a lot better to work hard,
than to sit and complain that life wasn't going my way.
Yep. But that's how I'm wired. Right. Right.
And and this is okay. So this is this is one of the
challenges of reading, a book like this or,
you know, watching a movie like I mean, I did make the joke, Ordinary People
or, you know, any other joke about mental illness. I mean, I think of the
movie in the nineteen nineties with Billy Bob Thornton with who's the autistic guy,
Sling Blade. You know?
It's one of those things. Again, I don't I don't understand how reality is put
together. Right? I I just I just don't. I'm trying to figure it out. Right?
And I don't understand at how how
mental illness operates at multiple levels. Right? And
I don't think anybody does, by the way. I think even the most highly educated
people don't understand how it works. Right? Even the most highly educated
in this space. They could just tell you what the best guesses
are because it's individualized,
and there's certain aspects of treatment
that only work for certain kinds of people and don't work for others.
So one of our one of our guest hosts, cohost, Dave Baumrucker,
works in the clinical psychological space.
And, a good friend of mine, we we were we were rugby teammates
years ago and went to college together, and he's gone off and done other things.
I've gone off and done other things. It's been amazing.
But in that space of clinical psychology,
it and it's not just when I hear him describe it. It's other clinical psychologists
who I've heard describe it. It seems a lot like whack a mole.
And not to lean too much into the religious pieces of it, but I do
think there's a spiritual element to this, which, again, we do not understand. We
just don't get. I do think it's there because why would it be everywhere
else but not there? Okay. That makes no sense. And
you even kinda touched on it a little bit where you you said at
an emotional level where you, like, you decided, I don't like this thing, and so
I'm gonna go over here and leverage this skill that I know I have here
to get this outcome here, to go into the backdoor, to get this
outcome here, to stop this thing here from happening. That's a
multifaceted solution that's unique to you. I wouldn't have
gone and picked up tennis. I just would have doubled down on the drinking probably
because I'm just that guy. Right? Or
I would have because, again, because I'm hard headed, I would have just run into
a wall eventually at a certain point. No. It wasn't like an
overnight. It wasn't an overnight Sure. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No.
No. No. No. And I'm not I wanna be very clear. I'm not being reductive
in your experience. I wanna be very clear about that. Right?
And it did it did take time. But when we're
dealing with, like, Nicole driving, you know, the
car over, you know, off the road, at that
point in the book where I was there, I
stopped reading. I just stopped reading for a little while and walk away from it
because I thought, I don't know how he didn't kill
her. I I I don't know how he didn't strangle that woman in
the car. I don't know how that didn't happen because this isn't
like, you know, cars with airbags in 2025. Like, this
isn't that in rollover and all that. Like, a car in 2025, it's a
bad thing. Don't get me wrong. But it'll survive a rollover accident, whatever
airbag safety features. This is a car in the nineteen twenties. So it's probably closer
to, like, a model a or a model t, one of those
crappy Renaults. Like, there was no safety anything.
Like, there's no seat belts.
So but I I what you're what you're getting at is a is
a whole another a whole another question. So one, what's the solution
to mental illness? And two, what's your response
to someone else's you know, mental illness? Absolutely. Yes. Okay.
Sure. Yeah. The latter is detaching yourself from, like, one
of the the greatest skills that I've
developed over the last, like, twenty years is detaching yourself from
how others perceive you, or detaching from how
others treat you because their experience
you know, I I actually I I think I'm just
a target based off what someone else's life experience has been. It has
very little to do with my intention. It has very little to do with how
I've delivered or what I've done. You know, they're acting based off of
their life experience. You know, today,
I can create boundaries so that person is no
long so I'm no longer in physical danger or emotion
or I don't have to deal with the emotional up and downs that that that
individual can create or the drama that they can create. I can
have compassion for their situation,
but I won't I no longer take it personally.
Mhmm. Right? I and, you know, and
if Nicole yeah. Yeah. I would have been livid,
but me being mad about it won't change it. Right? And
that's very different than where I would have been twenty years ago. Twenty years,
I would have been irate and yelling, but that's not gonna change the
situation. So that's what what do I do now.
Right? I I can I I would've I would've been irated
Nicole as well if it had just been me in the car? Yeah. It was
a kids. Yeah. And now it's my kids. And
I've invested a lot in these people. That's
what your next set of actions are. Right? Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Take take the children away. You need to put her into a place where she's
safe because she's she now is not safe for society
and or the family. Right. Right. Right. And now I have to make I have
to have a hard conversation with I mean, I have to have
a hard conversation with my children. Mommy's gotta
mommy's gotta go for a while. Mommy mommy can't stay. So that's gonna
be one hard conversation. The other hard conversation is going to be with
Nicole's family, which we'll get to that in a second here.
But, I can't have this person around my children. I don't care how much money
you have that Yep. Set it on fire like the dark like the Joker or
the Dark Knight. Whatever. I don't care. Doesn't matter to me.
You don't you don't have enough. Okay. And then because
that's gonna be one hard conversation. That's gonna be second hard conversation. The third hard
conversation is going to quite frankly be with Nicole because,
you know, when she's not in her right mind, it's not
gonna matter. Which when she is in her right mind and is gonna wanna know
what's going on, you can't have, sort of
a, you know, Rapunzel kind of posture.
Like, you can't just lock her in a tower and hope everything's gonna work out.
You know, you have to sort of get some info. And, again, this is this
is all about me not understanding how all this clicks together.
And so looking at those three hard conversations, I love it how
you talked about boundaries in order to to avoid taking it personally,
but also being equipped to have those conversations. And
weirdly enough, because the because
Dick Diver's doctor, Dick Diver's, was so clinical,
the way Fitzgerald wrote him,
because I don't think Fitzgerald actually did research into clinicians. I think he just based
it off of what he saw Exactly. Yeah. And put a chunk of
his own personality in there. He didn't have the ability to put the
boundary in, and so Dick didn't have the ability to put the boundary in, much
less have the hard conversation. He just sort of and this is Dick's end.
He just sort of took the Warren's money and, for lack of a better term,
ran. And I hate that. I hate framing it like that, but it's
true. It, yeah, I mean, that and it happens way too
frequently. It's it's the expert class. Right?
Right. It's about putting faith into the expert class
even when it's not you know, the the psychology of
the time was the expert and but it's not working.
Right. You know, so
Well and you can see it in the way the book ends. Like, the
the I won't ruin it for folks, but when you go read it, like, the
last page of the book book three, which is the end of the book,
it's just sort of a
on the one hand, from a writer perspective, from a creative perspective, I
think Fitzgerald struggled with how to end this. He didn't really
know where the ending should be. Like, how you because this could just
go on and on. This is just, like, whatever. You know? Oh, I'm thinking yeah.
All I'm thinking about is addicts, actually, and I think
that's really good. I mean, it is a it it is a
mental I don't like calling it an
illness, but it's an a mental condition. Mhmm. And, you know,
one of the things when friends come to me and they're dealing with addict you
know, addicts in their family, it is really hard. It's like,
you know, I would actually it is gonna be a long
journey, and there's no guarantee of
success. Yes. So you think about what's gonna be like, I know
you love this person who is in your family and an addict,
But when it gets to one place,
all addicts do is lie, and all
they're thinking they're not thinking about you at all.
And you may want to believe that they're thinking about you. They're playing
games and telling you that they're thinking about you, but they are not. All they're
doing is thinking about their next fix and how to get it and to
make sure that you continue to be there,
to facilitate, enable their addiction. Yeah. So
there is no easy answer in all of this. But
that's kind of late stage, And,
one of my you know, sadly, I'm a very rational
person. And, you know, one reason, like, relationships have not
are not, like, at the top of my
list outside of professional relationships is because I'm like,
you know, talk about it once, talk about it twice, but third time,
I'm out. Because I'm about taking action and not just
sitting in fear or, you know, or masturbating to an
idea. Like, let's talk about it once, talk about it twice, and we're out.
And so I don't have a lot of tolerance. You know, I'm not gonna be
an enabler. Let's just say Mhmm. Sure. But in an
early early in a relationship with someone who may not be
well, like, you can't you're you're not in a position to make those types
of judgments because you don't know Right. So addiction is
just easy to talk about. Yeah. It could just be someone just
drinks five nights a week, yell, a light drink,
and you may make a comment, but then it starts
to accelerate and you make another comment. But you
gotta start putting in boundaries where that individual
is not is is capable of making decisions in your best interest,
but they're not. And so that's where you have to have boundaries.
The challenge with, like, schizophrenia and others is are they ever in a
position to make the best decision for themselves?
And at what point do you let them out to fend for themselves
for AO so that your life is not negatively
impacted. And that's the gray area that I I do
struggle with because I don't want people living on the street. I don't want
people, you know, I want people cared for. So when
do you actually bring in institutions to help, an
individual? Right. Well, in a point that has
been made to me by various
people over the last, I would say, ten years in different contexts,
in different conversations,
has been that
we shifted around the laws around
institutionalizing folks in the eighties.
And Ronald Reagan or Reagan's administration,
shifted around a lot of the institutionalization models in the
eighties. And that was doubled down on in
the nineties. And now to fully come
back around to what you were talking about with, homeless people,
right, on the street, the vast majority of
homeless folks, if you take out the attics, right,
although a lot of there's a lot of overlap in these two areas, but do
suffer from mental illness. And it's hard to know is
the and I will call it I'll call it mental illness. It's it's fine. But
it's hard to know where the intersection and the overlap is
because the self medication follows from the other things.
Right? And so we're in a state culturally
of of where we looked at
what went on in the institutions. And this is that cultural
weakness that we're apparently going through, or a lack of
cultural confidence is what I say. So we have a lack of cultural confidence in
a lot of different areas. One of the big areas areas is immigration. Like, we
don't even wanna hear the word assimilation. We don't wanna hear. We don't wanna hear
that things are gonna pause and then we're gonna make these people be Americans, whoever
they are for wherever. Right? I don't care if they're from I don't care if
they're from South Africa, The Ukraine, or if they're from coming across the border.
We don't like that word assimilation because we don't have the cultural confidence
to believe that America is the best because, guess what,
people chose with their feet to come here. Okay. Fine. We don't believe it. Cool.
But then that cultural confident that lack of cultural confidence
drips into other areas. And so, of course, we have a decline of trust in
the institutions. It's a it's a it's a circle.
Right? So the population loses loses trust. The
institution becomes less effective. The institution then changes its
laws in order to regain trust. That doesn't work because now you've lowered the
bar. And now we just have the slow downward slide between institutions
and the culture with a lack of trust and a lack of
confidence until you finally wind up in, you know, San
Francisco in, you know, whatever that park is in San Francisco where people
are doing it's an open air drug farm. And there's there's and you can't tell
the difference between people who are schizophrenic and people who are just, you know, on
fentanyl laced heroin. Like, you just can't tell the difference. Right?
Made a difference. Doesn't doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
Correct. And so
Yeah. Bringing back the institutions is important. But one of
the things that we have done is we almost
glorify, like,
mental unwell unwellness. Well, that's a sign of hedonism
but that's a sign of hedonism and decadence and too much wealth. Right?
Where everyone's a victim, the victim Olympics, suppression of
Olympics. You know? But the whole Jordan Peterson,
well, I think is really important is we don't want a society,
you know, a society that, moves to the whims of
every individual. Mhmm. And we also don't want a
society that doesn't allow room for individuals to
be individualistic. Right. Right now,
people are trying to force their whims on all of us. Yeah. That's why the
language is constantly changing so that we can never come to a common,
definition or solution to, you know,
to anything. Mhmm. But,
the the we have to everything is about
trying to find balance in the whole in the whole ecosystem and continually
to measure, like, the effectiveness of things that are working.
You know, Newsom, he said he's yeah. No
one's never done more for homelessness than him.
And, yeah, how let's define what he's done for it. Like, is
he defining what he's done for it by the amount of money he spent?
Or are you defining it by the outcomes of
the money and how it's been spent. I would look
at the outcomes, and say, the
outcomes, yeah, you've done a lot more than anyone else,
but the outcomes are negative. You know, you gotta reevaluate
what you're doing and how and why.
But, one of my concerns with where
we are now in a society is everything's an
external answer. Everything is like a pill or food
or, some sort of external
effect. And that if you bring in institutions that they're just
gonna institutionalize all of, you
know, all of the poisons that are, actually
could potentially be exacerbating kind of the Mhmm. Mental
illness that that is out there. So how do you
I I always worry about institutions going too far
because they, you know, in the regulate regulated role that we live in right
now, but institutions just wanting to grow and continue to,
take on power if we are institute create institutions for mental
illness. Like, I wanna make sure that there are boundaries
and very strict and small boundaries
of what is, you know, meant institutionalized mental illness and
how we take care of those folks. The rest of it to me is
about working downstream and with families and
education and, a lot of the other
salute things that have been ignored that are
pre are prerequisites for accelerated
mental illness and self, medication. And that's
where we get to with in Tender is the Night
Nicole Warren. Not Nicole Diver, Nicole Warren.
Nicole Warren's father abused her and created an
environment where he was actually the one responsible
for her mental or or or well, no. No. I won't say he was yes.
Yes. Actually, no. I would say responsible. Absolutely for sure. I would say his
his actions. No. Because you could be responsible. Right?
But not But not be right. But not accountable. Right. You can
also be responsible. Say. Are you right. Responsible,
but I'm the only one who's accountable. Correct. That's right.
That's right. You could also be responsible
and not at fault. But this is a situation where he was
responsible. He avoided accountability because of his
wealth, and he was the one who was at fault, I
think, for the split inside
of her brain. Yeah. And he was
also responsible and at fault
for the damage he did to his older daughter in creating
an environment where she felt she had to protect her younger
sister, leveraging his money. There's a whole scene, a
whole incident that happens where she's we're at the end of book
two, I think, where the where Warren is, is dying or
whatever. And, you know, Dick comes and sees him,
and he's like, you know, he's doing he's in the hospital and, you
know, he's talking about the regret or whatever, and,
doctor Diver, for lack of a better term, sort of fails that fails that
test, a little bit and is going to you know, and gets a letter
and then delivers it to Nicole. And, you know, she's trying to make the decision
if she's gonna go see him. And then, of course, because it's a it's a
weird not weird. It's a it's an inappropriate relationship,
already, because of the abuse. She, of course, runs to see
him, and he has gotten up out of his bed
and escaped or gone back to America. And then he just is like, he just
walks out of the story. He never is referred to ever again. And it weirdly
enough reminded me a lot of this book reminded me of the movie Magnolia, Magnolia,
in the nineteen nineties directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. And, the
old guy played by Jason Robards, who is, Tom
Cruise's father, right, who's,
who's dying in the bed the whole movie, you know, muttering about regret.
And it's just it put that thing in my brain because I'm a I'm a,
you know, cinema cinema guy as well. So put that thing in my
head, and I'm, you know, I'm hearing the Amy Mann song under underneath
it and, you know, having the whole having the whole experience, right, while
I'm reading this. And
that character in Magnolia didn't get
forgiveness. Well, no. The son had to forgive him because the son had been
abused by the father. And that, of course, turned him into this
person who wanted to seduce and destroy all women.
Okay. And he blamed his mother for leaving and dah dah dah dah.
Okay. The the the same
dynamic happened in Tender is the Night. Just you just flip the you just flip
the genders. Right? And you can see this most notably
in how Nicole ends her marriage to,
to, to Dick through intentionally,
you know, pursuing an extramarital affair, and
then sort of in a very post
Victorian, pre World War two kind of way,
allowing two men to fight over her. And Dick just
doesn't he's like, I'm not number one, you're a boxer, so that seems to be
a bad idea. And this is back in the day when every man could handle
himself. And he could handle himself. Like, he wanna go be I mean, he'll go
be a problem. But, like, how much do I wanna get messed up over this
woman who's trying to manipulate me into
some shenanigans or nonsense that I don't want you to be manipulated into?
Right? And so the whole thing just sort of collapses in on itself.
And that leads me to turning the corner here because we've gotta
wrap up. And I wanna I wanna thank Libby for coming on the podcast
today. This is this is one of the I thought it was gonna be easy,
but this is one of the more deceptively tough books that we've covered on the,
on the show. And we've talked a lot about a lot of things today. We've
talked about, you know, the obsequiousness of wealth. We've talked about mental illness. We've talked
about addiction. We've talked about sort of the nature of
where we are at currently a hundred years later and how nothing much has really
changed. It's just our technology has gotten better for us sinning.
And we've also talked about the nature of, family secrets
and how do you deal with mental mental illness in a family
when it endangers people. Okay. Lot of different areas we've covered.
I'll ask the penultimate question, which is the question we always ask in this podcast.
What can leaders take from Tender is the Night? If I'm a
leader and I'm a hardcore, like, hey. I'm gonna get
psychological insights from, like, Adam Grant.
And I'm not I've mentioned him, like, four times today already, and I don't know
why he's living in my head rent free. I have no idea why. But, anyway,
I'm gonna get insights from that person or from Daniel Pink. Right?
And that's gonna be a better use of my time than reading this book. Why
isn't reading this book better than reading something by Amy Edmondson
or Daniel Pink or, therefore, mentioned
mister Grant or any other leadership book writer you could read?
What are you gonna get out of this that you can apply,
to yourself probably first and then your team?
Allegory.
Yes. This is why we're gonna take a break from Shakespeare this year. This is
why. Yes. No. Go ahead. Keep going with that.
Yeah. Don't get me wrong. I love Daniel Pink. Adam
Grant, not so much. I think he's overly simplistic and not yeah. I think he
he thinks he's smarter than he is.
But, yeah, you could have just asked Libby ninety percent of
the that he says. Just ask Libby. Just just
ask Libby. But Daniel Pink
gets into, more of, the
NLP type of stuff even though he doesn't discuss he doesn't call it
that specifically. Yep. But he's
none of them get into the reality of the
human experience and the challenges of dealing
with different types of individuals
and personalities, and you need to be adaptive
Mhmm. To individuals, and their
different needs while at the same time not enabling
and creating boundaries and when necessary removing
them from situations where they're impacting,
you know, others. One of my favorite and,
most true statements is that you never fired someone fast enough.
You can never fast them, fire them fast enough.
You know, to me, leaders there is never a leader who said I didn't fire
them fast enough. Like, they always say, I wish I'd done it sooner.
You need to take toxicity out of the workplace, and toxicity is about personalities that
are that are creating havoc on the
teams. How do we do that when we are in a space right now in
our world where and I wrote this wrote this word down because I see it
a lot where we are
almost commanded like a came down on a tablet from
Mount Sinai. Like, Moses delivered it
to us. You know? Well, you know, this is this is the way it's
framed. Right? We are commanded to our firm.
Right. How do we well, but but this is this is the point of all
the DEI programs, and this is the point of affinity groups, and this is the
point of this is the point of all of it. Like, how do we
deal with that dynamic? Yeah. When you
recognize really what it is, it's not good faith. The affirmations are not about
good faith. The affirmations are about, trying to
control others. And they typically
yeah. Or typically especially in the workplace,
you know, I see them mostly employed
by people who are afraid of doing the real work
and work that is designed to deliver results. So they focus
on the small stuff and not the big stuff.
Mhmm. I want true diversity in the workforce,
but it doesn't need to be talked about all the time. It's just about how
you show up. And the way that you address it
is like the guys at Coinbase did. It's like, yeah, we're you
know, that stuff for you. Like, I'm all about you living your
true your truest life. Yeah. We're a business. We're about
delivering results that matter to our customers,
and respecting all individuals. And we're focusing on delivering a
great customer experience at a economically viable price.
And, you know, we want you know, the way that I'm gonna my my
promise to you is that as you deliver, I'm gonna create opportunities
for you to thrive in the workplace based on the,
based on the results that matter in the workplace. Yeah.
So you just gotta be strong. It they're basically spoiled children
trying to be, you know, trying to dictate their, you know,
dictate their to their parents, how their parents should react.
Well, then it's another example, and I've been working on this idea through our shorts
episodes. It's yet another example of many of,
a thesis I'm working through, which is we ask the
workplace to take on too much. Yeah. We put too much
weight on the workplace. And so, do
I want people who are genuinely going through a
mental health crisis to be supported to be supported
by their workplace in their workplace telling them to go off and get help because
you can't get help here? Absolutely. That's the
correct move. Go off and get help because you can't get help here. We're not
qualified to do that. Heck, even if it's even the people
running a mental hospital should probably go take them if you can hey. Hang on.
If you mess up, go go go to right? Don't ask the mental hospital where
you're working to be the place where you get right. Okay. So
this is that's the extreme example. Right? I absolutely am in favor of
that. I am not in favor of
the, to your point,
the whole self movement that has that has sort of
taken taken hold of our culture, where the leader
in the environment, whether that person calls the title of manager or
supervisor, is asked to affirm the whole person,
that's too much weight to put on that leader. And quite frankly, it's too much
weight to put on that workplace because to my point earlier about
families and your point earlier about families,
family is where that weight should go. And yet
because we have moved over the last twenty years more and more towards
this atomization of family, we're
gonna have to struggle to get back to that. I'm write I'm writing a whole
thesis on this. I might publish it on my substack that no one goes to
anymore, and, and see if anybody will read it. But I've got
some I've got some ideas. I've got some thoughts on this because I think we're
putting too much weight on the workplace. You we we put way too much,
weight on schools. That's why. And now we're
doing it on the workplace. And, you know, we need to
you know, communities are there to support you for your extracurriculars and
the things outside of the workplace. The workplace, yeah, we want you to feel welcomed.
We want you to feel like you're, the conditions are there for you to
thrive, but there are gonna be boundaries for that. And
Yeah. And, and there need to be.
Yeah. And Yeah. Well, otherwise, we can't get the work done and then
It I I think, yeah, part of this is a product of there being too
much money being thrown at companies right now, and there's no accountability about
results in the workplace any right now, because
there's just so much money chasing a lot of business ideas.
You know, accountability like, we're not in a hard time right
now. So people can waste precious time
and resources on, things that don't create
value for the workplace, in place of the things that
do create value for the workplace. Well, and one of and one of the
I'm not insensitive to people's needs, but those are not things you bring
into the workplace. Like, there's a time and place for all of that.
You know? And it's not We should we should have a species, I think, of
hard headed empathy. So our empathy should not be
Yeah. Well, our empathy should not be weaponized against us,
to to achieve a particular outcome as a form of manipulation.
The Marxism. Right? And that's what it is.
It's about yeah. That's what again, politics is all about weaponizing
empathy as they cry you know, as they, you know, gain power
and then, you know, changing the rules, you
know, again, you know, you know, to create more
places of power, but it's all about empathy
Right. To gain power and control. Look at David Hogg.
Like
And with that right now?
Because he realizes that you know? I
I will not say because this is another three hours. I will not say anything
about that beyond this. I was surprised
that that he was the person
that the DNC selected. I I will just say I was shocked because
it doesn't on the surface, it doesn't click any
it doesn't check any of the boxes that we have been told the
Democratic party checks for the last at least fifteen years,
we've been told. So I don't know what shenanigans are going on
underneath that, and we don't have time to explore those right
now. Maybe we'll do that on the next episode of the podcast with the
just a male parent in the workplace again and not the children running
the Yep. Not the children running the institutions. Running institutions.
Yeah. Well, I think that's a good place to stop. So I
wanna thank Libby Unger for coming on Leadership Lessons from the Great
Books podcast today, talking about
Tender is the Night with us by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I would encourage you to
go out, pick up a copy of that book. And with that, well,
we're out.