Because understanding great literature is better than trying to read and
understand yet another business book, on the Leadership Lessons from the Great
Books podcast, we commit to reading, dissecting, and analyzing the
great books of the Western canon. You know those
books from Jane Austen to Shakespeare and everything else in
between that you might have fallen asleep trying to read in high
school. We do this for our listeners, the owner, the
entrepreneur, the manager, or the civic leader who doesn't have the time
to read, dissect, analyze, and leverage insights from
literature to execute leadership best practices in the
confusing and chaotic postmodern world we all now
inhabit. Welcome to the rescuing of Western civilization
at the intersection of literature and leadership.
Welcome to the leadership lessons from the Great Books podcast.
Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the
leadership lessons from the great books podcast, episode
number 134.
There are some books in the world that are so
difficult, so deep, and that bring up so many complicated
and important ideas that they require us
as readers and as leaders to taste,
chew, and swallow them
slowly. Some such books, some types of
those books we have covered on this show, and we will
revisit, this year as time and temperament
permit, including War and Peace,
About Face, by, Colonel David Hackworth,
and Crime and Punishment, and, of course, Sitting
Bull, his Life and Legacy. By the way,
we'll also be revisiting the Count of Monte Cristo this
year as well. However, the book we are
introducing to you today is one with which I had little
familiarity initially. This is not to say I didn't know the
title of the book. I'd actually had it sitting on my bookshelf in
my library for at least, I think, 4 years
up to this point. And I had heard about the
author. I'd heard his name pop up occasionally floating
through the circles of reformed theological thinking
on Twitter or x that I sometimes still
run-in. But this author, at
least for my particular position in the
universe, hadn't really made a dent.
Once I cracked the book open and began to read it, I
discovered, that it was a book that is
so relevant for leaders and for leadership. I
wondered what exactly it was that had put me off from
reading it for so long or
put me off from reading it up until this particular
time and this particular moment.
Other than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Piersig,
I am unaware of other books that so artfully, clearly, and
masterfully describe in philosophical
and pragmatic details the intersections between
manual labor and the challenges of an increasingly
digitized narcissistic and solipsistic
national culture. What this book we're covering
today offers a way out of our current predicament
and provides pragmatic solutions to the challenges inherent
in the existence and in us existing
in what is still deeply a material
world. After all, I'm still walking
around in a body just like you are. I'm still sitting in
a studio behind a microphone recording this podcast,
and it's cold where I'm at, so I still have the heat on.
By the way, I'm sure you're still dressed while you're
listening to this. The hard, cold
material world won't go away. No matter how much the tech
bros of Silicon Valley and the Madison Avenue
marketers would desire to will it to be so.
So today, we're going to read a book that's a that's
a direct punch in the mouth to all those folks.
Today, we will be covering the introduction
and a little bit of the first chapter and summarizing the
ideas within those two sections of Shop
Class as Soulcraft, an inquiry
into the value of work by Matthew
b Crawford. Leaders,
take hold of the material world around you. Build
something with your
hands.
And so we're gonna open up today with the introduction
to Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford.
Now just so that we can get this, off the table early, this book
was published by Penguin Press in New York in 2009.
And as such, we will not be reading
directly from the book. Instead,
what we are going to do is we are going to go through,
the introduction. I'm going to summarize some of the core ideas
from this book, and then we are going to
discuss those core ideas, break them down, and give
some pragmatic conclusions that you can take from the
book as a leader. So when you open
up shop class as Soulcraft and inquiry into
the value of work, you, of course, hit the introduction, and he opens the
book Crawford does with an anecdote about
a good friend of his who used to teach,
a shop class in Richmond, Virginia,
called Noel Dempsey, who is,
well, who was rescuing at the time of the writing of this book,
was rescuing tools being sold
off by high schools that were getting rid of shop class
in across the country in favor of turning students
into, quote, unquote, knowledge workers.
Crawford moves very quickly through a description of
Sears catalogs and, how
consumers back in the past used to be able
to access their material goods in order to fix
them and repair them with their own
hands. He also laments this idea of a wedding
of futurism to what might be called virtualism, a
vision of the future in which we, and I'm quoting directly from the
book the introduction here from Matthew Crawford, quote, a vision of the future in
which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a
pure information economy. Crawford
posits that building things in the material world is an antidote to
the ways in which the scientific managerial
structure created around this type of virtualism,
this type of fantasy, and
and and is it serves as an antidote to that. He also,
asserts that material work in the material world creates a
different kind of moral structure around work. And he's
going to talk a lot about the moral structure around work and what that
actually means in later chapters, which we'll cover in
later episodes of the show this year.
But it's an important point to remember from Crawford.
Also, in the introduction, Crawford,
states that he believes the ideal of manual competence
is an antidote to, quote, unquote, more ghostly kinds
of work. He, he doesn't degrade
knowledge work. He doesn't degrade the working of the mind,
but he definitely favors it. And by the way, we'll talk about the
background of Matthew Crawford here in the next section. He
is not an unintelligent person himself, not a person
who, is ignoring the cognitive load.
But he is a person who believes that cognition
and manual dexterity must go together.
Finally, he predicts that many of the challenges we're going to have at scale in
the future of artificial intelligence software, that
completely disintermediates the scientific manager and provides
the ability at an even deeper level to, as I already said, glide about in
a pure information economy. He predicts that those challenges are information economy,
he predicts that those challenges are going to
increase. One of the reasons why I think,
we needed to read this book now and cover this book now on the podcast
is because we are at this next technological revolutionary moment. I've talked a little bit
about technological revolutionary moment. I've
talked a little bit about AI on this podcast.
I have not focused on it necessarily.
And, yes, I have spoken about it from what may be interpreted as
a doom and gloom perspective, but AI is
just a tool. Crawford would assert that it's
yet another tool, a now
computational tool built on top of electronic
tools. That's a term that he used back in 2009, which were built on
top of scientific tools in the 20th
century that were designed
to delude and to create phasma
to phasmatagorical worlds for the
purposes of separating a worker from their
work and at a deeper level, for the purposes
of separating a human being,
men and women, but a human being from this
idea of competence, creativity,
and here's a big one, agency in
the material world.
So who is Matthew B. Crawford?
What type of literary life has he led, and why should we bother caring
about his book? And by the way, Shop Class as Soulcraft was
his first book. He's written
3 others focused on the intersection of
work and virtue, talking about,
vehicles and the power of driving in America
and what it means to actually have a vehicle in America.
And, and he's written another book. I can't remember the topic, the particular topic of
that one, but you can go and, you can go and find that book on,
on Amazon. He seems to be a thinker that
is living at an intersection
that has been abandoned by many thinkers.
Crawford was or is an American writer
and research fellow at the Institute For Advanced Studies in Culture
at the University of Virginia.
But before that, he was a physics major as an
undergraduate and then turned to political philosophy
in the early 2000. And in Shop Class as
Soulcraft, he chronicles his journey
from being in a graduate and PhD
role, a graduate student role pursuing his doctorate,
and applying for and thinking about the moving into the
academic world more deeply and the sense
of, dysfunction
is not really the word, disconnection that he had from that
because from that particular world, because
alongside his physics understanding and
his political philosophy graduate work, he
had been working as an electrician, and
he'd always worked with his hands. He'd been interested in mechanics
and in automotive work and, had been supporting himself as
electrician working during the summers while in while working as
an undergraduate. I'm not sorry. Not working. While matriculating
as an undergraduate and matriculating as a graduate student. So he'd
been doing that, and he'd also begun to develop, ever since he
was a teenager, an interest in
motorcycles and, in particular,
cars, in particular, a VW Beetle.
As of the year 2020, he,
was a contributing editor at the New Atlantis
and had continued to be a motorcycle mechanic
with a shop, Shockoe Moto in
Virginia. Matter of fact, in Richmond, Virginia. So if you Google
Matthew Crawford, you'll find Matthew B. Crawford. You will find,
a whole bunch of different things on him, including a very interesting
interview that he did with NPR
back in the day. Matthew
B. Crawford is one of these folks who came from
humble, humble origins. He
was, he was raised in a commune, from,
the time he was born until he was about 12 years old.
He learned how to engage with manual competency
and learn the power of agency that went along with that. His
father had a background in physics, and he talks about his father
in Shop Class as Soulcraft and how
his father's conception of the
world didn't really help him when he
had to fix a material problem
with a vehicle he was frustrated with,
that aforementioned VW VW Beetle.
I believe probably that would have been in the late seventies early eighties because
Mr. Crawford is, is, getting into his, into
his sixties by now. So
that's a little bit about Matthew B. Crawford, a little
bit about his literary life, his background, and his
influences. I strongly encourage you to check him out. And,
well, check out his work because
the intersection that he lives at is an important
one for us to get to as leaders
with our own unique backgrounds.
Alright. Back to the book. Back to shop class as
Soulcraft by Matthew B Crawford.
So we're gonna pick up, where we left off, and
we're going to jump, from the introduction, which is
all kinds of full full of all kinds of good stuff,
to chapter, to chapter 1. Now I mistakenly said
there that the introduction started off with a story about
the gentleman, buying things on eBay from,
from old, from old shop classes. And,
actually, the introduction, really does start with and
I, again, I need to correct this, a
dealer of a machine tool
warehouse, in Richmond, Virginia. Chapter
1 of Shop Class's Soulcraft, a briefcase,
for the useful arts, that's a subtitle of the chapter. The title of the
chapter begins with Tom Hull, who used to teach
welding machine shop, auto shop, sheet metal work, and computer aided drafting
at Marshfield High School in Coos Bay, Oregon,
who says, and I quote, a lot of schools shut
down their shop class programs in the 19 nineties when there was a big push
for computer literacy.
And he's right. They did. Matter of fact, I graduated high school just to make
this a little personal. I graduated high school in 1997.
I had to think about that for a minute.
Anyway, I graduated high school in 1997,
and I
did not take a shop class, actually, during
the course of my high school career. Now I did learn
how to, pull an engine out of a
vehicle and drop a new engine in to a vehicle,
but I learned that from my, from my
stepfather rather than from the
public school system.
So in chapter 1 of Shop Class's Soulcraft,
Matthew was making a case for the useful
arts, and he he delineates, he
separates, the useful arts as
those that are tied to manual labor, this idea of
craftsmanship, and how he characterizes it. And I
love this characterization. A brute understanding of the
character of the material world.
So just to make this really simple, every time a
natural disaster shows up, the
hurricane that hit North Carolina last
year, the fires currently
burning Los Angeles, in
Southern California, when a
hurricane strikes New York City or
when a earthquake strikes San Francisco.
When a volcano goes off somewhere in the world,
or when a winter storm
shuts down our very fragile, in the United States anyway,
electrical grid system. When these
systems collapse in the face of
brute nature, we are reminded as
sophisticated urban oriented
individuals. Even if we're rural, we still many of
us have cell phones, and we're still on Instagram and on
TikTok, and we can still see what people are doing in other places.
The urban and the rural have merged together. So in this
world where everyone knows everything about everybody or at least
can find it out, where the world has
flattened, where the distinctions between urban and rural,
between the work that is flashy, like that of being an influencer,
and the work that is practical, like that of being a plumber,
where those lines have attempted to be blurred, the
useful arts deal with the character,
deal with the brute character of a world
that is natural, a world that is material.
Think about it this way. When a mudslide happens,
an Instagram influencer isn't going to show up to your
house with a backhoe. Now, the
guy who shows up to your house with a backhoe and clears
the mud out of your front yard might,
matter of fact, probably is on Instagram. But they wouldn't
identify themselves as, at least not probably
primarily as an Instagram influencer. And this is the point that
mister Crawford is making in the first chapter of
or the first part of the first chapter of Shop Class's Soulcraft.
He states that, quote, craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for
a long time and going deeply into it because you
want to get it right, close quote. I can't
think of a better description for what leaders
are supposed to do. Not managers. If you're a manager listening to this, you
can become a better leader, not by becoming a better
manager, but by actually dwelling on the task
of leadership for a long time and going deeply into it because you
actually want to get leadership, not management,
right. Crawford addresses as
well the cognitive demands that are
required, that are placed on us as human beings by the
doing of manual work. I already mentioned plumbers
and the guy who runs the backhoe, but construction
workers, carpenters, automotive,
not technicians, but mechanics, the people who lay
road, and the people who lay brick.
There are cognitive demands to all of that work that in an
information and in a more technological age, we actually dismiss. And, by the
way, in the world of AI, world of large language models,
the work that is done in those areas defies large
language models because that work creates
experiences in a material world that the LLMs are
still shut off to. The
cognitive demands of manual work create a certain species of wisdom,
Crawford continues. And he points out that the
original idea of wisdom began with a
Greek root, a Greek word
that focused on the acquiring
of technical skill through disciplined
perception. Matter of fact, in a
quote, in the tradition that developed in the west,
wisdom lost the concrete sense it originally had in Homer.
In religious texts, on the one hand, wisdom tended towards the mystical.
In science, on the other hand, wisdom remained connected to knowledge of nature.
But with the advent of idealization, such as the frictionless surface
and the perfect vacuum, science too adopted a paradoxically
otherworldly idea of how we come to know nature
through mental constructions that are more intellectually tractable than
material reality, hence amenable to mathematical
representation. By the way, he doesn't
dismiss mathematics, but he merely says that it can only
take you just like software
so far.
So does god or nature really like a
builder? And how does god or nature
define a builder? Well, I'm of the
personal belief, and that was actually sort of the subheading of this particular
section of our podcast today, this particular moment
that we are going to have together that god does like builders.
One of the things that obsesses
parents and children alike, and Crawford talks about this
much later on in his book, and we'll talk about this as we go through
the book this year. But one of the things that obsesses parents
and children alike in America is
this idea or the idea of getting a, quote, unquote,
good job, making a good living, and living a,
quote, unquote, good life. As a
matter of fact, I have people in my life who are older than
me, and I'm in my mid forties, who are
still concerned that I'm not making a, quote unquote,
good living. But what does that actually
mean? What does that mean in the context of a K
through 12 system and, later on, a college
system consisting of graduated undergraduate work
that no longer aligns with the world of
work that is misaligned, or or
as Crawford would assert, that is too overly
aligned with the world of work.
What is the point of the K through 12 to college to
quote unquote urban employment in a large global city funnel
if the people produced by that funnel, if the product of that
funnel are unable to even know,
identify, or fix what's wrong in their own
material world. Sure, you can
read an Excel spreadsheet, but can you
mount a door on a hinge if it falls off in your
house without having to call somebody to do that?
Sure. You can edit really, really fast
using an AI program, or you can make really cool
looking videos for YouTube, but you can't hammer a
nail. Sure. You
can, go ahead and order a
really cool latte from a really cool
coffee shop in town with really cool people in it.
But when that little check engine light comes on in your car,
you don't even know what it means, much less what to do
if you're ground out in a 102 degree
heat in Texas or negative
15 degree cold in the mountains of Colorado.
To paraphrase from a movie from the 19 eighties, when you get
in trouble in the material world with all of your
degrees and credentials that your parents encouraged
you to get, who are you going to call?
These are increasingly important questions to ask,
and they were beginning to be asked in the
early 2000. I know I was there. I
was in college in the early 2000 as an undergrad
and then as a graduate student. And I worked in colleges and
universities for about the first 15 years of what is
nominally considered to be an an adult life attempting to make a,
quote, unquote, good living. And I've spent a lot of time
around academics, and I've spent a lot of time intersecting with the
academic institutions that make this country
what it currently is.
And none of these questions that I've asked can be answered by the
academic institutions because they don't consider them to be part of their
purview. They consider those questions to be part of the purview of, quote,
unquote, private institutions or, quote, unquote, larger society
or, quote, unquote, individuals or, quote,
unquote, systems.
They don't consider those questions to be
even relevant. But parents do consider
those questions to be relevant, or at least they should, and so should students,
particularly students in their late teen and early
twenties. Does autonomy, agency, and
competence mean anything in a world where everything is a distraction,
consumption, and the globalist universal message of a post Cold
War political and economic system
still doesn't have all of the shine quite off of it
just yet? I think autonomy,
agency, and competence mean everything. Matter of fact,
during COVID, and I'll go on a little bit of a rant here, during
COVID, we saw a decline in competency,
not in the plumber or the road builder
or the garbage man or the automotive mechanic.
We began to see a decline in competency in the
service person, the delivery driver,
the waiter or waitress. Isn't
that interesting? A decline in competency where people
are serving people in the material world because we still need to
eat food. But there was
an increase in competency
in interactions between people around
objects in the material world.
I think autonomy, agency, and competency mean quite a lot. I think
Crawford would agree with me about this. And ShopClass'
Soulcraft makes that assertion as
well. Look.
We've been asking these questions at a higher and higher level since the early
2000, and we've been asking these questions and demanding answers
more and more insistently, not just from
academic systems, but overall from the western culture
in general and, of course, the educational systems of the United States.
And we haven't been getting good answers. And so parents and
children have been wandering away from these institutions,
not in mass, not in gigantic
flood like deluges, but in small drips.
The pitter pattering of little feet as they go out the door to
explore other options. The
COVID 19 crisis of 2020,
2021, and 2022 fully revealed,
fully lay bare
the assumptions that we've been operating
and laboring under in the United States anyway for at least the
last 100 years, Assumptions about a quote unquote good
living. Assumptions about living in a quote unquote urban
environment. Assumptions about the value of an
advanced degree and assumptions about
the work that goes in to delivering
you that latte. Reality,
reality likes material reality. And we are
seeing a bifurcation in America and
globally between people who really, really, really like living in
the virtual machine, the virtual electronic
machine of pretend, where we can be avatars
with voices and faces and bodies that are
not, well, that are not real.
A bifurcation between that world and the world of,
well, natural disasters, the world
of fires and floods, mudslides
and earthquakes, the world of pandemics and
roads, the world of plumbing
and homeless people, the world of buildings
that are no longer maintained and fall down, and bridges that
cannot be rebuilt because we do not have the knowledge
to do so that has to exist in people
who operate with autonomy, agency, and competence
against or maybe with
the people who live in a virtual world.
It's time for leaders to
decide in which world
they are going to lead.
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Now back to the show.
Back to Matthew Crawford. Back to shop
class as Soulcraft. We remain
in chapter 1, summarizing,
talking, asserting.
Flipping forward or flipping through chapter 1, a brief
case for the useful arts. There's
another piece in here,
where Crawford talks about arts, crafts, and the
assembly line. And this is something that, I am very
much, oh, gosh. I shouldn't say in
favor of talking about, but I wish more people knew the history
of. You can read writers, marketers,
or no. Sorry. You can read writers like,
Seth Godin, the marketer, but others
who Doug Wilson, the theologian, who have talked
in-depth about one of the most dynamic
inventors of the early 20th century, a man named
Henry Ford, and how he constructed not
the car. Everybody thinks that that was his big insight
or his big innovation. And in reality, the
big innovation, the big insight was the
assembly line. And Matthew Crawford takes apart
the assembly line, and he
opens with talking about how, quote,
early in 20th century when Teddy Roosevelt preached the strenuous life
and elites worried about their state of over civilized
spiritual decay, the project of getting back in touch with, quote,
unquote, real life took various forms. 1 was romantic fantasy about
the pre modern craftsman. It was understandable
given changes in the world of work at the turn of the century, a time
when the of economic life was rapidly increasing the number
of paper shufflers. As TJ Jackson
Lears explains in his history of the progressive era, no place of
grace, the tangible elements of craft were appealing as an
antidote to vague feelings of unreality, diminished autonomy,
and a fragmented sense of self that were especially acute among the
professional classes, close quote. So
Crawford begins opens up this chapter on the assembly line
by talking about the progressives. Right? Most
people don't understand the history of the progressive movement. As a matter of fact, I
would encourage you to go back and listen to the episode that we published at
the beginning of last year, 2024,
when we talked about Woodrow Wilson's book, with Libby
Unger, and, his little screed that he wrote.
Woodrow Wilson was the classical Democrat
progressive, By the way, his great grandchildren
are Alexandria Okashia Cortez,
and every blue haired progressive that you've seen on Blue
Sky. But on the right wing in
America, there is also right wing progressives. Right
wing progressives progressivism began politically with
Teddy Roosevelt, and we also covered some of his writing and thoughts on the
podcast. I would encourage you to go back and listen to some of those.
His great grandchildren came down in the form of,
or in the visage of everyone from John
McCain to Mitt Romney to
Liz Cheney.
Anyhow, I'll leave out the political implications of this. You can think
through that on your own. You're a you're a smart and erudite
listener. If you weren't, you wouldn't be listening to this show.
But Crawford's point is that progressivism really
looked at craftsmanship as a romantic escape from paper
pushing, a romantic escape from bureaucratization.
And the elites pursued this, fiddling around on their
boats, having their properties at their estates, riding their
horses, these kinds of things. But the average person in the
early 20th century still worked on a farm. And most
farm workers had not transitioned into the
urban environment that basically was going to be built
out because of, well, because of the technology
known as the car.
This sense of a bureaucratized economic
life, and diminished autonomy and human agency in a
material world was looked at as a loss.
In our time, it's just looked at as the way things, quote,
unquote, are. But in the early 20th
century, this was looked at as a real loss. And Crawford points out that
institutions used the decline in craftsmanship
to create a new work order. Not a new
world order, a new work order, a new
scientific order. And even because progressives
starting all the way back with the abolition of slavery really like this
project, a new moral order, but
a moral order divorced from religion, a
moral order divorced from the fundamental
realities of the material world, a moral order
around technological fantasies
first brought to you by the assembly line
and later sold to you by the marketers on
Madison Avenue.
In chapter 1, Matthew Crawford makes the point
that bucking the quote unquote moral weight of egalitarianism,
that this sort of idea
of the assembly line applied to k through 12
education implies bucking that moral weight of
egalitarianism would take courage for high school principals,
to push students towards the cognitively
rich work of manual labor.
So what do we do with that idea? Right? What do we do with the
idea of the assembly line being taken from
making cars in the early 20th century to
making a new type of man, to selling
that new type of man to the new type of man, to
inculcating the young through the k through 12 educational system,
and to the decline of manual competency
in an increasingly difficult material world.
What do we do with all this? How do we stand
athwart history as William F. Buckley would have infamously said
back in the day, a product of the k through 12 system himself, as well
as the Ivy League Educational Elite Institutions
that produce the thinkers and the philosophers who come up with the justifications
for this new progressive order? What, he would
say stand to thwart history? How do we stand to thwart history and
yell stop?
And how do we do such yelling in light of
the fact that we are at the end of or approaching the
end of an 80 year cycle of history
known as the 4th turning and that we are about
to embark on another 80 year cycle
of history that will take us all the way to the end of this
21st century,
an end that I will probably not live long
enough to see.
What do we do with all of this? How do
we change the systems? Because here's the thing.
The material world isn't going anywhere. Right? Manual
labor still has meaning. You still have to
deal with the land. You still have to move the trees and
move the rocks and move the dirt and build the houses
and build the buildings. And by the way, you have to do it competently so
the buildings don't fall down, the roads don't crack, the
trees don't fall over on the kids, and, of
course, so that everyone is safe
physically so that they can all go run around and
be unsafe, virtually.
How do we manage this next transition of man
from what Crawford described as electronic back in
2008, 2009 when he was probably writing this book,
to digital, to now algorithmic,
which is the current transition we're in?
Well, if you're a leader listening to this, you're probably wondering
when I'm going to get to the point, and here is the point. I've been
looking for a strong antidote to the utopian level of marketing
hype from the usual suspects technologists
around what is now being called artificial intelligence.
This book, Shop Class as Soulcraft,
along with a couple of other books, including and I've already mentioned Seth Godin,
but Seth Godin's great book, Lynchpin, and Doug Wilson's
book, Productivity. These three books together
represent an antidote to that marketing
hype. Matter of fact, I would encourage you, if you're
listening to this as a leader and you have a student who's getting ready to
return to college for the spring semester or you have a
senior in high school or even a junior who is wondering what to
do with their lives and they're not exactly excited about going to
college, but they don't have the skills or
manual competency because you didn't have those skills and you couldn't give
them to them, and no one in your
family could either, I encourage you to get them those 3
books. Shove them in their hands and
then send them off to maybe trade school or maybe
apprentice them to a plumber or an HVAC
person or an auto mechanic in your local town.
Don't worry. They'll make a good living.
These three books are an antidote
to that marketing hype. Such utopian
hype, I worry, will only widen the chasm further
between human thinking and human doing. And Crawford
talks about the difference between those two things, and we're gonna cover that
later on as we explore this book more this year.
We just did the first chapter here today.
By the way, that chasm, the chasm between human thinking and human
doing didn't just open up during the 4th turning.
It actually opened up at the end of the second
turning in the United States
and continued to open up during the 3rd turning unraveling
in the 19 nineties when the Internet was turned
on. And, of course, just like most things during a
time of force turning chaos, that chasm has only grown
as more and more white collar work even, not just blue collar
work, but white collar work, has disappeared into the
gaping maw of the computer algorithm.
One of the things that people don't understand is that the computer will eat your
job if you allow the technologist to do
that. As I said
before, college students need to read this book.
And, yeah, there's been famous people who have banged the drum in
the years between when Shop Class as Soulcraft
was published back in 2009. And now,
on the same things that Matthew Crawford was writing about back
then, folks like Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs
and other folks. Andy Frisella, I'm thinking
of him as well, banging the drum and banging the drum and banging
the drum. But the problem is the problem is
that up until about the COVID crisis, too many people were still
too invested in the system thinking that, of course, if we
just throw more money at it, if we just throw more people at it, if
we just throw smarter people at it, it'll all
work out in the end. By the way, that's the conceit of scientific
managerialism brought to you by Frederick Winslow
Taylor, the guy who brought Henry Ford, the
assembly line, and made it better.
This year on the podcast, we are going to talk about solutions to
problems in pragmatic ways. And I know I promised a lot of that last year,
and we got to very few solutions, I feel, with many of our books that
we covered. But this year, we really are gonna talk about pragmatic solutions.
We really are going to talk about how to begin with the
basics as we go into
a cyclical spring.
So let's, let's address
that.
So solutions to problems. Right? REM back in the day
infamously said or sang in their great
song, it's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
Offer me solutions. Offer me alternatives. And, of course,
as being avatars of generation x during that period of time
in the nineties, they intoned, and I
declined. Anyway, I am gonna offer solutions
right now. I'm gonna offer some some ideas.
And there are ideas that you could find in shop class's Soulcraft by
Matthew b Crawford.
There are solutions, but we have to begin with the basics. And here's
some of the basics. We can't return to manual
competency without someone to train people in actual
manual competency. By the way, the people who
will train people in manual competency, the people who will train
people in how to do that work and how to do the work that
requires autonomy, agency, and competence well in a in a in
a world that is real, where there are upper
boundaries and limits to what can be achieved. The
people who are going to teach that kind of
work, the people who are going to insist that
people take on that cognitive strain are
probably not going to be, and this is part of the basics, they're probably
not going to be nice people. They're
probably not going to say the right words or put
them in the right order. They're probably not going to
be people that are going to make the right jokes
or or avoid inappropriate innuendos.
They're not going to talk the way that Hollywood writers writing for
people on Twitter, who will give them claps, would
write them as characters in movies.
They're going to speak roughly. They're probably going to use
slurs. They're probably going to have
retrograde attitudes towards minorities and women
even if they are a minority and especially if they are
a woman. They are probably
not going to be nice people
in terms of what we mean now in the world as nice, but they
will be wise. So here's one of
the basics that we're going to have to begin with, the kind of people that
we're looking for to teach these
sort of skill sets, the people who will have acquired
these sort of skill sets will be people who will
be competent but not and wise but not nice.
They will be hard, but not loving.
At least not squishy, warm. You can get
away with fuzz balls loving. They're
going to be hard. They're going to be not nice. They're going to
be difficult to get along with. They're probably
going to be taciturn and not tell you or tell
their students everything all at once. And they will probably be people
who would rather show than tell because too many
words can sometimes block
out intuition.
We have to begin with the basics. We have to begin with the kind of
people we are looking for. Leaders,
if you wanna be one of those kinds of folks, you're gonna have to go
and get information and competency and skill
and spend time with the kinds of people
who probably you wouldn't pick
to work with and you wouldn't pick to lead.
With the ruthless expansion of intellectual technology, building
things in the real world with real people helps increase autonomy,
agency, and competence way more than working
in services or manipulating consumption
through the exegesis of finance or through the
mysticalness of marketing.
The other thing that we're going to have to understand is that the acquiring of
manual competence requires us, all of us,
myself included, to put down our narcissism, put down
our overweening self regard
because we can successfully manipulate an algorithm
or we can get an LLM to do what it is we want it to
do, or we can navigate Instagram really
well. But this person who can hammer a nail, well, they
can't they can't manipulate the Internet, so they must not
exist.
We're going to have to put down our narcissism. We're going to have to put
down our overweening self regard. Narcissists tend
to become uncomfortable in the presence of manual competence
because their presence means that there's actual friction
in a place that a narcissist basically has
no foothold in. The material world.
A place where, as I said before, there are boundaries, there are barriers,
and there are borders.
At a basic level, leaders in organizations of
all sizes, but let's start with the small ones and then move into the medium
sized ones because as you go to scale, this becomes infinitely harder. But
leaders need to push back on the myth of a coming
singularity. There is no and will
never be a digital electronic or virtual eschatology
that will be able to successfully compete against the
brute reality of the facts of the material world.
Let me be blunt. If
you build your AI computing data banks
on land next to
a hurricane prone coast and a
once every 20 year hurricane comes, it's
going to kill your
server houses. And you're going to
have to find somebody to pour the concrete to
rebuild them. And that person
better be competent the first time.
Leaders need to speak this out to their organizations, their networks, their
families, and their communities. If they don't, they'll have
no one to blame but themselves when competency
and agency or as competency and agency continue to
drain out of the world. By the way,
the kinds of people that you're looking to teach these sort of
basics in the useful arts to the young,
the unwise, and even the incompetent.
The kinds of people you are looking for are people who are serious.
Maybe not necessarily intellectually serious,
but they are intuitively serious. They
know a valuable idea when they hear 1,
and they know what is not valuable when
they hear it too. By the way, they have a not nice
word for things that are not valuable.
It is time to lay the cornerstone of a new world
right around the corner that will look geopolitically,
and this is at scale now, like the world before World War
1, economically, like a return to
real gold backed material currency.
And psychologically, this new world will look like a return
to a humble acknowledgment of the
practical limits of hard material reality.
What you can do and what you actually can't do.
And saying no to what you can't do
while fully exploring what you can
do. But in order to do all this,
we have to continue to explore pragmatically
and understand pragmatically where to
go ahead from here.
And, well, that's
it for me. Thank you for listening to the Leadership Lessons from the
Great Books podcast today. And now that you've made it
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I've heard. Alright. Well,
that's it for me.